There’s much moaning about how the uncool uninteresting unrevolutionary candidate Clinton has only stodgy middle-aged (or even old!) women behind her. All the Cool Kids and men and thoughtful discussers of other people’s discussions prefer somebody else, anybody else. That is, Sanders. Some examples out of dozens: NYTimes, Salon, The Atlantic, LATimes, LATimes, LATimes. (The LATimes apparently really wants to be sure that none of those girl cooties stick to them.)

My mind reels at this stuff. I’m with Jill Filipovic. “Do ppl really not think that the first female pres would be a BIG DEAL?” And don’t try to tell me that it’s no different from first black or first Jew or first socialist or first candidate with curly hair. If they are male such people have been made leaders of countries dozens of times over. Women, on the other hand, not so much, and in the US of A, never. Never. N.E.V.E.R. Never.

Are so many people really that incapable of drawing the obvious conclusions from the obvious evidence? Somehow, I doubt it. That level of ignorance requires lots of work.

There’s a name for this situation:

1) We have a candidate with a list of accomplishments longer than a basketball player’s arms (both of them).

2) People say “Oh, that doesn’t count,” “Oh, those aren’t accomplishments,” “Oh, those aren’t her accomplishments.” ” She looks like somebody’s mom.” She is somebody’s mom. How uncool is that? Not like being a disheveled grandpa with big ideas.

Natasha Chart said it clearly. “This is a pressure that goes one way only. Men are cool, women aren’t — both are pushed to conform to stereotypical masculine norms. You know, if they want to be cool.”

The fact is, there is nothing Clinton can do that will be seen as right. She has boatloads of experience, so she’s part of the Establishment. If she had less experience, she’d be an airhead bimbo. If she’s ready for the cameras, she’s fake. If she has a hair out of place, she’s a wrinkled old fright. If she shows any military toughness, she’s a warmonger. If she didn’t, she’d be unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. If she makes money, she’s a shill. If she had no money, she’d be a loser. And on and on and on.

There’s a name for this, but nobody can say it out loud. It’s like that episode in Fawlty Towers where Basil Fawlty goosesteps around a party of Germans shouting “We won’t discuss the War!” Only in this case it’s a different war, which is ongoing and not funny yet. So it comes off more like pathetic climate change deniers sleepwalking their stupidity into disaster.

I saw a comment recently saying “When Hillary finds yet another way to lose,” and it went on from there. No, buster. When you’ve torn Hillary down enough to destroy her, you’ll land us all with the toxic two bit rabblerousers frontrunning on the other side. In a country with as much power as the USA, that will be bad.

Peter Daou said it best in an article on Hillary and the rage of straight white males.

You can’t stop a wild mob that wants to “burn the witch,” a mob that wants to dehumanize and degrade a woman, that wants to strip her of her dignity. It’s an impulse as old as humanity.

And it’s a monstrous thing to behold.

We will see if the inexorable transformation of the American populace will endure a dangerous setback with a President Trump or Cruz. Democrats must do everything in their power to prevent that outcome.

In that grave context, demolishing the public image of a leading Democratic candidate is unimaginably reckless.

But what about all this we hear how she has no support among the young, among young women? Surely, young women haven’t absorbed any messages about who’s cool and who’s old school? If they don’t support her it can’t be the bigotry-which-must-not-be-named. At least the media seem to desperately hope so.

So, what does explain the absence of the young? There certainly is a problem, but it’s not coming from Hillary. It’s coming from having fifty, sixty, seventy years of your life yet to live, from just starting out, from being incapable of seeing what you’re in for without being crushed. It’s a survival instinct. At the age of twenty five you may not yet have been kicked all the way to hell and back.

You’ve felt the crushing weight of sexism and misogyny, that starts before you can talk. You’ve dealt with the boys bullying, and the fathers putting a premium on pretty, and the street harassment, and all the instructions about how not to get raped even though you’re not at all in any way actually the perp, and you know the world isn’t for you and you better be invisible and hope some guy gives you shelter from the storm.

All that is already more than any human being can stand. Very few can face it squarely at any age. Most people cringe away from it, try to tell themselves that what it obviously means is not what it means. It’s just an accident. It’s isolated. It’s nothing to do with you.

But if you’re going to get excited about a female candidate for President, you have to acknowledge that there really have not been very many. You have to notice that there have been 44 of these people and not a single woman. That’s kind of high for just an accidental concatenation of circumstances. You’ll have to notice that the deck is stacked against you. What you’ve dealt with so far, all the stuff that’s so bad you can’t even look at it, is just the beginning. You’ll have to see that it doesn’t get better. It gets worse.

And people wonder why young women can’t bring themselves to celebrate Hillary Clinton.

But none of this can be mentioned. Instead let’s try to pretend that the pain of sexism, the damage it does to women, the amputations of humanity it causes in men, the crushed children, never have to be faced. We’re talking about people’s loves and families here. This hits everybody right in the heart. Unlike racism or homophobia or antisemitism, you can’t get some relief by living among your own kind. Nobody wants to do open heart surgery on their souls. Especially since there’s no anesthetic for it.

If you can’t even speak the name of the real problem, you’re reduced to coming up with cockamamie explanations such as that Clinton has some wrinkles, or she’s too reasonable, or too practical, or not exciting, or has too many pantsuits.

The problem isn’t pantsuits. The problem is the unbearable unmentionable burden which must be carried with an effortless smile. Once you see it, there’s no way to un-see it. Which is why it’s really really really important to look the other way.

The strange thing isn’t that young women are in denial. The strange thing is the unimaginably reckless refusal to face their own prejudices among all the people and pundits and thinkers and journalists and writers who are old enough to know better.