The New Yorker: 2016's Manifest Misogyny

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2016's Manifest Misogyny
The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot, 10/24/16 issue

At the end of the second Presidential debate, on October 9th, in St. Louis, when an audience member asked if each candidate could say something positive about the other, Donald Trump declared Hillary Clinton a fighter: “She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up.” It was a surprising admission—Trump had spent the previous several weeks castigating Clinton for her weakness, her lack of “stamina”—and one of the few unassailably true things he said all evening.

Plenty of the attacks levelled against Clinton over the years have been policy-oriented and substantive, stemming from her mishandling of health-care reform during her husband’s first Administration, or from her initial support for the war in Iraq, or from her use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State—criticisms that could have been lobbed in the same terms at a male politician of similar ambition. But much of what Clinton has had to battle, for decades, is sexism. She has not, as Trump noted, given up, but the fight has been a wearying spectacle, and one that may explain, at least in part, why people complain of Hillary Clinton fatigue.

When Patricia Schroeder, the former Democratic U.S. representative from Colorado, was campaigning in the nineteen-eighties, she was asked whether she was “running as a woman.” She replied, “Do I have a choice?” Clinton has certainly never had a choice; she has been scrutinized and judged as a woman in every possible way from the moment she appeared on the national stage. She’s been criticized for using her maiden name, for her decision to continue working as a lawyer after her husband became governor of Arkansas, and for her lack of interest in cookie baking—not to mention for her hair, her ankles, her clothes, her smile, her laugh, and her voice. The conspiracy theories about the Clintons often partook of old fears and suspicions regarding women: that Hillary was a lesbian; that she was a Lady Macbeth, responsible for the murder of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. (Trump has revived that rumor, calling Foster’s death, a suicide, “very fishy.”) And some would not accept her as a genuine icon of female empowerment, because she had obtained her national standing as an adjunct to her husband, and stood by him after it became clear that he had been having sex with a twenty-two-year-old White House intern and lied about it.

It’s always been dispiriting to see the latent resentments that Clinton’s political ambitions brought forth—she’s like one of those chemical solutions which make invisible writing manifest, only to reveal a message that we’d rather had remained hidden. In 2007, during the Presidential-primary campaigns, when she was the presumptive Democratic nominee, a supporter of Senator John McCain, the eventual Republican nominee, asked him at a gathering in South Carolina, “How do we beat the bitch?” McCain looked fleetingly uncomfortable, then called it an “excellent question.” The terms “bitch” and “witch,” and the associations they stir up, are slurs that Clinton’s detractors have resorted to freely. The political commentator Tucker Carlson said of Clinton, “Something about her feels castrating.” Rush Limbaugh asked his listeners, “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?” Bumper stickers appeared bearing slogans such as “KFC Hillary Meal Deal: Two Fat Thighs, Two Small Breasts and a Bunch of Left Wings” and “Even Bill Doesn’t Want Me.”

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1. good article. thx I wouldn't have seen it