No matter who you end up voting for, you can’t deny there is some serious hatred for Hillary out there, and it’s scary. One of our writers sent this post in, and I agree with her. It also made me hungry for a sandwich.
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I’m stunned by the amount of offensively sexist anti-Hillary groups that exist on Facebook and their enormous memberships. Regardless of whether one supports her presidential campaign, shouldn’t alarm bells go off when a large group organizes just so they can tell a woman like Clinton to get back to the kitchen where she belongs?
The most prominent of these groups is "Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich which has over 40,000 members. Facebook only recently disabled this group’s activity due to what it calls "photo upload abuse" and so instead, the group encourages you buy the T-shirt. Facebook’s official policy prohibits "hate speech, whether directed at an individual or a group, and whether based upon the race, sex, creed, national origin, religious affiliation, marital status, sexual orientation or language of such individual or group." Yet, this group still appears in group listings and there are literally hundreds more of these groups that attack the Hillary campaign by alluding to domestic abuse, rape, and general misogyny. And it seems more are being created everyday.
Anyone remotely acquainted with Facebook can probably guess that members and administrators of these groups are from a very select demographic not known for their progressive ideas on gender politics. Yet the continued popularity of these groups reveals that sexism is held as less offensive than other types of -isms. After all, what’s so degrading about making a sandwich?
The point is that there was a time in recent history when women were only allowed to make sandwiches. The point is that the women’s movement emancipated women from this domestic servitude. When two men yelled "Iron my shirt!" at Clinton during a New Hampshire speech, the outburst didn’t incite any riots and the only media coverage seemed to question whether the men were planted by Hillary’s team. 40,000 people are now yelling "Iron my shirt" at Hillary. I’d like to think that these incites are so ridiculous, that women’s rights have come so far that any thinking person wouldn’t give them a second thought. But how many times must we be told to get back into the kitchen before we stand up for a woman who is the realization of the dreams of suffragists? Not only can we vote, but we can run, and win.
-Amanda McCorquodale [email protected]
