Why Hillary’s Emails Mattered, but Bush’s Didn’t (And Neither Will Trump’s)

You may have heard by now, but high-ranking aides in the Trump White House are using their RNC email accounts. This may have you wondering: isn’t this exactly what everyone wanted to lock Hillary up over? I assume you may be wondering that, because that’s what’s been all over my newsfeed recently. What you may or may not be aware of, however, is that aides and Cabinet officials, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, did the same thing during the Bush administration. As did other Cabinet officials under Obama.

So why, then,did Hillary’s matter so much when others’ didn’t?
Spoiler alert: It’s sexism.

More importantly, it’s the pervasive idea that women are inherently duplicitous, untrustworthy, or unreliable when it comes to the truth. Whether this trend started with the story of Eve is a question for Biblical scholars to think about – but it certainly is advanced by that story. Eve tricks Adam into eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and thus expels them from Eden, damning the human race for all eternity.

In her essay, “Cassandra Among the Creeps” (also included in her book Men Explain Things to Me), Rebecca Solnit uses the story of Cassandra to talk about the pervasive belief that women lie and men are hurt by it. Cassandra, a character in the Iliad who plays a part in the Trojan War, is cursed by Poseidon to see the future – but have no one around her believe her premonitions. Thus, when she sees visions of Troy burning, people assume she is mad or lying. From Cassandra, she moves to the (routinely discredited) claim that rape victims often lie about their assaults (taking a brief side-trek into Freud, but we’ll forgive that).

So what does Cassandra have to do with Hillary’s emails? Well, if Solnit’s theory about the myth of the duplicitous woman is to be believed – and I’m inclined to believe it – then there is far more to fear from a woman who is hiding something than there is when a man does the same thing. We can arguably believe that a successful man will know how best to delineate official and unofficial communications when conducting some official business on another email address (and deleting some, or yknow, 22 million, of those emails). But we’re conditioned to believe that successful women must have somehow broken the rules to get to where they are. That something in the 30,000 missing emails must implicate her for the shady dealings she had to undertake to get to where she’s at. Because somehow we can simultaneously believe that women are already equal while assuming that most successful women have slept or schemed their way to the top.