I was recently called out by a friend of mine when I posted my opinion that Warren lost the Democratic Primaries because of the rare circumstances we face today, not because of rampant hatred of women. My claim offered a different point of view though it incorrectly claimed that misogyny is pervasive in our culture. I would like to clarify that mistake in another post. Due largely to the assinine interface on Facebook and the lack of format-ability, I am responding to his comments here after more than a week of careful consideration, research, and concern for both Warren supporters and the upcoming election.

My concern is real and not manufactured. I care less about being right and more about the effects that this hyperbolic belief in a conspiracy of hatred against women says about our upcoming election. An election where dismal female support could cost us 4 more years of Trump. To support the anti-male rhetoric of short-sited, sexist, angry Warren supporters is to guarantee our failure. Now is not the time to pout and throw tantrums about Warren’s loss. We need everyone in on this election and it may be a hard pill to swallow, but it’s all we got. Continue to believe that the country hates women in spite of evidence on the contrary and you are being as unreasonable as Trump supporters. Time to get over your loss and pull it together. I am sure this post is not going to be popular and regardless of the facts, I will be called a hateful misogynist, it is important enough that if even one grieving Warren supporter can overcome their grief and see that women are more powerful than sexism and now more than ever, women are wanted in government, we may have a chance in the upcoming general election.

Before I start, however, you are bound to wonder why this is so important to me. Why, as a white male do I feel like this is worth discussing. I don’t stand a chance of getting my friends to change their mind because to believe that Warren lost due to misogyny is comforting and reinforces their belief in the oppression of women by everyone.

Of course, it confirms the effectiveness of women’s supposed oppressor. It states that misogyny is more powerful than Warren. It submits without reservation to the notion that the hatred of women is so prevalent that it has influenced more than any other consideration, the votes of Democrats across the country. It allows them to avoid any error or deficiency in their hero and it informs their efforts moving forward.

This is my biggest concern. If you believe that misogyny is more powerful than women, Biden becomes a symbol of misogyny and women’s defeat. How can you support the idea that women, who are already conditioned to stay home and not vote, will choose to come out in the numbers we need to vote for a symbol of their defeat? How reasonable is it to support this irrational nation when it amplifies the pain Warren supporters feel and discourages them from participating in the momentum we have built to support women in government.

It doesn’t.It dooms us to failure by non-participation or dooms us to failure when put to the test. If Biden selects a female running mate, believers of this misogyny myth will be obligated to do what they can to prevent that decision because according to their strongly held belief, a woman on the ticket would be destined to fail. To support misogyny as the only or biggest reason that Warren lost you have to be a misogynyst or at least act like one if you want to win and avoid 4 more years of Trump.

This is terrifying to me. Sure, you can choose to be a hypocrite and suddenly support women (though your belief states that women are unelectable), but what amount of vigor can you muster for such a shallow and self-defeating belief? You choose to accept defeat to misogyny and that is ultimately misogyny in action.

This is why I am so adamant about getting this point across. Nobody has yet to provide a single example of how misogyny was more powerful than Warren or why Warren failed to prepare adequately for the well-known hatred of women in this country. And yet I am the bad guy who can’t see the truth. Perhaps, my friends, you are the ones drinking the kool aide and you are the ones giving life to the notion that misogyny is all powerful.

Regardless, here is my reply to your comments.

Jason these are easy points to make – coming from a white male –

Immediately upon posting my position, you replied. I was actually blown away by the fact that you were making me look like I was being a misogynist because I offered a different point of view. I couldn’t believe that you would discount 20 years of friendship to make such a dismissive comment that blatantly maligned me for my gender and race. I thought better of you than that and I was largely unprepared to respond.

My goal was to demonstrate a logical and rational explanation for Warren’s loss that didn’t involve the unfair and irrational villainization of an entire country. My goal was to provide some relief from the painful notion that the entire Democratic party and by association, the entire voting population of the United States chose to express their hatred of women by voting against Warren. My goal was to offer a viewpoint that allowed Warren to remain the best possible presidential candidate in any circumstance other than this one extremely rare circumstance so that we can maintain the momentum of the women’s movement and ensure that the next chance we get to have a female president, we aren’t held back by the irrational notion that everyone hates women. I honestly thought that this would provide a chance for women grieving over their perception that the hatred of women was so pronounced that none of Warren’s ideas or experience were valuable enough to overcome the hatred most of the country felt for women.

I based my opinion on reading article after article about Warren’s loss and compiled my view with the direct intent to capitalize on Warren’s virtues and divert blame for her defeat from her actions or her policies to this unique circumstance. There is no shortage of commentary on why Waren lost that paints a painful and hateful picture of Warren, but that was absolutely and expressly not my goal and at no point did I ever need to or did I ever bring up any of the nasty and hateful commentary that I read—none of which had to do with her gender or a prescribed stereotype of women in general.

I formulated this point of view not because I am the enemy, not because I hoped to tell grieving Warren supporters they were wrong, not to take away the bitterness or angst that they were feeling, but rather to offer an alternative that could possibly ease the pain and give hope. If this is in any way hateful or seeks to rub salt in the wounds of Warren supporters, as some have claimed, there are certainly more effective ways to do that and a quick Google search will give you plenty.

Your goal was to shut me up because you don’t agree with or more likely don’t understand my position. Regardless, your obvious intent was to diminish my point of view by judging me on my race and gender without considering my position. It’s downright hateful to do this on my Facebook page in a public forum. Your attempt to show your compassionate alignment with the oppressed class of females is called virtue signaling and it is a common tactic among the most woke. What it really does is paint me as not only an outsider but also the opposition. This is the kind of behavior that makes “woke” so divisive.

When you expanded your dismissal by making a substantive claim about the electability of women, you were changing the subject. I did not want to discuss the electability of women, I was offering a way to avoid that discussion to talk instead about why this circumstance made it imperative to select the most conservative candidate and to avoid picking the second most liberal. In my context, gender is not the issue. But as is standard for people with their own agenda, you changed the topic and made it appear that I felt like Warren was unelectable.

The bar is so low for white men to be considered “electable “ and the bar is so fucking high for a woman to be considered electable

This statement still does not have any effect on whether the primary election was a factor of circumstance and not Warren’s performance. The bar could have been the lowest in history and it wouldn’t matter. The bar could have been set so high that no human could ever meet it, that has no effect whatsoever when considering my statement. All this statement does is further the idea that I am a woman-hater like the rest of the Democrats who voted for Biden and not Warren.

At first, I thought you made this statement because you didn’t understand my point of view and possibly hadn’t read my post. I honestly never considered that you would be intentionally changing the topic so I would be at a disadvantage and feel like I had to defend a statement that I never made.

Fearful that others would just read your comment and assume that I was saying Warren was unelectable because of her gender or even because the bar was so high for her, but so low for white males, I unforuntaely took the bait and tried to explain my position.

But here is how the bar is set. When you have 42 elections where the candidates are all the same: older white Christian males. If you want to add someone new to this prototype, say a Catholic white male, the bar is going to be higher. John F. Kennedy had a higher bar set for him because he was Catholic and yet women came out in droves to support him. You not only have to overcome the expectation that we only get to choose between white male Christiantans but you also have to convince people to act on your new candidate that is foreign to them. You have to show that your candidate meets the standard of white males and exceeds it enough to get people motivated to come out and vote. Overcoming the momentum of the laziest voters in the world can be difficult and the bar reflects that.

You can see that the bar for Hillary in 2008 was set higher. Obama had the bar set much higher for him as well. Even Bernie Sanders has a higher bar to reach being Jewish. Pete had a higher bar because he was gay. And yes, of course, the bar is higher for Warren, Klobuchar, and Harris.

But the bar for women was not so high that Hillary couldn’t make it. She beat Bernie in the 2016 Democratic Primaries. This shows that no matter how high the bar is set, a woman is capable of exceeding the bar. And if the bar is so high that a women cannot be elected, how is it that for the first time in history we had not one, but two women in the primaries? This doesn’t sound like misogyny to me. In fact it aligns with the growing momentum of support for women in government expressed by the Democratic Party in the last two elections.

Warren was likely able to pass the bar as well. So why didn’t she win? Because this had nothing to do with the standards we hold a candidate to. This wasn’t about candidates or how high of a standard they represented. This was only about one thing: who was the most conservative candidate in the party.

I did read your post, I think you really fail to see the “real” reason Warren was not the better choice than Biden or Bernie is baked in misogyny in our country.There is in the minds of so many Americans a standard that is so high for a woman and yet we will squabble of 3 old fucking white men that should all be enjoying retirement. Warren, Klobuchar, And Harris are all 3 much stronger candidates, but because they are women- many people won’t vote for them,
Why? MISOGYNY. I don’t understand why you don’t see this. You understand the reason people won’t vote for Pete is homophobia.

Here we have the gold standard of virtue signaling. You think that you are being supportive of women frothing at the mouth with an expletive-laden rant about old white dudes. Maybe our mutual friend’s snarky claim that “ranting doesn’t make you right” was really intended for you. That would be ironic.

Let me break this into pieces so you can see where this is entirely inappropriate and falsely stated.

I did read your post, I think you really fail to see the “real” reason Warren was not the better choice than Biden or Bernie is baked in misogyny in our country.

Had you read my post, he would have seen clearly that I did not ever claim that homophobia was the reason Pete lost. In fact, I went out of my way to show that my favorite candidate lost and I wasn’t mourning his loss and falsely claiming that anyone who voted for Warren was a homophobe. That would be self-possessed and ridiculous (much like using misogyny as a scapegoat if you are a Warren supporter).

If you believe that misogyny is so powerful, who did you vote for in the Democratic Primary of 2008? Were you a misogynist for voting for Obama or a racist for voting for Hillary? See how neither of these claims adequately expresses the considerations every one of us made for voting? You are doing the same thing now. Which were you a homophobe, an anti-semite, misandrist, or misogynist? It’s lazy and unreasonable to make the decision that simple. But that’s exactly what you are doing.

Of course, because I am a white male and you have decided that I am the oppoosition, you are likely to claim that you have better insight into the minds of Americans than I do. While this is patently unprovable, it begs the question, if I am the prototype of a woman-hater, why wouldn’t I be able to see the effects of my belief system being authenticated through this vote? Wouldn’t I be more likely than a Warren supporter to see that my beliefs won?

Never mind that I support women now and have always supported women. I have been able to see the presence of sexism in every aspect of our society. Hell, I was even able to admit that my previous posts about Warren could have been incorrectly perceived to be a reinforcement of this sexist misgiving. No matter how much I admit that sexism exists and is pervasive, by blaming anything other than misogyny, I have been made the opposition. And again, this has nothing to do with my post.

There is in the minds of so many Americans a standard that is so high for a woman

We have already discussed this faulty perception and explained that Hillary met this standard before Warren. 100 women in the 2018 midterm elections met this standard and yet you want to claim that the standard was too high for Warren? What does that say about your faith or support for Warren that all of these women before her were better? That all of these women along with 14 state governors, 6 state Lt. Governors, 2038 state legislators, and countless other women are making changes to the way we see women in government. To claim that the standard for women is so high is to believe that women are too weak to meet that standard. That’s not very conducive to supporting women at all.

And again, you didn’t have to expose your underlying distrust of Warren’s ability to overcome misogyny in this country if you believed as I do that this particular circumstance where we need a super conservative Democrat to beat Trump is the biggest reason that prevented the amply powerful and more than qualified Warren from winning. It was only because she was so liberal and the change was too much to hope for. Not because she was too weak to make the standards set by Democrats. And not because she was a woman.

yet we will squabble of 3 old fucking white men that should all be enjoying retirement.

This is ironic because voting for Warren would make her the oldest president ever elected to office. She is 70 years old and will be 71 by the time she was sworn in. Warren is only 7 or 8 years younger than the white men in question making this statement completely self-defeating. If you think, as I do, that 70+ is too old to be president, Warren is out. An arbitrary barrier between 70 and 77 for Bernie is weak support for the claim of misogyny. In reality, they should all be enjoying retirement so this argument is just more bling for the “I support the notion that women aren’t strong enough to beat misogyny” bandwagon.

Warren, Klobuchar, And Harris are all 3 much stronger candidates, but because they are women- many people won’t vote for them,

By now, this conversation has nothing to do with my post. To falsely claim that 3 much stronger candidates only lost because they are women continues to miss the point. It reinforces the subtle but real notion that women are weaker than men and unable to beat men in the voting booth because misogyny is so powerful. It makes you the purveyor of misogyny, not the Democrats who voted for Biden.

Harris had an even higher bar but she will tell you she didn’t get where she was by succumbing to the rampant misogyny that you believe makes women so weak and unelectable. That’s because she is stronger than that and she would be insulted if someone said that misogyny rather than campaign mismanagement by her sister was the cause for her early withdrawal. She wouldn’t put up with the notion that the hatred of women was more powerful than she is. Only because it’s not.

Klobuchar is hard for me to defend because I never liked Klobuchar and never considered the fact that she was a woman. I didn’t like her policies or lack thereof and thought that her well known fits where she abused her campaign staff made her unfit for my vote when there were other options available. Not to mention her pedantic attacks on Pete showed she had no loyalty to her fellow candidates. She was petty a billious and I could care less what her gender was.

But again, this was not about Klobuchar or Warren or Harris. None of them had nearly as conservative of an agenda as Biden. None of them had been Vice President for 8 years. None of them were known by every American in the country already before the primaries started. In which case, none of them could have won the Democratic primaries as responsible Democrats voted for the most conservative and well-known candidate for the win.

…but because they are women- many people won’t vote for them,
Why? MISOGYNY.

In order to support this claim, you would have to demonstrate that a large percentage of your friends hate women so much that they voted against them at all costs. You would have to paint the ugly picture that the people who voted hate women. This is your world view. What does this say about you? Perhaps this deeply-rooted misogyny has overwhelmed your ability to think rationally. Perhaps it is your internalized misogyny that led you to think this even though you probably don’t know a single person who would vote against Warren simply because she was a female. How many people do you know are so simple-minded, so driven by their hatred of women, and so willing to go out of their way to vote for anyone but a woman? You are painting your friends as co-conspirators in misogyny and if that isn’t the exact goal that misogyny has in mind, what is? If you are willing to lay down and accept defeat to misogyny, perhaps your candidate WAS too weak to win. I personally don’t think so, but your world view obviously does.

I don’t understand why you don’t see this. You understand the reason people won’t vote for Pete is homophobia.

As I stated earlier, had you read my comments or my post, you would see clearly that I explicitly stated that Pete didn’t lose because of homophobia. The fact that homophobia played a part in his defeat was minor compared to the fact that Biden was better positioned to beat Trump. Perhaps you don’t understand why I don’t see your unfounded and unsupported belief is that you aren’t listenening.

Furthermore, you have shown absolutely no support for your claims. You have repeated them with expletive-laden expressions of dismay, but have not supported your claims at all. At best, if you spent half the time that I have spent researching the topic, you might find a handful of emotional responses to Warren’s defeat that offer the same lack of support for their claims. Of course you would find even more publications that dismantle these claims and demonstrate that they are emotional opinion pieces and lack any real evidence or support.

But to do this, you would have to read the numerous claims that Warren lost because she was a terrible candidate who lied and appropriated Native American culture, who accepted money from PACs after shaming everyone else into avoiding PAC funding and who acted histrionic in debates and stabbed her fellow Democrats in the back (with the exception of Klobuchar who she inappropriately defended when she (Klobuchar) pulled the victim card after attacking Pete). Though these claims sound like misogyny, they are more serious than just because she is a woman. In fact, you will not find one supportable argument that says the only reason she lost was because everyone hates women.

What you might see, if you can get past your appropriated persecution complex, is that my position is the single most gracious of all the possible viewpoints. But you would have to read them like I did and you would have to have the conviction that I do that women are more powerful than misogyny and that this time in our country is a time for the liberation of women.

There is unprecedented support for women in government. Even on the conservative side. Look at the governor of highly conservative Alabama: a female. I believe that Warren is a powerful woman with amazing qualifications that has had to overcome sexism repeatedly to get where she is. She is no stranger to the pervasive effects of sexism. But she is also the second most liberal candidate in the history of our Democracy. She is too liberal for our country right now. Not too female. Not too weak. Too liberal.

I’m afraid that you still would feel more comfortable in your little denial bubble that literally paints the nation as a seething group of women-haters rather than a reluctant group of responsible Democrats that chose to vote for the lesser candidate because he was more conservative and better known and for that reason alone stood a better chance of winning against Trump than a candidate already humiliated by Trump that represents the second most liberal agenda in history.

So to hammer my point in, here are the reasons that I refuse to believe that misogyny is the only or even the biggest reason why the second most liberal candidate in Democratic history lost the nomination. To have any personal integrity by supporting this irrational belief, I would be saying the following:

• The majority of Democrats believe that women deserve to be hated because they are inferior, a tenet of misogyny.
• Women who voted for Biden did so because they hate women as well.
• Warren was unable to overcome this hatred of women because she is weak and unprepared.
• Hillary was better than Warren because she won the primaries and the popular vote when Warren couldn’t.
• 100 women elected to congress in the 2018 mid-term elections were better than Warren.
• Democratic voters were unable to consider anything beyond Warren’s gender.
• Biden should not pick a female candidate because it would spell certain defeat with a woman on the ticket.
• Women should not even run for office because the specter of misogyny is more powerful than women as evidenced by Warren’s defeat.
• We have made no progress in this country in our view of women in government.
• What appeared to be a sign of momentum was really just a fluke and it is futile for women to run for government.
• If Biden selects a female candidate, his loss to Trump will be even more proof that women are hated. It won’t matter why he lost, I’ll blame misogyny.
• This election had nothing special about it. There was no reason that a more conservative candidate was selected other than he was a straight white male.
• All of my friends and everyone I know male or female must hate women

I could go on with the unfounded and ridiculous claims that the practical application of a belief in misogyny would support. But to be honest, it seriously pisses me off. It sets this country up for a repeat of what happened in 2016 with disgruntled Bernie supporters. This belief in a conspiracy of misogyny all but guarantees low female turnout for the general election.

When coupled with the historically low turnout for women in the polls, it spells disaster. Asking women to put away their pain, their bias, and their belief that misogyny is all powerful so they can vote for a white male that defeated their candidate by a considerable margin is really unreasonable. If we can’t get women to vote without this kind of defeat, how do you expect to get them to vote if you support this notion?

This problem is made even more pronounced if you support the notion that these men are symbolic of the hatred of women and women are unelectable because of misogyny you would be a complete traitor to women to vote for them. Your belief sets this country up for failure.  

But again, this was never my point. This was yours. You successfully changed the topic and made me defend a position that wasn’t even my own. You called out to other Warren supporters to join in your charade and chastise me with insults and name-calling because you changed the topic. Their comments, as well as yours, had nothing to do with my post. This is your issue, not mine and I resent the position you put me in for your attempt to signal virtue to oppressed women. I prefer not to think of women with such obvious disdain and my position in my post was written with that in mind.

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