This has been a puzzlement to me for a while: Why do people respond to her with this gut reaction of discomfort—even dislike? I understand that the right wing narrative of distrust has been repeated so often that people find it an easy explanation to reach for, but over all these years of attacks against her, I have never heard anything substantive to support it. I’ve never been a Hillary activist, but I have always found her to be pretty idealistic as politicians go. She’s excruciatingly careful with the truth. Maybe nuance makes people uncomfortable? I don’t agree with her on every policy, but I don’t find it difficult to admire her sincerity and dedication—to underlying principles of governance that I do share with her. If I were stuck in an elevator with her, we could have a lively dispute about policy priorities, but I think it would be a productive conversation. “Corrupt” and “dishonest” just don’t seem remotely apt characterizations.

So now that the campaign cycle has reached a point that a lot of really reassuring and inspiring stories about her are coming out, I feel really great about her candidacy. I’m thrilled to support her. I think she’ll make an excellent president. What keeps startling me is that some people who kind of want to be on her side, or should be on her side, aren’t feeling it. I’m not startled that some right wing, Trump-supporting congressperson from a nearby suburban Republican district casually drops the “corrupt and dishonest” meme, but when the liberal radio host he’s talking with lets it go without a murmur, and when millions of voters find it plausible, I just wonder what is driving that. Why does it seem to so many people to somehow jibe with their own impressions?

Then again, I don’t watch much TV. So my impressions are mostly based on voice and print. Once in a while, though, I do watch a speech or a snippet of some TV interview. I watched Hillary’s San Diego speech during the primaries, and I watched quite a lot of the Democratic convention. And I have a theory.

First of all, she thinks while she speaks. This is unnerving if you’re not used to it. Most people only say things that they are thinking of at the moment they say them, which is to say, most speech that people experience in everyday life actually is spontaneous. Very polished speakers and professional performers affect spontaneity, appearing to be only thinking what they’re saying when they speak. It’s what entertainers are paid for. People see that all the time, too. But Hillary is not as smooth a speaker as some other successful politicians. She speaks fluently and expressively enough, but she can’t hide the thinking.

I’ve had the privilege, in my life, of knowing some extremely smart and expert people. I went to a top graduate school, where the geniuses at the top of the field (both professors and students) were all around me. So there is this thing that insanely smart, expert people do when they’re talking, which not everybody does at the same time that they’re talking: they think. Their brains are so active, all the time, that they can do this virtuosic mental multitasking, where they can process different ideas and problem-solve simultaneously with listening or speaking and explaining. They have previously thought through a great variety of different, related ideas. These are so familiar to them that many different ideas are present in their minds alongside the ones they are expressing. I think that when Hillary speaks, you get flickers of this kind of excess thought going on. You see it in her eyes. It doesn’t bother me, because I don’t think that extreme intelligence or deep expertise are defects in a candidate, but some people might not know what they are seeing. They might mistake it for disingenuousness—and therefore grounds for distrust.

Second, the eye flare. This is a subtle little mannerism. You’ve seen it—the slight widening of the eyes for emphasis. And I’ve got to say, Hillary has done an amazing job over the years of expunging all the softness and femininity out of her speaking manner. I think she’s developed a very presidential persona—tough, strong, confident, yet still caring. Of course, ours being the masculinized political culture it is, that means she has basically had to defeminze herself and affect masculine mannerisms. But this eye flare has slipped through the cracks. Mobility of the eyes and face during speech is a feminine trait, just like greater variation in pitch. Ask a linguist; this is a known thing. If a man flared his eyes like that when he was speaking, it would seem overly dramatic, maybe ominous. Maybe effeminate. In a woman, it seems normal… it reminds you that she is, after all, a woman. And if this is a problem for you, you will just feel like something is not right.

Third, what is a woman doing sounding so presidential anyway, so tough and strong? Who is she, Lady MacBeth? Why has she worked so hard to sound like a man? This reminds me of an interview I heard a little while ago on NPR, of Amy Chozick, a journalist who covers Hillary for the NYT. Chozick talks about HRC supporters trying to get her to avoid certain language in her reporting.

CHOZICK: … a group of very eager Hillary supporters called the Super Volunteers who emailed me early on and said this is a list of language we're going to be watching for in your stories, and these are sexist terms. And, frankly, they were not at all sexist terms. They were, like, ambitious or will do anything to win. I mean, it was, like, 25 adjectives that you couldn't write a political story without using (laughter).

Here are the words that Chozick dismisses as really not being gendered at all.

GROSS: You wrote about this, and I have a list of some of the words that you mentioned ... polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, overconfident, secretive, will do anything to win - so those are some of the words and phrases that you were warned not to use because that they were sexist. It was gendered language. CHOZICK: Right. GROSS: So do you think it's fair to call those words coded, gender language. CHOZICK: No. I don't think secretive means - has anything to do with gender. I really don't. And I also think you can't approach every story thinking is this word going to be interpreted as sexist, you know? I mean, she's running for president. If she's being secretive by keeping a private server in her basement in Chappaqua, I don't think that has to do with gender. And I think that you can't walk on eggshells, you know, afraid of that. I mean, that said, you know, we have to be conscious when we describe her hair, her clothes, but we do that for men as well. You know, we describe men's clothes all the time.

Sure, the super volunteers come off sounding like fools, trying to be pc-obsessed language police. But I think Chozick misses the point. It’s not that the words themselves are gendered, it’s the narrative about who Clinton is as a politician and what a politician should be. What characteristics are salient or noteworthy? Deep down there is a gendered expectation about what kind of persona a woman should have: nurturing, gentle, warm, sentimental, agreeable, sincere, genuine, self-effacing, unchallenging, emotional, subservient. Anything that is the opposite of that is basically a violation of these gendered expectations, and thus a reproach. “Ambitious,” for example, or even “polarizing” or “secretive” are only seen as strong negatives in the context of a narrative that demands something else. Clinton’s friends were saying, ‘don’t buy into that narrative. Don’t promote it.’

So here is the big irony: Clinton, by all accounts, actually is very sincere, genuine, sentimental, warm, empathic, and maybe even modest. But if she allowed those qualities to dominate her public persona, she would be dismissed as being too feminine, too soft to be president. So she cultivates and displays her “masculine” qualities of confidence, intelligence, discipline, toughness, etc. And people just can’t stand that. They feel a dissonance between a gendered expectation that they might not even be aware of, and the manned-up demeanor that is the only way for a woman to succeed at that level in public life. They feel the dissonance, and they don’t realize that they themselves are not being honest about how they are judging her. They might not think of themselves as sexist or misogynist (especially women!), but they can’t get away from the feeling that someone is hiding something.

So to bring it back to the original question, right wingers keep pounding on these conspiracy accusations and suspicions, and after a few decades of “she’s dishonest,” even liberals might feel like, well, maybe she is hiding something. You know, everyone says people don’t trust her…

Well, I trust her.