“I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions”: Hillary Clinton talks about sexism

“I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions” Hillary Clinton talks about sexism.  Democratic Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, opened up about sexism and the difficulties faced by a woman politician in a two ­part post uploaded by Humans of New York on 8th September. Hillary Clinton, who is often criticized for looking like a robot and acting emotionally distant, explained that she had to learn to control her emotions in order to succeed as a woman politician. She said: “But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off’.” In the first part, Clinton recounted her experience of being taunted by men as she prepared to take her law school admissions exam. “I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room”, she recalled. “And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’” One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ She added: “It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room”. Talking about sexism, Clinton revealed that “women are seen through a different lens”. She explained that as a woman in politics “you have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her’. But it is more difficult for a woman as there is a dearth of proper role models.“If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the Presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you”, she told Humans Of New York. Clinton explained how men and women are perceived differently by the society: “I’ll go to these events and there will be men speaking before me, and they’ll be pounding the message, and screaming about how we need to win the election. And people will love it. And I want to do the same thing. Because I care about this stuff. But I’ve learned that I can’t be quite so passionate in my presentation. I love to wave my arms, but apparently that’s a little bit scary to people. And I can’t yell too much. It comes across as ‘too loud’ or ‘too shrill’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that’.”