FLASHBACK: That Time Hillary Supporters Tried To Punish Men Into Voting For Clinton

Hillary Clinton has been trying desperately to explain away her theory that white, married women voted for Donald Trump not because he was the more appealing candidate, but because they were cowed into pulling the Republican lever by their overbearing, sexist, Patriarchal, Middle American husbands.

But, if you look back, there was only one candidate whose followers actually made an effort to sway the opposite sex into voting for their preferred candidate: and it was a group of women closely aligned with the Clinton campaign, not men for Trump.

Back last march, a group of women declared that if the men in their lives voted Trump they would “get dumped.”

The “Vote Trump, Get Dumped” campaign pledged to “Join us by wielding your influence. Until Trump is defeated, we don’t date, sleep with, or canoodle with Trump supporters.”

The theory, as in the ancient Greek play, “Lysistrata,” was to get men to abandon their chosen candidate in order to save their sex lives. Men simply wouldn’t get laid until they agreed to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election — or at least someone other than Donald Trump.

Their media materials were as dignified as you might expect.

[[{“fid”:”31382″,”view_mode”:”default”,”fields”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”Vote Trump Get Dumped Campaign”},”type”:”media”,”field_deltas”:{“1”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”Vote Trump Get Dumped Campaign”}},”attributes”:{“title”:”Vote Trump Get Dumped Campaign”,”class”:”media-element file-default”,”data-delta”:”1″}}]]The plan clearly didn’t work. Men voted for Trump in far greater numbers, even than white married women.

The Vote Trump, Get Dumped campaign is only one of many examples of women using their own feminist brand of sexism to promote Clinton during both the primaries and the general election (and try as I might, I failed to find even a single campaign encouraging men to withhold sex, affection, housework, or really anything, lest their wives set aside their Clinton vote).

Against Sanders, they complained of “Bernie Bros” who were pressuring their progressive female friends to vote against the only logical choice for women: the candidate who shared their genitalia. During the campaign, Clinton’s surrogates, like Lena Dunham, tried desperately to drive home the idea that women were gender traitors if they failed to support the “First Woman President” even if they didn’t agree with her policies.

Clinton herself referred to women who didn’t vote for her as gender sinners, offering them “no absolution” in the wake of her loss, for their failure to recognize what it might mean to womankind to have a female president, even if that female president was just as interconnected to the D.C. “swamp” and arguably as banal as any old white male candidate the Democratic — or Republican parties — could cough up.

Hillary simply has to learn that sometimes it’s not all about identity politics.