Hillary Clinton and the Crisis of Feminism
EMERY, NOEMIE
Hillary Clinton and the Crisis of Feminism By Noemie Emery Where are the feminists? David Broder wondered on Meet the Press. "Why are they silent about the allegations involving the president?"...
...But there are many more women in this country like Gennifer, Paula, and Monica than there are professors like Anita Hill...
...No harassment culture, no harassment law...
...And it is this triumph that may prove lethal—for it was on one such fishing expedition that Paula Jones's lawyers came up with the names of Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky, who otherwise would have remained unknown...
...But as it turns out, they are for women selectively, and against harassment only now and then...
...I believe Anita Hill," said Gov...
...Says one-time believer Margaret Talbot of the New Republic, "It seems harder than ever to scrunch our eyes shut and construe Hillary Clinton as a feminist icon, a role model for young women of ambition and talent...
...It was never a principle—merely a hammer, a tool used to bludgeon political enemies...
...Her power-shared marriage was the new model, the ideal that all women should reach for...
...Senate, the first feminist president in American history, and his ur-feminist heroine wife...
...Aware of this, some of the sisters, with their Bill on the griddle, are quickly reversing field...
...The feminists laid the groundwork for the destruction of their own...
...We don't defend women who don't dress the way we do...
...In 1991, Anita Hill did not keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court...
...All of these were connected, and they were powered by Anita Hill...
...It began in 1991 with the Hill-Thomas hearings and bloomed the next year into numerous payoffs: harassment consciousness, harassment law, four new feminists in the U.S...
...Blessedly, we may have seen the last of the Thomas and Tailhook hysterics, of the jihads against men who "don't get it...
...No future first ladies will adopt her as a model...
...Defending their goat-king, feminists are not only changing their old standards—they are surrendering their queen...
...So: No Anita Hill, no harassment culture...
...It was their urging that created the expansive nature of harassment law, wherein a plaintiff is given unlimited access to rummage freely in the prior private life of a defendant, a scope not permitted even in cases of rape...
...We do not see Monica as some little naif here...
...Few women can now want to be like her...
...Alone, Bill Clinton is merely one more male politician, "right" on the issues, but no more so than others—one more expendable pol...
...She will not figure in little girls' dreams...
...It was the feminists who created the aggressive laws and culture that led to the Paula Jones lawsuit...
...Their outrage, it is now clear, has always been a fraud and a pretense...
...Hillary Clinton has suffered humiliations the likes of which Rose Kennedy never dreamed of...
...No matter what happens to him or his future, Hillary's iconic stature is gone...
...nightmare...
...Outed as fakes on their signature issue, what other lies have they told...
...She wasn't killed, she wasn't harassed, she wasn't fired," harrumphed Betty Friedan about Paula Jones...
...But of course, feminists don't approve of little girls' dreams, or of most women, either...
...The bargain she seems to have made—to put up with the humiliations of marriage to an apparently indefatigable womanizer in exchange for a share of his power—seems increasingly just like that—a bargain, an unidealistic and demeaning deal...
...That is why the era of feminist influence, which peaked in 1992, the "Year of the Woman," may now be drawing to a close...
...The president made a definitive statement...
...In the old days, before Bill Clinton was in the dock, a consensual relationship between mature co-workers, when the man held the higher professional rank, was automatically defined as coercive, owing to the sinister nature of power...
...They said they were a universal moral movement acting on behalf of all women...
...She has ruined Bill Clinton as a serious person, destroyed his wife as a cultural role model, and exposed as empty the movement they embraced...
...Bill Clinton has been toxic for women, and most of all for his wife...
...We now "get" the sisters just fine...
...The personal, it seems, is not always political: It sometimes is quite private, which is something all adults should understand...
...Is this what "liberation" was for...
...No discovery process, no other women...
...But she has at last brought down an even larger figure—a president—in actual, if not legal, terms...
...And as working women defect, she has gathered a new and odd set of allies—angry white males who envy her husband and the license she gives him, and the housewives she once seemed to look down on who now see her as a figure with whom they can empathize...
...And they did it all by themselves...
...The feminists stand exposed as a partisan pressure group, which is not what they said they were...
...That was the problem—one did...
...In previous times, fostering a locker-room mentality, where anything went, was defined as the worst of all social offenses...
...Now, sex between an unpaid 21-year-old intern and the president of the United States is cool...
...At that moment, feminist law and feminist consciousness began to ensnare Bill and Hillary Clinton, beginning their Noemie Emery is a writer living near Washington, D.C...
...Anita Hill brought on the great Clinton crisis...
...The feminists' one-time concept that sex equals power also has gone by the boards...
...No more...
...Harassment, which used to be measured by tonal matters of atmosphere—a joke overheard, a magazine on a desk, the wrong kind of picture—is now to be measured only in the narrowest of legal terms...
...Clinton in 1992, clasping hands with feminist candidates...
...No one any longer compares her to Eleanor Roosevelt...
...Feminists led the way to their own and their leaders' destruction...
...Now, it seems, women can—and do—tell terrible whoppers, and men ought to be taken at their word...
...I believe him," said Rep...
...No other women, no lies...
...Like Bill Clinton, feminists have exposed themselves: as a small interest group, on the fringe of one party, no more significant than the rest...
...When you hear these words from that source on that program, you know hard times have arrived...
...She was their icon, the gender-avenger, demanding, and getting, respect from all comers, the forger of new and sublime roles for women, the bearer of deep-seated change...
...Careers were derailed over what earlier had been regarded as hijinks...
...No one can now believe a word they say...
...They claimed, very loudly, that harassment was an outrage and a horror...
...It was their overheated rhetoric in the Hill-Thomas hearings that formed the idea that it was the pass, not the punishment, that was the basis of legal harassment, thus giving the Jones case its legitimacy...
...Their silence, and their words, will come back to mock them...
...Her trail now leads back to the old-fashioned parlor, where the wronged wife stands up for her wandering husband, pretending that nothing is wrong...
...No Paula Jones, no discovery process...
...But we do defend lawyers from Yale...
...No lies, no perjury charges, no witness tampering, no obstruction of justice, no crisis, no talk of removal...
...No one again will look at him without laughing...
...We are not falling on our swords for these types of women, Paula Jones or Gennifer Flowers," a congresswoman told the New York Times...
...It was by the feminists' insistence that not merely an act but an atmosphere could be construed as criminal...
...Maureen Dowd writes of "their repugnant bargain...
...It was by the feminists' standards that Bill Clinton's behavior ascended from the seedy to the criminal...
...And possibly less so, as they lack credibility...
...If passes do not lead to rape, they are of no consequence...
...It was the feminists who, in their search for private dirt on Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, and John Tower, created the conflation of public and private from which the Clintons now suffer...
...What other fits have they feigned for their interests...
...His wife attended a lunch in Hill's honor and urged women with stories like hers to come forward...
...She is a victim, an "enabler," the worst kind of compliant wife, forced to stand up and make pleas for the bounder in public and suffer the insulting public musings of his friends...
...The mucking about in the private arena that feminists enjoyed so much in the cases of Tower and Thomas is now a shameful and degrading exercise, and ought to be outlawed...
...She has lost her real dream, to be a cultural idol, a woman for the ages, a trailblazer...
...Rosa DeLauro...
...No harassment law, no Paula Jones...
...Hillary has become the very model of the Victorian little woman, denying it happened, blaming the floozies, absolving her husband of blame...
...I abhor the use of a sexual issue in this way...
...What's a little harmless fun among friends...
...Why does she put up with it...
...What is she thinking now...
...But if the feminists' stake in Bill Clinton has always been marginal, their stake in his wife, and his marriage, has been great...
...Once, sisterhood was powerful and women were supported...
...She is of interest now only as a psychological puzzle: How can she stand it...
...And Hillary herself...
...Now, boys will be boys, or possibly goats, as in the case of our president...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 25
