Unhappy Thoughts Part One

Currently coping with a swirl of thoughts, most of them unsettling and troubling. There's so many of them that I'm going to have to break them down into bite-sized chunks.

I seriously believe the level of sexism in this nation means we will never see a woman elected to the Presidency. I know that people are pointing to "other issues" as to the reasons why the two major candidates - with Hillary in 2016 getting tarred with "her emails" fake scandal, with Kamala in 2024 getting tarred with "inflation" - lost to a clearly unqualified (and by 2024 clearly criminal) donald trump, but the backlash they both got from male voters can't be ignored. Olga Khazan at the Atlantic makes the case:

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was a former secretary of state and senator running against the politically inexperienced real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. She lost. People would vote for a woman, the thinking went, just not that woman.

In 2024, Kamala Harris was the vice president, a former senator, and a former attorney general also running against Trump, who was by then a convicted felon and sexual abuser. She also lost. People would vote for a woman, once again, just not that woman.

The events of the past eight years might prompt some to wonder: If Clinton wasn’t good enough, and neither was Harris, will a woman ever be good enough to be president? What kind of a woman would it take? According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president. “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”

...In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man. This bias against female presidential candidates, Ono and Burden found, was most pronounced among men and among politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with.

There is painful irony that women candidates lost to a man exposed as a vulgarian towards women, a court-adjudicated rapist and confirmed misogynist.

For all the decent - if not great - choices of women leaders in the Democratic ranks like Governor Whitmer or AOC, it is insane that too many men - even among liberals! - just won't consider it.