Here is one of those pressures: Hillary Clinton absolutely cannot express negative emotion in public. If she speaks loudly or gets angry or cries, she risks being seen as bitchy, crazy, dangerous. (When she raised her voice during the 2013 Benghazi Senate committee hearings, the cover of the New York Post blared “NO WONDER BILL’S AFRAID.”) But if Hillary avoids emotions—if she speaks strictly in calm, logical, detached terms—then she is cold, robotic, calculating.
You’d think the solution might be to put on a happy face, to admit to emotions only when they are positive. But it turns out that people hate it when Hillary Clinton smiles or laughs in public. Hillary Clinton’s laugh gets played in attack ads; it has routinely been called “a cackle” (like a witch, right? Because she’s old, and female, like a witch); frozen stills of Hillary laughing are routinely used to make her look “crazy” in conservative media.
She can’t be sad or angry, she can’t be happy or amused, and she can’t refrain from expressing any of those emotions. There is no way out of this one. There is no right way for her to act.
That’s just one set of examples. There are plenty more. She’s not the right age(Republicans from Mitch McConnell to Rand Paul to Rick Santorum have poked fun at her perceived dotage). There are no right politics for her to have (she’s been accused of everything from “radical feminism” to having economic policy positions indistinguishable from those of right-wing Republicans). There is no right way for her to want to be president (because she is suspected of being both “pathologically ambitious”—unlike, say, anyone else who ever thought they should be leader of the free world—and the beneficiary of marital nepotism).
How long would you make it, if people treated you the way you treat Hillary Clinton?
You’d think, given the impressive amount of unfair and often cruelly personal scrutiny this woman faces, it would make sense for her to be pretty cautious about how she presents herself in public. Bizarre, then, that Hillary Clinton has developed a reputation in the press for seeming distant—even secretive or paranoid! It’s almost as if, after a quarter-century of being attacked for her appearance, personality, and every waking move, breath, and word, Hillary Clinton is highly conscious of how she is perceived and portrayed, and is trying really hard to monitor her own behavior and behave in ways people will accept. Which is “disgusting,” of course. We want “authentic” candidates.
Remind me: How well did the public and media react the last time she appeared in public without makeup? Or raised her voice? Or laughed? Or went to the goddamn bathroom? Or did any “authentic” thing that a real-life person does every day?
Naturally left-wing misogynist and unethical lying hack journalist Doug Henwood keeps on with his deranged hatred for HRC - Doyle has a good response.
And speaking of Doug Henwood and his socialist handmaidens, I discovered that Amber A'Lee Frost was promoting the awful bully and conscience-free smear-monger Mikki Kendall here.
Although I was amused to see anti-feminist asshole Will Shetterly agreeing with Frost for attacking Rebecca Solnit and meanwhile Shetterly despises Mikki Kendall.
You can see why socialist bros love to publish the work of Amber A'Lee Frost - she can be relied upon to attack feminists for their refusal to focus exclusively on poor women's problems, which is the only proper form of feminism as far as these socialist assholes are concerned.