The notion that Hillary’s nomination helps me as a woman is degrading

There’s been a lot of talk of glass ceilings this week as Hillary Clinton became the first female nominee for president in American history, and a lot of positive messaging to little girls that this somehow represents the righting of some great injustice which will somehow make their dreams for the future more attainable.

As a 23-year-old woman with a lifelong obsession with all things political, I find this particular line of rhetoric puerile and degrading.

Sitting in undergraduate classes wrestling with the nuances of Aristotelian philosophy or the political mandate of some government mandate, it never occurred to me for a second that my feminine form should be a lens which influenced my perception, that it in anyway affected my analytic abilities or disqualified me from reaching and voicing my own conclusions.

Most of my heroes are men. But that has nothing to do with their anatomy and everything to do with the merit of their character and ideas.

I am emphatically not a feminist. Yet, I have experienced sexism- I’ve been told my rejection of feminism makes me a traitor to my sex and somehow invalidates my convictions. I reject this line of reasoning as patently ridiculous. Experience makes a liar of collective ideologies like feminism. They promote assumptions about meaningless features, assign endemic features to distinguishing physical characteristics.

Everything of substance to a person is in their character- a wholly individual organ.

The modern push against stereotypes, which celebrates personal accomplishments as historic or significant because of some tradition of oppression against an identifying characteristic, actually reinforces them and denigrates the individual by making their actions significant only as part of their place in a collective. The individual substance of a person’s character is lost in laudations for race or gender or sex or whatever other preference one expresses.

This is problematic because it disempowers the individual voice and makes it significant only within the context of a subgroup for the purpose of identity power politics. But it also teaches that the only heroes one can have are those who look or think exactly like you.

Contrast is the best teacher. My greatest insights have always come from something someone else has said and the realization that it would never have occurred to me to approach an issue from their perspective. That difference is significant. I may not personally identify with someone I disagree with, but the separation helps me to understand myself and the world around me. It teaches respect, that I am as different from them as they are from me and that if I want what I have to say to be considered and taken seriously, I must respect the same capacity in them. Without qualification or consideration of personal ideology or physiognomy.