this is the loss of Hillary Clinton to Trump in the 2016 election. Throughout her campaign, Clinton had been cast—and had attempted to cast herself—as a difficult woman, a beloved figure of the mainstream feminist zeitgeist. She fit the model. For decades, her public narrative had been determined by sexist criticism: she was viewed as too ambitious, too undomestic, too ugly, too calculating, too cold. She had drawn unreasonable hatred for pursuing her ambitions, and she had weathered this hatred to become the first woman in American history to receive a major party’s presidential nomination. As the election approached, she was held to a terrible, compounded double standard, both as a serious candidate going up against an openly corrupt salesman, and as a woman facing off against a man. Clinton attempted to make the most of this. She turned misogynist slights into marketing tactics, selling “Nasty Woman” merchandise after Trump used the term to disparage her during a debate. This merchandise was popular, as was the reclaimed insult: on Twitter, rather embarrassingly, feminists called themselves “nasty women” all day long. But if we really loved nasty women so much, wouldn’t Clinton have won the election? Or at least, if this sort of pop feminism was really so ascendant, wouldn’t 53 percent of white women have voted for her instead of for Trump?
Clinton was in fact celebrated for outlasting—until November, at least—her sexist critics. Her strength and persistence in response to misogyny were easily the things I liked most about her. I felt great admiration for the Clinton who had once refused to change her name, who couldn’t stand the idea of staying home and baking cookies. I believed in the politician who sat patiently through eleven hours of interrogation on Benghazi and was still called “emotional” on CNN for choking up when she talked about the Americans who had died. I was moved, watching Clinton white-knuckle herself into stoicism, in 2016, as Trump stalked her around the debate stage. No woman in recent history has been miscast and disrespected quite like Clinton. Years after the election, at Trump rallies across the country, angry crowds of men and women were still chanting, “Lock her up!”
But the gauntlet of sexism that Clinton was forced to fight through ultimately illuminated little about her other than the fact that she was a woman. It did her—and us, eventually—the crippling disservice of rendering her generic. Misogyny provided a terrible external structure through which Clinton was able to demonstrate commitment and tenacity and occasional grace; misogyny also demanded that she pander and compromise in the interest of survival, and that she sand down her personality until it could hardly be shown in public at all. The real nature of Clinton’s campaign and candidacy was obscured first and finally by sexism, but also by the reflexive defense against sexism. She was attacked so bluntly, so unfairly, and in turn she was often upheld and shielded by equally blunt arguments—defenses that were about nasty women, never really about her.
Clinton’s loss, which I will mourn forever, might reiterate the importance of making space for the difficult woman. It might also point toward the way that valuing a woman for her difficulty can, in ways that are unexpectedly destructive, obscure her actual, particular self. Feminist discourse has yet to fully catch up to the truth that sexism is so much more mundane than the celebrities who have been high-profile test cases for it. Sexism rears its head no matter who a woman is, no matter what her desires and ethics might be. And a woman doesn’t have to be a feminist icon to resist it—she can just be self-interested, which is not always the same thing.
I Thee Dread
My boyfriend maintains a running Google spreadsheet to keep track of the weddings we’ve been invited to together. There are columns for the date of the event, the location, our relationship to the couple, and—the ostensible reason for this record-keeping—whether or not we’ve sent a present yet, and which of us sent the gift. The spreadsheet was first a function of his personality: where I am careless about most things outside my writing, Andrew, an architect, is meticulous even about irrelevant details, a monster of capability who rearranges the dishwasher with a fervor that borders on organizational BDSM. But at some point, the Google spreadsheet became a necessity. Over the past nine years, we’ve been invited to forty-six weddings. I myself do not want to get married, and it’s possible that all