Liberals are unhappy at this point that Hillary Clinton isn’t trouncing Donald Trump, so there must be an obvious culprit: Sexism. Especially among white males, the most likely Republican voters. On Thursday night’s PBS NewsHour, they interviewed their own correspondent Daniel Bush on their question “Does gender bias explain why Hillary Clinton has fared so poorly with white male voters?”
Bush wrote an article for the NewsHour website titled “The hidden sexism that could sway the election.” He interviews people who say they can’t trust her, citing the fiasco in Benghazi. Bush isn’t convinced. Say she’s not trustworthy? It’s because she’s a woman. White males who won’t vote for Hillary and deny thinking women aren’t suited for the presidency are in denial, suggests PBS.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM, anchor: In your piece, you introduced me to a term I had never heard about before. It's called ambivalent sexism. What is that?
DANIEL BUSH: So, researchers who study these issues, who study bias and stereotyping, for a long time thought that stereotyping was basically uniformly negative.
But what researchers who focus on gender specifically in the 1990s and on have realized is that gender bias takes different forms. So, there's what they call hostile sexism, sort of overtly negative views of women, what we typically associate with gender discrimination, right?
Then there's also ambivalent or benevolent sexism, which, from a male point of view, encourages men to be supportive of women who are in traditional roles, traditional gender roles, but when women step out of that, when they seek power, when they seek to enter male-dominated fields, men tend to look at them worse. And obviously we're seeing that play out with Hillary Clinton.
This is one of those annoying games liberals play about subliminal motives. You say you won't vote Democrat because you're conservative. But I know you're secretly it's something else, that you can't admit to yourself. Liberals have some kind of special insight, undermining the idea anyone could defensibly vote in a conservative way. But wait, said the anchorman – maybe the refusal to vote for the woman is a policy matter. Bush thinks that’s not the real reason:
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: How do we know with some of the other men that you talked to, or just men more broadly, that their beef with Hillary Clinton might be about her policies or her positions? I mean, how do we know that it’s overtly about the fact that she’s a woman?
DANIEL BUSH: On an individual, case-by-case basis, it’s difficult to say, yes, this voter in particular doesn’t like Hillary Clinton only because she is a woman.
And, of course, there are millions of voters across the country, in the primaries, and there will be in the general, who have legitimate policy disagreements, right, with Clinton, whether it’s about health care, whether it’s about taxes, and so on.
But when you really start talking to men — and in this story in particular, we were looking at white men — you see that gender is an underlying sort of current in the way that they think about Hillary Clinton.
Brangham ended the interview with an atta-boy: “Thanks for this. Great reporting.” If we were playing at this game, we could suggest that subconsciously, these two white men loathe both their whiteness and their maleness, which would explain this segment.
The PBS lesson? Don't vote for Hillary because she's a woman. Vote for Hillary so you're not accused of subconsciously loathing females doing anything but making you breakfast.
Bush’s article for the NewsHour website concluded: “social science evidence, primary exit polls and my interviews with researchers and dozens of voters indicate that white men's attitudes toward Clinton are driven by a complex mix of conscious and subconscious sexism.”
It’s always amusing for liberal journalists – on a matter like this – say we’re all hopelessly biased: “Social psychology research tells us that everyone thinks they're not prejudiced, and everyone is wrong. We all have built-in biases, whether we recognize them or not.”
It’s funny how PBS never seems to admit theirs.
PS: They even had an “Are you sexist?” quiz. These are somehow voting tests for Hillary. Agree or disagree with the following?
1. Many women have a quality of purity that few men possess.
2. Women should be cherished and protected by men.
3. Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.
4. Every man ought to have a woman whom he adores.
5. Men are incomplete without women.
6. Women exaggerate problems they have at work.
7. Once a woman gets a man to commit to her, she usually tries to put him on a tight leash.
8. When women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against.
9. Many women get a kick out of teasing men by seeming sexually available and then refusing male advances.
10. Women, compared to men, tend to have a superior moral sensibility.
11. Men should be willing to sacrifice their own well being in order to provide financially for the women in their lives.
12. Feminists are making unreasonable demands of men.
And of course:
13. What is your gender identity?
–Male
–Female
–Other
–Prefer not to answer [Safe space]
At the end, you get your score, and the lecture: "Benevolent sexism perpetuates gender-based prejudice more subtly, feeding the notion that 'wonderful, but weak' women need men to help and protect them and ultimately justifies gender inequality."
