NYT columnist Thomas Friedman, called a "sensitive man" by Tina Brown at last night's "Women in the World" event, said he'd heard that when Hillary Clinton wore her hair tied back...

... she was about "to deliver unpleasant news."

Hillary, icily, and with strange new hair (and face!) said: "Really, Tom?, and everyone laughed and laughed, because the topic was whether there's a "double standard" (gender-wise) and there's always been so much talk about Hillary's hair.

(I mean, I was totally distracted by her new look, which you can check out at that link. I think I notice how everyone looks, and I don't like feminist efforts to deprive us of our engagement with the visual world, but I've got to concede that our emotional reaction to the way female power-seekers look is much more complicated than how we feel about their male counterparts.)

Hillary said:

“There is a double standard, obviously.... We have all either experienced it or at the very least seen it. And there  is a deep set of cultural psychological views that are manifest through this double standard.”....

“Some of those attitudes, we know, persist.... And that’s why it's important that we surface them, and why we talk about them, and help men and women recognize when they are crossing over from an individual judgment — which we’re all prone to make and have a right to make about somebody, man or woman — into a stereotype.”...

“Too many young women are harder on themselves than circumstances warrant... At this point in my life and career I’ve employed so many young people — and one of the differences is, whenever I would say to a young woman, ‘I want you to do this. I want you to take on this extra responsibility. I want you to move up’ – almost invariably they would say ‘Do you think I can?’ or ‘Do you think I’m ready?’”

“When I’ve asked a young man if he wants to move up, he goes: ‘How high?’ ‘How fast?’ ‘When do I start?’... There is just a hesitancy still about women’s worth and women’s work that we’re going to have to continue to address.”

Notice how she holds women responsible too for their own failure to advance. Was that subtle enough to avoid the wrath of millennial females? She knocks her own female employees as insufficiently cocky and ambitious. We've got to "continue to address" the "hesitancy." These are careful words. Good enough to stay out of trouble as long as the women she needs to wrangle are allied in keeping her out of trouble, but if a handsome new man arrives on the scene — as in 2008 — she's got to worry that once again the Alliance of Women will collapse.