If you dislike a male politician, then there is something wrong with that particular politician. If you dislike a female politician then you often find something lacking in the entire female sex. This article in the Seattle Times talks about misogynistic hatred for Hillary Rodham Clinton on the internet. I vomitted a little in my mouth reading this article.
Facebook, popular with high-school and college students, has dozens of anti-Hillary groups, many of which take great delight in heaping abuse on Clinton as a woman, imagining her reduced to a subservient role, and visiting violence upon her.
One is “Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich,” with more than 23,000 members and 2,200 “wall posts.”
Another Facebook group, more temperate in tone and with about 13,000 members, is “Life’s a bitch, why vote for one? Anti-Hillary ’08.”
Is this merely some adolescent “guys gone wild” (most but by no means all Hillary haters are male)? The rank rituals of the rec room revealed for the whole world to see?
The proprietors of the Facebook group “Hillary Clinton Shouldn’t Run for President, She Should Just Run the Dishes,” with 2,159 members, offer a pre-emptive disclaimer to offended visitors.
Daniel Jussaume, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Southern Maine, was not among the creators of “Just Run the Dishes.” After he joined, however, he volunteered to chair its “Feminist Liberal Complaint Dept.”
Is it so surprising that this is being tolerated? Let’s remember one of the most evocative moments in the presidential race so far…
At a campaign meeting in South Carolina, a woman of patrician bearing asked Arizona Sen. John McCain, “How do we beat the bitch?”
A surprised McCain laughed along with the rest of the small crowd.
“That’s an excellent question,” McCain said after regaining his stride. He proceeded to explain why he could beat Clinton.
Viewed nearly 1 million times on YouTube in the week afterward, “How Do We Beat the Bitch” has entered the lore of the 2008 campaign, but with barely a hint of soul-searching.
“Can you imagine if that woman had said, ‘How do we beat the “n-word”?’ ” asked Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics.
For McCain, or at least for those who think the nation might have benefited by examining why that woman felt so free to say what she did so publicly, “it was a terrible missed opportunity,” Walsh said.
Thoughts readers? How can we make people see their own misogyny in a culture that seems to have accepted it as normal and allowable?