--- title: Hillary Clinton: How Bad Men Have Held Her Back description: Her own husband. Donald Trump. Anthony Weiner. James Comey. canonical: https://time.com/4551478/hillary-clinton-bad-men/ author: Jill Filipovic article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-10-31T16:34:13.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:54:59.842Z article:section: Ideas og:title: How Men Behaving Badly Hold Hillary Clinton Back og:description: Her own husband. Donald Trump. Anthony Weiner. James Comey. og:url: https://time.com/4551478/hillary-clinton-bad-men/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt074942066e0db6d4/6988ac39196cf4649903dc52/hillary-clinton-presidency2.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: Democratic Nominee for President of the United States former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Men Behaving Badly Hold Hillary Clinton Back twitter:description: Her own husband. Donald Trump. Anthony Weiner. James Comey. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt074942066e0db6d4/6988ac39196cf4649903dc52/hillary-clinton-presidency2.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How Men Behaving Badly Have Held Hillary Clinton Back > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: How 2016 Turned Into a Battle of the Sexes [Watch (HLS stream): How 2016 Turned Into a Battle of the Sexes](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/IQPiMq6t.m3u8) (2:56)  _Published 2016-11-03. The 2016 election is a referendum on what women can be--and what men can get away with_ by [Jill Filipovic](https://time.com/author/jill-filipovic/) ## Jill Filipovic Oct 31, 2016 4:34 PM UTC  Hillary Clinton speaks to Florida voters at a Baptist Church in Miami on Oct. 30, 2016 Hillary Clinton speaks to Florida voters at a Baptist Church in Miami on Oct. 30, 2016 Melina Mara—The Washington Post/Getty Images by [Jill Filipovic](https://time.com/author/jill-filipovic/) ## Jill Filipovic Oct 31, 2016 4:34 PM UTC The first woman is just days away from (probably) being elected President of the United States, and so of course her candidacy has been fraught by two guys obsessed with their own penises, including one whose last name is literally [Weiner](http://time.com/4550435/joe-biden-anthony-weiner/). If there’s one lesson to draw from this historic election, it’s that even women a hair away from the most powerful position in the world can still see themselves quickly derailed by [badly behaved men](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/opinion/sunday/if-hillary-clinton-groped-men.html?%5Fr=0). In what would have been an unbelievable plotline for a TV drama, Hillary Clinton — a hypercompetent, pantsuited icon of unbridled female ambition — has seen her career and her campaign repeatedly destabilized not just by men themselves, but by their actual, um, manhoods. Her opponent, Donald Trump, brought women who accused Clinton’s husband of sexual misdeeds to a presidential debate — a tactic possible because Clinton’s husband, among other notable instances, has been accused of rape and was involved in a White House sex scandal where she had to play the standing-by-her-man spouse. Trump bragged about the size of his penis onstage at a primary debate, and has run a campaign unabashedly catering to the masculine identities of [white men who believe that](http://time.com/4239152/white-voters/), by virtue of no longer being 100% in charge of everything, they are culturally marginalized. And Trump too has been accused of sexually assaulting and forcibly kissing women many times over. He denied it; [now there’s a video](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-jennifer-hawkins-video%5Fus%5F58137b85e4b0390e69cfbbba), but it’s not getting much traction, perhaps because Trump sexually humiliating a woman doesn’t really surprise us, and certainly because the news cycle is again dominated by Clinton’s emails. Or at least what might be her emails. We don’t know, because the FBI has no idea if previously unread Clinton emails are on the laptop they seized from the Weiner household. But “emails” plus “Hillary” strike at Clinton’s soft spot: the public perception that she’s not trustworthy, and that despite being cleared of wrongdoing by the FBI she must still be hiding something. And so now, after holding a strong lead over Trump, Clinton’s candidacy is again endangered. So too is [the career of Huma Abedin](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/us/politics/huma-abedin-anthony-weiner-clinton.html), one of Clinton’s top aides and the estranged wife of Anthony Weiner. Weiner lost his seat in Congress because of a scandal wherein he sent sexual text messages and photos of his underwear-clad genitals to various women; Abedin tried to help him rehabilitate his political career by supporting his run for mayor of New York City, a race he lost spectacularly after another sexting scandal. When Weiner came into the news a third time because of yet _another_ sexting scandal, Abedin finally left him. But that last publicly discovered bit of sexting is thwarting her yet again. Because Abedin’s husband couldn’t stop himself from taking photos of his own penis, her boss’s race is now vulnerable. And depending on what Abedin told investigators during the FBI investigation into Clinton’s private email server, she could be facing serious legal trouble if she used Weiner’s laptop to access classified material and did not disclose that fact. Weiner, Trump and even Clinton’s own husband aren’t the only men whose bad decisions are blowing back on Clinton. FBI director James Comey, who sent the letter to Congress raising the possibility that there are Clinton emails on Weiner’s computer, sent that letter against the advice of Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Lynch rightly surmised that suggesting malfeasance on Clinton’s part with no hard evidence just days before a national election would be seen as inappropriate interference — and indeed, the [Department of Justice has a policy of not doing exactly what Comey did](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eric-holder-james-comey-is-a-good-man-but-he-made-a-serious-mistake/2016/10/30/08e7208e-9f07-11e6-8832-23a007c77bb4%5Fstory.html?utm%5Fterm=.4aad1f87d1e8). Comey’s motivations are foggy, and he was surely in a tough spot: pause the Weiner investigation or not raise the Clinton issue and be accused later of lacking transparency, or send the letter to Congress and face accusations of meddling in an election. But there was an obvious solution to the quandary Comey found himself in: take the advice of the Attorney General and follow DOJ protocol. Instead, he added himself to the long list of men whose outsized egos and personal proclivities could very well keep a woman out of the White House. At least, unlike the others, he wasn’t guided by his penis. But that is the depth to which many of the men even tangentially related to this election have sunk, and how low they have set the bar. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Sure, we knew Clinton would face some sexism — comments about her hair and her clothes, suggestions she would be weaker on defense because she’s female, the ubiquitous characterization of her voice as “[shrill](http://time.com/4268325/history-calling-women-shrill/),” maybe even a calculated suggestion that she’s angry or unstable because it’s that time of the month. For all of that, feminists were ready, and indeed, we fired back quickly when male commentators demanded she smile more or complained that she sounded like their nagging wives. But many of us believed a woman running would mean a new focus on issues that matter to women and have been long neglected by a male-dominated political class — things like paid parental leave, expanded access to abortion and contraception, and affordable child care. Clinton, to her great credit, has detailed policy proposals on nearly every point on the feminist wish list, and she has tried mightily to keep the focus and the discussion on what she’s proposing to do as President. Americans keep getting distracted, though, by the many men waiving their proverbial, and sometimes actual, things in our faces. Gendered insults we were expecting. “Look, a penis!” we were not. In hindsight, maybe we should have seen these boneheads (and their boners) coming. It all feels very Freudian, but an emphasis on his own package is, of course, the last-ditch effort of the imperiled man seeking to assert his masculine strength. Men build towering shrines to their manhoods — the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower. Are we really so surprised that, faced with the first woman inches away from taking the seat of ultimate and until now male-only power, men like Trump would explicitly emphasize their own inches? (It’s fair, though, to be shocked that Clinton’s October surprise would come in the form of an actual penis, especially one attached to a third-rate disgraced Democrat.) The great irony of it all is that little else could make a better case for putting more women in positions of power — women can be as craven, evil, and corrupt as men, but rarely do they act so pathetically like adolescent boys, distracting from the real issues with lizard-brained sexual stupidity. Yet here we are, in an election of historic feminist significance, and we aren’t talking about the hard-earned power of a groundbreaking woman. Instead, the hard-ons of has-been men and the hard heads of quietly powerful ones might just screw Clinton’s shot at the White House. ## Transcript If 2016 was going to be a battle of the sexes, everyone thought Hillary Clinton would be the main combatant. But this year, Trump, not Clinton, has made this cycle the most gendered election in political history. These are just the greatest hits. After Megyn Kelly asked him this question at a primary debate, You call women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, And disgusting animals. You know you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever. He's called Hillary Clinton disgusting for taking a bathroom break. Sorry. [ LAUGH ] Donald Trump said the following about you. Quote look at that face. Would anyone vote for that? He slammed GOP primary opponent Carly Fiorina for her appearance. And he's accused Clinton of playing the woman card. She's constantly playing the woman card. It's the only way she may get elected. On the other hand Clinton is emphasizing the historic nature of her gender more than she did in 2008. She gave her first speech as a presumptive nominee to Planned Parenthood, where she said the word abortion, Legal abortions. 16 times. By contrast, Barack Obama almost never says that word. Women should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own health. She frequently refers to herself as a grandmother and in her first appearance at the DNC, she had this message for the next generation of female leaders. If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch Let me just say. I may become the first woman president but one of you is next. Still, Hillary Clinton is a presidential candidate who just happens to be a woman. Donald Trump is a man for whom the presidency is the ultimate validation of his masculinity. [ UNKNOWN ] And he referred to my hands. If they're small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee you. And his followers have taken their cues from the top. [ BLEEP ] Hillary. I still can't hear with this [ BLEEP ] in my ear. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. For other Trump supporters, this election is about jobs, trade, and the economy. I will be the greatest jobs president that god ever created. But those issues are linked to a massive social shift away from an economy Economy based on male breadwinners. I'll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico- When Trump talks about jobs, he's talking about a specific kind of job. The manufacturing and industrial jobs that once allowed men to support family on a single income. In other words, the jobs that made men feel like men. As those industries have declined in Last three decades, others have grown. And the fastest growing industries education and health care are dominated by women. So the November election has turned into a referendum on gender, but it was Trump who justified on the battlefield. Which means that this November, American voters will be sending a message about how men are allowed to behave and what women are allowed to achieve. [ MUSIC ] ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4551478/hillary-clinton-bad-men/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4551478/hillary-clinton-bad-men/"},"headline":"How Men Behaving Badly Have Held Hillary Clinton Back","datePublished":"2016-10-31T16:34:13.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:54:59.842Z","description":"Her own husband. Donald Trump. Anthony Weiner. 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