Hey, Obama boys: Back off already!

Ashley Johnson, 21, is a senior at Princeton who is undecided but leaning toward Obama. She told of a male acquaintance who questioned whether her hypothetical vote for Clinton would be "just because you are a woman and you want a woman in the White House." Said Johnson, "That doesn't give me enough credit and underestimates how much thought I've put into this."

It also prompts the question of when it became so wrong-headed to care whether a history of white male presidential privilege might be interrupted.

"If I did end up voting for Hillary, would part of me be very proud that I was voting for the first female candidate?" said Johnson. "Yes." As for her peers, Johnson continued, "I have not talked with any straight men on campus who are voting for Hillary. And a lot of the females I know are supporting Obama. I don't know if that's because they actually do support him, or if it's because they don't want to be attacked because they're female and they're leaning toward Hillary."

Eva Gruenberg, a 21-year-old senior history and political science major at the University of Pittsburgh, who is also leaning toward Obama, reported something similar on her campus, warming up for the April 22 Pennsylvania primary. She said that her fellow students are "more subtle" about their Clinton support. "I don't want to say 'quiet' about it," Gruenberg said. "I feel like the kids who are for Obama are much more into marketing and bragging about it. Hillary people are not so much into advertising it yet."

Perhaps the hesitation to throw a Hillary placard in your window is related to the fear that doing so will make you –- like Clinton herself –- a regular laughingstock.

Mia Bruch described a recent trip to Ricky's, a cosmetics shop in New York City. "The only political item was a huge stack of Hillary nutcrackers," she said. "Obviously, the play here is that she's a ball-buster. No one is making nutcracker icons of McCain or Obama." More important, no one would buy them. Ricky's cosmetic store is not selling Hillary nutcrackers for its health; it's selling them because there is a market. "People like making fun of Hillary Clinton," said Bruch simply.

"There have been nasty, dirty things said about Obama -– insinuations about his religion and coded references about his race," said Bruch. But she pointed out that to overtly mock Obama "is putting yourself at risk for being part of a long tradition of caricaturing black faces. It's a little easier to do that if you're caricaturing a woman."

Opening up the discussion of sexism inevitably leads to comparative observations about racism -- a tragic, reductive byproduct of two historical barriers having been broken in the same election year. Many young women expressed their annoyance that the competition conversation needs to take place at all. O'Brien explained that, at a certain point, she and her boyfriend, who is African-American, decided that the two experiences were simply not comparable in any useful way. Jessica Valenti lamented what she called "the Oppression Olympics," which she says make both sides look bad.

But the urge to make comparisons, and the speed with which they flame up when touched even gingerly -– consider Geraldine Ferraro's assertion that Obama was lucky to be a black man, Gloria Steinem's reference to blacks getting the vote before women, Jeremiah Wright's observation that Hillary "ain't never been called a 'nigger'" -– remind us that drives toward equality have often been pitted against each other and have also spelled the divisive end of social movements; a reluctance to make room for racial and sexual difference contributed to the unraveling of second-wave feminism.

But not before the feminist movement made tremendous strides. In today's United States, racism continues to have more damaging economic and social structural implications for African-Americans than sexism has for women. Especially white and well-educated women, who are catching up to their male counterparts, if not in terms of equal pay or domestic expectations or secure reproductive options, at least in their ability to pursue the education and vocation they desire. And that makes them a more threatening group to the population of white men who have enjoyed unchallenged power -- in the White House and other workplaces -- since the birth of the nation. Those who feel the army of tough ladies breathing down their necks, competing for jobs and salaries and refusing to drop out of the race, are the population of privileged white men from which the elite portion of the Democratic Party is built.

That does not mean that all privileged white male Democrats are sexist, anymore than it would be true to suggest that all working-class white Democrats (the segment of the party that is breaking for Clinton) are racist. But a lightly disguised uneasiness with female power, as well as the "we love women, just not that woman" rhetoric will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the reception of the feminist movement. It's the movement of which Clinton has become emblematic -– not because it was her bailiwick, but because she has been exactly the kind of woman that feminism made room for: ambitious, ball-busting, high-earning, untrained in the finer arts of hair care, and unwilling to play dumber (or nicer) than she is.

These women –- and the movement whence they sprang -– have never been the most popular girls in the Democratic Party, even if the party's male elders have grown up enough to know that they're not supposed to say so out loud anymore. At least not until they find themselves pinching Clinton's cheek like Chris Matthews, or accusing her of destroying the party by staying in a race in which she is still competitive. It's like how Democrats love women, just not those goddamned women with their single-issue reproductive rights obsession that sticks us with Lincoln Chafee and Joe Lieberman.

In this case, the frustration with the feminist old guard's reaction to Hillary Clinton is not unmerited. The exhortations from Robin Morgan have not exactly been lyrical, or tuned to ears of women younger than 50. Assertions from Obama-maniacs that a woman who votes for Hillary must be doing so only because she is a woman may be bad, but it's just as bad for older feminists to instruct women that they have some kind of ovarian, fallopian responsibility to do the same.

Rebecca Wiegand, a 24-year-old development assistant at a film company, and an Obama supporter from the beginning, said, "Those editorials by Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan I was appalled by, and I felt completely alienated from second-wave feminism."

But instead of spelling the end of the movement, as Michelle Goldberg suggested in a recent Guardian piece, this generational break may signal a healthier divide. Because while these young women may not be changing their votes, and may not be hewing to the words of Robin Morgan, they're also not -– as many of the elder handwringers fear -– tossing their feminism out with the bathwater. In fact, it's possible to envision a way in which, rather than simply sealing the demise of the second-wave, this election might give birth to a new generation of young feminists awakened by the harsh treatment of Hillary -– on their own terms and without the voices of Steinems and Morgans to overshadow or boss them.

"When the election started, I felt very postfeminist," said Wiegand. "I felt like, I'm a woman and I'd love to have a woman president, but I also have many other issues I care about and the Iraq war is a big one, and I'm not going to make my decision just because I'm a woman." But over the course of the campaign, Wiegand said, "there has been a lot of anger toward Hillary that's felt really intense and misogynistic. The gloating after Iowa was something to behold. And it's made me realize we are still dealing with the gender issue. I don't think we know what to make of women in power, or make of Hillary. I don't think the world is as postfeminist as I was feeling that it was."