The campaigns of those who deviate from the traditional model of the American president—the campaign of anyone who is not white and Christian and male—will always carry more than their share of weight. But Warren had something about her, apparently: something that galled the pundits and the public in a way that led to assessments of her not just as “strident” and “shrill,” but also as “condescending.” The matter is not merely that the candidate is unlikable, these deployments of condescending imply. The matter is instead that her unlikability has a specific source, beyond bias and internalized misogyny. Warren knows a lot, and has accomplished a lot, and is extremely competent, condescending acknowledges, before twisting the knife: It is precisely because of those achievements that she represents a threat. Condescending attempts to rationalize an irrational prejudice. It suggests the lurchings of a zero-sum world—a physics in which the achievements of one person are insulting to everyone else. When I hear her talk, I want to slap her, even when I agree with her.

To run for president is to endure a series of controlled humiliations. It is to gnaw on bulky pork products, before an audience at the Iowa State Fair. It is to be asked about one’s skin-care routine, and to be prepared to defend the answer. The accusation of condescension, however, is less about enforced humiliation than it is about enforced humility. It cannot be disentangled from Warren’s gender. The paradox is subtle, but punishing all the same: The harder she works to prove to the public that she is worthy of power—the more evidence she offers of her competence—the more “condescending,” allegedly, she becomes. And the more that other anxious quality, likability, will be called into question. Warren’s “‘my way or the highway’ approach to politics,” Joe Biden argued in November, attempting to turn what might also be called principle into a liability, is “condescending to the millions of Democrats who have a different view.”

Late last month, Kelli María Korducki, an editor at Forge, wrote an essay titled “Why High-Achieving Women Pretend Their Lives Are a Mess.” Korducki pointed to 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon as a particularly revealing kind of archetype: the woman who is successful in her career but who is also, in her personal life, a disaster. “She was a striver in the workplace,” Korducki writes of Lemon, “but she also binged on baked goods and watched Real Housewives. She was a singleton on the dating market who was also a raging prude. She was consistently the smartest person in the room. She also sometimes wore plastic Duane Reade shopping bags as underwear.”

For Korducki, the trope of the hot mess doubles as an indictment of how American culture perceives feminine ambition and success. She dubbed the phenomenon “Hot Mess Syndrome,” and her essay struck a chord. You can read that syndrome as an answer to a culture that demands too much of women—a culture that has wrought the second shift and “having it all” and the even more generalized assumption that to be a woman is, to some extent, to bear pain. You can also read it, as Korducki does, as a kind of preemptive apology—and as a bid for relatability. To succeed as a woman on the terms set by the current culture, Korducki writes, “you’d best be a little bit of a fuck-up.”