My issues with Hillary Clinton have had nothing to do with her gender and I find it insulting and a little cowardly that so much is attributed to sexism rather than substantive issues. Even this article has a glaring contradiction in it: that Hillary fought against a tide of gender bias, and yet early on (before she started actually campaigning) she was the presumptive nominee. If sexism was such an overriding force, how did she get to be the hare in this tortoise-and-hare race in the first place? Indeed, she only stopped becoming the automatic nominee once issues OTHER than her gender came up.

Imagine, if you will, a candidate of unspecified gender--I shall use the pronoun "it"--with the following characteristics:

1) It became a senator in a state in which it didn't even reside until the last minute, taking the nomination for senator over the millions of people already in one of the biggest states in the union, apparently none of whom were qualified for the role.

2) Further to 2, above, its main qualification for public life up to that point was that it was the spouse of a national leader. Yes, it's a smart human with good academics and a strong career as a lawyer but there are a lot of those in New York. What makes this one stand out from all the others?

3) It comes from the wing of its party whose policies, tactics and philosophy have been seemingly designed to hand power to the Republican Party (at best by triangulating itself into irrelevance, rolling over for the most extreme Republican extremists and carrying on the policies of the previous Republican administration including ending welfare; at worst, by selecting "electable" candidates and running three-state strategies that lead to defeat, again and again and yet again.)

4) Despite its reputation for being a fighter, it has only really fought when its own political ambitions were at stake. Where was it during the 2000 Florida recount? Where was it during the run-up to the Iraq War? On Kyl-Lieberman? On impeaching Bush? On regulating the mortgage and lending industry, and on the financialization of the US economy in general, BEFORE a housing bubble could develop? Where, indeed, has this not-gender-specific candidate BEEN for the last seven years?

5) It freely associated with Mark Penn from Burson-Marstellar. If you know anything about the public relations industry and how it works, just standing in the same room with one of those fuckers without vomiting bespeaks a tolerance for evil and mendacity that goes way beyond any basic political survival mechanism.

To me, these bespeak a bad candidate. (Indeed, in many respects it sounds like Al Smith who lost to FDR in the 1932 primaries.) Some people may not like Hillary on the basis of gender but many more people have little or no issue with her gender--it's the substantive issues like where (and when!) she stands on Iraq.

After being raised as a feminist (definition: one who treats men and women equally, all other factors held constant) I went to university in the early 1990's where intellectual laziness, half-baked pronouncements floated as fact, and post-modern disregard for actual knowledge of one's subject were rampant. Much of this nonsense was floated by men and much of it by women; however, if you challenged a woman on her half-baked pronouncement, your motivation was immediately imputed to sexism, not a substantive issue. (Similarly, if the male was queer or brown or of some non-WASP persuasion, your motivation was deemed to be ipso facto homophobia/racism/antisemitism etc.)

It was a great way for a lazy, stupid, and/or overprivileged student to deflect any criticism of their logic, assumptions or conclusion. This in turn cheapened and undermined the discourse for everybody, not least of which for those women who WERE concerned with intellectual rigor and would have liked to have an intelligent conversation without e.g. Valerie Solanis being invoked as an authority on climate science.

And the males in the room, were they foolish enough to open their mouths and suggest that, for instance, Newtonian physics were not simply a patriarchal construct, were routinely shouted down as sexist or--worse--betraying the "unconscious" sexism inevitably invoked when there is no evidence for the conscious kind.

Much of the "sexism" debate in this campaign--not all, but toomuch--is in my view a product of the ongoing baby boom dominance of the discourse. That "iron my shirts" incident seemed awfully suspicious, as one Salon writer pointed out, as it is hardly likely that guys that age would remember an age when women routinely ironed their men's shirts and even more unlikely that these guys wore shirts that needed ironing, such things being a relic of the '50's anyway. I won't suggest that sexism is absent in the Gen X and subsequent demographics--especially in working-class environments, but then Hillary apparently had a lock on that tax bracket anyway--but to impute the opposition to a female candidate to sexism is demeaning. People who went to college post-1980 have had a very different upbringing and education re: gender issues than did the Animal House generation. Give us a little credit here.