This just changed my vote for Hillary from a maybe to an absolutely

“The frat boys at MSNBC portrayed Clinton as a castrating scold, with Tucker Carlson commenting, “Every time I hear Hillary Clinton speak, I involuntarily cross my legs,” and Chris Matthews calling her male endorsers “castratos in the eunuch chorus.” Matthews also dubbed Clinton “the grieving widow of absurdity,” saying, of her presidential candidacy and senatorial seat, “She didn’t win there on her merit. She won because everybody felt, ‘My God, this woman stood up under humiliation.’ ” While that may be partly true—Hillary’s approval ratings soared in the wake of l’affaire Lewinsky—Matthews’s take reduced her universally recognized political successes to rewards for public sympathy, as though Clinton’s intelligence and long record of public service count for nothing. Would a male candidate be viewed so reductively?" - Amanda Fortini, The Feminist Reawakening, New York Magazine

So, I have been noncommittal when people ask me who I'm voting for in the distant future of the Oregon Primaries, mostly because I think by the time I vote the nominee will have been decided. And, quite frankly, I'd be happy with either Obama or Clinton. But something my mother said when she was up here last month has been stuck in the back of my mind (and I'm paraphrasing here): that Obama will win because sexism runs deeper than racism.

And I think I agree, especially now that I've read this article in New York Magazine that lays out everything so clearly. I mean, while acknowledging that being anything other than a rich, white male will put a candidate at a disadvantage, I think that there are definite stereotypes that a woman has to face that a man does not, and these stereotypes are much harder to overcome.

For example, according to Wikipedia, two of the most common stereotypes of blacks is that they are "Unintelligent/Ignorant/Stupid" and "poor". I don't see Barack Obama having any trouble convincing most people that he is none of these things. Stupidity and net worth are tangible things; there are academic tests and salary amounts that quantify intelligence and wealth.

But one of the biggest problems for Hillary is the perception that she's a shrill, ball-busting harpy. How do you fight that, exactly? One person's speaking your mind is another fucktard's shrill. Ball busting is just another word for doing something better than a man. Can anyone who calls Hillary a harpy actually define that word accurately?

Or are they really calling her a "a foul malign creature in Greek mythology that is part woman and part bird"?

It just makes me so angry. Very angry indeed. And so that is why I will be voting for Hillary. I don't care if her victory is mathmatically unlikely. I don't care if my reasoning here is based on emotion (there's plenty of logical reasons to vote for her: She's on the armed services committee, she knows how to work the system. She's fucking SMART!). I don't care if my decision is based largely on the fact that my vote in the primaries will most likely make no fucking difference whatsoever.

I am voting for Hillary because she can still find it in herself to be professional and clever and relatively normal, even though she has to put up with all this shit every day from Tucker Carlson and Chris Matthews and every fucking neo-con and libertard in the world. That she is still running proves to me that she can handle the presidency.

And I'm not saying that Obama can't, or that he hasn't been through shit too. I'm just saying that I rarely get to do something that puts my girly money where my feminist mouth is, and if I get to make history while doing that, then yay for me.