Name the candidates for a Presidential nomination who are displaying a massive, achingly obvious ambition to become President, causing them to conduct carefully calculated and expensive campaigns that display their personal abilities for that office.
Hillary Clinton.
John Edwards.
Rudy Giuliani.
Michael Huckabee.
John McCain.
Barak Obama.
Bill Richards
Mitt Romney.
Name the candidates whose ambition for the job of President brings forth cries of personal hatred towards them from a lot of people.
Hillary Clinton.
Why is that happening? Easy. Strong ambition is an accepted part of the stereotypical male role, while it is specifically listed as a major negative characteristic of the stereotypical female role.
A lot of people get very upset when others fail to conform to their personal social stereotypical roles, especially gender roles. They try to enforce those stereotypes on people who defy them. The enforcement takes the character of ostracizing and expressions of hatred. Yet the twentieth century has not been kind to women who tried to become stereotypical wives and mothers. Consider women of marriage age in Great Britain after WW I when there was only about one potential living husband for every ten women, or during and after WW II when women first had to enter the (stereotypically male) work force. Then the economy changed after about 1960 so that a single worker could no longer support a family on one job. Women had to work, and good paying jobs were stereotypically male jobs. Women had to work, but were looked down on for breaking the stereotypical female gender role and going to work. Things have changed, but gender roles have been slow to catch up.
Now, almost fifty years and two generations after the two worker family has become the norm, a lot of people are really upset that at age 60 Hillary Clinton is violating the out-dated female role typified by June Cleaver as the Beaver’s sweet den mother non-working housewife. Instead Hillary Clinton actually has the gall to try and compete with “the men”, most of who in fact feel thoroughly threatened because they don’t have the ability to compete with her.
That’s what is causing all the expressions of Hillary-hatred. Chris Matthews is a prime example. Hillary could easily do his job better than he does, while he could not compete with her. On a gut level, he knows that, and it drives his misogynistic commentary.
America has a lot of men who depend on gender stereotypes to keep them from having to compete with more competent women. (Rachel Maddow could replace Chris Matthews in a heartbeat, and ratings would quickly rise.) There are also women who have so thoroughly adopted the passive, quiet, non-competitive female stereotype that they feel threatened when Hillary proves that stereotype is not necessary for a woman to be a good and competent person.
That’s what all this rapid Hillary hatred is all about. It’s basically frightened and conservative people who expect other individuals to adopt the gender stereotypes that those people assign to them, and when those others do not adopt those gender stereotypes on their own and prove successful without them, then such stereotype-breakers will be met with anger and will be ostracized.
But society has passed the frightened, angry people by, and their nasty tactics no longer work. Which, of course, will just make them even angrier. Watch Chris Matthews if you don’t believe me. Barring a sudden insight into his own personal fears which I doubt he has the capacity to conduct, he has no choice except to get more and more rapidly anti-Clinton as he joins Bill O’Reilly as part of the nut-job fringe.
