Why do we shout?
We raise our voices when we feel that we aren’t being heard, when we’re angry, when we’re threatened, when we want others to threaten others, when we’re excited, when—
You get the point. There are so many reasons why we yell. At the same time, there is only one—passion.
When we are passionate about something, our decibels rise easily. And so, shouting, per se, is never good or bad. It’s what we yell about that matters. For example, there’s certainly a difference between barking bigotry and crying for tolerance.
You know who shouts a lot? Hillary Clinton. You know who else shouts a lot? Bernie Sanders. And Donald Trump. And Ted Cruz. And practically every politician who’s ever stood at a podium. They holler because they are passionate. Some are just zealous about all the wrong things.
Recently, a number of observers have commented that Clinton shouts a lot, that her voice is “harassing to the ear” or has a “decidedly grating pitch and punishing tone” or, as reporter Bob Woodward pointed out, “[There is] something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating.”
“It is 2016 and I cannot believe—cannot believe—we are having this conversation,” remarked Stephanie Schriock in an interview. Schriock, president of Emily’s List, a group that works to elect female candidates, is not alone in defending Clinton. The problem is—and if you have a certain set of chromosomes, I don’t have to tell you—for some people, anytime a woman speaks, she’s shouting.
Guess what? Sometimes she actually is shouting. And that’s OK. Female politicians can be just as passionate as their male counterparts. It’s too bad that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and an all-male panel recently opined about how Clinton needs to speak more softly, making it clear that their suggestions had nothing to do with gender.
Curiously, they didn’t offer recommendations to the other Presidential candidates.
