Hillary’s Gift to Women

In Friday’s New York Times, Susan Faludi rejoiced over Hillary Clinton’s destruction of the myth of female prissiness and innate moral superiority, hailing Clinton’s “no-holds-barred pugnacity” and her media reputation as “nasty” and “ruthless.” Future female presidential candidates will owe a lot to the race of 2008, Faludi wrote, “when Hillary Clinton broke through the glass floor and got down with the boys.”

I share Faludi’s glee – up to a point. Surely no one will ever dare argue that women lack the temperament for political combat. But by running a racially-tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience, and repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn’t just break through the “glass floor,” she set a new low for floors in general, and would, if she could have got within arm’s reach, have rubbed the broken glass into Obama’s face.

A mere decade ago Francis Fukuyama fretted in Foreign Affairs that the world was too dangerous for the West to be entrusted to graying female leaders, whose aversion to violence was, as he established with numerous examples from chimpanzee society, “rooted in biology.” The counter-example of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the first of head of state to start a war for the sole purpose of pumping up her approval ratings, led him to concede that “biology is not destiny.” But it was still a good reason to vote for a prehistoric-style club-wielding male.

Not to worry though, Francis. Far from being the stereotypical feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to “obliterate” the toddlers of Tehran –along, of course, with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters. Earlier on, Clinton foreswore even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk addicts of the species. Watch out – was her distinctly unladylike message to Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il, and the rest of them – or I’ll rip you a new one.

There’s a reason why it’s been so easy for men to overlook women’s capacity for aggression. As every student of Women’s Studies 101 knows, what’s called aggression in men is usually trivialized as “bitchiness” in women: Men get angry; women suffer from bouts of inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility. So give Clinton credit for defying the belittling stereotype: She’s been visibly angry for months, if not decades, and it can’t all have been PMS.

But did we really need another lesson in the female capacity for ruthless aggression? Any illusions I had about the innate moral superiority of women ended four years ago with Abu Ghraib. Recall that three out of the five prison guards prosecuted for the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners were women. The prison was directed by a woman, Gen. Janis Karpinski, and the top U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, who also was responsible for reviewing the status of detainees before their release, was Major Gen. Barbara Fast. Not to mention that the U.S. official ultimately responsible for managing the occupation of Iraq at the time was Condoleezza Rice.

Whatever violent and evil things men can do, women can do too, and if the capacity for cruelty is a criterion for leadership, as Fukuyama suggested, then Lynndie England should consider following up her stint in the brig with a run for the Senate.

It’s important –even kind of exhilarating – for women to embrace their inner bitch, but the point should be to expand our sense of human possibility, not to enshrine aggression as a virtue. Women can behave like the warrior queen Boadicea, credited with slaughtering 70,000, many of them civilians, or like Margaret Thatcher, who attempted to dismantle the British welfare state. Men, for their part, are free to take as their role models the pacifist leaders Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Biology conditions us in all kinds of ways we might not even be aware of yet. But virtue is always a choice.

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way – by demonstrating female moral inferiority. We didn’t really need her racial innuendos and free-floating bellicosity to establish that women aren’t wimps. As a generation of young feminists realizes, the values once thought to be uniquely and genetically female – such as compassion and an aversion to violence – can be found in either sex, and sometimes it’s a man who best upholds them.

Comments

[Anarcissie]

I thought Faludi's comments were rather odd. I don't follow mainstream big-ticket politics very closely, but it was my impression that Clinton played very deliberately to the Soccer Mom constituency on her journey from dabbling in leftish activism to right-wing warmongering, imperialism, and race-baiting. In a world where we had already observed Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and many other tough female politicians, I don't think a new example was needed, but I believe Clinton thought she needed to distance herself from _herself_ to meet the requirements of a politics whose heroes were overt thugs like Bush, Cheney and Giuliani. Reminds me of Nixon reinventing himself every few years.

[Rif]

Instead of exposing Obama for being a crook, oportunist, and a marxist, you attack a more accomplished woman than yourself. Are you jealous? Obama did nothing for his constituency in Chicago. He opeated with a crook and an anti-white american, and a terrorist to gain politically. GE controls nbc and it's affiliates. Exelron is a subsidiary of GE....do your reasearch on Obama and his legislation regarding nuclear waste inot his district. He is all talk. He is dangerous and you knock a woman who has more in her little toe than Obama has in his whole body. Then check out the city of Chicago...what has he done for the poor. He lined the pocket of Rezko and did nothing but give lip service to those who relied on him. In the 8 years Pres. Clinton placed his offices in Harlem it has become a safe and thriving community. He may have done it for political reasons but he got positive results. Obama got negative results. He is all Axelrod words and slogans and does not represent the mainstream. Who is the real Obama? Is he a combination of Michelle, Rev. Wright,and Bill Ayers? Is he more like his six stepbrothers and cousin Odinga? Instead of knocking Hillary why don't you do research about how Obama used the black community and did not help them. How he used all the people in power around him to get what he wanted. You are either being payed off by the Obama team or you are stupid.

[dana b]

I don't believe Senator Clinton did anything wrong in pointing out that working class, white voters are now, more strongly than earlier in the election season, favoring her. What she should have pointed out, however, was that this is more likely a phenomenon of class than race.

Paul Krugman stated this best in a recent column of his: the transformational message of Obama and his supposedly "new" politics leave many working class voters cold. Clinton appeals to working class voters of all races (and to many others to the tune of 49%!).

If Cllinton's opponent were not black, working class black voters would be voting for her over the more aspirational, process-oriented candidate that Obama is. I don't begrudge black voters of any social class or gender their decision to vote for Obama as a matter of pride and as taking part in an historic moment. White, Hispanic, and Asian working class voters, however should not be branded as racist for choosing the more experienced, policy-wonkish, and traditional candidate. They envision her doing more for them and for the country in concrete ways that matter to them.

Clinton, herself, should not be pilloried for simply pointing out the statistical, demographic facts of this election as reported in the AP poll. Race is hard to talk about deftly, and Clinton wasn't elegant about it in that USA Today interview in which she cited the AP report. But that inelegance does not make her racist, nor does it make her campaign "dirty". I continue to respect her.

[Anarcissie]

Rif: 'Instead of exposing Obama for being a crook, oportunist, and a marxist, you attack a more accomplished woman than yourself. Are you jealous? ...'

I'm happy to say that my accomplishments don't including voting for the war in Iraq. I'm certainly not jealous of that one.

[lc2]

Pssst. The would-be Emperor Obama has no clothes! Sure he hasn't ruffled any feathers ... he hasn't said anything the slightest bit controversial. Think about it. It's the Bush-y cult of personality all over again. Will we ever hire people for this job based on their intelligence and work ethic?

[Anarcissie]

"Bitter."

[tata]

"Biology conditions us in all kinds of ways we might not even be aware of yet."

According to Dr. E. O. Wilson's work all
social behavior is based on genes and Evolution. Racism is because human have most of their evolution organized in terms of tribal identity.

Just look at White people, they have been runing the world for 500 years so their racisim is even more potent because they have the power. Compounding all this all automatic responses. Things like Freud's work have totally been refuted by current work on genetics and function of brain.
But that does not stop you from throwing the old canard of Choice.
and Psychologist beating the drums of Id, Ego and Super Ego.

So No amount of Intellectual rationalization will change this but at least you can describe the situation in terms of current science.

[Anarcissie]

A lot of people seem to be down on racism these days. It's just possible that that attitude will have some effect, and people will find some other ways of mistreating their neighbors and doing evil in general. There's always hope, right?

[Ted Atkinson]

You say "the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to “obliterate” the toddlers of Tehran." Senator Clinton said that, in response to a nuclear attack by Iran on Israel, she would obliterate Iran. Do you think that any future American President should give Iran the impression that we would NOT massively respond if they attacked Israel with nuclear weapons? To do so would place millions in the region in peril. You might want to read a book or two about past foreign policy errors which have led to enormous bloodshed. I would certainly hope that Senator Obama makes it very clear that any nation attacking another nation with nuclear weapons would face massive retaliation from the United States. This policy, called deterrence, has helped save the world from destruction since the end of World War II.

[Walter Dufresne]

I'll surely vote for (and campaign for) either Obama or Clinton after the convention. Nevertheless, it is astonishing that some of Hillary Clinton's recent campaign behavior is reminiscent of another, often-disliked politician, another politician with "high negatives," Richard Nixon.

[Anarcissie]

I am not going to vote for anyone who voted to start or support the war in Iraq. I don't want to come away from the voting booth with blood on my hands.

As for this fantasy of "obliterating Iran" -- genocide -- I think it's as immoral as the idea of throwing a hand grenade in a schoolyard full of children. That this sort of talk is condoned and even praised shows the moral deterioration caused by the lust for power.

At some point, if we want to survive at all, we're going to have to stop supporting this kind of mental garbage. Let me suggest to anyone that today is as good a day for that as any. If not now, when? If not you, who?

[Steve]

Although I appreciated the analysis in your "Hillary's Gift to Women," I wish you had devoted at least a sentence to gender, a category broader than just women.

As a gay man, one of the most offensive aspects of Hillary Clinton's campaign was the ugly (and ridiculous) turn toward masculinity bullying, including surrogates belittling Obama's testicles, attacking his supporters as effete, and resorting to such gendered epithets as "sissy" and "pansy" - clevely stopping just short of "queer" and "faggot," but exploiting the same prejudices.

I will NOT support a candidate, male or female, who behaves like an insecure, queer-bashing teenage boy who bullies younger boys or drives a souped-up car in a pathetic attempt to show off what a big, bad-ass man he is. And that is exactly what Hillary has become.

Sadly, however, I've long since given up expecting middle-aged white feminists to give a damn about subordination of gender-noncomforming men and boys. Living through the 1970s apparently has rendered the entire class hopelessly self-absorbed. So we witness the disgusting spectacle of NOW cheering on Hillary as her surrogates spew masculinity epithets like "sissy." And I'm supposed to take NOW seriously? Whatever.

[Walter Dufresne]

This old "yellow dog" Democrat would gladly vote for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama over John McCain. Just because the Democratic Party might not nominate my preference, that's never been a reason to stay away from the polls. Electoral politics really is often a case of campaigning for the candidates most closely allied with one's beliefs, and then pulling a lever for the lesser of two evils.

I have zero problems with distinguishing between the kinds and amounts of evil that politicians perpetrate. Heck, I do it all the time. As bloody as we suspect Hillary might be, old John's got more than a little first-hand experience with both dropping the bombs and voting for more bomb dropping. Consistently so. There really are differences between what Bush did and what Kerry might have done, between what Bush did and what Gore might have done, between what Clinton did and what Dole might have done ... and on and on.

Staying away from the polls and deliberately refusing to choose between greater and lesser evils because a favorite lost a primary is, I suspect, its own kind of narcissistic immorality. But there's good news: the guy who opposed Iraq from the start looks like he's going to get the Democratic nomination.

[Buena]

Steve, how can you label all "middle-aged white feminists" as card-carrying NOW members and Hillary supporters who are hopelessly self-absorbed?

Not all of us MAWF's like Hillary or her tactics -- most of my women friends(who lived through the 70s but manage to avoid hopeless self-absorbtion) can't stand her and are avid Obama supporters.

Don't stereotype us and we won't stereotype you.

[dana b]

Steve,

On the whole I found your comments illuminating and much needed -- about the use of terms like "pansy" and other sexist language & imagery by Clinton surrogates.

I must take issue with this however:
"Sadly, however, I've long since given up expecting middle-aged white feminists to give a damn about subordination of gender-noncomforming men and boys. Living through the 1970s apparently has rendered the entire class hopelessly self-absorbed."

My impression of gay male culture in San Francisco where I now live again is that many of its participants are just what you criticize here -- self-absorbed and interested only in their own sexuality and men like themselves. The Castro neighborhood is nearly wiped clean of children. Women are outnumbered 50 to 1 on the street. Is that the reflection of gay men's commitment to equality and justice only for themselves? Their world seems to be an all-male affair with drag-queen events, S&M parties, and drinking. Not a world this middle-age, lesbian and feminist feels she can engage with seriously.

So what have gender non-conforming men and boys within their movement done for anyone else's rights or struggles? What have they done for women anywhere except exaggerate gender stereotypes by appearing in drag shows? Maybe when women see some reciprocity of interest in what should be shared struggles for gender freedom they will pour more effort into what concerns you here.

[Anarcissie]

Choosing the lesser evil is fine, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and cynical, calculated participation in mass murder is on the other side of the line I choose to draw. It has nothing to do with any primary -- Obama is a charming fellow, but regardless of his earlier opinions, he did vote to support the war more than once.

I really think we have to get serious about this stuff. It's not just a horse race between competing interests with tolerable old blowhards in straw hats making deals in back rooms. There's blood on the ground.

[Buena]

If you don't vote for the lesser of two evils, will you feel better when the greater of the two evils wins?

[Anarcissie]

It's not a matter of feeling good. It's a matter of who I am. I can't be the person I am and voluntarily participate in mass murder.

[Brian]

I think even a discussion of gender and race is so old school it makes me pause and then shudder. Its not that it is wrong or innaccurate or not interesting, but the discussion really occurs on another mezzanine for me. Its the traditional real outtake of our team against theirs and is so elementary school it brings back memorys full of horror of being forced to be a member of that pack of dogs. Tata said freud has been replaced by the MRI scanner and thats that. Nature has us in such a competing frenzy "WE BUY IT". We need a serious radical re-think here and I would posit try and step out of your mammal. Step outside of it and see the quarks interacting inside, and take a dualistic look at what is happening. Mammals an embodiement of quarks which are little pigeons of quantized energy joining at the most basic level to form a species of jealous beings who compete, compete, compete, because their primary nature is to compete. Its not about right or wrong, integrity or sociopathy. Its about competition and a fullfillment of a sense of the useful all powerful mammal on steroids out-competing all its breathern. Its silly to think either Freud or the MRI is the right answer, as we are composites of psychological overlays on biologic substrates. Our brain can process in and outside the competitve mode. Our competitive mammal has been cleverly harnessed to be the bestest consumer in the world. That isn't freedom. That is being in a yoke. We are told to even consume more in the name of obtaining our freedom from the very same yoke that has blinded us into doing its bidding. This entire competitive election process is a big money maker for the media and a whole host of companys while channeling all and any political aspirations of so many high energy people into a harmless hobby as far as "the system" is concerned. Hillary is scary at how little thought she gives to the potential repercussions to her decisions. She is bright, middle class bright, but not a deep thinker. She says what it takes to win, but beyond that has little to say. She can pose for the camera like a good star trooper, but she has no driving theme. If the theme is she is a women, thats truely sexist and pathetic. If the theme she is a being with sincere deep ideas, that would be a nice change. In this day and age no politician can afford to talk about "obliterating" anyone anymore than that president of Iran has. If that is the level of her intelligence that is too dangerous for us, we the people. For the press to play childish "got-you" games is equally disgusting. Why don't we just have Hillary and Obama mud wrestle? The very same media that bashes bush is salivating at the chance to bite and chew on whomever wins, and surely will probably succeed in trashing them as they did Truman, Nixon, Johnson, Carter, and Bush. The fact that you are expected to side with one of these "leaders" is the biggest falsity of all. It reminds me of "The Prisoner" tv series with Patrick McGoohan in which he is kidnapped off to a government village for quitting his secret civil service job and then interviewed and challenged in each show by a new "number 2" village administrator. Interestingly as each fails to break the prisoner, he is replaced by a new number two each episode till the very end when we learn who number 1 is. It turns out to be the chimp in all of us, the raw animal with an aggressive guile and manic will. The series was so controversal it ended his career in England as he its actor, producer and chief writer. Malthus, John Locke, Emerson, Thoreau, all wrote of a similar angst of their times, and so did Chaucer in 1400AD. HillBam is nothing new really, just television and now the net is. A good social critique will have to transend the mammal, though the humorous observations of Mark Twain and now Stephen Cobert might do aptly as well. Didn't Goldwater say about the USSR what Hillary said about Iran? Yes, yes, the clerical fascist regieme is terrible there and they are trying to make nuclear weapons. But what I am talking about is HillBam is just another American iteration along such familiar bombastic lines. Some can say, well much more goes on behind the scenes than the media toppings we are shown and haranged by. Her refusal to quit despite the math has a certain air of psychosis as it passes the bad smell test. She cannot believe this is happening to her after all her long choreographed work to become president which I think crystalized for her during bill's rockier days as president. It was always subconiously there from her first job after Law School but she followed a path with bill that took some zags when it should have been taking zigs. Freud was a projective psychologist caught in the clutch of his own demons, brilliant all the same, while Jung was an analytic psychologist(one self-aware of projections and their undercurrent in methaphor and culture and art(Joeseph Campbell). Marshall McLuhan(the media is the message). Our political culture is not self aware at all, it is numb yet stoically determined to circumvail over anything sensible. It keeps us in the mammal mode. For those of you who want to step off that drilling rig and look at it another way, you won't find the media helpful. There is an absolute dearth of drilling below the carpet as to what drives our culture beyond "Car-Talk" and the brothers who do that show. Our election process paraded embarrassingly before us everynight reveals something no body wants to talk about. I suspect we haven't even entered the real silly season coming.

[Walter Dufresne]

"I can't be the person I am ..."

I respect that, a lot, and won't argue with such principles. And if I so much as sounded like I was ridiculing them, well, I'm wrong to do so.

It's easier for an old guy like me to go to the polls with hope: we Americans have, I believe, mismanaged the deposition of Saddam Hussein, failed to capture Osama Bin Laden, and created the current on-going murderous conditions in Iraq. I don't see our military there as now engaged in anything more than imperial policing, policing in the midst of bloody tribal warfare, with the focus of the violence alternating between our policemen and other tribes.

A Democrat's Iraq policies will begin winding down the current US presence there. That repellent GOP talk of crusades and hundred-year wars, impractical all, will end. My biggest November fear is a GOP attack machine that will manage, somehow, to pull off three classic campaign tactics: motivate the base, FUD the un-decideds, and suppress the opposition. Which is why I'm always willing to vote for the lesser of two evils.

[Buena]

I agree, Walter. It's the only alternative we have. Look what happened when people voted for Nader in 2000. The "lesser of two evils" vote brought us George Bush.

When the Supremes gave him the office of president, I thought, "Oh well, how much harm can he do?"

Now we know.

[Jaliya]

Thank you, Barbara, for a courageous post. Where violence is concerned, I think there are so many factors that ball up into a terrible snag...I can't see how one gender is morally superior to another. I have experienced violent attacks by both male and female people during my life, and one incident (back in 1985) shocked me to my bones: at a gathering in which survivors of child sexual abuse were lobbying Canada's federal government to change the "statute of limitations" law so that survivors could have their abusers charged long after the event, a chilling silence slathered the room when one woman, a therapist of long experience, arose to say that "men are not the only abusers."

Hillary Clinton's vow to "obliterate Iran" is, to me, no different than the screeds of anyone else who churns up rage and hatred for another person or people. Obliteration will do only that: obliterate.

[Anarcissie]

In 2000, Bush was supposed to be the non-interventionist guy not interested in foreign adventures and "nation-building", and Gore, following Clinton (and the Democratic tradition for the previous half-century) was supposed to be the big interventionist (imperialist). Clinton's policies in Iraq were supposed to have caused the death of half a million innocent people, mostly children. When Madeleine Albright was asked about it on television, she didn't deny it; she said "We think it is worth it." As far as I know, Gore never separated himself explicitly from the policy or the actions. So if you went by what the politicians and the media said, and your primary concern was to select the president least likely to start a war and commit war crimes, you would have to vote for Bush or Nader.

So not only does your vote have an infinitesimally small chance of affecting the outcome of a large election (that is, zero), if your concern is the practical outcome, you can't tell who to vote for. All you know is what they say, and as we see over and and over, it has little connection with what they do.

One thing you can tell, though, is who actually went along with the current criminal war, and either attach yourself to it and them, or separate yourself. Certainly as long as people who know better refuse to get serious about this stuff, it's going to go on -- imperialism, war, murder, mayhem, terror, theft, lies, astronomical waste, all in the service of political ambition and greed.

[Carol]

Barbara:
What a silly article, I am surprised. Why is Clinton supposed to be a surrogate for all women? Why is she demonstrating female moral inferiority? Maybe her own, but not mine nor anyone else's.

Honestly, I don't care if you have a hate on for her, which it is obvious you do, but you should at least be able to discuss all of this intelligently.

I am so TIRED of people trying to use one person as an exemplar for a whole group, which of course is never done for WHITE MEN. Can you imagine writing an article like this about McCain? Bush? Cheney? No, they are individuals with failings etc. But Clinton is a WOMAN, hence she may be appropriated by the punditocracy as some sort of symbol.

Arch!

[Katie]

YES! Thank you.