Why does America hate women?

I realize the title of this blog post is inflammatory.

I don’t believe our entire country hates women. But given the developments in the race for the democratic presidential nomination, it’s starting to feel that way. In an opinion piece by Michelle Cottle of the New York Times, she notes that gender was considered a bigger barrier to electability than “age, race, ideology, or sexual orientation”. This is a huge statement in a race that included several candidates of color, multiple men in their late seventies, and a married church-goer from South Bend, who also happens to be gay.

When I was spending lots of time thinking out loud about who I thought had the best shot at beating Donald Trump (side note: I can’t believe we even have to say this. A “shot” at beating Trump? Literally any human on the long list of people who threw their name in for the democratic nomination, including a man who ran on the platform of giving everyone free money, and a woman who’s resume lists her as being “Oprah’s Spiritual Adviser”, is more qualified and more capable of running this country than the person who currently sits in the White House), I cynically made lists of the ways the current president, his supporters, and advisers, could rudely attack each opponent.

“Joe Biden is just more of the Obama-era crap”, or “Joe Biden is losing his cognitive abilities”. Trump can claim that Bernie Sanders is a socialist (some of his supporters, such as a man I briefly argued with yesterday, even claim with fervent insistence that Sanders is a communist), or that he’s a crazed old man. I can’t imagine what ol’ DT would have to say about Michael Bloomberg, since they have so many problematic things in common. When it came to who he could attack on a more personal level, I shuddered to think of his future treatment of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg.

However, this is what occurred to me: the negative things that Trump and the extreme right can say about women can be veiled much easier than the negative things they could say about a homosexual man. Statements such as “she’s too loud” or “she’s too angry” or even the positive context for “nevertheless, she persisted” are things that, on the surface, sound like basic criticisms of a candidate but are actually words that would never be used to describe a male politician. The fact that Elizabeth Warren was once “warned”’and continued to speak is a rallying cry for democrats (and feminists) across the nation, but it’s considered one of her biggest flaws by republicans. While we know that Donald Trump has very few boundaries when it comes to the bigoted insults that fly from his lips, it’s likely that his advisers would stress heavily that, in a campaign against someone like Buttigieg, he should leave the sexual orientation attacks out of it.

“Who do we think America hates more, a woman or a gay man?” I asked, wryly, for the last few weeks. It’s negative. It’s not productive. But this is where we are. I like Mayor Pete just fine, but it should be noted that for all of the far-right’s hatred of anyone who doesn’t fit the heterosexual, traditional-family-unit norm, most Republicans I spoke to in the last weeks seemed more concerned with Elizabeth Warren “flip-flopping”, being “untrustworthy”, being “too angry”. Does this sound familiar? Are these not the same words used in 2016 when Republicans convinced nearly half a nation that Hillary Clinton was a crooked liar (but no one could really say what, exactly, they believed her to be lying about)?

I’m not saying I wouldn’t love to see Mayor Pete as president. He’s great. This has nothing to do with him, except that he represents a group (non-straight men) that I had assumed, up until recently, that the far-right would have more issue with than another group, women. And I have to admit that I probably contribute to the unconscious bias, because I want to vote for someone who can win against Donald Trump, and it worries me that the same tools used against Clinton could be employed again. I do not think Elizabeth Warren is weak. I do not think she would have any problem ripping Trump to shreds with her intelligent, articulate words, as well as her penchant for using actual facts about the things he has done and said. What I do think is that Trump, his supporters, and maybe our society in general, is more comfortable discrediting, insulting, and belittling a woman, and can apparently find many ways to do so that don’t even play on her supposed political shortcomings. If we look back to 2016, we can pinpoint a campaign of mud-slinging, half truths, and false generalizations that managed to ultimately ruin Hillary Clinton’s chances, in spite of her being an experienced, qualified, intellectual candidate. It’s now 2020. This is both puzzling and devastating.

When we look at the fact that America has now had it’s first black president (and for two terms!), as well as several people of color, multiple women, and a gay man as candidates for the democratic nomination, it can make us believe we have come a really long way. It certainly feels like we have. When I cast a vote in the primary this week for Elizabeth Warren, I was still hopeful. While republicans would like to draw every parallel they can between her and Hillary, she is not so many of the things our country claimed to hate about Clinton. Warren is not a former First Lady. She isn’t subject to the social bias that Hillary had to endure because of her husband’s behavior while in office. She is not a former member of a White House administration that a (shocking) number of citizens disliked. And yet, she tanked on Tuesday, even in her home state of Massachusetts.

I’m so tired of hearing that we could easily elect a woman if we could just find the right one. The right one. Never mind that we had a diverse group of females running for the nomination this year. Americans found a way to take exception with each one of them, in spite of many being more qualified than several of the male candidates they ran against. It’s demoralizing to feel that our nation is making leaps and bounds in who we would allow to represent us in terms of skin color, background, or sexual orientation - but not gender.

If not this woman, then which woman? And when?