A Very Special Election Post For My Male Friends and the Women Who Love Them

This post grew out of talking with my female friends over the last couple of weeks, and listening to the many incredible women who have spoken at the DNC so far. Stick with me, there’s a basketball metaphor at the end.

I want to say something to some of my liberal and progressive friends who are men. I’m going to try and say it as gently as I am capable of doing, because I believe there has been some misunderstanding about why a lot of your female friends are feeling fired up right now. Some of this misunderstanding may be intentional, some of it may not — I’m not here to debate that, to debate whether or not leftist misogyny has found itself unbound (it has), or to debate the misogyny my female friends and I have seen and experienced (I will not be gaslighted (gaslit?), I’m here to tell you — you want to come at me on that you better come correct). I’m also not speaking for every single woman I know, or to every single man, and I want to go ahead and get that out of the way. So, here goes.

Some of your women friends are getting a little fired up because:

1. Almost without exception, my female friends and I have been pretty quiet this primary season, and when we’ve gotten together to discuss why, almost exactly the same narrative has emerged: Early in the primary, we said/did/saw something that indicated some support for Hillary Clinton, whether we intended to vote for her or not, and were patronized, mansplained, and sometimes outright bullied or shouted down. From my friends and me, this is anecdotal. But coupled with what we saw on TV and social media happening to other women, we felt like it was hard to speak up. This is especially true when we tried to talk about gender dynamics, critiques that were often met with derision, eyerolls, and “well-meaning” dismissals and alternative realities. When we spoke about this situation to one another, we often wondered how some of our male friends could notice that these otherwise outspoken and engaged women were so quiet. Did they ascribe this to the faux “enthusiasm gap”? Did they think we agreed with them, and felt no need to chime in? Or worst of all, did it just not occur to them a lot of us were not around?
2. It is difficult to hear the ongoing narrative that Bernie Sanders and his supporters “pulled the party/Hillary” to the left, to see the credit for the achievements of the platform land squarely at his feet. This is not to diminish the work of Sanders or his supporters, who have shone a light on some issues that already should have been more centrally in the discourse. However, it is difficult to see some of the work of a major portion of the Democratic base, women — women of color, woman-identified lesbians, bisexuals, and trans women, feminists, activists and organizers, be attributed often without credit to a male candidate and/or his supporters. The left didn’t “come out” in this election — a lot of us were already out and already here, year in and year out doing the work. Black women have led the charge, often alone, on criminal justice reform, women have led the charge on reproductive rights, women were already in the Fight for Fifteen and the fight against income inequality, women were at city councils and statehouses and courthouses fighting for marriage equality, fighting against rape culture and the abuse of transgender students in our schools and colleges, showing up to fight against bathroom bills and the dehumanization of human beings who are transgender, women were leading the charge to end gun violence, women have been fighting the fight on teaching and education, women have been showing up for environmental justice, for humanized immigration policy. Some of these women supported Bernie Sanders, some of them supported Hillary Clinton, but almost all of them were already here, already a reliable and vocal part of the Democratic Party, pushing that rock up the hill, to borrow Bill’s phrase. Out of the gate, Hillary Clinton’s first major campaign appearance was about the fight for reproductive rights and women’s bodily autonomy. Sometimes men have stood beside us, but sometimes they have not, and yet we will still be here in 2017, 2018, and 2019. It is hard, therefore, to be saturated with the narrative that Democrats were not already doing this work, that our party was corrupt, that the work of so many for so long was compromised at its core. Most of us welcome the enthusiasm Sanders brought to the game, and a lot of women supported him in that endeavor, but when you say the game is inherently corrupt, you are talking about us and our work.
3. A lot of us don’t think of this election or Hillary Clinton as the choice of a lesser evil or as a bump in the road to progress or as a black mark on the soul of the Democratic Party. For a lot of us who consider ourselves liberals and progressives, the election of Hillary Clinton does represent progress, and we do not lack enthusiasm. When we hear some of our male friends diminish her or bemoan her “likeability” problem or, worst of all, demonstrate quite frankly an unfounded and unhinged hatred of her, we are reminded yet again of how difficult it is to be a woman with big ambitions who has been working to solve big problems and who has big goals. A great many of my female friends are ambitious professionals in male-dominated fields, and every time someone says she just isn’t likeable or that she is a bitch or that she is cold and manipulative or that her ambitions will “rip the party apart” or how much they “just hate her”, a lot of us remember all the times the exact same things were said to or about us. A lot of us see again how easy it is dehumanize ambitious women. Do not, in seeing our excitement, presume to argue that we are not real progressives. Please do not, in your rush to assure folks that you do not care for her or you are not a fan, miss, diminish, or belittle the enthusiasm and pride that a lot of women rightfully feel.
4. Finally, a lot of us are fired up because of how easily some of our male friends can let Obama “evolve” on the issues or still really love him despite disagreements with his politics, but dislike or hate Hillary Clinton. We are fired up because we know why this is the case, we have seen it play out in our own lives. You can call it personality or charisma or whatever else you want to call it, but it is most definitely also about gender. We are fired up at the thought that these sentiments could mean casting a vote for Stein (or Trump or Johnson) in order to “raise awareness” or “send a message to the Democratic Party”. The reality is you won’t be sending a message to the DNC, but to the coalition, painstakingly built, of women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, the disabled, and the many other voters who pushed Hillary Clinton to the nomination and who show up not just for the person or the party, but for principle. That is who is reading your message loud and clear. There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Hillary Clinton and the party, and we must keep making them just as we always have been in order to keep pushing for social justice, economic freedom, and environmental action. Vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or Donald Trump if you want to, but please do not continue to call yourself a “progressive” while deriding the Democratic Party and the people that make it up. Hillary Clinton is a human being, as a politician she is not perfect, but she is a progressive, and so are the great many women who have supported her or will support her in the coming months and years, and we will be here in 2017 — win or lose, and we will only lose if folks don’t show up. The very definition of the word “progressive” is the action of progress and pushing the rock up the hill and going hard in the paint — things you cannot do if you take your ball and go home. We will hear your message loud and clear, yet we will still be devoting our lives to the many manifestations of the work.

I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries and will do so in the general election. To me she is not the lesser of two evils, to me she is a one of the many pieces of evidence of the work and progress women can achieve, and to many of my female friends who were Sanders supporters, she is now their candidate. I am most assuredly with her, and will ugly cry from here to November at the opportunity for which I have the fortune to be a small part.