Hillary Clinton: the hysterical insults flung at Hillary are just franker, crazier versions of the everyday insults that are flung at any vaguely liberal, mildly feminist woman who shows a bit of spirit and independence

December 28, 2007

From Katha Pollit in Elle:

But then I come across one of these sulfurous emanations from the national collective unconscious and I want to sit down and write Hillary?s campaign a check immediately. I want to knock on doors for her every Saturday from now until primary day, on which I want to vote for her twice. Sisterhood is powerful! We are all Hillary Clinton! After all, the hysterical insults flung at Hillary are just franker, crazier versions of the everyday insults?shrill, strident, angry, ranting, unattractive? that are flung at any vaguely liberal, mildly feminist woman who shows a bit of spirit and independence, who puts herself out in the public realm, who doesn?t fumble and look up coyly from underneath her hair and give her declarative sentences the cadence of a question. Ice queen. Hag. Witch. Bitch. Dumb bitch. Feminazi. Slut.

Slut?

Type just about any misogynist insult into Google with ?Hillary Clinton? and up come hundreds of thousands of links. Promiscuity might not be the first sin that pops to mind when you think of her, but last time I checked, ?Hillary Clinton? plus ?slut? brought up 208,000 results. True, a lot of these are aimed at her husband or his various women friends, but prim and proper Hillary gets plenty of her own, as in ?I will never vote for that corporate slut? and ?HILLARY CLINTON IS A SLUT.?

To you, to me, to a professional political analyst, Hillary Rodham Clinton may be a wonkish centrist Democrat, a believing Methodist, a people-pleaser, a trimmer. But to a lot of people, especially men who spend an inordinate amount of time online, she taps into some deep Jungianunconscious well of evil female archetypes: She?s Snow White?s evil stepmother, Jezebel, Lady Macbeth, Marie Antoinette, and Nurse Ratched all rolled into one. In other words, she?s a powerful liberal woman. An older powerful liberal woman. An older powerful liberal woman whose power is illegitimate because it is bound up somehow with sex?how else could a woman get power over men, its rightful possessors? In a country where it is still controversial for a married woman to keep her name (something Hillary Rodham was unable to do without making her husband look henpecked in the eyes of Arkansas voters), women with power are automatically suspect. Even on the supposedly P.C. left, prominent right-wing women attract far more vitriol than comparable men, and of a more personal nature?remember Katherine Harris and her makeup? Or the rumors that she slept her way into office? But a powerful woman who is perceived as liberal, perhaps even feminist, awakens at many different points on the political spectrum a kind of free-floating late-night hysteria that would be funny if it didn?t have reallife consequences, such as making large numbers of smart people think that Hillary Clinton is unelectable.

Robotic. Dragon lady. Castrating. Lesbian. Pig. Hillary Rotten, daughter of Satan.

It isn?t just anonymous nuts who talk like this. Don Imus referred to Hillary as ?Satan? constantly (?that bucktoothed witch, Satan?; Bill Clinton?s ?fat, ugly wife, Satan?)?11 times on just one show. CNN?s Glenn Beck called her ?the Antichrist.? Michael Savage called her ?Hitlerian.? Chris Matthews called her ?sort of a Madame Defarge of the left.? Rush Limbaugh, who devoted many hours of radio raving to floating the charge that Vince Foster had not killed himself but had been murdered at the Clintons? behest, described her as ?the woman with the testicle lockbox,? whatever that means. ?When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs,? said CNN?s Tucker Carlson, in a jokey segment about the Hillary Nutcracker, which crushes walnuts between its steely thighs, yours for only $19.95.

The ballbusting theme looms prominently in the male Hillaryhating imagination?that?s why she can be both a lesbian and a siren who has Bill by the short hairs. But it isn?t just men who get a bit unhinged by Hillary. Maureen Dowd has compared her to Tony Soprano, ?so power-hungry that she can justify any thuggish means to get the prize.? Peggy Noonan: ?Cold and ambitious.? Ann Coulter: ?Pond scum.? ?White trash.? Well, okay: For Ann Coulter, that?s fairly restrained.

In any ordinary primary, I?d probably vote for John Edwards on straight policy grounds, or for Barack Obama as the slightly lefter, fresher face, the candidate who can bring in the most new voters and give America?s relations with the rest of the world a new start. Or I might just say the heck with the top three?who are much less different from one another than their self-branding would have you believe and who would probably do equally well (or not) if elected?and vote for Dennis Kucinich, who actually stands for things I believe in, like single-payer health care and not bombing Iran. But then I come across one of these sulfurous emanations from the national collective unconscious and I want to sit down and write Hillary?s campaign a check immediately. I want to knock on doors for her every Saturday from now until primary day, on which I want to vote for her twice. Sisterhood is powerful! We are all Hillary Clinton! After all, the hysterical insults flung at Hillary are just franker, crazier versions of the everyday insults?shrill, strident, angry, ranting, unattractive? that are flung at any vaguely liberal, mildly feminist woman who shows a bit of spirit and independence, who puts herself out in the public realm, who doesn?t fumble and look up coyly from underneath her hair and give her declarative sentences the cadence of a question. I?ve found a Hillary-with-apenis photo in my inbox more than once, to say nothing of anonymous e-mails calling me a ?fat, ugly bitch? from people who I doubt know what I look like. Every woman I know who calls herself a feminist, or is even just doing especially well in a field in which men also contend, deals with some version of this, an underlying unease she evokes merely by being a woman who doesn?t devote every waking minute to making some man feel 10 feet tall. Sure, you can brush it off, but that brushing off, over a lifetime, has psychic costs. And anyway, why should you have to?

Think of it this way: If all the castrating bitches voted for Satan?s daughter, we might actually move the feminist revolution out of the parking lot where it has been sitting, low on gas and with major transmission problems, for the past decade and a half. As long as women in positions of power are as rare as Florida panthers, their femaleness, with all it connotes, will be the lens through which people see them. We?ll never be equal as long as ambitious is a dirty word when applied to women (as if male politicians are modest and self-effacing); as long as serious and businesslike read as cold. It works the other way too: We?ll never be equal as long as the president has to be the national Daddy. Maybe the only way to defuse the immense fear so many Americans have of a woman assuming the quintessentially masculine mantle of the presidency, her delicate, manicured index finger hovering over the nuclear button, is for them to experience it and get over it.

Women are just as much?well, almost as much?a part of this double standard system as men are. Women don?t like ?cold,? ?ambitious,? ?angry? women either. That?s why Hillary Clinton goes on the morning shows and girltalks about dieting and clothes. For every woman who is excited by the prospect of voting for a woman in the presidential election?and let?s not forget that Hillary, as of this writing, has a substantial lead among female primary voters? there?s another who feels it?s somehow dishonorable to take gender into account. I know, because I used to be one of them. In 1992, when Elizabeth Holtzman and Geraldine Ferraro were running in the New York State Democratic senatorial primary, I managed to find reasons to reject both of them?Ferraro favored the death penalty, I think it was, and Holtzman had gone after Ferraro?s husband?s business dealings in a way that felt sensationalist to me. I cast my ballot for low-key, humane State Attorney General Robert Abrams. I felt so lofty, so just, so rational. Abrams won, ran an invisible campaign, and lost to Republican Alfonse D?Amato in November.

This time around I find myself thinking, What?s wrong with putting the thumb on the scales for a Democratic woman, all else being equal? Just to balance out the surprisingly large swath of people (fortunately, mostly Republican) who tell pollsters they won?t vote for a woman, however qualified? I?d never support an antifeminist woman, a rightwing woman, a Margaret Thatcher. But Hillary has stood up for women?s rights for 40 years. In the context of American politics, which to a European would seem to offer a continuum that goes all the way from moderately conservative to insanely reactionary, she?s a liberal. Many people think she?s not electable, but the last time Democrats voted in the primaries for the candidate we thought would have the widest appeal in November, we got John Kerry. We think we can handicap Hillary?s chances because she is the only candidate voters know well. But maybe Obama or Edwards would be the Robert Abrams of 2008, great on paper but lacking what it takes in real life. Maybe Obama will read too young or too black, or Edwards too slick or too one-note, to win over the undecided voters of Ohio or whatever demographic sliver will hold the key to victory.

Think of it this way: Hillary Clinton has been at the top of the list of Democratic candidates since the list began. She has a powerful campaign machine, which she began putting together more than a year before any of the other candidates got started on theirs. In fact, she has sewn up so much talent that the conventional wisdom has it that Al Gore would have a hard time finding good staffers if he decided to jump in. If she were a man, there would be no doubt she?d win the primary, and the general election, too. Oddly, it?s rightwingers who seem most able to acknowledge, albeit unhappily, the strength of her position. ?Looks like it will be President Hillary,? one blogger wrote on the archconservative website humanevents.com. ?Marxism, here we come!?

Harridan. Virago. Whore. Ballbreaker. Stalinist. Hellcat. Evil Queen of Darkness.

As I write this, the New York primary is far in the future, so I have lots of time to see how the candidates and their campaigns play out. In the end, I wouldn?t choose Hillary just because she?s a woman. The issues facing our country?Iraq, health care, education, poverty, civil liberties?are too crucial for me to treat the election as primarily an opportunity for national gender reeducation.

Don?t try my patience, though, Rush, Chris, Peggy, and all you anonymous posters and bloggers out there. I?m only human. You might just push me over the edge…