Headlines of the Day

These are actual headlines about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in response to the pictures of her dancing and drinking a beer in Cartegena:

1. The Telegraph: Is Hillary Clinton becoming an embarrassment as Secretary of State?

2. The Atlantic: Hillary Clinton Loses the Scrunchie in Colombia.

3. Always classy, the New York Post simply went with: SWILLARY.


Ladies, this is your infuriatingly regular reminder that you can spend your entire life working at something, learning, practicing, training, honing your skills, building your talents, giving every piece of yourself, your nights and mornings and weekends and every spare minute you have, keeping a laser-like focus on your ultimate goal, inch by inch making your way to the top of your field, becoming the best there ever was, maybe the best there ever will be...and whether you're a presidential candidate or a vice-presidential candidate or America's best female skier or a popular actress, they can still put you in your place with a single slur, a single touch, a single image, a single shared chuckle over your nothingness, a single reminder that evidence of your humanity as a woman makes you less than.

And talk about a game of Can't Fucking Win: Hillary Clinton is too cold, too calculating, too hard, too humorless. [Insert texting, dancing, and beer.] Hillary Clinton is an embarrassment, a drunkard, a woman who wears a scrunchie but now isn't wearing one oh no oh god oh the humanity she is so terrible.

I don't write about this garbage because I believe Hillary Clinton needs my defense. In order to do what she does every day, she's so far beyond giving the tiniest infinitesimal fuck about headlines like this that they may as well exist in another dimension in another galaxy in a parallel universe, for all they affect her or her life.

I write about it because demeaning Clinton demeans all women, and vanishingly few of us are born into this world inherently prepared to counteract, or even process, the metric fucktons of misogynist shit that the Patriarchy throws at us in its grand bloody game of Fuck You, Ladies.

I write about it so that we may all feel less alone on this journey, and find some resolve and coping strategies in the shared space of acknowledged subjugation.

I write about it because this is how feminism works.

I write about it in solidarity.

And I write about it as a thank-you to Hillary Clinton, and all the feminist and womanist women who have gone before me, blazing a trail that I may follow, despite the personal cost.