Send Me No Flowers

I'm not sure if the idea of "playing hard-to-get" is inherently sexist or not. In the light of the current political climate, which, not incidentally, includes a woman nominated as a major-party candidate for president of the United States for the first time in U.S. history, I've been questioning a lot of things I hadn't viewed through the prism of sexism before. Like I've been a lot more circumspect about where I employ the word "cunt" anymore. I used to be pretty defensive about it, like, "hey man, they use it in Britain all the time and it's no big deal, and I should know because I, like, went there."* But now I'm more apt to check myself, thinking "hey, maybe don't scream it in the face of the lady at the Ralphs who took the last of the good white nectarines." You know, because she's a lady.

I watched the Trump speech at the RNC in Cleveland last week and just got done watching Hillary's address to close out the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. After absorbing both, sorting the rhetorical flourishes from the policy bass notes underneath, I came to the realization: I'm not doing nearly enough to be wooed properly in this election. Or any election. I've been voting since I turned 18 in 1992 and I've never voted for a Republican for president. I'll go further and say I've never even really seriously considered it. Clinton, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Obama and now... well, first of all it's frustrating as the Republican option this year is a big, tall, icy glass of freshly poured anti-freeze. Sure, maybe Hillary's only warm milk, which is maybe not the most exciting thing, but can be pretty comforting and also will not dissolve your esophagus. So what's an ostensibly open-minded guy supposed to do?

As I was watching Hillary's speech, I was nervous about it, not because my vote hinged on it in any way, but in a more meta-strategical way, knowing the convention was well-run and organized (despite the Bernie people exercising their hard-won and American guaranteed right to be petulant assholes in public) building to this crescendo after an impossible-to-follow series of devastating barn-burner speeches the night before. The goddamned thing had to do so much: introduce 2016 Hillary to a national audience that hadn't really thought about her since the Blowjob Heard 'Round the World, shore up the Democratic base after the Berniac fracture, rescue the economic and geopolitical narrative from the Trump demon-fantasy, get some hard body-shots in on Trump AND convince people she's not just a pantsuit stuffed with cold, canny ambition.

What she never had to do, at any time, was convince me to vote for her. It's like a Doris Day movie where she's casually seeing a curiously disinterested Rock Hudson around and can't figure out why he's not as into her as she'd like, so her older and perpetually single best friend reminds her that a man likes the chase. She should play "hard to get." I know I'm trying to make a specific point about myself, but I'm still a little uncomfortable with this concept. Is "hard to get" inherently sexist? Men do it now, but apparently it's a super aggressive version called "negging" which has the unfortunate side-effect of making you completely unfuckable forever and ever, like Chernobyl with a (probably undersized) dick. When Doris Day did it, it was... kind of empowering, yes? Maybe? Like shifted the initiative onto the woo-ee instead of the woo-er? Or wait, why would I assume the man would have to be the one to pitch all the woo? See, I've done it again, walked into my own feminism trap. This would probably less fraught if I used nonbinary, gender-neutral pronouns, but even though I'm a staunch supporter of transgender rights, I don't think I'm ready to refer to another human as "zim." The spellcheck gives it the squiggly red underline, you guys. I just... I'm just not there yet.

I guess it's only sexist if it's false, like doing it because it conforms to a general, gendered role, not because it's true to the limited, specific situation in which you're trying to apply it. And for me, any suggestion that I would have been willing to consider Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or really any of the GOP offerings this cycle just to get them to pay more attention to me would have been transparently disingenuous, especially seeing as I have, over and over again, in this space, in print, expressed a strong preference to not dying in a self-inflicted national cataclysm. Which is basically all any of them were really offering.

So I'm a Democrat. I have been for a while now. Which means this whole convention wasn't for me. It was for Bernie people and undecided independents and wavering Republicans and, as much as anything, for the news media to nudge the parameters of their Hillary narrative a little bit wider. She did a great job delivering a well-crafted speech, right through my TV and over my head. She doesn't need me and she never did. She had me at "my fellow Americans."


---

*It probably isn't important that I sound like I'm being played by Jeff Bridges in this hypothetical scenario... OR MAYBE IT'S THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.