On Liking the Unlikeable Hillary Clinton [View all]

[ehrnst]

It wasn't even that I respected her and her record (with some acknowledged disagreements), or that I believed she would make a competent president. There were plenty of Serious People who believed the same, so that was tolerated.

It was that I like her.

I like Hillary Clinton with unabashed enthusiasm. I like listening to her speak, I like looking at photos of her interacting with people, I like her resplendent jackets and colorful pantsuits, I like her loud laugh, I like her expressive face.

These things, one might note, are not about policy. They are about liking Hillary as a human being.

When I look at her, I don't see a stereotype of a nagging wife or mother, nor the caricature of a man-hating feminist, nor an extension of her husband (or his administration), nor an embodiment of some nebulous evil.

I see her.

This was not always the case. I've written previously about my own experience coming to like and admire Hillary, which required a journey past entrenched false narratives about her and past my own internalized misogyny.

Through that fog emerged the picture of a person whom I like very much indeed.

When I write about her, that comes through. It's not because I can't help it; it's because I want it to be clear, in the spaces between every letter and every line, that I am writing about a woman I like.

It's a thoroughly conscious rejection of the corrupt dynamic in the political press that requires a perceptible contempt of Hillary in order to establish credibility among the gatekeepers.

I refuse to perform disdain, or even an affected neutrality, in writing about her, in order that I might earn the plaudits of people who have spent four decades transmitting lies about her and burying her in thinly-veiled (or shamelessly overt) misogyny.

That I like her does not inhibit my commitment to facts, nor my willingness to dissent when I disagree with her.

But it renders me uncredible all the same. Because she is "unlikeable." This is treated as objective fact by the same people who spent the entirety of the campaign invisibilizing her enthusiastic supporters, to uphold their spiteful construct. Spiteful, but effective—which is why women were obliged during the campaign to write pieces with titles like "An All-Caps Explosion of Feelings Regarding the Liberal Backlash Against Hillary Clinton" and "I Like Hillary Clinton. Get Used To It."

http://www.shakesville.com/2017/04/on-liking-unlikeable-hillary-clinton.html