Poor Hillary Clinton. Her campaign’s not even dead yet, and it’s already being autopsied in the media, with headlines like “Gender issue lives on as Clinton’s hope dims.” I don’t particularly like her, and I didn’t like her campaign at all, but I honestly feel sorry for her, both as a person and as a candidate.

Clinton has had a rough campaign. I don’t like her politics, and my lack of support for her stemmed from a general dislike to go along with her positions (and her profound lack of ethics), but she also faced a lot of misogyny. Obama, of course, has dealt with his share of racism, which also sucks, but I do think that the misogyny has been just as internalized, insidious, and widespread as the racism in this campaign. At least Obama didn’t get assaulted by the fashion police every time he appeared in public. The fact of the matter is that a lot of people did attack Clinton because she’s a woman, not because her politics suck, and that makes me really sad.

I would have liked to see a lady candidate I could really get behind and support, because, yes, I do think it would be awesome to have a woman as President, just I think it would be marvelous to have anyone who isn’t a white, middle-aged Christian male as President, for the sake of variety. And this campaign has really made me feel torn, as someone with lady bits, because I feel like I’m condemned for not supporting her because I’m betraying the sisterhood, while women who do support her are being condemned for blindly following the sisterhood instead of thinking for themselves, when in fact pro and con Clinton camps have very good, well thought-out reasons for their opinions.

I hate, hate, hate that the media is acting like Clinton’s defeat spells the end of women in politics, because it doesn’t. Clinton was a poor candidate, and that’s why she’s getting hammered right now; not because she’s a woman, but because she’s a Clinton. Because she played dirty, because her politics were divisive, and because she just wasn’t (in my opinion) right for America. There are lots of powerful, smart, awesome ladies in politics right now, and their numbers are likely to grow in the coming years, with or without Clinton.

Most of my friends, for some reason or another, all have little boys instead of little girls, but if they did have little girls, I have every confidence that those girls could grow up to be President, if that’s what they wanted to be. It’s sad that this campaign has involved a lot of poisonous sexism and racism, because I imagine that’s pretty hard for younger minds to deal with: I can look at a Clinton rally and see someone wearing a stupid “do my laundry shirt” and just be amused and sad, whereas a young girl might have a tougher time dealing with that image.

It makes me angry that Clinton has tried to make herself out as a victim, crying “misogyny” instead of simply admitting that she is a poor candidate in a lot of ways, but, at the same time, to act like her gender isn’t an issue is just plain stupid. Obviously it’s an issue, obviously there are people who didn’t vote for her solely because she’s a woman (just as people didn’t vote for Obama because he’s black), and that really, really sucks. It sucks that a successful female politician is, by nature, going to have to be twice as awesome as her male counterparts to buck misogynistic stereotypes, and it sucks that people think it’s ok to assault Clinton on the basis of how she looks and dresses.

Because, in the end, this distracts from the fundamental issue, which is that people had some very good, strong reasons for not wanting to support Clinton, and those reasons had nothing to do with what’s between her legs and what she wears to debates. Gender and racism have become huge issues in this election, and not in a positive getting-society-to-think kind of way, but in a negative, distracting kind of way.

That, in my humble opinion, is a travesty.