The XX Factor: What women really think.

Or Let's Return to Langston Hughes?

I love that Woolf quote, Judith, and it's sadly apt, lo this century later. And I think you're right that's both Hillary's own doing and a product of how she's been treated. But I wonder about your claim that she has weathered horrors and Obama's hasn't. Yes, she wore the straitjacket of being the first lady, which was never more strangling than in Bill Clinton's White House. But Obama is a 46-year-old black man with an amazingly unconventional and also difficult past; see his autobiography. Forgive me if you were talking about their public and recent political personas and experiences rather than their whole selves and lives, but since I don't like the race-and-gender-suffering one-upsmanship, I can't help pointing out that Obama knows a real trial when he sees one. His have been different kinds of crucibles, and maybe that explains why he's sunny Jane Austen, but maybe it's more apt to think of him as a black writer with a light and wry side, like Langston Hughes (who Rosa reminded us of the other day.)

I'm curious: Does the comparing of your racism as worth than my sexism, and vice versa, distress any one else? Or is it just me who sees this as singularly unproductive?