It does seem that the hunger to know what’s really going on with Hillary is on overdrive, much more so than it would be for a male political figure. Part of that is the ever-present sense of secrecy and privacy around her. On the one hand, it is frustrating to see her campaign create bigger problems for itself in the way it handles things (rather than the thing itself), but on the other hand, it is an understandable product of surviving the political limelight for over three decades. Still, I am most interested in how our hunger to know more is fed by the “she”-ness of it all. I wonder if we are driven particularly mad by female discretion — in fact, as a filmmaker, I know we are. See Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Lauren Bacall in Young Man With a Horn, Kim Novak in Vertigo, Ava Gardner in The Killers. An entire genre of film banked on the assumption that women hide things, and it leads to the downfall of men. As a result, we have inherited a belief that there is a hidden truth to be excavated from a woman, and we must do so to protect ourselves from her secrets.

Politics makes a sport out of humiliation. Put a woman at the center of that sport, and we are twice as likely to participate because of these associations we have with just the image of a woman. So it brings me back to my question: Can we look at and listen to a woman of authority at the same time? I think it will be hard to untangle everything we have been taught to feel about her. The only solution is to remap the image of a woman entirely, to create an entirely new set of associations with that image. The more women we see and hear in positions of power, authority, and leadership, the more we can collectively shift this iconography. It is a mountain of a task, but it is the only way to dismantle a history of images made by men looking at women. It is what wakes me up every morning, ready to fight the fight, a battle I am waging by simply being the one who is looking and hitting record.