Right-wing Trump fans now attacking Hillary for … sitting on stools

My automatic thought was that it was just your basic misogyny – call the little lady by her first name, and all that – but then I remembered that she just went through a primary season battling someone known mostly as “Bernie.” Up here in Canada everyone knows who you’re talking about if you say “Justin.” In his case, I think it’s partly the way to make him young and hip, or, if you’re a Conservative, young and immature. I’m wondering if there’s a difference between conservatives and left-wingers there, considering that Stephen Harper first ran as “Steve” and then apparently realized that no amount of playing the Beatles offkey would actually make him a Steve.

In general I suspect it depends a whole lot on the specific politician, and also on how unusual/recognizable their first or last name is, with a sidebar of misogyny in that we’ve stopped saying Mister Trump and Mister Cruz all the same and started referring to men by their last names alone, and it feels awkward to do that to women, especially when they have the same last name as their husbands, but saying Mrs all the time would sound clunky. Not sure. Help us out, Brits — when Thatcher was in power, did the men around her, leaders of the opposition, etc., get a “Mister” when she got a “Mrs?”

And if not, was that misandry?

It takes me a while wearing heels for the pain to start, mostly because the years I spent wearing pointe shoes for ballet have caused a not-insignificant degree of loss to the amount of feeling I have in my feet. Most of the time they’re sort of numb. Hillary Clinton is an older woman – a fair number of her adult years being at a time women who worked, those in white collar and professional jobs at least, were expected to wear heels every day. The construction of shoes and the components used in them have changed since they were invented, and changed even more when footwear became a (near) universal requirement for everyone (almost) everywhere. I can’t imagine the high heeled shoes of the 1960’s -1980’s were more comfortable than the ones being sold in stores today (unless you’re buying the absolute crappiest and cheapest you can find, getting those to wear is just setting yourself up for some serious foot pain, possibly injuries as well). So if she wants to sit on a stool sometimes, I say give her a g’damned stool! And don’t make a big deal of it!

Sinkable John – Glad you liked it, sorry about the burning!

Full disclosure: I got ‘cranial-rectal inversion syndrome’ from either Pharyngula or Dispatches from the Culture Wars a long time ago, back in their Sciblogs days. I just added the pseudo charity thing.

Wow, I must also be on death’s doorstep, for I sit at work, I sit at home, if there’s a chair, I sit in it. Otherwise, I’d sit on the floor.
Then, have one hell of a time getting up off of the floor. :/

But, we know where this all came from.
First, we had “crooked Hillary” from Trump, now “sick Hillary”. Just another fine product from the nonsense factory.

Thinking further about the semiotics of naming British politicians, I think the BBC names female public figures who’ve been awarded the equivalent of a knighthood as Dame+firstname. (Yes, the fairly recently invented female equivalent of “Sir” is “Dame” – which always sounds faintly ridiculous, because the only other common use of the word now is for pantomime dames, who are men playing middle-aged or older women in deliberately absurd drag. But I guess whoever came up with it was stuck for an alternative – “Lady” is used both for female peers in their own right, and for the wives of male peers and knights, and in some cases for the daughters of peers – I don’t know exactly what the rules are.) Of course a great deal of trouble could be avoided if we abolished the ludicrous honours system, but these baubles are useful to the ruling elite both as signifiers of their own importance, and as rewards or outright bribes.

They just found out about basic biology and realized they couldn’t claim that bleeding from her wherever would make her unfit anymore because of her age, so they resort to stools

OMG A PERSON SITS OR LEANS SOMETIMES!!! #notfittoserve!!!!