I’ve been thinking a lot about this attitude – men, those poor creatures of machismo and id, can’t help themselves, but women should do better – in the wake of the US midterms
The night before the 2016 presidential election, I watched a short news feature about how women in the US vote and, hoo boy, it made for some bracing viewing. “I would never vote for Hillary Clinton – she is literal scum,” a white woman in Florida told the reporter. When he asked her to elaborate, she said, “She let her husband sleep with that intern.” The interviewer asked if she had similarly strong views about Bill Clinton, given he did the aforementioned “sleeping”. The woman shrugged and replied, “Boys will be boys.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this attitude – men, those poor creatures of machismo and id, can’t help themselves, but women should do better – in the wake of the US midterms. Initially, when the results came in, there was a sense that we were witnessing a thrilling new feminist dawn: Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim women elected to Congress; Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, the first Native American women to be elected to Congress; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. But the initial crowing about a female future was quickly tempered by the release of voting patterns: a heck of a lot of white women had voted for Republican candidates.
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