According to a piece in the feminist blog Bustle, the #ZombieHillary hashtag is a “sexist attack” on Hillary Clinton, and that in many cases, it’s just a coded way of saying you’re “bothered by powerful women of a certain age.”

In case you’re not familiar with #ZombieHillary, people recently started using it in tweets describing Hillary Clinton’s demeanor while she was speaking to her press pool about the explosion in Chelsea late Saturday night.

“Twitter users who felt Clinton appeared ‘tired’ while speaking to the press pool traveling with her from Washington to New York City argued her appearance was proof she didn’t have the stamina or strength needed to be president,” Morgan Brinlee wrote in an article titled “The Zombie Hillary Hashtag is Yet Another Sexist Attack Against Her.”

“Under the hashtag #ZombieHillary, Some accused the Democratic nominee of being under the influence of drugs or alcohol and questioned how she’d be able to run the country in such a ‘weak’ state,” Brinlee continued.

Now, if Brinlee’s point was to say that some of the tweets were kind of mean, then that I could understand. But just what in fresh hell does it have to do with sexism specifically?

Well, according to Brinlee, #ZombieHillary is just another example of how “coverage and commentary of Clinton . . . continues to invoke a sexist double standard” where Clinton is “often subjected to a level of criticism and scrutiny we fail to expose her male competition to.”

While this may be true in the case of some of the criticism against Clinton, I really don’t think that commenting on her lack of energy has anything to do with gender. After all, Jeb Bush (a man) was repeatedly attacked for being “low energy” during the primaries.

To be fair, Brinlee does acknowledge that the “internet has poked fun at Trump’s hair, orange skin, and small hands,” but she maintains that “these threads of criticism are often short lived and not put into general use by the media in the same way that comments about Clinton’s appearance, age, voice, smile, laugh, health, and emotions are.”

That is, of course, just plain wrong. Jokes about Trump’s orange complexion are not “short lived,” they’re constant, and anyone who has been living anywhere but underneath a rock for the past year knows that. What’s more, people — including Clinton herself — criticize Donald Trump’s handle on his emotions much more than they criticizes Clinton’s over hers. But despite all of this, Brinlee still insists that the characterizations of Clinton as a zombie are “often used as a means of offering thinly-veiled criticism of Clinton’s physical appearance and age without the user having to come clean out and say, ‘I am bothered by powerful women of a certain age.’”

Now, Brinlee is not the only person to chalk up people’s criticism of Clinton to their being uncomfortable with “powerful women.” In a speech at a Clinton fundraiser on Sunday, President Obama said: “There’s a reason why we haven’t had a woman president. We as a society still grapple with what it means to see powerful women.”

Make no mistake: I do agree that many in our society are, in fact, uncomfortable with powerful women. But to say that that’s the reason more people aren’t supporting Hillary Clinton in particular is a disingenuous oversimplification.

#related#Clinton is deeply flawed candidate. She has been careless with our national security, she’s been dishonest, and she refuses to hold herself accountable for her own actions. Hillary Clinton may be the first female nominee of a major party, and that is something that makes her run different. But she’s also a nominee with a past chock full of serious scandals, and that makes her run different, too. If she doesn’t win, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that no woman could have, it would simply mean that she, specifically, couldn’t . . . and when you look at her record, it’s not hard to see why people might not want to vote for her.

Women need more women in positions of power, and it makes me angry when people deny that — but I’m also angry when people say that means we need Hillary Clinton in particular.