Do we have to do this? We do. But we don’t have to do it the boring way. Oh, I know the ritual: Eww, her again, didn’t she know she needs to GO AWAY already? People say this, almost no matter their politics, at this point. Some who wish she’d won and fault her for having not done so, others who hate her from the left, others from the right. Like how Girls was both Bad because Lena Dunham was celebrating the progressivism of decadent Brooklyn white people (she was satirizing them!) and because she depicted a New York without the city’s rich diversity (these fictional New Yorkers wouldn’t have had squat to do with that diversity, it was realistic!). It adds up because Lena Dunham, Hillary Clinton, Amy Schumer, and Sheryl Sandberg are all actually the same person.
Point being, the wincing that follows every instance of recent-few-years Hillary Clinton opening her mouth (or, posting) is predictable enough to inspire a yaaas, Hillary born of contrarian impulses.
It felt like Hillary won, even though she did not, was the problem. Her brand of glass ceiling feminism was declared obsolete before the achievements it represented had even happened. MeToo had its moment but then it was all about the Karens. Everyone hates Amy Schumer because she is not the pro-Palestinian far-left activist one would imagine she’d be (if one were massively naive) or maybe just because she’s cringe and reminds one of Lena Dunham in several distinct yet not unrelated respects. Meanwhile people on Twitter were pointing out that Actually Hillary would have been more likely than not just Trump but also Biden to force the Israelis and Palestinians to set aside their differences, so maybe if it weren’t for the Electoral College there’d be world peace. Oh well.
Back to the Barbie posting. I don’t know what Hillary is doing here, beyond knowing that this is about Oscar nominations, a topic I usually zone out. I have a longstanding theory about Hillary, though, which is that she has for so many decades had some close-knit circle around her telling her she’s great and that her detractors are sexist losers (which, in fairness, some are! not all, however), so she literally just does not know that not everyone is a normie liberal residing in some millennial-pink amalgam of the 1990s and 2010s. She knows many people don’t like her but misses all the nuances of why.
But is that even it? Maybe she straight-up does know what she’s doing—she is smart!—and is leaning into her cringe-girlboss persona. Maybe she picked up on the fact that the Barbie movie being a phenomenon tells us that no feminism did not Become Intersectional in 2017 or 2020 or whenever else it was meant to have done so, which is why Michelle Goldberg was writing, as recently as July, “This summer’s two biggest entertainment phenomena, the movie “Barbie” and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, have a lot in common. Both feature conventionally gorgeous blond women who alternately revel in mainstream femininity and chafe at its limitations, enacting an ambivalence shared by many of their fans.”
Maybe Hillary has picked up on the fact that the like totally obsolete thing she came to represent is more relevant than whichever leftier-than-thou podcaster types would have it.
Maybe she’s running. What does she have to lose?
as maybe your one gen z reader i have to say that i adore lena dunham and girls, feel ambivalent towards hilary and never particularly warmed to amy schumer. i get the conflation though. these three very different women were all amalgamated in the 2010s to represent Bad White Woman guilty of not being conventionally attractive. it's a shame though because HBO girls is brilliant and misunderstood because audiences can't tell when women are joking and assume all female writers are just publishing diary entries
as a 2016 bernie supporter i think i’m meant to have sworn an eternal blood oath against her but this is so strange and cringey that for me it’s looped around to being very cute and charming