Male politicians are behaving badly, yet it’s a woman who’s being skewered.

Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior senator from New York, is a longtime advocate for victims of sexual harassment and assault, releasing annual reports on sexual assault in the military to push for policy change and sponsoring a bill to aid sexual assault survivors on college campuses. It’s no surprise, then, that she’s taken the lead on criticizing her colleagues (and potential colleagues) who face harassment or assault charges. She wrote on Twitter that “There’s no question that Roy Moore is completely unfit to serve in the Senate” and encouraged her followers to donate to his opponent. She has pointed a finger at the president, too, noting that “President Trump has admitted on tape to how he treats women,” and hammered Republicans for their silence on sexual mistreatment of women. “[Rep. Blake] Farenthold should step aside, Moore should never set foot in the Senate, and President Trump should be held accountable,” she tweeted. (Farenthold was accused of gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and creating a hostile work environment in a 2014 lawsuit. He settled the case but denied the accusations. Moore has been accused by nine women of sexual misconduct and Trump has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual misconduct. Both men also deny the allegations.)

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But Gillibrand has also held the men in her own party accountable, last week joining a group of other Democratic women to call on Sen. Al Franken to resign after radio news anchor Leeann Tweeden shared a photo of him appearing to grope her while she slept, and other women accused him of sexual misconduct. And when an interviewer for the New York Times asked her if she believed Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency 20 years ago after his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, then a White House intern, became public – this was after several women had also made sexual harassment and assault allegations about President Clinton – Gillibrand “took a long pause and said, ‘Yes, I think that is the appropriate response.’”

Cue the skewering.

Gillibrand now stands accused of being craven, disloyal, and cynically using this moment to build her brand and put herself in the national spotlight. Maybe she is – welcome to being a politician. Or maybe she’s just doing her job, but being pilloried for it because she’s widely believed to be considering a run against Donald Trump in 2020 – and as we learned in 2016, Americans remain remarkably hostile to women seeking power.

While Democratic strategists complained that Gillibrand’s remark about Clinton “reeks” of “political opportunism,” it’s easy to forget that Hillary Clinton was accused of the same thing for staying with her husband after the Lewinsky affair. And while the story is being framed as Gillibrand going after President Clinton, that’s not what happened. Gillibrand didn’t put out a statement or seek to attack President Clinton; she was asked the question directly during a podcast interview and responded in the moment (and clearly with some hesitation). She tried to pivot to President Trump, saying that the landscape of sexual harassment and assault claims is different now than it was when Clinton was president, and “I think in light of this conversation, we should have a very different conversation about President Trump, and a very different conversation about allegations against him.” Her spokesperson clarified the comments afterward, saying that Gillibrand meant that the current era is a different one than the ‘90s, and that President Clinton would be treated differently now. And really, what else could she have said and not been branded a hypocrite?

So instead, she’s “the most devious and cunning politician in America today,” according to one Daily Beast columnist (and she didn’t escape the hypocrite charge either). It’s not just Clinton loyalists who are mad at her; far-right conservatives and Franken fans alike are, too, suggesting she is leading a "witch hunt" and a “lynch mob” to take down a senator without due process.

There are good questions to debate here – including whether Franken should have resigned, or whether the Democratic Party should have instead pushed for a full ethics investigation and gone from there. I waver between the two camps. But in either case, it doesn't make a ton of sense to take down a solid progressive female senator over her demands that sexual misconduct have real consequences, nor is it helpful or healthy for progressives to demand loyalty trump all else.

Yes, Gillibrand benefited from the Clintons' support over the years, and she supported Hillary Clinton's presidential run. But she also has a responsibility to her constituents, herself, and her party to respond honestly to questions from the press, and to be as consistent as possible in her positions. One of those positions is that sexual harassment, assault, and misconduct should have consequences – even for the powerful, and even for her friends.

Gillibrand, like Clinton before her, faces a tough road. Taking aggressive positions and putting oneself in the spotlight may be normal and admirable for male politicians, but in women it's often seen as attention-seeking and power-grabbing – we like our women quiet and working hard behind the scenes. At the same time, women face expectations that we will be more moral and high-minded than our male counterparts. That a male politician might do something for political gain is to be expected; if a female politician appears to be making a carefully calculated decision, taking her political ambitions into account, she's craven and devious.

We've seen this before, and not just with Hillary Clinton and now Gillibrand. Elizabeth Warren was a nearly universally loved progressive hero until it appeared she might have greater ambitions; then she faced backlash from certain segments of the left (especially for supporting Hillary Clinton's campaign). Kamala Harris has also been on the receiving end of sustained attacks from the left and the right since it became clear she might be a promising presidential contender. And there's a reason this latest ire is directed at Gillibrand and not the many other Senate women and men who also said Franken should resign – it's because Gillibrand took on a leadership role, and might run for president. And despite her solid progressive credentials, there are a lot of people on the left who just can't stand her. There's always a reason, of course. Sometimes it's that she was too soft on guns when she represented a more conservative district in upstate New York (though "soft on guns" didn't hurt Bernie Sanders with his base), or it's that she's a "turncoat" on guns, unlike Sanders, "a paragon of political consistency." And often it's just that she's allegedly craven or power-hungry or ambitious or maybe just unpleasant – perceptions of her character and motivations that are never disqualifying for men. Just like Clinton before her, Gillibrand is branded a grown-up Tracy Flick, a reference to Reese Witherspoon's power-hungry high-school-presidential candidate in the film Election.

Gillibrand may indeed have taken the wrong course of action here in calling for Franken to resign; there's plenty to discuss about what we should do about years or even decades-old accusations, and what behavior is serious enough to merit the resignation of a Senate seat. But the tarring of her has taken on a notably gendered tone, and is both a depressing kind of 2016 deja vu and a concerning precursor to what women vying for the presidency might still face in 2020.

Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. Follow her on Twitter.

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Jill Filipovic
senior political writer

Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com. She is the author of OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind and The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. A weekly CNN columnist and a contributing writer for the New York Times, she is also a lawyer.