It's never not about identity politics

Steinem says it best.

And Andrew Sullivan, my erstwhile favorite cryptoconservative, is now off my reading list. His increasingly shrill hysteria (words deliberately chosen) over Clinton is edging into insanity. And he calls the above Steinem essay "tired old victimhood." Here's a tip, Andrew: if the person you're describing has been victimized, the language of victimhood is neither tired nor old-school. It's accurate, and it needs to be heeded.

The most common thing I've heard about Clinton is "I like her, but want to vote for the person, not the sex/race/whatever." Admirably post-feminist, right?

The problem is, we've moved from pre to post without spending long enough in plain ol' feminism to actually get the job done. In the previous post's comments, Ted tries to reduce the problem to one of "bias at the margins." That's utter nonsense. The problem is in the process itself -- the way Clinton is received, interpreted, and given an impossibly small range of ways to define herself in the public sphere. People say that they "like her, just not enough" without stopping to consider whether this is because of the constricted way in which pundits fashion her image out of the raw materials she provides, even as they make so much more -- often with so much less -- of her male competitors. And those are, of course, the minority of opinion-shapers, the ones not hopelessly fixated on her hair, clothes, laugh, or wrinkles. Another NYT article (in the, sigh, 'Fashion & Style' section) does a decent job at a partial summary of related issues. Even Sullivan essentially concedes that she's damned if she does and damned if she doesn't -- before happily shrugging it off as so much hard luck for the candidate he loathes with forceful irrationality.

Other critics challenge the good with the perfect: oooh, she's not feminist enough. She's using her husband's fame. I tend to think most of these folks are actually engaged in baiting or are otherwise insincere, but, to humor them: if we need to wait for a woman of an appropriate age and level of experience to ascend the ranks without having been influenced by the mores of her earlier years, we're going to wait a really long time. But even that misses the point of my consequentialist position on this primary. Frankly, the benefits of having a female president, in terms of paving the way for others and increasing younger women's participation in politics, are such that I'd have to hesitate a nanosecond before voting against Schlafly. And Clinton's no Schlafly.

We don't yet have the luxury for voting for the person irrespective of sex. And until we do, we're pointlessly squandering desperately-needed top talent, and dissuading too many from even wading into the pool. Spending too many years going too close to a doctorate in cognitive science tells me that "role model" isn't a cliche; it's a concept that fundamentally maps how we define our lives. I'll be voting for Clinton in the hope that, eight years from now, we can be a little closer to saying "I'm voting for the person" -- and having it be meaningful.