As she circles the globe in coming years, making the case for women’s empowerment, starting with their basic right to be taken seriously, Clinton really has her work cut out for her. And it isn’t just because the situation of women around the world is so dire, and the ocean of problems confronting them — maternal mortality, sex trafficking, domestic abuse, malnourishment, lack of education, lack of adequate medical care, just for starters — is so wide and so deep. And it isn’t just that her historic mandate — to equally empower the other half of the world’s population, to chip away at the forces “devaluing women,” in the words of Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s new ambassador at large for global women’s issues — is so huge and vague and seemingly overwhelming. It’s also because the tide of trivialization that washes over all things “Hillary” is just so powerful. That tide threatens to drown out anything of substance Clinton might attempt for a population whose problems have long been obscured in the androcentric world of diplomacy. And that’s a huge pity.

Apparently, journalists are only capable of going after low-hanging fruit. Never mind the types of hard-hitting journalism, done by others, that have shown that the history of the violence in the Congo is a complicated disaster of smuggled minerals to make cell-phones, which help to finance the war; the continued fighting of the Rwandan civil war; the vacuum of power at the top in the Congo, which makes it a dysfunctional state; and the sheer barbarism of what is happening in central Africa: the rapes, the murders, the torture, the wholescale destruction of a culture. 

No. It's so much more amusing to make fun of Hillary. 

Great. The press corps covering Clinton are a bunch of 13-year olds. 

Warner is angry, and I'm right there with her. 

This could be a moment for America to redeem itself as far as the world’s women are concerned. Our recent track record, after all, is pretty dim. The Bush administration sent anti-feminists to Iraq to train that country’s women in participatory democracy. We pulled our financing from the United Nations Population Fund and imposed a global gag rule barring women’s health organizations that merely talked about abortion from receiving U.S. funds. We never ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a pretty base-level human rights treaty, because of worries by black helicopter types that American sovereignty would be compromised. Our lack of paid maternity leave made us something of a world joke.

We are a world joke when it comes to the way we lecture the rest of the world about the way it treats women, and then we deny aid funds to anyone who mentions abortion as a possible solution to a problem pregnancy. Because, you know, women just don't know what's good for them.

And yet, even to talk about these things in this country gets them labeled as "women's issues." We are told to shut up about the small things. President Obama's got bigger things to worry about. Yes, the economy affects men and women; yes, health care affects men and women (and especially women, since as far as I know, we aren't trying to outlaw any medical procedures performed upon men.)

“We have our own work to do at home,” Verveer told me. “We trivialize the importance too often of these issues: the ‘women’s issue’ — you put it in quotes, that little category over there, the box you check. What we have to do is realize these are the issues; if we want societies to prosper and if we want our own security, we have to raise the status of women.”

Women’s issues are being framed by this administration in terms of realpolitik: U.S. security depends on women’s empowerment. Global economic growth depends on women’s participation.

Just so there is no misunderstanding about my motives here, I have been writing about the women of the DRC for a while now, and I do not have any intention of stopping soon.