Why are all my male friends (mostly white, educated and intelligent) misunderstanding the misogyny charge? To simplify it to “not voting for a female candidate does not make me misogynist” is depressingly inaccurate.
What I want to try to make the case for to you, is that this isn’t about YOUR privilege, its about the candidates. That you can’t measure their decisions against each other in an apples to apples manner because they come from different circumstances and privilege.
To put it simply- do you honestly believe that if a woman was in Sanders position- rallying around revolution and forgoing SuperPAC money, that she would succeed? Of course not- she’d be called crazy and that’s by the people who’d pay attention. A white guy was able to do so mostly because he’s a white guy. Maybe now, that its happened once, a female can replicate it in a future election, but lets not presume they could have the same experience.
Do you honestly believe that Clinton is not “politically brave”? Or that she had a different set of circumstances applied to her. Do you not remember the 90s, during the time she fought for health care and so many people said, “who elected her?”.
I think its overly simply to keep going back to the Iraq vote. We are simplifying it in hindsight, but at the time, I do not remember “everyone knowing the evidence was false” and I was someone ardently against the war. What I remember is that everyone thought the evidence was strong, and that most of congress voted for the war, not by a narrow margin, but by a huge margin. That we know now the evidence was bad is hindsight. And lets not give Sanders insightful credit here, the man is against military action, period endstop. He wouldn’t have voted for military intervention under any circumstances. I feel like we can’t go 10 minutes without this coming up, his whole campaign is propped on it.
How can you possibly know HRC’s motives about the money? Isn’t it just as easy to say, “hahha, I’ll take their money then screw them” as it is to say “I’ll take their money and spend my entire presidency paving the way for them”? Many of us see it as amazing that Goldman Sachs paid her the same, if not more than male speakers. Have you ever taken a role and then said, “hey. That’s too much money. I’m going to have to ask you to pay me less. Infact, I think its better I just not take the role at all, in case I ever want to be up for this later role”. Probably not.
Sanders, a well meaning, completely altruistic guy- I have nothing bad to say about him except that he yells a lot and reminds me of my dad, was the senator for a small, wildly liberal state. I’m pretty convinced they’d elect Ben & Jerry there. Like, to one seat. Do you honestly believe if he’d held the same political stance as the Senator of say.. New York or California, that he’d remained in office? Probably not.
Do you honestly believe that they’ve been exposed to the same decision making? Sanders, again, was mayor and Senator of a small state. Clinton served in some capacity while FLOTUS, she was Senator for New York, and then Secretary of State.
In the end, you vote for who you vote for… but even you seem to be less about voting FOR Sanders as voting AGAINST HRC. And for a lot of reasons that many of us deem misgynist. Not because she’s a woman, but because you’re judging the two without acknowledging the different circumstances they had. And while you are a wildly empathetic guy, you will never, ever understand what its like to be a very intelligent, ambitious woman with all the skills who is constantly getting slapped down by men because you’re a bitch, or you don’t smile enough, or because you didn’t leave your husband, or because you stayed.