MAY I advance the notion...a woman may dislike a fellow woman and not be considered a traitor to her gender?

She's not my cup of tea
By Elinor Lipman | March 3, 2008

MAY I advance the notion that in the year 2008, a woman may dislike a fellow woman and not be considered a traitor to her gender?

First, I'm all set with role models: my doctor, my agent, my current and last six editors, my editor in chief, my publisher, my mayor (Claire Higgins, Northampton), the president of my college, my orthodontist, my state Senate president, and my speaker of the US House are all women. I'll add, because I can already sense the hackles rising, a couple of personal feminist touchstones: I sued a former employer 30 years ago on the grounds of equal pay for equal work, and won. I didn't take my husband's name when I married 32 years ago, and for months carried in my purse a copy of the law stating that I could use any name as long as it wasn't for the purpose of defrauding.

So here's what I'm leading up to: I love Barack Obama and I have a low threshold for Hillary Clinton. The same goes for my furiously e-mailing friends and four-fifths of my knitting group, most of us in the demographic alleged to be Clinton-prone.

Go ahead, ferocious readers: Insult my pals who are smart, witty, kind, intuitive women of substance, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and diehard Democrats. We feel no guilt and we don't apologize for our votes. We trust our taste in people; some of us make a living studying them toward a goal of putting them into books. Words and dialogue are our daily bread. Many decades of exposure to the human race give us a right to discriminate against a candidate who can't put a joke across, whose timing and ear are, well, not about to be studied at Comedy College.

Survival of the fittest, especially in junior high and high school, taught us that we liked some girls and we didn't like others. Because we played sports, we saw women as both teammates and adversaries. As charter subscribers to Ms. magazine, we feel equal to men in our hearts, minds, and bones. Plumbing does not ensure sisterly solidarity.

Questioning a woman's tone and delivery evokes charges of sexism, of biased preoccupations with niceness - as if no one ever complained about the Bob Dole snarl or the Dick Cheney sneer. How many times do we have to hear that when women get forceful, they are called shrill and angry, while bellicose males are lauded as strong and presidential? We get it. No one has questioned Senator Clinton's toughness, or her readiness to be commander in chief. I hope "hectoring" isn't a word that is more feminine than masculine, because I would like to employ it now.

My e-mailing friends took great and irretrievable offense when Senator Clinton rapped on our candidate's knuckles with "So shame on you, Barack Obama!" for campaign mailers criticizing her healthcare plan. Paired up with her Providence soliloquy ("The sky will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing. Then everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect!"), she crossed some line in our maternal hearts. "Hillary off the deep end?" two friends wrote in near-simultaneous e-mails. "Off her meds?" wrote another. I wondered if these double rhetorical whammies might be a paler version of Howard Dean's unintentional valedictory in Iowa in 2004.

Obama responded shortly thereafter. "There's nothing in that mailing that is inaccurate" or new, he said. Essentially the same charges had been out there for weeks. Clinton's anger, he suggested, might be "tactical. . . . The notion that somehow we're engaging in nefarious tactics I think is pretty hard to swallow."

This exchange, hers then his, reminded me of something I didn't immediately identify. Was I hearing players before a big game? No, that wasn't it; not enough trash-talking on Team Obama's part. And then it came to me: divorce, celebrity style. The calmer spouse, on the record, takes the high road, speaking in a more measured and sympathetic tone, mindful of the custody battle ahead and the judge who is listening: us.

"Tone" again, that word that carries the burden of female animus. Today I'm not talking about policy, experience, votes in any chamber. I'm not hearing the fine points of healthcare at this moment, but something narrower and closer to music, the felicitous qualities of grace, wit, and - oh, no, not that idiot's delight - sheer likability. Am I not allowed to gravitate toward that baseline human trait? That's how we live our lives, favoring the even-tempered over the snappish, the deft over the tone-deaf. Advantage, Senator Obama.

Elinor Lipman, a guest columnist, is the author of eight novels. Her most recent is "My Latest Grievance."