Katherine Timpf:
According to a piece in the feminist blog Bustle, the #ZombieHillary hashtag is a “sexist attack” on Hillary Clinton, and that in many cases, it’s just a coded way of saying you’re “bothered by powerful women of a certain age.”
In case you’re not familiar with #ZombieHillary, people recently started using it in tweets describing Hillary Clinton’s demeanor while she was speaking to her press pool about the explosion in Chelsea late Saturday night.
“Twitter users who felt Clinton appeared ‘tired’ while speaking to the press pool traveling with her from Washington to New York City argued her appearance was proof she didn’t have the stamina or strength needed to be president,” Morgan Brinlee wrote in an article titled “The Zombie Hillary Hashtag is Yet Another Sexist Attack Against Her.”
“Under the hashtag #ZombieHillary, Some accused the Democratic nominee of being under the influence of drugs or alcohol and questioned how she’d be able to run the country in such a ‘weak’ state,” Brinlee continued.
Now, if Brinlee’s point was to say that some of the tweets were kind of mean, then that I could understand. But just what in fresh hell does it have to do with sexism specifically?
Well, according to Brinlee, #ZombieHillary is just another example of how “coverage and commentary of Clinton . . . continues to invoke a sexist double standard” where Clinton is “often subjected to a level of criticism and scrutiny we fail to expose her male competition to.”
While this may be true in the case of some of the criticism against Clinton, I really don’t think that commenting on her lack of energy has anything to do with gender. After all, Jeb Bush (a man) was repeatedly attacked for being “low energy” during the primaries.
To be fair, Brinlee does acknowledge that the “internet has poked fun at Trump’s hair, orange skin, and small hands,” but she maintains that “these threads of criticism are often short lived and not put into general use by the media in the same way that comments about Clinton’s appearance, age, voice, smile, laugh, health, and emotions are.”
