This past week, Talking Points Memo ran an excerpt from Laura Kipnis’s new book, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation, in which Kipnis, who teaches in the radio/television/film department at Northwestern University, analyzed several biographies of Hillary Clinton written by male conservatives such as R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and John Podhoretz (plus David Brock, who became an ex-conservative in large part as a result of his Hillary bio).
Kipnis asserted that the writers in question aren’t dealing with the real HRC; rather, “each invents his own personal Hillary—from baroque sexual fantasies straight out of The Honeymoon Killers and girl-girl sexcapades, to big sis—then has to slay his creation, while paying tribute to her power with these displays of antagonism and ambivalence. They’re caught in her grip, but they don’t know why; they spin tales about her treachery and perversity, as if that explains it. Except that the harder they try to knock her off her perch, the more shrill and unmanned they seem.”
From the Kipnis piece (bolding added):
Here’s what happened the last time Hillary Clinton ran for president: she drove men wild. Well, certain men. Especially certain men on the right. You could recognize them by the flecks of foam in the corners of their mouths when the subject of her candidacy arose. And they’re already girding themselves for the next time around, because there’s something about Hillary that just gets them all worked up.
But what exactly? Despise her they do, yet they’re also strangely drawn to her, in some inexplicably intimate way. She occupies their attention. They spend a lot of time thinking about her—enumerating her character flaws, dissecting her motives, analyzing her physical shortcomings with a penetrating, clinical eye: those thick ankles and dumpy hips, the ever-changing hairdos. You’d think they were talking about their first wives. There’s the same over-invested quality, an edge of spite, some ancient wound not yet repaired. And how they love conjecturing upon her sexuality! Or lack of, heh heh. Is she frigid, is she gay? Heh heh. Yes, they have many theories about her, complete with detailed forensic analyses of her marriage, probably more detailed than their thoughts about their own.
My point is that 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, which is running high. Understandably, given that the whole male-female, who-runs-the-world question is pretty much up for grabs.
As our tour guides into these subterranean psychical thickets, I’ve enlisted a selection of Hillary’s right-wing biographers to lead the way…
Biographies, even bad ones, are the record of a relationship: temporary marriages, so to speak. More than a few self-reflective biographers have admitted as much. And for whatever reasons, Hillary seems to attract a certain type of husband: guys with a lot of psychological baggage, emotional intensity, and messy inner lives…
Edward Klein, author of the bestselling The Truth About Hillary, [is] a tragically humorless type. When Klein rants, “As always with Hillary, it was all about her,” note the rancid flavor of marital over-familiarity…He’s practically venomous. Though he’s also so suspicious of her sexual proclivities that unintentional humor abounds: he’s like an angry Inspector Clouseau with gaydar. The inconvenient fact that there’s no particular evidence Hillary bends that way dissuades him not…
…Tyrrell sounds like an aspirant for the Vidal Sassoon endowed chair on the Clinton-hating Right when he concludes that Hillary’s “search for the perfect hairstyle has finally been resolved into a neatly elegant businesswoman’s coiffure” and that she “seems to have turned her hair into a major strength”…
"All biography is ultimately fiction,” Bernard Malamud wrote in Dubin’s Lives, his novel about a biographer. What would he have said about this motley collection of writers: all biography is ultimately a Rorschach test? The various Hillaries that emerge are fictive enough, yet clearly they have an inner truth for their creators. Each invents his own personal Hillary—from baroque sexual fantasies straight out of The Honeymoon Killers and girl-girl sexcapades, to big sis—then has to slay his creation, while paying tribute to her power with these displays of antagonism and ambivalence. They’re caught in her grip, but they don’t know why; they spin tales about her treachery and perversity, as if that explains it. Except that the harder they try to knock her off her perch, the more shrill and unmanned they seem.
