Democratic presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren in Memphis. Photos / AP file
Democratic presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren in Memphis. Photos / AP file
Imagine that you were the mayor of a city of around 100,000 people, the 301st largest in America.
One day you thought to yourself: "I'm smart and competent. I have lots of thoughts about how to improve things. Sure, I'm only 37 years old, but I've got talent and energy. I think I'll run for president of the United States."
How do you think that candidacy would be greeted? Chances are that if you're a man, your answer is something like: "Well, it seems like a long shot, but who knows? Anything is possible." If you're a woman, your answer is probably: "Yeah, right. Give me a break."
The presidential race we've now embarked on is unusual in lots of ways, perhaps most notably the presence of six female candidates, four of whom are US senators.
And the recent surge of interest in South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is casting an interesting light on what we expect and demand of women and men.
I don't mean this as a criticism of Buttigieg. He has a lot to commend him. But Buttigieg is enjoying a hearing, including lots of positive press coverage, that no woman in his position could possibly be granted.
That's in part because, as Jill Filipovic reminds us, we judge women by their accomplishments but we judge men by their potential. Ambition in a man is considered admirable, while in a woman it's considered threatening.
We've seen this over and over again. Hillary Clinton's popularity bounced up and down depending on whether she was seeking an office.
Or take Elizabeth Warren. Back in 2016, many on the left held up Warren as everything they wanted in a presidential candidate. The key, though, was that Warren wasn't running.
Once she did run, many of those same people decided they weren't so enamoured of her after all. She used to be brilliant and charismatic; now people have decided she's an inauthentic schoolmarm.
That case came up in a recent conversation I had with Kate Manne, a Cornell philosophy professor and author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. As Manne points out, when each woman currently running entered the race, a fatal flaw was quickly identified: Warren's Native-American ancestry, Amy Klobuchar's treatment of her staff, or Kirsten Gillibrand being, well, too ambitious (and the role she played in pushing Senator Al Franken to resign after multiple women alleged he groped them).
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in Greenville, South Carolina.
It wasn't that you couldn't make a case that those weren't real issues (some more than others), but they dominated the discussion of those candidates to an unusual degree.
"The real fatal flaw is ambition," Manne says, "and wanting to lead, and wanting to have a male-dominated authority position at the expense of men and particularly white men in the race. And that implicitly becomes the basis for suspicion and moral condemnation."
Manne's conception of misogyny isn't as simple as the way we usually think about it, as just a hatred of women. Instead, she sees misogyny as a system that enforces patriarchal values, punishing women who step outside the norms of that system and the roles they've been assigned. And few things pose as much of a challenge to the patriarchy as a woman seeking the most powerful position in the country.
But some of the challenges women candidates face are the same as women face in other contexts, like the workplace. Manne points to experimental research showing that when a woman is perceived to be competent, people will decide she's unlikeable, but if she's likeable, they'll decide she isn't as competent.
And as Manne points out, it isn't just that women have to be twice as good to be judged equal to men. When a man and a woman are competing directly against each other, people alter their judgments of both, so the man is judged even better than he would be if he was competing with another man, and the woman is judged even more harshly than she would be if she was competing with another woman.
"Women who go head-to-head with men for male-dominated positions are in a really bad spot," she told me. "It's striking that a lot of the areas where women have made enormous gains like education don't involve head-to-head rankings of men and women or boys and girls. It's just about how well you do on a particular test or essay, or what grade you get overall," without situations in which one female is judged against one male.
Kamala Harris, of California, is one of several senators in the race. She takes selfies with supporters in Atlanta.
But of course, that's just what a presidential campaign is. And if a woman should become the Democratic nominee, she'll be running against a president who will again make hostility towards women and racial minorities not a bug but a feature of his campaign.
"He made America the locker room," Manne says, "where there are implicit permissions to engage in the kind of talk that would and should get you in trouble in more egalitarian settings. He radically extended the field of permission."
Trump's sexism is so vulgar and unapologetic that it's easy to think about it as something separate from the kind of hurdles that are placed in front of women candidates, hurdles that white men like Buttigieg or Beto O'Rourke don't have to worry about.
But they're parts of a complex whole. O'Rourke's entire campaign is essentially built on likeability, without anyone bothering to ask whether he's competent. Buttigieg's desire to leapfrog three or four of the traditional rungs on the ladder is seen as worth noting but hardly disqualifying. If a woman in his position showed that kind of ambition, she'd be considered some kind of lunatic.
Reading Manne's book can make one pretty depressed about the prospects for change any time soon, even with an unprecedented number of women running for president this year. "I think the idea that the American system will support a female president coming from the left any time soon is really optimistic, and maybe naïve," she said.
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton did win three million more votes than Donald Trump, and were it not for a highly unlikely confluence of events she'd now be the president.
Yet the more success any woman running has, the more she'll be the target of a backlash. It might be possible to overcome, but it won't be easy.
