The glass ceiling is just cracked, not shattered
Ruth Marcus says the fact that Hillary Clinton will face gender challenges even if elected president tells us how far we’ve yet to come.
There are many better reasons to oppose Donald Trump than his rampant sexism. But the brazenness of Trump’s recent comments, and the not-so-subtle piling on by the Republican National Committee, demand some attention. The remarks are worth noting not only because of what they tell us about Trump & Co., but also because they illustrate some of the gender-based challenges that Hillary Clinton confronts as she seeks to become the nation’s first female president, and that she would continue to face in office.
At NBC’s Commanderin-Chief Forum on Wednesday night, Trump was asked about his 2013 tweet on sexual assaults in the military: “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”
There is only one possible answer when questioned about this tweet: “That was dumb, and I retract it.”
It will not surprise you that this was not Trump’s response. “It is a correct tweet,” he told Matt Lauer.
Sure, it’s easy to avoid claims of sexual assaults if you exclude women from the military — or from the workplace, for that matter. But keeping women out of jobs for which they are qualified isn’t the solution, nor is the answer to blame the victim of sexual assault for her presence on the scene. The fault of sexual assault lies with its perpetrator, not with the fact that enlightened public policy created the possibility.
As Washington Post fact-checker Michelle Ye Hee Lee noted, the Pentagon report that Trump was citing actually found that 50 percent of the episodes involve assaults of men, mostly by other men. But the more fundamental point is this: In Trump’s world, the smart solution would be to segregate the sexes, and keep the women out.
That was only the latest. The week already had brought Trump proclaiming that Clinton “doesn’t look presidential, does she, fellas?” And, in case anyone could have failed to take that as the gender putdown that it was, Trump rephrased it the next day, “I just don’t think she has a presidential look. And you need a presidential look.”
Hmmm, what about Clinton looks different from all those other, um, fellas? Hint to Trump: If you’re down by 23 points among white women with college degrees, maybe this isn’t the smartest move.
Trump’s sexism should no longer be surprising. This campaign alone, we have had his references to Megyn Kelly’s “blood coming out of her wherever,” his disparaging of Carly Fiorina’s looks (“Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?”) and his “Mad Men” attitude toward sexual harassment (“find another career or find another company”).
What is surprising, at least given his party’s deficit with female voters, is that Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus would so blithely join in. “HillaryClinton was angry (plus) defensive the entire time — no smile and uncomfortable,” he tweeted. Really? Would Priebus complain about a male candidate’s failure to smile?
I’m not arguing that this was intentionally demeaning, rather that it was unintentionally revealing of a double standard. Girls are supposed to be nice. Nice girls smile pleasantly. Clinton does not smile pleasantly. Therefore she is not a nice girl. And while nice guys may finish last, girls face risks either way.
For women, there is an elusive, pardon the phrase, sweet spot, between too meek and too tough, too frivolous and too serious. For a would-be first female president, even for one who has been a senator and secretary of state, that balance is even harder to find. It’s hard to be likable enough.
Thus the Clinton campaign’s move Thursday, in a post on the blog Humans of New York, to explain — womansplain? — her seeming emotional inaccessibility, recalling how male students heckled her when she was taking the LSATs, complaining that she had no business taking their spots in law school.
“I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional,” Clinton said. “But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena.”
Sigh. Barack Obama is aloof. Mitt Romney wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy. The country may be on the verge of electing the first female president. But as this campaign demonstrates, shattering that glass ceiling will still leave a lot of cleanup work to even the gender playing field.