I remember growing up hearing horrible stories about Hillary Clinton, and I see now how they were similar to the horrible stories I was told about feminism. The movement has been warped by an ugly stigma that leads too many women to irrationally deny a movement that exists for their benefit. It worked on me at first. I told cute guys in college that I wasn’t a feminist. Thankfully, by my junior year, the book Full Frontal Feminism had saved my life. I think a lot of young women experienced a similar awakening when Beyoncé made Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s definition of the word go viral back in 2014.

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Zooming out on Hillary’s 2016 loss reveals the broader contours of women’s oppression. We’re told that sexism is something we are dreaming up, that the women’s movement is unnecessary, or unsavory, or both. Even faced with the mind-numbingly obvious role that sexism played in the 2016 election, we are still parsing the extent to which Hillary’s every flaw must be cataloged and examined. This bullsh*t buffet truly never ends.


It took me years to unpack the lies I’d been told about feminism and about Hillary. Gender inequality was so aggressively denied in the 2016 campaign, it was easy to lose sight of the most concrete examples. For me, the most grounding and concise description came from Rebecca Traister, who asked, during a panel at Rutgers University in spring 2017, “If we only have a problem with Hillary Clinton, not with women, why is she the only woman who has ever gotten this far?”