Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed this weekend that she lost the election because women — in particular, white women — caved to pressure from the men in their life, and voted for Trump.
The quintessential modern feminist Clinton says women were too scared to stand up to their husbands, boyfriends, and fathers, who told them to vote Republican, and since, clearly, women have no agency or ability to think for themselves, they listened.
Clinton made the outrageous claim in an interview with NPR, where she also blamed the so-called “Bernie Bros” for bullying Democratic women into avoiding the more moderate Clinton in favor of progressive Bernie Sanders.
“You yourself in the book acknowledge that a good number of young women didn’t vote for you, which is presumably not a sexist choice. They just weren’t inspired by your message,” NPR’s Rachel Martin said during an interview with Clinton, out to promote her litany of excuses…er…recently released book, What Happened.
“I think it’s a lot more complicated than that,” Clinton answered. “I did win the women’s vote. I didn’t win the vote of white women, but I got more white women votes than Barack Obama did,” she said.
But, said Clinton, even though women liked and respected her — an observation American women might disagree with generally — they were too afraid to stand up to the oppressive Patriarchial hand that often forces them to hide their allegiance to womankind.
“Women will have no empathy for you because they will be under tremendous pressure — and I’m talking principally about white women — they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers, and husbands, and boyfriends and male employers, not to vote for ‘the girl,’” she said.
That is, of course, ridiculous. Women are not only capable of making decisions on their own, they’ve been doing it for decades. Centuries even.
The problem is, though, that women who are able to think for themselves eventually realize they are not bound to support candidates simply because they share a similar set of genitalia. The cause of “womankind” isn’t always furthered by every female politician that steps into the arena. And when it comes to the ballot box, women have routinely told pollsters that they vote for the candidate they feel will have the best positive impact for their families.
In the case of the 2016 election, women were looking for economic security and protection from foreign terrorists, things Clinton simply couldn’t provide.
But lest you think Clinton’s ire falls only on those dastardly, oppressed Republican women who live under the thumb of domineering fathers and partners, she extends blame to female Bernie Sanders supporters who she says were cowed into supporting the progressive septugenarian by online bullies.
“And we saw a lot of that during the primaries from Sanders supporters, really quite vile attacks online against women who spoke out for me, as I say, one of my biggest support groups, Pantsuit Nation, literally had to become a private site because there was so much sexism directed their way,” she said.
Pantsuit Nation, by the way, is far from a walled garden; its founder recently received a six-figure book contract, and the Facebook site has become a hub for women-led “resistance.”
But hey, it’s much easier to blame everyone but yourself, right? Feminism!