MSM's ham-handed protectiveness toward Kamala Harris: "The unique harm we cause when we dissect a powerful woman’s love life."

Oh, it's just exquisite, the harm we inflict on the delicate female candidate! It's unique! It hurts their tender feelings, so shush now, and allow this fine woman to become President, where we can continue to feel responsible for protecting her.

Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry. I want a President who will protect us. So your protectiveness toward Kamala Harris completely backfires.

I'm reading Monica Hesse in WaPo. The quote in the post title is the headline for her column. She's fielding the news that former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown has confirmed that years ago he dated Kamala Harris and he appointed her to 2 commissions, which — as Brown put it — "may have influenced her career." At the time, Brown was 60 years old and 30 years older than Harris. He was the speaker of the state assembly, and she was an assistant district attorney.

Why aren't we supposed to talk about that? There are at least some questions. In the #MeToo era, we have to wonder about whether the man sought sexual favors. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, we've heard from women who say he pressured them to give sex in exchange for career advancement, and that implies that there were women who said yes and received the advancement that was denied to the women who said no. That is a system of discrimination that matters a lot, even if we're disinclined to condemn the women who went along with it. But it's one thing to refrain from condemning them and quite something else to say these are the women we want to trust with the heaviest responsibilities.

If Kamala Harris is fit to represent the United States in confrontations with the greatest thugs in the world — Putin, et al. — she doesn't need kid-gloves treatment, and saying she does and impugning us for not getting in line makes me much more suspicious of this old love/"love" affair than I would have been if MSM weren't bending over backwards to protect her.

A little of Hesse's verbiage:

Plenty of us have... spent an awful lot of time discussing Bill Clinton’s willie and Anthony Weiner’s wiener: it’s not that we don’t talk about the sexual predilections of male candidates. But we do talk about them in a different way. We talk about men abusing power. We talk about women not even deserving power. The distinction matters, because the conversation isn’t really about sex, it’s about legitimacy. It’s about who we think has earned the right to be successful, and what criteria we’ll invent, and who we’ll apply it to.

“Maybe we should stop accusing women of ‘sleeping their way’ to the top,” Erin Gloria Ryan wrote in the Daily Beast in 2017. “Maybe because men have been the ones sleeping women to the middle and bottom.”

It takes two to "sleep." Both the man and the woman are trying to get something, and whether the woman gets as much as she wants — whether she gets to "the top" or only "the middle" — is no more interesting than whether the man got really great sex out of the arrangement or not. If, later on, we the people are judging a candidate, we look at what that candidate has done — whether it's the one that wanted to get sex or the one who traded sex for something else — and we judge them on the individual details. Why would sex be off limits just because women are more likely to be the ones in a position to give sex in exchange for something else, and the men tend to be the ones who want the sex so much they dole out non-sex favors to get it? Yes, it's different for men than for women, but so what? We the voters are the ones in the down position, stuck needing to vote for one of these fallible human beings. Don't tell me what not to talk about!

Does it help your career, to date someone powerful? I’d assume so. Does it also help to play golf with someone powerful, or smoke cigars with someone powerful, or belong to Skull and Bones? I’d assume that, too. But for decades we’ve accepted those relationships — many of which benefited only men — as standard procedure for how executives and politicians get ahead.

No, actually we haven't accepted it. Feminists have been denouncing the "old boy network" for as long as I've been listening to feminists, which is about half a century. The "standard procedure" has been under attack and deserves to be under attack.

We're supposed to throw feminism out the window now in order to help the fragile flower Kamala Harris? Ridiculous!