An Insult to Women Everywhere

This post is some of the best feminist writing to come out of an election that has launched a Renaissance of feminist writing.  (And I am certain that much more is to come once the election is over.)  But this post sums up exactly how I, and I suspect many other women, are feeling about now.  It’s not long and you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

Being right should at least feel good, but it doesn’t. I should have enjoyed the debates — seeing that, finally, many of my Clinton-doubting friends got what I saw in her; her grace under fire, her merciless tough-bitch baiting of his insecurities, her ability to take a man who’d bulldozed over a dozen Republican candidates and make him look like a screaming, pouting toddler — but I didn’t. It isn’t just an insult to Hillary Clinton that she wound up facing Trump. It’s an insult to all women; it’s confirmation of our darkest suspicions about sexism, that while women are killing ourselves to do better and be smarter and work harder, while we’re building resumes, accumulating qualifications, going to classes, applying for extra credit, the only thing all that excellence does, at the end of the day, is to put us on equal footing with some male idiot who’s done precisely none of the work. It isn’t fun, realizing that the most qualified candidate in modern history is considered roughly equivalent to a barely literate game-show host with no government experience, just because she’s female. It doesn’t feel good, knowing that even Hillary Clinton has to stand there and get screamed at by some Twitter troll, just because she’s trying to get a job.

The post is titled:  Goodbye to All That.  You may remember that Robin Morgan wrote an essay with that title when some feminists, including W.I.T.C.H., took over a radical newspaper and tried to explain to lefty men something Hillary Clinton had to go to China to declare:  Women’s Right Are Human Rights.

It’s going to be a long 8 years.

Picture found here.