Last April Donald Trump said, “If Hillary Clinton were a man, she’d get 5% of the vote because the only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card.”
In return, Clinton passionately fired back, “Well, if fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in.”
Trump has continued to insinuate that Clinton’s gender is an advantage, despite a dominantly male American government system, in which 80 percent of Congress, 90 percent of governors, and 100 percent of past presidents are male.
The implication that being a woman has made this election easier for Hillary is simply fallacious.
In the article “ Fear of a Female President” published in the The Atlantic, Peter Beinart points out that apart from Clinton’s gender, she is “a highly conventional presidential candidate. She’s been in public life for decades. Her rhetoric is carefully calibrated. She tailors her views to reflect the mainstream within her party.” Yet she has yielded the one of the least favorable views, with “52 percent of white men” finding her to be “very unfavorable.”
The Republican Convention, was riddled with Trump enthusiasts sporting sexist paraphernalia that read, including “Don’t be a pussy vote for Trump,” “Hillary Sucks but not like Monica,” and even a “KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts…left wing.”
While never this widespread, Clinton has endured gender inequality throughout her career. In an interview with Humans of New York, Hillary revealed as a senior in college during her law school admissions test, her male peers berated and shamed her saying, “‘you don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense.”
Trump has never personally experienced the gender pay gap. To him 77 cents to a dollar is purely a statistic, which has never applied to him. He pledges to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which prevented insurance companies from charging women more for the same coverage. To him, a woman’s reproductive rights are punishable if she doesn’t make the choice he believes in.