Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton listens to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis on Sunday. (John Locher/Associated Press) Every week, I answer a question from the Monday Act Four chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Oct. 10 chat here, and submit questions for the Oct. 17 chat here. This week, a reader tries to figure out what’s going on with the national reaction to Hillary Clinton. I recently saw a rerun of “Family Guy” that first aired in 2000, and Brian says while reading a newspaper “I like Hilary Clinton, I don’t care what anyone says.” This was 16 years ago, and nine years before becoming secretary of state. But I remember she was hated the day Bill was first inaugurated and she decided to [do] real work, not just ribbon-cutting ceremonies. I believe they wrongly took this as an insult to the great first ladies who preceded her. I think they’ve hated her since, and come up with any reason they can to criticize her. Countless words have been written attempting to diagnose what’s behind the powerful national reaction to the former first lady and secretary of state; I’ve written quite a few of them myself. One piece that I find particularly worth revisiting is Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Hating Hillary,” which was published in 1996. (This and Gates’s account of the O.J. Simpson trial and the Million Man March are both astonishingly good; I wish he were still writing regularly for the New Yorker.) It’s a long and not entirely satisfying investigation, in part because there isn’t really a satisfying answer for why people feel the way they do about Clinton: It’s a weird and toxic combination of changing gender roles, shifting Washington norms and actual decisions Clinton herself has made along the way. Truly, maybe it was inevitable. I think people who are “firsts” tend to become tools by which the rest of us work out our feelings about change. And when it comes to gender, we’ve been taking inconsistent steps forward and back for essentially the entire time Clinton has been on the national stage. We’ve made big strides on the ways we talk about rape and sexual harassment — for all I was horrified by the “Access Hollywood” video of Donald Trump, I was heartened by the essentially universal recognition that what Trump was describing was sexual assault. But we’ve also looped around again and again on questions such as whether there’s something essentially female about women’s brains, whether women have different leadership styles and the meaning of beauty culture. It’s not merely that Clinton is still in the public eye. It’s that we haven’t resolved the questions that we use women like her to discuss. | 