What Women WantEmily Bazelon and Melinda Henneberger discuss Slate's XX Factor and the female perspective on politics.

Slate "XX Factor" bloggers Emily Bazelon and Melinda Henneberger were online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, Nov. 15, to take readers' questions about women and politics. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

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Emily Bazelon: We had an interesting debate about this on "XX Factor," and Meghan O'Rourke, one of our Slate colleagues, saw this precisely the way you do. My own feeling is that Hillary walked right up to the line of making the "pile on" about gender, and then Bill crossed it, by talking about "the boys" ganging up on her.

Here's the link to Meghan's post:

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Arlington, Va.: My wife is a moderate Republican who dislikes the Republican candidates and supports Hillary because this is the first legitimate chance to have a woman president. HRC's moderate positions are a factor of the support. Is she a statistical outlier, or is this a trend?

Emily Bazelon: Your wife isn't an outlier. Something like 58 percent of Republican women say they might support Hillary. Her numbers are dreadful, though, among Republican men.

Emily Bazelon: make that 62 percent of MODERATE Republican women, according to an August poll.

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Washington, D.C.: Yes, I understand the sentiment that "we won't vote for Hillary just because she's a woman!" but... well, I am sometimes frustrated how issues that disproportionately affect women (access to birth control, family leave, fair pay) are often considered "special interest" issues or not very central. They're central to my life! And I hate the idea that women are a special interest, when we make up more than half the population.

I'm not going to vote for Hillary because she's a woman, but the fact she is a woman is most definitely not irrelevant to my evaluation of her candidacy. I can't be positive that she'll be less likely to push off these issues as "pet causes" or unimportant, but I think it's a heck of a lot less likely.

Emily Bazelon: I am completely with you on both of those points. One of the reasons I write a family column for Slate, as well as wite about legal issues, is that I think the issues that are traditionally labeled for women or or for mothers really affect everybody, in ways that matter, a lot.

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Prescott, Ariz.: I've seen a lot of the punditry react harshly to a poll that women were more inclined to vote for Clinton because she is a woman. Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson even went so far as to declare that any woman who based her vote on gender should lose the right to vote.

Why aren't these same pundits outraged that married men seem less likely to vote for Clinton because of gender (I think they said she wouldn't be very fun to go duck hunting or "have a beer with")?

Emily Bazelon: Good point! White men have been able to be identity voters forever, and invisibly. Now women get suspicion for their resaons for being Hillary supporters and African-Americans have to put up with the same for supporting Obama. Not fair.

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Portland: Hi Melinda -

I cannot figure out why Sen. Clinton has these high "negatives." Her positions are not out of the mainstream and are pretty close to those of other democratic candidates. It seems to me that this dislike for her precedes her run for the presidency.

Is there any valid polling data that points to the reason(s) for her high negatives?

I'm missing it.

Thanks

Emily Bazelon: There's no good polling data on this that I know of. And it's complicated. There is some evidnece that to the extent people have trouble with Hillary, it's bec they don't find her honest and trustworthy. Which, my colleague John Dickerson points out, is why Obama and Edwards are hitting her on precisely those points. I agree with you: I think that impression of Hillary predates her candidacy, and in fact predates her tenure as NY senator. It's her time at the White House. Some of it is self-inflicted—her defensiveness and secrecy—and some of it manufactured—Whitewater.

Melinda Henneberger:

Clinton-hating is an industry that goes back to 1991; there are shelves of books on how she sent lamps flying and lined her pockets with the White House silver. But as Emily says, what stands out in the polling is that her biggest liability is the perception that she is a phony. In my conversations with women voters, too, that's what stood out: "I just don't feel the realness from her,'' one young woman in Florida said. I don't see that as gender-related because that was also her husband's greatest liability. And even more to the point, because voters generally consider women candidates more trustworthy.

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