Madame President: the One that Wasn't and the One that's About to Be
an election reflection
On Sunday, Mexicans will head to the polls to elect a new president, as well as about 19,000 other officials all the way down to the municipal (basically, “county”) level.
The presidential election, of course, is the one we’ve all got eyes on.
The next president of Mexico will most surely be a woman, and it will most likely be the ruling-party Morena candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum.
So here we are: in a move that no one would have predicted a few years ago, Mexico is getting its first woman president before the US, a country which seems to increasingly be trying to turn back the clock in the worst ways possible (labor rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, public and social services — let me count the ways. Actually, please stop me; it’s depressing.). It’s been stuck in a black hole of political despair since Trump won by way of the Electoral College in 2016, and I’m still not 100% convinced that we didn’t get thrown into some nightmarish simulation that night by some Very Angry gods.
Unlike our own election with a woman top-contender, Mexicans do not seem to despise Sheinbaum the way that Americans (especially American men and the women who wanted to make a point of how cool, fair, and sensible they were) despised Hilary Clinton. Given Mexico’s reputation as a far more chauvinistic country than our own, this is a pleasant surprise.
Maybe it’s because the other major candidate is a woman, too, so there’s no point to attacking her on a sexist basis. (What we’d call a far-behind, no-chance-of-winning “third-party” candidate, by the way, is the only male candidate for president.)
It’s probably the fact they’re both women, actually. But hey, I’ll take what I can get, because it’s just nice to not hear a candidate for president be described by a bunch of seemingly perfectly nice people as a “vicious bitch.”
As you’ve likely concluded by now, I’m still not over 2016. Before the election, and even after, nearly every liberal male I knew made a point of exclaiming his distaste for Hilary Clinton. They’d always have a long list of specific complaints about her, and the popular phrase at the time was “I’m holding my nose and voting for her.” Talk about enthusiasm!
Here’s what I noticed more than anything, though: none of those same people ever had anything close to that long of a list for other (male) politicians they didn’t completely agree with (when it looked like Elizabeth Warren might claim the nomination, though, I noticed an uptick in anti-Hilary-like grumblings).
On one hand, this was kind of normal: Democrats have always made a bit of a show of ensuring that everyone knows we scrutinize our own as much as our opponents. It just went majorly overboard with Hilary, as she bared the brunt of scrutiny while The Dudes were simply accepted as the imperfect people and politicians that they were.
No one took anywhere near the time they did with Hilary to research up a list of very specific reasons to both hate them and to prove that their hate was justified. Ask people where their lists about Al Gore are, or even Joe Biden during his first run. Were they published on Facebook, perchance?
And then she didn’t win, and that’s how the women of the country learned that lots more people than we thought harbored feelings of contempt — both openly, à la Trump, and slightly buried, à la “She’s awful and I hate her but have to vote for her” — for women who wanted to be powerful.
And it was very sad. And now, to top it off, access to abortion for large swaths of the country, even to save a woman’s life and/or health, are a thing of the past. Talk about insult to injury. So many things are so much worse as a result of that election.
Because that is what happens when we are collectively unable to accept the competing values between what it means to be a good politician and what it means to be a good woman. In 2016, Hilary being a good woman was the more important value, and she was punished — really, we were all punished — for not living up to those standards. In the eyes of too many, politics and the seeking of power made her contemptible.
So rather than have a woman president, we put a literal sexist, fascist, baboon in office. Yes, yes. Much more presidential. Well done.
Like I said, I’m still not over it, because just look at the consequences (the Supreme Court, oh my God), that that shit show of an election has wrought.
But here in Mexico, it’s happening. We’re discussing whether or not “presidenta” is an official word now (most are leaning toward “yes”). And while the likely new president’s detractors might hate her, they hate her because they hate her party and its platform, not because she’s a woman.
And that, I think, is progress.
Great article. So amazing that Mexico will have a woman president before the USA. Hard to believe it’s really going to happen after spending years in a Mexican company seeing how women are treated here.
Thanks for the analysis. Maybe the only reason why the right-wing party (PAN) has stopped (for now) their misogynistic attacks is because they have a female candidate themselves: they would shoot themselves in the foot. In the past their leaders have referred to women as “viejerío” (an insulting way to call women) or two-legged washing machines. Sheinbaum was not attacked for being a woman, but she was a victim of xenophobic comments by expresident Fox who called her “Bulgarian Jewish”. He also called Ebrard “French stuck-up”, Noroña “extraterrestrial” and Augusto López “Transylvanian”.