Does anyone remember MLK or other great reformers and leaders for the unfairly disenfranchised weeping and sobbing at an electoral loss? Or did they roll up their sleeves and buckle down to keep going? I've already commented on the irony of feminist complaints about the mythical wage gap and pink tax only serving to advance the idea that women are irresponsible and inept at important lifeskills, but now people are whining and moaning about what do they tell their daughters. They can tell their daughters that their gender has to do better than a serial liar, whose name is a byword for overweening ambition, arrogance and being out-of-touch. They can tell daughters that they have the first president in history to have a female campaign manager! Up until now, only losers hired women. According to all the sad mommies out there, no other campaign manager ever did more with less than Kellyanne Conway. They can tell their daughters "Don't marry a pig and don't tolerate you husband acting like a pig, because otherwise, people won't mind voting for a pig against you."

A long time ago, one of the greatest poets of the English language wrote a poem called "If." It was full of very good advice for life, but the final line was "You'll be a man, my son." For some reason, this sexist, patriarchal monster preferred to address poems to his actual son, rather than imaginary daughters, and didn't seem to have any interest in attempting to appropriate the female experience anyway, so some dippy broad had to write a bullshit facsimile of the poem called "If: A poem for young women." Despite its frequent appearance on Hallmark cards, it has somehow failed to enter the canon of great poetry, probably because it uses the word "resources." I can't think of any great poems which use the words or phrases like "enrich", "introspection", "building bridges", "temper facts with understanding", or "prejudice (twice)".

The real "If" says things like, "If you can see the things you've given your life to broken, and stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools" or "If you can...lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss" asserting that these qualities, among others, are proofs of manhood. That virtue is the goal, rather than a means to a goal, and that success is not as important as how you carry yourself through success and failure. Other things Clinton & her weeping congregation might have taken notice of in that poem include "nor lose the common touch", "being hated but don't give way to hating/Or being lied about, don't deal in lies". Stuff like that.

Meanwhile, "If for insecure feminists young women", while sensibly admonishing one to "be courageous when defeated", promises as its finale not "you'll be a woman, my daughter" (probably because daughter is too hard to rhyme for so unoriginal a poet), but "You'll be successful...and those around/Will be the richer for your womanhood." Pretty much the opposite, in fact. Since when has virtue ever been promised as a path to success, by any greater thinkers or philosophers than a kindergarten teacher? Rudyard Kipling promised that dealing with all the world throws at you, and treating other people well was the mark of a real man. Barbara Burrow promises that if you serve all sorts of contradictory impulses, you'll eventually win. Ironically, one of her prescriptions for success is "work at building bridges and not walls". I'm not saying, of course, that Hillary Clinton and the rest of the grieving womynhood ever read this poem, but it pretty well illustrates the smug, self-congratulatory mindset their cause has been cultivating for generations now, ever since the first woman reached the pinnacle of the US government, and served as Secretary of Labor...during the worst period of unemployment in the history of this country. And Frances Perkins was still worth a dozen Rodham Clintons.

Speaking of Clintons, familiarity with Kipling's body of work reveals some rather humorous lines, like "The female of the Species is more deadly than the male" or "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke".