We’ve finally gotten to the bottom of Hillary Clinton’s polling problems:
We Americans haven’t been “trained” to find her likable.
Here goes, from BoingBoing’s Carolyn Siede:
Whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent your entire life being trained to empathize with white men.
Really? Hitler? Stalin? Oh well, here’s Siede’s theory:
That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot during this increasingly insane presidential election season. Particularly as I try to wrap my head around the fact that Hillary Clinton is on one hand the most qualified human being to ever run for president of the United States, and, on the other, one of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time….
Gallons of digital ink have been spilled trying to figure out why Clinton struggles so much with likability. But perhaps the problem isn’t with her at all. Maybe it’s with us.
And here’s the solution: More books, movies, and TV shows featuring fictional women who happen to be just like Hillary Clinton:
Our movies, books, and TV shows are filled with attractive female love interests, badass female warriors, hissable female villains, and bumbling female leads. But we don’t have very many female protagonists who are allowed to be flawed in ways that are messily realistic not just charmingly endearing. We haven’t been taught to empathize with flawed women the way we have with flawed men.
And if only we were properly “taught” by this propaganda barrage, we wouldn’t be turned off by Hillary’s fibs, evasiveness, and inability to relate to anyone warmly except maybe Barbra Streisand warbling at a fundraiser. We’d…understand:
Essentially what Clinton is saying is that the stiltedness of her public persona is a kind of self-preservation tactic born out of years of brutal misogyny. And while that doesn’t excuse the fact that she sometimes struggles with transparency, it transforms a dehumanizing flaw into a relatable one. It gives her a humanity that’s too frequently missing from the discourse around her.
So maybe when Hillary Clinton becomes President Hillary Clinton, she could set up a Ministry of Truth that will train us to 1) love Big Sister; and 2) blame everything on “brutal misogyny.”