Truthfully, the release of these documents will probably have very little effect on whether or not Hillary chooses to run. Hillary has been a controversial figure for decades, and it is unlikely that her ability to succeed as a presidential candidate will be drastically altered by anything at this point.
Let us take a walk down memory lane. In 1996, Hillary was subpoenaed and forced to testify before a federal grand jury as a result of the Whitewater controversy. She chose to stay with her philandering husband after the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. She essentially only moved to New York State to run for a Senate position in 2000. As a Democrat, she supported military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and in 2012 was credited with the disaster of the Benghazi attack that resulted in the deaths of a number of American diplomats. Today, she tours the country as a guest speaker and lecturer, heavily compensated for her appearances.
This is all public knowledge, and while these may all be blots on her personal and professional record, Hillary is still considered the top contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2016 election. The entire party eagerly awaits her declaration before making any other moves. So is it really plausible to think that anything else we may find out about Hillary will honestly ruin her chances at the presidency?
Hillary is the first real chance women have had at occupying the Oval Office. Despite her questionable past, she has been involved in politics since she was a teenager in the 1960s. She may not be loveable, but there is no doubt that she is intelligent and qualified for political office. Therefore, not only is there nothing that will stop her from running for president, if that is what she so chooses, but no one should try to stop her.
America needs smart, ambitious, female political leaders, and we need them now. Women are grossly underrepresented in our nation’s elected offices, and unlike nearly all other modern countries, we have yet to have a female leader in our highest political office. Truthfully, you would be hard-pressed to find a woman with more involvement in the political process than Hillary Clinton. So stop nitpicking through her life to find the moments where she faltered. After all, she is only a human being just like the rest of us, and whether you want to admit it or not, we need women like Hillary a lot more than they need our judgment.
As a single woman in my twenties, this is a struggle close to my heart. I have always been a hopeless romantic, and you can either blame it on my sick obsession with romantic comedies or the fact that my parents have been together since they were fifteen years old. Either way, love is all I have ever wanted, and as someone who has been fortunate enough to have some really wonderful relationships, it is an issue I feel confident discussing.
People used to want to be in committed relationships because marriage used to be the end goal. This is not the case today. It is not that none of us want to find love anymore. The real problem is that while we all want to be loved, young Americans today love themselves more than anyone else.
Take a look at the way relationships, particularly committed relationships, are portrayed in the media today. The media makes it seem as if being in a committed relationship with someone is some sort of trap. Marriages are shown as the worst and ultimate loss of all freedom. There are always running jokes in popular culture where the husbands complain about not being able to do what they want because of their wives and hiding and sneaking around just to have any shred of dignity. For one, this negatively stereotypes women and wives as being overbearing and unreasonable and stereotypes men and husbands as being unhappy and resentful. Want an example? Check out this scene from This is 40, about a married couple’s struggles at the age of forty:
With a generation more plugged into media than ever before, it is no wonder that we do not want to settle down with anyone when this is the image presented to us. We are a generation with more freedoms than any before us, particularly for females, and when relationships are viewed as constricting this independence, of course we feel as if we must shy away from them.
American society today also has an obsession with perpetual youth. For some reason, young adults these days are encouraged to extend their youth as long as possible. Many of the parents responsible for raising my generation were encouraged to let their kids be kids for as long as possible. While that is all fun and games, at what point do you give your children a wake up call? At what point do we stop letting our kids be kids and actually prepare them properly for the real, cruel world that they will one day be independently a part of?
Whereas people used to have real jobs and families in their twenties, today college is essentially a daycare center for 18-22 year old young adults, and after college it is totally acceptable to just move back in with your parents, spend a few years finding yourself, and then maybe get some sort of real job and living situation. We are encouraged to focus on ourselves and our careers first, especially before we put any focus on finding someone worth giving up all our independence for. While there is certainly value in all this, it seems that we have made the mistake of not realizing that there is a difference between being forever youthful and being forever a youth.
Of course, while all this soul-searching and personal building is going on, we also now live in a society where the “hook-up culture” dominates young adult relationships, particularly in the college years. Especially now that contraceptives are so widespread and accessible, young women along with young men are exploring their sexuality much more casually than ever before. As someone who has experienced this first hand, I can assure you that I know more people whose relationships arose out of a consistent “hook-up” rather than from “dating.” Going along with that, while I have no official statistics, I can also assure you that the majority of the young men and women I know are not in committed relationships, and many of them see such commitments as either a relic of the past or something to strive for in the future, but certainly not now, in their prime.
Contrary to popular belief, it is not only young men that think like this. Women too are now full, accepted, participating members of this “hook-up culture.” The New York Times came out with an article last summer that specifically discussed how, “those who studied the rise of hookup culture had generally assumed that it was driven by men…but there is an increasing realization that young women are propelling it, too.” The article notes that because smart, young women today are more focused on themselves, their ambitions, and their resumes, it makes no sense for them to expend the time and energy it takes to maintain a healthy, committed relationship. Instead, like their male counterparts have done for centuries, women are now taking charge of their lives on their own terms and pushing off relationships in turn for their own personal growth.
However, there are also some less pleasant consequences. In 2008, studies found that while 75% of women gave birth between the ages of 20 and 34, a woman’s prime childbearing years, 14% of women gave birth after the age of 34. However, it is well-known that it not only becomes increasingly harder to conceive after the age of 35, but mothers and babies of older mothers are much more likely to experience complications. Furthermore, studies have also found that the likelihood of genetic disorders rises dramatically for babies of fathers over the age of 35.
This is not to say that people should get married younger or have children younger, nor is it to say that we should not spend time exploring who we are and developing our personal and professional lives before settling down. Truthfully, I have never been married and have never had children, so I cannot tell you that it won’t ruin your life or constrain your independence. However, if love is something that we are all looking for, why not make that a priority worth exploring as well? Because at the end of the day, if marriage and parenthood are as horrible as everyone makes it out to be, wouldn’t you at least rather spend it with someone you really, truly love? Even if those plans are not a part of your life trajectory, I assure you that there is no greater joy than finding someone to love. I also promise you it is a million times more fulfilling than only loving yourself.
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and like most single people in their twenties, I spent last night with some friends, Chipotle, Sprinkles cupcakes, a bottle of wine, and of course, the new season of “House of Cards.” The Netflix original series, which released its second season in full at midnight the morning of Valentine’s Day, features Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright as the most powerful political couple in Washington DC and has gained much hype since its release last February. However, despite the captivating political drama, what is truly special about the show is its presence of a uniquely strong, female lead.
Claire Underwood (Robin Wright), the wife of politician Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey), rules the screen with a short pixie-cut and elegant, fitted dresses. Claire defies female stereotypes, especially those of political wives, by being just as vicious and heartless as the men around her, but she does it all in heels and a dress. She chooses not to be a mother and instead runs her own nonprofit, takes charge of her sexual life, and does what she wants despite the expectations of the men in her life. Claire plays key roles in many of the most important decisions in the show, and she proves that a woman can be both strong and powerful yet still feminine. When qualities such as strength and power are still associated with masculinity, it is both rare and important for the media to get on board with the image of a woman who maintains these masculine qualities along with her own femininity.
It is also through women such as Claire that we can see that these characteristics are not inherently gendered ones. That being a woman means you can still be both sexy and smart, both powerful and pretty. When the media and much of popular culture still portrays women as sexual objects, weak and subordinate to men, it is extremely important to recognize women in media who defy these stereotypes. Characters such as Claire Underwood serve a purpose greater than moving along a storyline; they prove that the modern, American woman can be whoever she wants to be, and that whatever she chooses does not make her any less of a woman.
A couple days ago, The New York TimesMagazine ran an article called “Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?” by Lori Gottlieb. The article has generated a number of responses within the last two days because it uses a few studies to argue that while heterosexual, American women undoubtedly prefer a more egalitarian marriage, where the husband and wife equally share all responsibilities, couples, and women in particular, have expressed less sexual desire in their marriages. The study that Gottlieb relies most heavily upon is the one from The American Sociological Review called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage.” Researches in the study found that couples where the husbands did more “feminine” chores, such as laundry or cooking, had sex 1.5 times less per month than those where the husbands did chores considered to be more “masculine.”
The article, admittedly written by an unmarried woman, goes on to discuss possible reasons for why couples that share such tasks have sex less frequently and how this can affect married couples. The problem is that Gottlieb seems to assume that this slight difference in sexual activity is of extreme significance to most married couples. Of course, sexual desire is an important component in a marriage, but does it really mean your marriage is unhealthy if you are having sex 1.5 times less per month? That essentially means that of all the times a couple has sex each month, those where husbands help with gendered chores are having sex one or two times less each month than a couple where the husband does not help out with such tasks. Is that really such a negative consequence, especially when there is probably not a single woman out there who wouldn’t love a man who helped out with these tasks?
The adolescent response would be yes. However, when people are now expected to live into their nineties, we need to be more realistic about the fact that we will not be having passionate, wild sexual experiences for the rest of our married lives. Marriage is supposed to be for life, and we do not spend the majority of our lives having sex. Therefore, instead of getting our panties in a twist over the one to two times less married couples are having sex each month, we should be celebrating the fact that women are experiencing happier, more fulfilling marriages rooted in equality. While it is still true that about half of marriages end in divorce, Gottlieb admitted that studies have shown that “American couples who share breadwinning and household duties are less likely to divorce.” In a society where women are just as legally powerful as their male counterparts due to increased financial independence, this is an indicator that women are not staying in these marriages because they are trapped but because they are happier, even if that means they may not be having sex as frequently.
Sexual frequency is certainly not the only measure of a healthy relationship and should certainly not be the most important indicator. What is wrong about Gottlieb’s article is that she makes it seem as if it is. She cites a poll where women were asked “Would you make a long-term commitment to someone who had everything you were looking for but to whom you did not feel sexually attracted?” Because women over 60 were the least likely to respond “yes” to this question, Gottlieb concludes that, “At any age, companionship, it seems, is no longer enough of a draw on its own,” as if this is some sort of amazing revelation. Of course we want to have long-term relationships with men whom we are sexually attracted to, especially if we want to (or expect to) spend decades married to them. In modern America, where women are just as free as men to engage with different sexual partners and where we have been raised to believe that we can have whatever we want and be whoever we want, why would we choose to spend a prolonged period of time with someone who does not fulfill our sexual needs? Gottlieb simplifies the response to this question to insinuate that women are more concerned with sexual satisfaction in their relationships than with anything else, when in reality, answering “no” to this question simply means that sexual attractiveness is a component that is important to American women when choosing their life partners, not that this is the only important criteria.
Instead of focusing on the positive changes we now see in American marriages, where more wives operate on an equal playing field with their husbands, and where egalitarian couples are happier in their day-to-day lives than couples where there are disparities in their responsibilities, Gottlieb’s article harps on the small sexual disparity between married couples who share gendered responsibilities equally and those that do not. So let’s not take issue where there is none, because at the end of the day, does a woman really want to be married to a man who does not carry his weight in the relationship? The modern American woman would say absolutely not.
P.S. Here’s the music video that inspired this post’s title. Enjoy!
Girls, Who Run the World? 