Saturday, November 12, 2016

"if you try to break a glass ceiling, you'd better be prepared to get cut"

I keep forgetting for a half second and then I remember and feel my stomach drop all over again because we elected Donald Trump president of the United States.

My visceral reaction to the news has surprised me. It feels personal, because I relate to Hillary Clinton, in that she's worked for a long time to try and succeed in a male-dominated field and has often been held to a different standard because she's a woman. I think a lot of my ambitious female friends feel the same, and therefore this defeat feels like a personal rejection of the "nasty" women we aspire to be.

Part of the depth of my reaction is probably from the shock. I really expected America to resoundingly renounce That Monster with his groping and sexual assault bragging but we didn't. Instead, we implicitly endorsed his misogynist, hateful views and propelled him straight to the Oval Office. You can grab em by whatever you want because they're women [not people] and we just don't care. His deplorable treatment of women wasn't enough for us to get over Hillary's emails or Hillary's potential Supreme Court nominees or whatever it was that you thought was so important that we elect an accused rapist instead.

You can keep all your unity and acceptance and blah blah blah to yourself for now because I'm livid. And I'm allowing myself to indulge in that for a little bit until I figure out how to shape this rage into something more productive than this blog post and a bunch of retweets.

If you have ideas, I'm all ears.

(title quote from this article)