On last night’s episode of Full Frontal, the reliably excellent Samantha Bee teamed up with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other female world leaders to find out if “it gets better” for potential future President Hillary Clinton.
“Why are men afraid of women? I think we’re seen in whatever previous relationship they have had, like the third-grade teacher that told Johnny to be nicer—or Donald,” Albright tells Bee. “When Mr. Trump talks about her in terms of her voice or her looks, I think he thinks he’s being subtle. I don’t think he’s being subtle.”
Bee then met with several women heads of state to find out whether they’ve dealt with similar shit; the only one who hadn’t was Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine, whose country is literally disappearing. In a familiar refrain, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet told Bee that male leaders can cry, but if women get emotional, “you’re hysterical”; Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg recalled that in the beginning of her term, “they would look at the most elderly guy in my entourage and address him as the Prime Minister.”
In the most visceral example, President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović of Croatia recalled that a newspaper printed shots from a porn film and claimed they were her “in action”; right now, when you google her name, pictures of Ice T’s wife Coco in a bikini appear.
“I’m not the president of Croatia,” Coco clarifies. “Honestly, I’m tired of having to defend her pro-Eurozone deficit reduction policies. I don’t have an opinion.”
Ah, misogyny, the cottage cheese of human impulses: it’s very gross, yet a shocking percentage of the population just doesn’t seem to care.
