However... I believe sexism is so endemic, its manifestations are virtually invisible.
Edit to preface my rant: This is about his stated "reasons" for her being unqualified, which were all about her CHARACTER -- as evinced all over GDP.
Think about it. Racism is relatively recent as a matter of systemic prejudice. I see it as akin to tribalism. When hunter/gatherers moved and encountered other tribes, they were naturally suspicious -- these people are different, what are their intentions, will we negotiate or fight, etc.
In western cultures over the centuries since this country was "founded" (or invaded), women and Africans were both considered property. Here's the difference: The subjugation of WOMEN was systemic long before that, because all cultures included both men and women.
Apart from cultures where women bonded together or otherwise wielded power over survival (beyond themselves and their children), we've been THOUGHT OF as "other." Not the standard, and failures as competitors for that standard (that standard being "male" for so long).
Just from fairytales and kids' TV from my childhood, I remember having the idea as a little girl that boy dolls were "better." I had several sisters and no brothers, but I remember telling my mother that I wanted a Raggedy Andy doll instead of a Raggedy Anne, because boys are "better." How? I didn't know. I remember her seeming puzzled.
I could go on but... I just think somehow it's cool to stick with the winning team, especially when you're otherwise on the losing one. (Nothing irks me more than women congratulating themselves on not being feminist, or on voting against the woman in the race. Fine if they prefer another candidate, but the smug "Ain't I cool and post-all-that" gets me.) At the same time, it's somehow ingrained in us from childhood to rebel against the authority figure, and that figure tends to be a woman (mom, teacher, evil stepmother, wicked witch).
So I still think there's a self-congratulatory zeitgeist, from a heavy backlash against the feminist movement, that says "I'm so hip, I am with the MAN! The woman is EVIL!"
Surely there's also an issue about the backlash against the Clintons as Babyboomers --think of the 60s vs. 50s as a culture clash -- and how the real "establishment" HATED them to mind-bending degrees. Billions of dollars. Millions of hours. Thousands of researchers. Decades of years.
Conservatives created a new backlash in the "Young Fogies," as I call them. Now ageism rears its head against Clinton -- her ankles! her wrinkles! her grandma-ness! -- which is ironic to the hilt, to me.
Sorry for rambling. I guess I have the sense that we get a very few fast steps forward (as in the 1920s and the 1970s) and then we're hit back (the 1950s, what we've seen since the 1990s) and it's such a long hard road just to get back to where we were when we were last moving in the right direction.
People don't need a real reason for vitriol against her. There ISN'T a real reason for it. With nothing but rumors, innuendo, mischaracterizations, creative dot-following, quotes out of context and outright lies, they are CONVINCED she is the Evil Stepmother Wicked Witch and everything worse!
Sanders has exploited that, RNC's work in our own party. Yet somehow it's we who read the policy positions, weigh the records, consider the sources and seek maximum progress who are outcast as fuddy-duddy unhip "establishment."
I've seen enough to know BS when I see it.
= new reply since forum marked as read
