Earlier this month Hillary Clinton gave probably her most revealing interview, – not to CNN, not to the New York Times, but to the blog Humans of New York, which posts photos and short interviews with New Yorkers. Clinton’s interview, sui generis as she is, could not really be described as representative of the average New Yorker, but it did sum up the problems faced by high-profile women today, still, and nowhere more so than in politics.

“What works for them [men] won’t work for you [women],” she said. “Women are seen through a different lens. It’s not bad. It’s just a fact.” She then detailed precisely how, if it’s not bad, it’s certainly outrageous: “I’ll go to these events and there will be men speaking before me, and they’ll be pounding the message and screaming about how we need to win the election. And I want to do the same thing. I love to wave my arms, but apparently that’s a little bit scary to people. And I can’t yell too much. It comes across as ‘too loud’ or ‘too shrill’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that’.”

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Clinton has always been careful not to complain about the absurd double standards imposed on women in the public eye – after all, as she says, “it’s just a fact”. And heck, nothing worse than a nagging, whining woman, right, guys? But at this point, in this election, where she, the most qualified presidential candidate in at least a generation, is running near even with a man whose political experience amounts to firing people on a reality TV show, she had little choice but to state the oft-forgotten obvious. The first presidential debate should be studied by future generations – who, I dearly hope, will have a more evolved attitude towards gender than we do – about how sexism helps the individual but hurts the populace. For here voters had a chance to watch the different approaches that got Clinton and Donald Trump to precisely the same point.

Not just their approaches either. As Fox News’s Brit Hume sagely noted afterwards: “I think a lot will turn on how people reacted to the faces they saw side by side on the screen tonight.” And, unfortunately for Clinton, Hume decreed that Clinton looked “not necessarily attractive”. Bad luck, Clinton! You might have all the “facts” and “experience” but you didn’t give a Fox News host a hard-on. Election over! (Hume felt no need to say how much Trump had turned him on. Different lens and all that.)

But before we get to the compare-and-contrast segment, let’s start with a fun game. Much has been written about how Trump’s rise is – some commentators airily claim – an inevitable reaction to globalisation, or political correctness, or liberal elitism, or whatever argument you want to make.

But imagine it wasn’t Trump who was the conduit for this anger. Imagine it was a woman. Picture a woman up there on the podium last night shouting over her rival, jabbing her finger in the air, denying she’d said things there was ample evidence of online that she had said. Imagine a completely inexperienced woman insisting she had better political nous than someone who had been at the forefront of politics for decades. And, of course, you can’t: it is, literally, beyond imagination.



Sarah Palin, whatever her flaws later proved to be, had actual - and successful - political experience. She also was parachuted in as a vice-presidential candidate, which is very different from making it through the presidential primaries.

If Trump’s political rise is an expression of rage, that it is Trump – a white man whose entire existence is built on inherited mega-wealth – up against a woman emphasises how this rage has nothing to do with righting liberal mistakes and everything to do with restoring the old structures.

Trump also had a far lower bar to scale on Monday night, even though this is a man so blessed with privilege he was able to dismiss a 1978 $1m gift from his father as “a small loan” in the debate.At one point he congratulated himself for not bringing up something “extremely rough” about Clinton and her family – clearly her husband’s alleged infidelities, as Trump confirmed backstage afterwards – and it did feel like a miracle of self-control that he didn’t. After all, according to a tweet Trump retweeted last year, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” (He couldn’t, however, resist threatening last weekend to bring one of Bill Clinton’s alleged former girlfriends to the debate. His campaign hastily shut down that story.)

Clinton, on the other hand, was being judged as a politician and therefore had to behave marginally better than Charlie Sheen drunk on tiger blood. Her strategy for dealing with Trump’s absurdism without being “too this” or “too that” was something we can call the Side-Eye Strategy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There is no denying that she is clearly the superior candidate and he is a walking bag of lies.’ Photograph: Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty Images

Some of her supporters have already complained that she didn’t jump on some of Trump’s more deranged statements, such as that not paying federal income tax is “smart”. But she couldn’t – because she’s not trying to appeal now to her supporters but to the undecideds who might well find that kind of attack “too shrill”.

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She instead, wisely, let him hang himself with his words, and restricted herself to some side-eye smiles to the camera and nudges to the fact-checkers. She was Martin Freeman’s Tim to Trump’s David Brent in The Office, staring straight into the camera while Brent comes out with another absurdity. No comment necessary. She did, however, allow herself a wiggle of delight when Trump roared that he had “a winning temperament”, and who can blame her?

Of course, even some of Clinton supporters have already described her as “too smug”, “too straight”, and all those other things people say when they mean “too obviously smart for a woman”. Chuck Todd, from the ostensibly neutral network NBC, actually complained that Clinton seemed “over-prepared”. Because nobody likes a woman who performs too well, guys.

A Republican congressman griped that “she just comes across as my bitchy wife/mother”, which serves as a convenient reminder that people who are sexist about Clinton actually just hate women.

But all of this is merely the surface of Clinton’s real problem. It is widely agreed that she wiped the floor with Trump in this debate, and that even if you don’t like Clinton there is no denying that she is clearly the superior candidate and he is a walking bag of lies. Those are America’s two options now. And yet Trump really could still win this election: because he is he, and not she. That is bad, and that’s just a fact.