Poor Hillary Clinton, caught between the rock of the “hard right,” which believes she “practically held down virgins for Bill [Clinton] to deflower,” and the hard place of the “feminist blogosphere,” denizens of which think she “should have allied herself with Bill’s female accusers -- including the ones who sold stories about him to the tabloids.”
That sympathetic note was sounded this past week in a Vox essay by Laura Kipnis, a professor in Northwestern University’s radio/television/film department. Please note that Kipnis is not “some big Hillary fan, by the way. I was a Sanders supporter who will vote for Hillary…to prevent a lunatic pig from being elected.”
That said, Kipnis had a few points to make about how to, and how not to, discuss the Clintons’ marriage and related issues. One was that “playing the sexual blame game” regarding Bill and Hillary “means being a right-wing patsy. The reason [the Monica Lewinsky] story became a political football in the first place is because right-wing thugs like billionaire Richard Scaife paid millions to dig up dirt on the Clintons.”
Another was that Bill was pretty awesome back in the ‘90s, even when he was a bad, bad boy: “Wasn’t it always obvious that Bill Clinton’s so-called ‘character issues’ were part of the attraction, that he was elected twice not in spite of his glaringly apparent flaws as a husband, but because of them?...There was never any charge that Clinton either harassed or pursued Monica. There may be different ideas about the propriety of workplace romances at present, but as Monica herself said at the time, the relationship was her choice.”
Kipnis also reminded us that when liberal feminists set priorities, abortion seldom, if ever, is far from the top (bolding added):
I don’t get the sentimentality about the prospect of a woman president — Margaret Thatcher was a woman too, and so what? But Hillary has been a tough advocate on international abortion rights and stood up heroically to Republican sexual dinosaurs trying to control women’s bodies globally by yanking UN and NGO funding for reproductive health. That should qualify her in anyone’s book for the Feminist Hall of Fame. You say she should have been nicer to the women boffing her husband? I say get some perspective.
In her book Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation, published in late 2014, Kipnis wrote, “You can tell a lot about a man by what he thinks about Hillary, maybe even everything. She’s not just another presidential candidate, she’s a sophisticated diagnostic instrument for calibrating male anxiety.”
