Rachel Rippetoe |
Hey Madeleine Albright, Gloria Steinem and all Generation X ladies and beyond trying to guilt trip me into voting for Hillary Clinton: Cut it out.
Your crusades fighting for young women to “seize an opportunity” by electing the first female president, your scolding of millennials for their Sanders support is useless, tiresome and downright condescending.
But ultimately, it’s not working.
These women don’t really want us to vote for Hillary Clinton. If they did, they wouldn’t belittle our knowledge and beliefs. They wouldn’t insult our “hashtags” that they were desperately using to gain our support just a couple months ago.
I’d have to assume that women who accuse me of simply “going where the boys are” or women who open their opinion pieces intended to shame me like, “Yes, Millennials, Hillary Clinton is a feminist,” aren’t actually interested in my support.
These speeches, articles and tweets aren’t aimed at young women. It’s clear from their haughty language and petty jokes about modern technology that these women are just speaking to other versions of themselves.
They’re hitting all the middle-aged moderate female democrats on the shoulder and saying “Am I right? I mean, kids these days!”
Hillary, here’s some advice on how to get young women to vote for you: Fire your marketing team. Immediately.
Anyone who’s biggest advice to gain young voters is for you to go on Ellen and do “the dab” is ripping you off. It’s time to go back to the drawing board.
In some sense, Clinton’s lack of appeal to young voters stems out of pure laziness. She and all her supporters are attempting to be relevant to an audience they know little about, and from what I can see, haven’t made much of an effort to understand.
LA Times columnist, Meghan Daum, in her pro-Clinton op-ed, belittles the idea of intersectionality to a hashtag and deems it too complicated to understand.
When your defenders are too lazy to Google-search a term that has played a pivotal role in the next generation of feminism, you might have a problem.
To assume that Bernie Sanders is leading in the polls among young people because he is a man is about as obtuse as Clinton’s hashtag obsession (which her supporters readily mock when it’s no longer of use to them).
Sanders is in the lead because his campaign team DID Google intersectionality, because he doesn’t just assume what young people are up to these days by what’s trending on Twitter.
This isn’t even an argument on who is more qualified for the job. It’s who has made the most effort to come off as genuine to a new generation of voters.
Hillary assumed she had the democratic youth vote when she announced her run for president. That assumption has bred laziness into her campaign toward young people and it now leaves her painfully lagging behind.
Yet none of that is my fault.
So listen up Albright, Steinem and Daum. I’m sorry you’re scrambling for a demographic Bernie has been working for since he started running, but I’m not interested in being reproached for my political beliefs. I’m not interested in my feminism getting questioned because putting a woman in office isn’t my first priority.
I’m not the one who needs to “get with the program.” Unless she’s hiring me, Clinton’s marketing issues aren’t my problem.
So kindly and respectfully, step off.
Rachel Rippetoe is a reporter for The Beacon. She can be reached at rippetoe18@up.edu.
