A Shrew

Continuing with “Good & Mad” I find myself amazed at almost every paragraph!  I now realize why I was alone (or so it seemed to me) in KNOWING that Hillary Clinton out-debated both Obama and Trump.  The reporters were listening to the supposed sound of her voice instead of actually listening to her words!  How silly of me to think that content mattered more than any imagined delivery.  And I do mean imagined.  The poor darling couldn’t win for losing, as they saying goes.

What am I on about?  Rebecca Traister describes how women are perceived when they send out a message in an elevated tone of voice.  This is perceived as hysteria, screeching, caterwauling, or other like-minded hogwash.  Unfortunately the book was published before the infamous Ford / Kavanagh hearing as I would have loved to see her take on that farce.  My own opinion, now that I have read the description of hysteria as illustrated by a dozen political women is this – if ever in the history of media coverage I saw someone in the throes of hysteria it had to be Brett Kavanagh.  The man was beside himself, ranting like a lunatic and going so far as to reach into a 20+ year time that somehow made it possible that Ford’s accusations were related to the Clintons.  Holy cow.  And yet media gave him a PASS.  Even so called left wing media were not all over him for losing his cool from beginning to end.  The way he slapped those papers down was crazy.  If a woman had behaved like that they would have nailed her to the cross.  As it was Dr. Ford was still marginalized by them saying “well, something happened to her but it wasn’t him” even after she said she was 100% sure he was the one.

Excuse me . . . are you catching my tone?  Do I sound hysterical, mad, shrewish, perhaps?  Ah, you cannot really tell from print.  But stop . . . you know this is a female writer so yes . . . I must be frothing at the mouth.  Is it any wonder that women may still want to hide behind initials?

But I digress.

I am still barely half way through this book but as I say, I am really stunned by the incredible bias women are facing with respect to their right to be angry, even furious.  And oh my goodness, for a non-white woman she has 2 strikes against her.  She becomes “the angry black woman”.  Incredible to read about how Michelle Obama was first treated and how she had to “send a message” rather than speak like an ordinary, sane woman.

“When they go low, we go high.”  Michelle Obama