Sure, there'll be Hillary nutcrackers. But I prefer to think that such an election year novelty speaks more to her Olympian quads than the assumption she would subjugate all men, geld them in a secret ceremony (tastefully lit with tuber rose-scented Jo Malone candles) and lead them around in studded dog collars like moist, smoothly complected capons.
I mean, it's not like there would ever be similarly outrageous paraphernalia that inanely caricatures Obama, right? After all, there's been so little of that kind of thing over the years. But lately Hillary's fiercely loyal base insists that her negative treatment has been due to the fact -- and only due to the fact that: she's a lady, whoa-whoa-whoa, she's a lady.
The truth is, her gender was and is helpful in her rise, but not as much as her intelligence and ability. And it should be an asset when 110% of the world is run by men. She, along with millions of women, has had to work much harder than her male counterparts to make it, to achieve anything approaching parity. There is rampant, maddening sexism. But Hillary's latest claims are simply not credible and in fact go a long way to diluting the scourge of daily, routine oppression against women. It is her sophisticated feminine talents, her truly advanced power of reason that propels her to her rightfully earned heights. If nothing else, during the episode involving Bill's legendary satyriasis, Hillary was far more understanding and/or forgiving than perhaps a marital partner of the opposite sex would be and effectively put to rest any insinuation that she'd be an unholy, testicle-mashing harridan. Bill had to be grateful for his wife's strength and wisdom. All men are. They are also, however, scared shitless.
Men, with their incessant chest-thumping; their insatiable, sloppy libidos; their back hair; their gas; their drool. Men, with their vein-popping, hyper-competetiveness, their Saturday afternoon scrums around the plasma watching ESPN and "300" and guzzling Red Bull and pork rinds, all because their days of trampling villages with severed heads on wrought iron pikes are gone. And though the hunter gatherer lies a-mouldering in the grave, men nonetheless require ersatz prey for their perpetually cocked shafts.
Wow. I just soiled myself.
What has effectively killed the enthusiasm for her as the possible President of the Re-United States is not the fact that she lacks a Y chromosome. Rather, it is her use of tactics culled from the pages of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy for Dummies, her not-so-subtle pressing of buttons calculated to catalyze knee-jerk responses from the sea of supposedly loyal Democrats but who seem to be nothing more than cultural automatons ready for a shiny penny to be slid into their slots, apparently as vitriolic as the Repuglican somnambulists that made Hillary's life a misery and whom they so rightfully despise.
But like the attacks on Obama that highlight his scary sounding middle name or his scary sounding pastor or his scary sounding wife (and she's a WOMAN!!!!) categorizing Hillary as a victim of sexism shows there is nothing else to be said that cogently criticizes her qualifications, nothing of any substance that is assailable. Like all the bloody invective launched at Obama, the Hillary nutcracker exists because her actual ideas are unimpeachable. That she is using those low-brow tactics herself, or that her surrogates accuse the media (inarguably culpable for much that is low-brow and divisive) it is the fact that she is cannibalizing her own integrity by invoking sexism as a ploy to get herself elected that indicates her unsuitability as a genuine force for change.
So, it's not the gender, stupid. You'd have to be nuts to think so.