Kerry Howley

This Wall Street Journal article on Hillary Clinton and the anti-feminist backlash feels truer to me than almost anything I’ve seen written about the gender politics of this election:

Katherine Putnam, president of Package Machinery Co., a West Springfield, Mass., equipment manufacturer, recalls that at a lunch she attended recently, a group of male chief executives “started talking about what an awful b—- Hillary was and how they’d never vote for her.” She says she kept quiet. “I didn’t want to jeopardize my relationship with them,” she says. “But their remarks were a clear reminder that although I could sit there eating and drinking with them, and work with them, instinctively their reaction to me isn’t positive.”

Jean Yarnal, who has worked in local government for 41 years, says she was unnerved recently when a man she knew came into her office and asked for help with a zoning issue. When talk turned to politics, she says, he denounced Sen. Clinton as a “lesbian” and used several slurs. Ms. Yarnal says she didn’t respond, but thought to herself, “That’s the last time I do you a favor.”

It’s a subtle, melancholy piece with a jackhammer-soft headline: “In the barricades of the gender wars.” What an embarrassingly inept use of cliche. Does this feel like a war? Putnam didn’t tear her bra off, throw water in her lunch date’s face and declare eternal sisterhood with Clinton. She is an adult enmeshed in a series of complex and advantageous relationships, and navigating those relationships involves absorbing some slights and repelling others. She continued eating. It’s not war, it’s diplomacy, except you’re the weaker state, and your hosts insist on denigrating your allies.

I understand both the disappointment at Hillary’s now-slight chances and the sense of relief that will come with her defeat. Clinton is uncomfortable to defend because she embodies, to a painful degree, the stereotypically female qualities that male executives will harp on at lunch. There is an earnest hall monitor-ness about her. She wears power awkwardly. I don’t like watching her any more than I like watching Blind Date; I just feel vaguely embarrassed for all of them. But I also understand that self-seriousness is a quality that emerges, in part, from a life spent struggling to be taken seriously. “Be more self-deprecating!” is a truly ridiculous thing to ask an ambitious 60-year-old woman who experienced childhood in the anti-feminist backslide of the 1950s. Or who spent her adult life being pilloried for, alternately, following her husband around like a housewife and being insufficiently vapid to occupy the position of First Lady. (Cough up a cookie recipe, Hillary! Now laugh at yourself.) But I don’t have to like listening to the president of the United States; I do well enough avoiding that experience now. Her apparent lack of charm is not a serious impediment to being an effective executive, though obviously an impediment to getting there.

But I get it. I understand feeling relieved every time I see comments like this one, because nothing is worth enduring this for four years:

Alexa Steinberg, 25, a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire, says she recognizes “that women only make 78 cents for every male dollar, and there are still hurdles for women that I’ll face.” She says she thinks it’s only a matter of time before she’ll be supporting a female candidate for U.S. president — but it won’t be Sen. Clinton. “Politically and personally, she’s trying to take on the male persona, and isn’t a woman in the way I want a woman candidate to be,” she says.

This makes sense until you realize that it’s completely insane. If you tag all the qualities required for electoral approval “male,” and then criticize every woman who embodies them, you aren’t going to get very far. The benefit of having a female president–which this woman says she wants–is in widening the boundaries of female identity beyond “the female persona” (whatever that is). Demands that Clinton conform just reinforce the need for powerful women.