Perhaps you ought to ask yourself honestly why Hillary Clinton's competitive drive and desire scares you. Because from my perspective, you certainly don't appear to be expressing any similar concerns about Bernie Sanders being "too ambitious," or the other men in the race "[wanting] it too much."

(And please don't respond with the excuse that you supported Jill Stein in 2012, because Ms. Stein was a marginal Green Party candidate who therefore constituted no actual threat to gain the presidency.)

I've known more than a few middle-aged and older progressive men for whom the very real prospect of a female president frankly gives them the willies. They've long supported the idea of gender equality in the abstract, yet when it's actually put to the test, it's pretty apparent that they still subscribe to the increasingly obsolescent notion of traditional gender roles.

Ergo, the prospect of women competing with men (and perhaps winning) somehow becomes a threat to their own manhood, and is thus frightening and even repellant. They won't admit it, but it's there.

I've even seen this latent sexism play out at high school volleyball matches, while listening to some of the fathers of the male student-athletes who are presently coached by my daughter. They're talking to one another, and they most always qualify what they're about to broach by reiterating their support for women's equality per se. It's clear that they can't quite wrap their minds around the idea that women can or should coach boys and men in sports -- even though they quite obviously have no problem with men coaching women and girls.

I keep my mouth shut, because I don't want to create issues for my daughter. But it makes me angry that even today, women still have to endure these insidious double standards, by which they're ostensibly the equal of us men, but yet they're discouraged by us from aspiring to and assuming so-called traditional male roles in our society, because they're -- well, you know, women.

There are still an awful lot of men -- and more than a few women, too, for that matter -- who really need to get over themselves, and finally realize that (a) what they were taught about traditional gender roles while growing up is of no real value in our 21st century society; and (b) our traditional notions of male chivalry were never really anything more than polite excuses to keep women "in their place."