She Is In A Bigger Harvard Test Room

I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ 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. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.

Essentially what Clinton is saying is that the stiltedness of her public persona is a kind of self-preservation tactic born out of years of brutal misogyny. 

She is still being yelled at. The yelling is being done by the media. Email. Benghazi. Whitewater. And the yelling is being done by the loudmouth dumbo running for president. Get rid of your bodyguards? Is this guy kidding me?

She is being yelled at and her supporters, men and women, need to step in and respond. We are the proctors. This is a democracy. She is not doing this for her. This is not just about America. This is about the women across the globe.

Barack Obama was about 500 years of world history. Hillary Clinton is about 5,000 years of world history.