bekka pramheda @bekka--pramheda - Tumblr Blog

It’s hard to remember these days, but just a few years ago, everybody loved Hillary Rodham Clinton. When she stepped down as US secretary of state in January 2013 after four years in office, her approval rating stood at what the Wall Street Journal described as an “eye-popping” 69%. That made her not only the most popular politician in the country, but the second-most popular secretary of state since 1948.

The 2012 “Texts from Hillary” meme, which featured a sunglasses-clad Clinton scrolling through her Blackberry aboard a military flight to Libya, had given rise to a flood of think pieces hailing her “badass cool.” The Washington Post wanted president Barack Obama to give vice president Joe Biden the boot andreplace him with Clinton. Taking stock of Clinton’s approval ratings, Nate Silver noted in a 2012 piece for the New York Times that she currently held “remarkably high numbers for a politician in an era when many public officials are distrusted or disliked.”

How times have changed. “The FBI And 67 Percent of Americans Distrust Hillary Clinton,” booms a recent headline in the Huffington Post. Clinton’s favorability ratings currently hoveraround 40.8%. Bob Woodward complains that “there is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating.” “Hillary’s personality repels me,” Walker Bragman writes in Salon.

How can we reconcile the “unlikable” Democratic presidential candidate of today with the adored politician of recent history? It’s simple: Public opinion of Clinton has followed a fixed pattern throughout her career. Her public approval plummets whenever she applies for a new position. Then it soars when she gets the job. The wild difference between the way we talk about Clinton when she campaigns and the way we talk about her when she’s in office can’t be explained as ordinary political mud-slinging. Rather, the predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americans’ continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power.

We beg Clinton to run, and then accuse her of feeling “entitled” to win. Several feminist writers have analyzed the Clinton yo-yo. Melissa McEwan sees a deliberate pattern of humiliation, which involves “building [Clinton] up and pressuring her to take on increasingly prominent public challenges, only to immediately turn on her and unleash breathtaking misogyny against her when she steps up to the plate.”

If you find this hypothesis unlikely, there’s Ann Friedman’s explanation: Clinton makes people uncomfortable by succeeding too visibly. Clinton is trapped in “the catch-22 of female ambition,” Friedman writes: “To succeed, she needs to be liked, but to be liked, she needs to temper her success.”

Yet it seems odd that even when Clinton ascends to ever-greater positions of power—from first lady to senator, from senator to secretary of state—we start liking her again once she’s landed the job. It’s not her success that seems to arouse ire, but the act of campaigning itself.

This issue is not specific to Clinton. As Slate writer Jamelle Bouie has pointed out on Twitter, even progressive demigod Elizabeth Warren was seen as “unlikable” when she ran for the Massachusetts senate seat. Local outlets published op-eds about how women were being “turned off” by Warren’s “know-it-all style”—a framing that’s indistinguishable from 2016 Clinton coverage. “I’m asking her to be more authentic,” a Democratic analyst for Boston radio station WBUR said of Warren. “I want her to just sound like a human being, not read the script that makes her sound like some angry, hectoring school marm.”

–Sady Doyle: America loves women like Hillary Clinton–as long as they’re not asking for a promotion

giandujakiss-deactivated2021081

i think i need to reblog this at least 5 times a day

russianglitter

if i could find the original post i would just reblog it, but as always, thank you to @graceandbeautywins for making this a few years ago:

#same

russianglitter

ok you can’t add back in everyone’s mistakes except aliya’s and then say “they all would have beaten aliya!!!” lmao

what she says: i'm fine

what she means: THE OLYMPICS ARE STARTING YASSSS HERE WE GO Y’ALL GIVE ME ALL THE GYMNASTICS AND SOCCER/FOOTBALL AND SWIMMING AND TRACK AND FIELD AND DIVING AND EVERYTHING ELSE AND WHO NEEDS A JOB ANYWAY BC IT’S THE FUCKING OLYMPICS AND IT’S SO GREAT AND SO INSPIRING AND GOD BLESS ALL THE ATHLETES BC THEY’RE TO TENACIOUS AND INSPIRING AND GREAT AND ISN’T IT COOL THAT THE WORLD GETS TO EXPERIENCE ALL THAT AWESOMENESS TOGETHER AND REMEMBER THAT WE’RE ALL MORE ALIKE THAN WE ARE DIFFERENT AND THAT JOY THAT YOU SEE ON AN ATHLETE’S FACE WHEN THEY’VE WON GOLD AND THEIR NATIONAL ANTHEM IS PLAYING AND THEY’RE SMILING AND CRYING AND I’M SCREAMING AND CRYING BC IT’S THE OLYMPIIICCCSSSSSSSS LESGOOO!!!!

#honestly same