By Kathy Gyngell: Poor persecuted Mrs Clinton has become the overnight victim of a brand new gender crime, 'manterrupting'.Yes, really. Within minutes of Donald Trump challenging her comments in the first of their debates the other night, feminist tweeters were at it, monitoring his every gender offence and creating some brand new ones to boot:
‘Trump's definitely winning the #mansplaining and #manterrupting components of this debate’, one tweeted in desperation.
This was the feminists’ answer to Mrs C’s lacklustre performance - to account for it in terms of women’s historic state of victimhood.
‘To the men amazed Clinton hasn't snapped: Every woman you know has learned to do this. This is our life in this society’, another tweeted bitterly.
Oh, so Hillary cannot stand up for herself. The poor put-upon dear. How terrible is the lot of women! This had to be the reason.
Donald Trump did indeed harass, shout, taunt and talk over Mrs Clinton. But he does it to everyone. The fact is that she let him. That is what these safe space feminist commentators couldn’t digest. Trump treated her equally – like a man.
And at the game of reality TV, which is what this debate was, he won and she lost - whatever the heroic CNN poll and other polls claimed.
But we can hardly expect Mrs Clinton’s feminist backers to face the real reasons for her continuing unpopularity.
They are blind to Hillary's humourlessness, to her lack of charm. They don’t see that she has no natural capacity to communicate, let alone to inspire or to engage. They don’t get that she simply lacks the skills and the badinage needed to put such an opponent as Trump down, that she is a bore.
A cleverer, witty woman could have given him a roasting. Or she could have set out the real dangers of his populism, in a reverse of an “I am here to bury Caesar not to praise him” speech. ‘Donald Trump is a remarkable man’, she might have begun.
Clinton has only ever had one ‘trump’ card to play - that she is a woman (hardly a killer credential when half of the population are too). But that is all her defenders have to fall back on. It is what feminists do. They invariably interpret inadequacy through the prism of identity politics, discrimination and victimhood and then play the blame game.
Shouting, talking over, bulldozing and ‘mansplaining' are Mr Trump’s linguistic trademarks they say - typical of male behaviour of course.
Women, by implication, never interrupt men as anyone who watched the ITV and BBC Brexit debates can vouch for. I am being sarcastic of course.
Remember Julie Etchingham standing by as Nigel Farage was harried and repeatedly ‘womenrrupted’ from the audience. Remember Boris meekly at the receiving end of another furious ‘womanrrupting’ assault by Amber Rudd, Angela Eagle and the poisoned dwarf of North, Nicola Sturgeon?
The diktats of feminism forbade him from fighting back and, I have no doubt, so too did his prior briefing. Today men are expected to sit and take their punishment.
That is what the feminists cannot get over about Donald Trump. He has torn up the rule book. Though he did out of deference to Chelsea Clinton, he said afterwards, restrain himself from calling out Hillary on her knowledge of husband’s ‘peccadillos’ (or sex crimes depending which side of the feminists’ bread is being buttered on any one day).
Lets be clear, Mrs Clinton’s failure in the polls is not, as Yvette Cooper claimed on the Today programme yesterday, down to being treated differently or judged by different standards because she is a woman. If anyone’s appearance has been focused on over the last months of campaigning, surely it is Donald Trump’s.
Her failure is down to her lack of personality and her stale identity politics obsessions. As Tim Stanley of The Daily Telegraph observes, she continues to display 'all the faults of liberalism that has lost it so much working-class support down the decades'.
What Trump said in the debate, Tim also points out, was just about 'everything that anyone who hates Clinton – and that’s a lot of people – have been waiting thirty years to say'.
But don’t expect Hillary’s battalions of feminist furies to get that any time soon.
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