(London Guardian) -- Blues legend BB King once sang, “Never trust a woman, until she’s dead and buried”. Sadly, it’s a sentiment that sounds just at home in our current political discourse as it does an old song: while this week’s NBC/WSJ poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump in general support, voters consider Trump more “honest and straightforward” than Clinton by ten points.
Let’s just take a moment to consider this. A candidate whose first campaign ad was judged by one site to contain one lie every four seconds and who, according to Huffington Post, told over 70 lies in just one televised town hall; a man who one philosopher argues has “perfected the outrageous untruth as a campaign tool,” is considered more honest than his opponent.
This isn’t a new problem for Clinton – a CNN poll from July found that only 30% of people surveyed found Clinton trustworthy, while 43% thought Trump was. It’s also not a new issue for American women.
Advertisement - story continues below
The notion that women are fundamentally untrustworthy snakes through almost every area of our lives. Managers distrust women who ask for flextime; women who show anger are less trusted than their male counterparts; and people think the more makeup a woman wears, the less trustworthy she is. (In fact, there is a trove of “don’t trust women” memes inspired by before and after pictures of women with makeup.)
