A pundit once quipped that the problem with Hillary Clinton is that she reminds everyone of their first wife. It's not much of a joke, but in the last decade or so, it's become an old saw, a way to quantify the aversion some feel to Clinton, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state who is now the Democratic nominee for president and the first female major party candidate in U.S. history: A worn-out nag, overdue for replacement.

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But get past the gross condescension, and what strikes me is the speaker's casual confidence that listeners — everyone — would get it. Who has first wives? Men, obviously. And the speaker's assumption is that it is men whose opinions matter? Well, that's par for the course.

In an election year that's provided no shortage of remarkable events, this is, perhaps, the most remarkable thing about Clinton's candidacy: Someone more likely to be a first wife than to have a first wife is competing for the presidency. And in doing so, she's challenging longstanding assumptions about whose priorities and whose opinions are important.

About who gets to tell our stories.

Into the wild zone

It's hard to say that pundit was wrong when he assumed that a male audience would define Clinton's persona. Because men, basically, are in charge: Dominant in the U.S. Congress, the judiciary, state and local government, big business, and in control of the American presidency for 240 years and counting.

And that's small potatoes when you consider that for thousands of years, from cave paintings to big-budget movies, our understanding of the human experience has been defined by men's experience.

That's a phenomenon so marked that in 1981, feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter dubbed the broad, untold realm of women's stories "the wild zone," a term borrowed from an anthropological model used to explain the cultural dynamic between what researchers called "dominant groups" and "muted groups." For most of human history, the dominant group has been heterosexual and male; in the West, it's been white, heterosexual and male. A muted group's experiences can overlap, but also remain separate from, a dominant group, Showalter wrote, with a distinct, broad realm of experience that isn't represented in the dominant culture, while the reverse is unlikely to be true. Because the dominant group's understanding of itself forms the cultural narrative, its experiences are accessible to all.

Clinton threatens that order, not just in her policy positions, but in her person, in her story. To see a woman in the White House requires Americans to change our default understanding of the human experience — to stretch that understanding further than it has ever gone.

We're heading, folks, into the wild zone.

But not fast enough

In the last century, once-muted groups have started to tell their stories. But if you doubt that our cultural narrative is still largely written by men, take a look at the box office.

Variety, a film industry trade publication, found a spike in women's roles in 2015, citing research by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University: That year, women had 22% of lead roles in the top 110 grossing films, were 34% of major characters and 33% of all speaking characters. But, the magazine noted: "Many top-grossing films were awash in gender stereotypes. Moviegoers were more likely to know what male characters did for a living than female characters and were more likely to be told a female character’s marital status. A larger portion of men (64% to 44%) were depicted in a work setting than women; 78% of male characters had identifiable jobs compared to 61% of females."

Despite an increase in female roles, women are still, by and large, bit players, adjuncts to men's stories. Movies starring women are likely to be labeled "chick flicks," relegated to a female audience. Movies starring men, of course, are for everyone.

And when women are cast in roles traditionally held by men, or made central to male-identified franchises — this year's all-female-lead "Ghostbusters" remake, for example, or last year's "Mad Max: Fury Road," in which actress Charlize Theron and not the titular Mad Max dominated the action — there'soutcry aplenty.

None of this would be news to Hillary Clinton.

Except for ... 

Which brings us to the electorate.

Woman have tended to vote for Democrats since 1980, and have voted majority Democrat in every presidential election since 1992. Women vote more frequently than men — in 2012, 63.7% of women turned out to vote, compared to just 59.8% of men. Clinton stands to win more female voters than any presidential candidate in American electoral history.

But candidates, overwhelmingly, are male. And despite this shift — more women vote more often than men — campaigns, by and large, still behave as though male approbation is what matters.

Clinton can change that.

She's qualified for the job, even most of her credible critics admit. But where she struggles, conventional wisdom offers, is relatability. Likability. People don't connect with Clinton.

There are reasons to scrutinize her record that have nothing to do with gender: Clinton's long life in public service has left her laden with baggage — dating from her days as the first lady of Arkansas, dogged by a real estate scandal. Her husband’s infidelities, before and during the Clinton years in the White House, are legendary — former President Bill Clinton was impeached on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice over trying to cover up an affair, but was ultimately acquitted. Her term as New York's senator didn't spur much controversy, but as U.S. secretary of state, Clinton's decisions have provided fodder for copious critique. Those who dislike her blame her for the deaths of four Americans after a 2012 terror attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi; her decision to use a private e-mail server maintained at her residence for government business was, an FBI investigation found, extremely careless though not criminal.

Clinton polls well with older women, but young women? Not as well, so far. And when she's looking for work — as she is now — her unfavorable ratings are high, in sharp contrast to how she's viewed when she's on the job. As secretary of state, Clinton had the highest approval ratings of any administration official at the end of President Barack Obama's first term, including Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Politifact, the award-winning, nonpartisan fact-checker, found that Clinton is more truthful than other presidential candidates.

In the realm of ephemeral traits such as likability, there is no objective truth. And that's why stories, and who's telling them, matter.

What would a campaign from the wild zone look like? Bill Clinton offered a glimpse last Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention with an anecdote from 1980, when Hillary Clinton was pregnant with Chelsea Clinton, the couple's only child: Then governor of Arkansas, he'd just returned home from the National Governors' Convention when Hillary's water broke. Off they went to the hospital, and Chelsea was born.

It was a unique moment in American history. Most presidents have had children. But none have given birth. It was a simple, and breathtaking, change in perspective.

Clinton herself has indicated she's ready to engage the wild zone, with a nearly unprecedented plan to cap the cost of American day care at 10% of household income. The last time the federal government contemplated offering subsidies for child care was in 1971, when a bill passed both houses of the U.S. Congress to be vetoed by then-President Richard Nixon. Subsidizing child care, Nixon said, threatened the American family and social structure.

And this is where it gets tricky.

The hero in somebody else's story

Clinton's candidacy offers a chance for women's shared experience to become part of our cultural and national story in a way that no U.S. congressional race or U.S. Supreme Court appointment ever could. And her success may be defined by the outsize presence of women in the American electorate. But — because men still, by and large, tell our stories, Clinton's campaign will require Americans to adjust their perspective, to believe that this time, a woman can be the main character.

The "Ghostbusters" remake, with its all-female cast, didn't do very well in its first week at the box office. "Mad Max," likewise, didn't bring in big bucks on opening weekend — but it was a critical darling, in part because of the way female characters revived the action movie's shopworn tropes. Because of stories that hadn't been told.

Think about it. 

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