2016 Postmortem

Why do successful women like Hillary Clinton get under so many people's skin?

There’s nothing the public enjoys more than a high-flying woman brought low, argues Sady Doyle, and nothing we like less than a woman who refuses to play the game


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‘Hillary’s extraordinary success may only be tempting the God of Trainwrecks to make her our biggest and best catastrophe yet:’ Clinton talks with members of her staff inside her campaign plane at the Westchester County airport. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters


Hillary Clinton has a unique talent to make people viscerally angry. Just look at the footage from Trump rallies: supporters carry “Lyin Hillary” dolls hung from miniature nooses, cry “Lock her up” and “Hang her in the streets”, and wear Trump That Bitch T-shirts. You could chalk this up to Trump’s toxicity, but some of it also haunted the Democratic primaries, in the over-the-top depictions of Clinton as a cold-blooded murderer or criminal mastermind promulgated by the most fanatical Bernie Sanders supporters.

So why is it, exactly, that Clinton gets under our skin? We could blame it on sexism – personally, sexism is one of my favourite things to blame stuff on; I recommend it highly – and that would be correct. Still, that diagnosis is a little too blunt to really get at the problem. Women and men, left-wingers and right-wingers alike, all dissolve into spasms of rabid conspiracy theorising and ranting when Clinton’s name comes up.

I would argue that Clinton irritates people not just because of her gender, but because we simply can’t process her narrative. There are no stories that prepare us for her trajectory through life and, therefore, we react to her as if she’s a disruption in our reality, rather than a person. We love public women best when they are losers, when they’re humiliated, defeated, or (in some instances) just plain killed. Yet Clinton, despite the disapproval that rains down on her, continues to go out there and chalk up wins.

Aversion to successful or ambitious women is nothing new. It’s baked into our cultural DNA. Consider the myth of Atalanta. She was the fastest runner in her kingdom, forced men to race her for her hand, and defeated every one of them. She would have gotten away with it, too, if some man hadn’t booby-trapped the course with apples to slow her down, which is presented as a happy ending. By taking away her ability to excel, he also takes away her loneliness.

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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/06/why-do-we-love-a-trainwreck