Compare Clinton 42 with Clinton maybe-44. While Hillary’s libido-oozing husband could rile voters with a soulful sax session on The Tonight Show—and while male politicians as a rule, from TR to JFK to W, have gained capital from sheer virility—she gets consternation for a V-neck. Givhan doesn’t just describe that double standard; she endorses it. Blatantly. And that’s what seems to have struck the biggest nerve here: the sense that Givhan’s article is somehow a betrayal of the women’s movement itself, that the considerable progress that’s been made—enough to get Clinton where she is right now, leading the pack for the Democratic presidential nomination—is disappearing in the dip of a neckline. If Hillary is playing for the boys’ team, then Givhan’s article is a turnover at the one-yard line. The sheer frustration in much of the coverage is nearly palpable. “Message to women,” writes The Nation’s Katha Pollitt. “You can’t win. You can’t win. You can’t win.”

Givhan has neatly articulated the basic Catch-22 of Clinton’s candidacy: that her political legitimacy is somehow inversely proportional to her sexuality. That the more she puts her femininity on display, the less presidential she seems. It’s not simply a matter of the “sex sells” maxim not applying to Clinton; it’s a matter of gender politics seeping into conventional politics—and of paradigms shifting, forcibly, before our eyes. Clinton, in short, is calling our bluff. And Givhan is revealing our hand: in a society still deciding where to draw the line between “attractive” and “slutty,” assertiveness and bitchiness, and all the other familiar dichotomies of attempted egalitarianism, a woman asking to be our leader still, to some extent, confounds us. In the many calculations of the campaign trail, the sexual appeal-equals-political appeal equation is one that simply won’t work for the first woman with a serious shot at the Oval Office. Not only does sex not sell for Clinton; it could end up selling her out.

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