The HDS Backlash

So, after a mild, ah, discussion with The Great Ducknik this morning, Plotnik has to admit to his readers that the Gender Gap is real.

The subject was Hillary's Disaffected Supporters, which to Plotnik appears to mean women who became attached on many levels to Senator Clinton's campaign for the nomination. When this campaign did not achieve victory it served to kick up frustrations and angers that have long been lingering not that far under the surface.

It is not enough for Plotnik to simply repeat what he, and, he imagines, most men would want to say here: Someone has to win. Someone has to lose. He won. She lost. Stop whining.

Because we are not talking about the nomination, which is tangible. We are talking about what is intangible, all the slights and comments, many of them purposeful but just as bad when they are inadvertent, the burrs under the saddle that don't add up to much one by one but over the long haul begin to blister. Women have felt it and stayed quiet, but they are sick and tired of staying quiet. Blisters hurt, and then they fester.

(Plotnik knows he can't say 'whining.' He can't say 'emotional.' These are loaded words.)

(He can say 'asshole,' because that's only derogatory to men, and he can say 'tall and skinny,' which is how Barack Obama was described, and he can say 'he looks like a pencil with big ears,' because these aren't derogatory to men, but he can't say 'short and squat' because that is derogatory to women.)

(And he absolutely can't throw up his hands in frustration when this is explained to him and say "CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT?" because, yes, he'd better believe it.)

The Great Ducknik asks where are the women leaders? After Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and less than half a dozen female CEOs, where is the next generation who will provide the solidarity and the insistence that women's issues be dealt with fairly? The issues that were issues at the beginning of the women's movement are still issues today: unequal pay, government staying out of reproductive rights and men and women respecting each other's differences.

What Plotnik says is that this discussion has been advanced a hundredfold by the 2008 battle for the Democratic Nomination. Women's anger is being vented at husbands in bedrooms across America this very morning, and not just by Hillary supporters. The Great Ducknik stopped supporting Clinton when her campaign and her husband got too nasty, but this doesn't mean she abandons the cause.

If men still don't get it, they are going to have it explained to them. We don't like it, trust Plottie, but tough noogies. It's time to shut up, listen and learn.

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Why a Mary Cassatt painting? No one in 1890 could recognize Mary Cassatt as a great painter because she painted domestic scenes. Women were basically ignored in the Impressionist world.