After Hillary Clinton's appearance at the Commander-in-Chief Forum on Wednesday night, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted that the former secretary of state "was angry [and] defensive the entire time — no smile and uncomfortable."
In addition to being a criticism far too often leveled at women, Priebus' comment that Clinton lacked a smile summed up the entire perception of her as cold, robotic, and removed — a perception Clinton says she developed for the sake of survival. In a moving testimony she relayed to Humans of New York in a post published Thursday, Clinton recounted her experience taking a Harvard law school admissions test with a friend, when the pair were set upon by male harassers: "I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions ... And that's a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don't want to seem 'walled off' […] But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can't blame people for thinking that."
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