We may never be able to fully parse the level of witting or unwitting collusion between Putin, Trump, and Assange in the DNC hack, but it’s no trouble at all to identify a common motive. All three men deeply, publicly loathed Hillary Clinton. Assange, according to former associates, saw Clinton as primarily responsible for U.S. hostility to WikiLeaks, and was eager to “settle a score.” Trump, especially in the late stages of the general election, seemed to harbor hatred for “Crooked Hillary” in a way that verged on the physical: stalking her around debate stages, hinting that “Second Amendment people” could “do something” about her, hissing “nasty woman” while she spoke. And Putin, well, his response to Clinton’s criticism of his regime speaks for itself: “It’s better not to argue with women. But Ms. Clinton has never been too graceful in her statements,” he said in 2014, after she’d criticized his invasion of the Ukraine. “When people push boundaries too far, it’s not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman.”
It would be foolish to attribute all of this to sexism. Clinton was a legitimate threat to Trump’s presidential ambitions, Putin’s national interests, and Assange’s freedom. but it would be equally foolish to count sexism out. When three men, with three nominally different world views, are all so singularly, obsessively angry at a powerful woman that they all somehow wind up working to destroy her career and reputation, and when at least two of those men explain their anger in terms of the target’s refusal to behave “correctly” (i.e., correctly for a woman), it’s really hard to tell a coherent story of their alignment without bringing misogyny into the equation.
Yet we continually refuse to bring misogyny into the equation, or to see violence against women as political violence. Political commentators parse elections in terms of the gender of candidates or voters, divide issues into “economic” and “social,” divide causes or actors into “right” and “left,” rather than considering that repressing women’s participation in public life may be its own coherent political ideology, shared by men and some (admittedly self-destructive) women across the political spectrum.
