The unimaginable just became possible: Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

Few really thought this would happen. The polls all tipped Clinton. I certainly hoped that when even Clinton-unfriendly voters looked at their ballots and really pictured President Trump, they would hold their noses and check her box.

I underestimated the sheer rage of resentful white men.

Early exit polling suggests that white men broke for Trump by huge margins. Contrary to the electoral media narrative that this is all about economic anxiety and class, it’s increasingly clear that Trump’s victory is about race and gender. There is one lesson to take away from this election: Racism and sexism continue to be formidable motivating forces for tens of millions of Americans. And feminism has not come nearly as far as we thought when such a well-qualified woman can lose to such an imbecilic bully.

In any sane country, this election would have been a no-brainer: A woman with decades of experience and a sophisticated and progressive platform surrounded herself with the best in the business, and ran a thoughtful and expansive ground game to get out the vote. A man with no political experience but several bankruptcies behind him and no real grasp of the issues ran on racial and sexual resentment, his campaign team a disaster, his ground game weak. Still, he won.

This election is such a deeply felt insult to women across the United States. The message is just so obvious: You can be the best by a long shot, but sorry, sweetie, that ain’t enough. Every woman who has ever been passed over for a promotion in favor of a lower-achieving male colleague, who has been condescended to by a teacher or a male classmate, who has been told her voice sounds too girly or she just doesn’t seem like a scientist or she lost the student body election because Dave just seemed like a more chill guy knows this feeling: that you are not enough, just because of who you are. It’s crazy-making, especially in a country that promises equality and that anything is possible. That ethos makes lots of women blame themselves, concluding maybe we’re just not as good, not as smart, not as hardworking as we think we are.

At least now we have a stark example of just how good a woman can be and still lose to a man who is deeply and fundamentally bad.

This is not a failure of feminism, but a failure of America — and of white male America in particular. In the past half-century, women have made enormous gains, going to college and entering the workforce in record numbers, getting elected and appointed to increasingly higher offices, and often outperforming men in school and in the workplace. But that hasn’t been enough for us to reach the highest echelons, the positions long controlled almost entirely by white men — we still make up tiny minorities of leadership in business, law, politics, and the sciences. Many of us, feminist and not, have wondered why we aren’t getting there. It can’t be just sexism, we have largely concluded. Maybe we don’t negotiate hard enough. Maybe we don’t promote ourselves enough. Maybe we use “upspeak” and make ourselves sound less authoritative. Maybe we’re too combative, or not combative enough, or too nice, or not nice enough. Maybe we spend too much time focused on our children and families; maybe we’re overly ambitious career women who never had them and that makes us cold and unrelatable.

Maybe it’s not us.

Maybe it’s that most of American history has been a series of slaps in the face to women. We have had to fight hard and fight better at every turn — to even get the right to vote in the first place, to get the police to take violence against us seriously, to get the right to control our own bodies. For white men, much has come for free, and since the founding of this country, white men have been imbued with a series of rights and privileges simply by virtue of the bodies they were born into. Securing those same rights and privileges has been, for women, a centuries-long struggle.

We have lost many times over and come back to fight another day. And surely we will do it again. But this is a big, hard, misogynist hit. And it stings.

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Jill Filipovic senior political writer Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com.

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