Why Are Female Candidates Apologizing For Caring?

At the sixth Democratic primary debate on Thursday (December 19), moderator Judy Woodruff suggested a final question in the spirit of the holiday season. Candidates could either ask forgiveness from one of their peers on stage, or provide a gift to them. Both Senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren went for the former alternative. They were the only two to do so.


Warren went first, noting that she is aware she gets “a little worked up” and “a little hot” about the issues she cares about. However she attributed such passion to the tens of thousands of selfies she’s taken with people at her events across the nation and the stories she’s heard from the people she met. In particular, she spoken about meeting a veteran with diabetes, who rations his insulin so that his sister and daughter can also access the life-saving medicine, which several people cannot live without — and fewer and fewer can afford.


Klobuchar echoed the sentiment. “I'd ask for forgiveness whenever any of you get irritated at me. I can be blunt,” she mentioned. “But I think it's key to pick the correct candidate here. I do.” The comment came immediately after she and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in particular consistently went at each other for specifics in their rhetoric, policies, and political experience; the senator also spent much of the night providing zingers and getting a word in edgewise whenever other candidates yelled at each other.


While some people commended Sens. Warren and Klobuchar for their humility — and not, mention, plugging a book — others immediately registered the disparity between their answers, and the answers issued by the male candidates.


They weren’t the only people to recommend @they could be wrong about how they approached any given topic that night: Bernie Sanders owned up to his vote on the war in Afghanistan, noting that Rep. Barbara Lee (CA), the only Democrat who voted against the war, was right at the time and he was wrong. Although taken in isolation, asking forgiveness, or apologizing more generally, is something ladies, in particular, can typically more culturally primed to do than their male peers.


Ladies are more frequently reprimanded for being “aggressive” at work, while boys are often rewarded for that instinct. Girls are perceived as being “more emotional” than boys are, once the fact of the matter is, people of all gender identities feel any span of emotions — it’s just that cisgender boys can typically taught and conditioned to not express those emotions, often to their own detriment. And things are even worse for minority women and particularly Black women, who are some days forced to navigate harmful microaggressions and racist stereotypes additionally to performing the jobs for which they were hired.


That there still exists an expectation that females temper themselves and their ambitions, and that it is still a fulcrum of the presidential race, is depressing. Nevertheless caring about something isn’t something to apologize for, and increasingly folks are standing their ground on that point. Case in point, any time While you are first Lady Melania Trump seemingly boasted that she didn’t care any time whenever she wore a certain Zara jacket en route to the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018, plenty of brands responded with merch that avowed just how much they do.