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At this point in my life, I feel like I could set out a tent offering advice that seems obvious but clearly is not: Don't go bowling with a chimpanzee. Don't let grade-schoolers learn to drive by watching YouTube. Don't tell women to be quiet. You might bend the first bit of advice, if you find the right chimpanzee, but really, don't tell women to be quiet. It is an action that will rebound with great force.

However, it is a difficult lesson to learn. This week, I watched as Hillary Clinton tried to explain what had gone wrong during the historically messed-up presidential election campaign of 2016. She has not given many interviews since her defeat in November, but spoke to CNN's Christiane Amanpour at the Women for Women International conference about the many factors that led to her loss. Asked by Ms. Amanpour if she took personal responsibility for the defeat, Ms. Clinton said: "I take absolute personal responsibility. I was the candidate. I was the person who was on the ballot. I am very aware of, you know, the challenges, the problems, the shortfalls that we had."

Ms. Clinton certainly is aware of the picture painted of her campaign as a dysfunctional nightmare in the new book Shattered, written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes – although most losing campaigns probably look like disasters in the rear-view mirror driving away from the wreckage. The flaws in her campaign are absolutely worth discussing, and remembering for the future.

However, in her talk with Ms. Amanpour, she also had the temerity to suggest other factors might have had something to do with her defeat: Like the presence of an army of Russian cyber-goblins determined to affect the outcome of the election. Or rampant sexism. Or FBI director James Comey's letter of Oct. 28, which revealed to the world that the FBI was continuing its investigation into Ms. Clinton's e-mails – an investigation that went nowhere, though that announcement came too late to help her campaign.

This is what led to a barrage of criticism: Why was Ms. Clinton blaming others? (She clearly blamed herself, as well as the political vagaries she couldn't control.) Why wouldn't she just shut up? Why couldn't she just accept the results of an election in which a hostile foreign power had dipped its fingers? Why did she have to keep dwelling on misogyny? Or, as one Washington Post writer coyly put it, "the m-word."

"I don't know why she needs to be coming back," said Bill Maher. "She had her turn and it didn't work out." A columnist in the New York Daily News offered a delicate suggestion straight out of Miss Manners: "Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f--- up and go away already." Social media commenters echoed this theme, with less subtlety. Why couldn't she just disappear into that forest near her house and never return, like a naughty girl from a cautionary fairy tale?

That's a good idea, right? Let's not talk at all about the role that gender, voter suppression, or Russian interference played in the election. Let's not talk about what actress Zoe Saldana calls "the pink elephant in the room." That's sexism, for those of you who can't see pink elephants.

Ms. Clinton is hardly the first female politician to be shushed, metaphorically. The British Labour MP Jess Phillips literally gets shushed by male colleagues when she's speaking in Parliament. Ms. Phillips wrote about this, as well as her battle against online harassment, in her recent memoir, Everywoman: "Women are shutting up. Not because they are scared, not because they believe the threats, but because it is so tiring that whenever you speak, you face hatred due to the makeup of your chromosomes or your political opinions."

As Manitoba MLA Nahanni Fontaine said in an interview with CBC's The Current earlier this year, speaking about the sexist abuse she's received, the consequences are chilling: "It's a conscious attempt to silence and regulate what women can say and what women can do as female politicians." It's not just politicians, either. During the election campaign, some female journalists reported being viciously criticized when they reported on Ms. Clinton's campaign, and supporters were heaped with abuse by trolls, many of whom magically disappeared after the election – almost as if they'd been called home by their dark lord.

The good news is that shushing women, as I mentioned at the outset, has an equal and opposite effect: a big, fat, sustained raspberry. Hillary Clinton is not going anywhere, and for those who supported her, and were brave enough to say so publicly, this is a cause for celebration. She's starting a new political group to oppose Donald Trump's policies, and she's writing a memoir about the campaign.

She will almost certainly be criticized as a cash-hungry monster by people who do not realize that writing books is precisely the wrong way to get rich (unless you're J.K. Rowling). Those complaints are to be expected. The more important lesson is for the women who come after: Tell your story, or someone will tell it for you.

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