The XX Factor: What women really think.

Lessons Hillary Taught Me

I spent the day of Hillary's concession speech at a college reunion with one of my oldest friends, and we were talking about the ways, negative and positive, in which Hillary's campaign has served as a role model for our (suddenly!) 41-year-old selves. One take-away from watching her over the last 16 months, we decided, was a motto that might have saved her campaign and could serve most women I know in good stead in our professional and personal lives: Don't Be a Victim. She was always at her best as a candidate when she lightly mocked gender conventions (like that moment in the New Hampshire debate when she deflected a moronic question about her popularity ratings with a wry "Well, that hurts my feelings.") When she actually did showcase her own hurt feelings (with the "pile-on" complaint, for example, or with any and all attempts to win the race-vs.-gender sweepstakes of oppression), she came off as the girl trying to get out of gym class because of her period. But to say that HRC should have toned down the whining is not to say she should have campaigned more like a man. I thought the much-derided tears-in-a-diner moment was a legitimate expression of exhaustion-driven vulnerability, and I hope Slate's Tim Noah is right that the diner sob (really, it was more of a sniffle) represents a turning point in the politics of weeping. With the pitiless mill we put them through, I'm impressed all presidential candidates, male and female, don't regularly crumble into sniveling heaps.

But my friend and I also agreed that, for all the delusionality of the late stage of her campaign, there was something perversely admirable about Hillary's refusal to quit, her blithe disregard for the fact that a great demographic swath of our nation hates her guts. Wanting to please, to be seen as personable and reasonable and—in all senses of the word—attractive, remains a constant in female professional and personal life. Ours is a culture that views the openly expressed desires of older women as risible and grotesque (witness the subplot of the new Adam Sandler comedy, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, in which we're encouraged to laugh at the sex-starved grannies who line up to get their hair, and themselves, done by Sandler's randy Israeli stylist/hero.) As I watched the supposedly comic ecstasy of Zohan's clients on the eve of the Montana and South Dakota primaries, I couldn't help thinking, there's Hillary's base. What's so funny about what they want?