And I'm part of the generation of feminists who came of political age watching the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Bill Clinton impeachment. People my age saw the Supreme Court decide an election and a president start a war based on a lie.

In this environment, you learned very quickly that authority figures would deceive you, and that if you wanted anything different from what was suffocatingly popular, you were going to have to find it yourself. These ideas were related: If something was popular, it probably rested on some kind of lie. Brands could not be trusted, and we understood that politicians were just another kind of brand.

Hillary Clinton and Anita Hill taught me another sour truth: Being a woman—simply existing in the world of men—meant always being something less than authentic. Even the world of independent music demanded making compromises, having my words and ideas lifted out of my possession. I found myself powerless to resist protective coloring. I tried to be myself, but I was also always reflecting back at people what they wanted to see. In other words, being a woman in the world of indie rock was like being a woman anywhere.

Still, I found my own identity in the aggressive idiosyncrasies of those ’90s bands because their uniqueness suggested that I could be unique. I wanted them to succeed because it would allow me to believe that my own rough edges didn’t need to be softened too much. Authenticity might be rewarded.

Nonetheless, I became an adult assuming that I’d never hear what I really loved on the radio and that I'd never cast a ballot for the person I actively wanted in the Oval Office.

In 2008, I enthusiastically voted for Barack Obama, but I was very aware that I was voting for a brand even more than I was voting for a man. (And I was also very aware that I was voting for a man.)

As for Hillary Clinton, a brand was what she had been forced to become, and I didn’t blame her for that. Even that sacrifice wasn’t enough to inch past the seething, barely sentient blister of rage and bigotry she ran against in 2016, a man endlessly lauded for his own “authenticity” although nothing about him, from follicles to finances, is real.

Hillary Rodham Clinton: American democracy is in crisis

No wonder my friends and I were reluctant to voice admiration for Elizabeth Warren at first. There was her incredible, tone-deaf opening gambit too: When she publicized those DNA-test results, I wrote her almost completely off. She was another disappointment, another future compromise to make.

But as her policies piled up and the selfie lines stretched, my friends and I began to talk in literal hushed tones about the feelings we were beginning to have. Her passion and palpable joy in campaigning caught our eye. Her quick wit bore repeating. I remember one quiet conversation on a dark airplane with another journalist who’d met her; maybe we were trying to avoid waking the other passengers, but it also seemed as if we were trying to keep a secret: I really like her, she said. I’m afraid, because I like her and I’m not sure I want to.