#democratic primary

Dudes, men, gentlemen, boys, bros…

I need to talk about why a lot of women have the feels about Elizabeth Warren and the primaries.

If you’re already poised over your keyboard, ready to respond and explain things to me, stop. Shut up. Listen. JUST. LISTEN.

We’ve all known from the start that Warren, like any candidate, could lose. It’s simple math – only one person is getting the nomination. We knew this. And we knew it would be an uphill battle under the best of circumstances because being a rich white man is still considered the default qualification for POTUS, and anyone deviating from that has to do extra work to prove the country is ready for them or that they can do the job.

The fact that things have played out the way they have are frustrating in ways previous elections haven’t been, though, and it’s not because our preferred candidate didn’t make it on to the ballot. I mean, yes, there’s that part, but there’s more to it. A large part of it is because we watched Warren jump through the same bullshit hoops we’ve all had to jump through in our daily lives, and while we had hope she might prevail anyway, the glass ceiling held.

I’m sure Sanders voters can relate to the deck being stacked against their candidate. I’m certainly not saying Warren voters are alone in their disappointment and emotions over how this race has been run. I am just, for this post, focusing on why women who supported Warren feel the way they do right now.

From the start, Warren was scrutinized for her electability. Her likability. Before we could even talk about her qualifications or her plans or her platforms, we had to discuss if she was LIKABLE enough, and that never stopped. A lackluster debate performance meant she wasn’t aggressive enough. A stellar debate performance meant she was too aggressive, too loud, too shrill. She ripped out Bloomberg’s still-beating heart and showed it to him, and we were back to talking about if she was “likable” or “too forceful.”

This happens with any female candidate, but for a few shining weeks, we had hope that Warren would transcend it. That the woman who inspired “nevertheless, she persisted” would rise despite people wringing their hands over if she was likeable, something we never discuss about male candidates.

Through it all, even when the numbers looked great, she was blatantly erased from coverage. News outlets posted graphs of the leading candidates, and just… left her off while including those who were trailing her. Analyses of debates, campaigns, etc., simply didn’t mention her at all. She was a strong contender, but she was ignored and erased for no reason, and if that isn’t something that a lot of women can relate to, I don’t know what is. The feeling of being a viable candidate for a task, a job, a committee, whatever, only to be written off from the start because of girl cooties, or of having to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously as male counterparts, is an all too familiar frustration for a lot of women.

Nevertheless, she persisted, and we had hope that Warren could have a strong finish despite concerted efforts to pretend she wasn’t even there.

Unfortunately, questions about her “electability” became a self-fulfilling prophecy. After months of being told she couldn’t win, she didn’t… and I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve seen comment that “Warren was my preferred candidate, but I didn’t think she could win, so I voted for X.” She could have won… if we’d voted for her. She was electable… if we’d elected her.  

When she was winning, she was taking votes away from more viable candidates. When she was losing, she needed to get out of the way. That dichotomy never seems to apply to male candidates, and it strikes a particularly bitter chord for women who have, all their lives, had their achievements and failures filtered through men. Boys don’t like girls who are smarter than them. If you beat him at something, he’ll feel emasculated. If you aren’t better than every boy on the team, then you don’t belong there, but if you are better, then you’re making them all feel bad for being bested by a girl. The important thing is not what we do and how we do it, but how it reflects on the men around us or their masculinity.

In the end, if all things had been equal, Warren still might have lost. Maybe the majority of voters wouldn’t have been onboard with her plans and platforms. Maybe they would have preferred another candidate. That’s how elections go, and we can all live with that. We’ll never know how it would have gone if she’d been treated the same as her competition. In particular, her male competition. (Because let’s face it, Amy Klobuchar had the same “likability problem”)

And if Warren had lost in an election where she was considered an equal to her competition, where she wasn’t blatantly removed from coverage as if she weren’t there at all, then I think we could all swallow the loss as disappointing but part of the game.

The fact that she had to be twice what her male counterparts were in order to be taken half as seriously, that a white man who’d only had experience as a mayor was taken more seriously than a woman with Warren’s resume, that she could destroy Bloomberg onstage and still be questioned about “likability”…

THAT is why we’re frustrated. Because on smaller levels, we’ve been there.

And for one shining moment, we thought we were going to see a qualified, badass woman win despite every effort to make us forget she was there at all.