Men

by Laura Kipnis

  None of this is exactly a testimonial to his deep self-acuity. Or very attractive propensities in a man, it must be said. Though maybe he’s unconsciously identifying when he writes that Hillary had “always thought of herself as an ugly duckling,” and particularly hated her body, which caused her to neglect her personal appearance as a young woman, and go around dressed like a hippie in shapeless clothes, and with hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed for a month. Or secretly commiserating about her feeling “so hopelessly unattractive that she did not bother to shave her legs and underarms, and deliberately dressed badly so she would not have to compete with more attractive women in a contest she could not possibly win.” I feel compelled to note, if we’re going down this path, that—having seen a few photos of the author—this is a man who can’t have felt entirely secure about his competitive mettle on this score either.

  Hillary’s physicality really does loom large for her biographers. Tyrrell too spends many passages mocking her youthful hairdos, down to the thick eyebrows, which once “would have collected coal dust in a Welsh mining village.” In other words, she’s an overly hairy woman, in addition to everything else. Hairdo, eyebrows—thankfully we’re not privy to data on the condition of her bikini line. 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.” He also concedes that Hillary “flirts well” and has evolved into “a handsome woman.” Klein gets in a few digs on this point himself, as you’d expect, benevolently mentioning that Hillary’s the kind of homely woman whose looks have improved with age, then trotting out an anonymous medical expert to testify that she’s been “Botoxed to the hilt.”

  You get the feeling that outsized female personalities both repel and attract Klein: note that his previous biographical subject was Jacqueline Onassis, another woman with a charismatic straying husband, by the way. Klein is one of those guys who snidely notes the cubic poundage of any oversized woman in the vicinity: Monica Lewinsky (who “had gained a lot of weight” and “was bursting the seams of her thin, sleeveless summer dress”), Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Evelyn Lieberman (“overweight”), and his Arkansas chief of staff Betsey Wright (“heavyset”), not to mention Hillary herself, whom Klein refers to throughout his book by the nickname “the Big Girl.” But hold on—it turns out there’s a gynecological explanation for those lumpy legs and ankles, since Klein quotes yet another “anonymous medical authority,” who speculates that Hillary may have contracted an obstetric infection after giving birth to Chelsea that resulted in chronic lymphedema, a condition that causes “gross swelling in the legs and feet.” Forgetting that this diagnosis is utterly speculative (and as far as I can tell, nowhere else confirmed), Klein goes on to inform us that lymphedema contributed to Hillary’s pre-existing self-image issues, observing that she tried to cover up the alleged lumpiness with wide-legged pants. (Was she supposed to wear leggings on the campaign trail?) You have to give Klein credit: it’s not every biographer who approaches his subject with calipers and a speculum. It’s a clammy job, but I guess someone had to do it.

  No, Hillary doesn’t elicit the best in her foes. On the sexual creepiness meter, Klein gets some stiff competition from Carl Limbacher, who writes for the far-right news outlet NewsMax and is the author of Hillary’s Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton’s Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House. Here’s another biographer a little too keen to nose out the truth about Hillary’s sexuality. In fact, Limbacher comes up with an even darker picture than Klein’s if that’s possible: Bill Clinton is a predator, Hillary digs it, and this is the key that unlocks her character. If Hillary didn’t literally hold down the victims while Bill did the deed, she was complicit nonetheless—“a victimizer who actually enabled her husband’s predations,” since “a woman with half the intellect of Hillary Clinton would understand that she’s married to a ravenous sexual predator at best—a brutal serial rapist at worst.” At least he compliments her intellect. I’m dying to know what Limbacher imagines Hillary’s wearing when he fantasizes about her in the henchwoman-to-rape role—her Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS outfit or the navy-blue pantsuit.

  But Hillary really only stuck with Bill because he was her springboard to power—or wait, maybe it was because “her state of denial was so extreme as to suggest some sort of psychological impairment.” Then he says that Hillary had to suppress evidence of Bill’s sex life, especially any suspicion that he liked rough sex, as some of his accusers implied, because this might “raise questions about her own private peccadilloes.” It’s not entirely clear what “peccadilloes” Limbacher is referring to, though elsewhere he says insinuatingly that Vince Foster was Hillary’s “intimate friend.” He forgets to offer any evidence.

  * * *

  As we see, the problem for Hillary’s biographers isn’t that a woman’s aspiring to be president—none of them mount an actual argument against women as presidential candidates. The problem is that Hillary’s a deformed woman. She’s a sadist, a victim, asexual, a dyke—maybe all at once. Taking the measure of Hillary’s perverted femininity also preoccupies John Podhoretz in Can She Be Stopped: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless … On the one hand, Podhoretz wants to like Hillary, even though he finds her tough to warm up to as a woman: she never figured out what to do with her hair and clothes, in his diagnosis, she isn’t a raving beauty, and her manner is almost pathologically unsexy. Interestingly, Podhoretz, who tries to present himself as a reasonable guy (in this group the bar is set pretty low), thinks this anti-feminine quality may actually work in her favor: being “neither girlish nor womanly” with a “hard to describe style” could be the perfect blend for the first woman president, he muses, since a president has to be a little scary, not seem emotional—basically she should be an unlikable bitch. “And Hillary is a bitch.”3 Feigning worry that saying this kind of thing makes him sound sexist—while clearly admiring himself for saying it—he explains that a woman presidential candidate needs to show she can be manly, and if any woman politician can pass for a tough guy, it’s Hillary. This scares him, though in a sweaty, enthralled sort of way. Call him Mr. Conflicted.

  If Podhoretz is all over the map about Hillary, no doubt he has his reasons. As with his fellow biographers, we have reason to believe that his own intimate relations are not without their complications, especially when it comes to women and politics. For one thing he’s a neocon currently married to a northern liberal, as he himself reveals in the Hillary bio. However, those who pay attention to such things may recall his previous marriage to a more like-minded Beltway conservative following a whirlwind ten-day courtship, during which Podhoretz declared his love for his new amour in his Weekly Standard column (“In her calm, there is the permanence I seek”). Unfortunately, the permanence proved short-lived—the relationship unraveled rather publicly after a brief three months.

  But maybe inner maelstroms come with the territory when Mom is the ultra-conservative doyenne and fiery anti-feminist Midge Decter, author of numerous books denouncing the women’s movement and the dupes who fell for it. And Dad is the notoriously pugnacious neocon Norman. When Podhoretz says, incoherently, that Hillary had an “easy path due in part to feminism,” he sounds like the dutiful son, channeling Midge. What mother could ask for more? But things can’t have been easy for John: between the powerhouse mom, his own romantic impetuosities and flip-flops, and the politically strange-bedfellows current marriage (though I’m sure they’re a lovely couple), Podhoretz has more than his share of family baggage when it comes to love and politics. As has Hillary herself, needless to say—in a better world the two of them could have a fascinating heart-to-heart on the subject.

  Instead, Podhoretz spends a good chunk of his book proffering weird advice to Hillary on how to position herself
to win the election, even while bashing her senseless at every turn. Example: to avoid being upstaged by Bill, Hillary should treat him “as though he were her father—there to provide her with emotional support and little else.” Here we pause to note that Podhoretz is someone whose career has always been upstaged by his more famous father. How can the reader keep her footing amidst this mad swirl of relatives, husbands, ambitions, and projections?

  By the way, R. Emmett Tyrrell has some free advice for Hillary too: she should get herself a divorce, and pronto. Since Bill is not only goatish but also “ithyphallic” (I had to look that up too), Hillary could present herself to women voters as “a victim of the male penile imperative,” then start dating again. I imagine Tyrrell is so pro-divorce because his own life improved so dramatically following one, especially on the penile imperative front. His fans will doubtless recall Tyrrell’s bubbly reports about life as a swinging bachelor, picking up “terrific co-eds” at various right-wing think-tank shindigs, and not returning home alone. Yes, conservatives do score, as Tyrrell—who charges Hillary with having been too self-disclosing in her memoir Living History—makes sure to let us know. His preference is for the “soignée” and “physiologically well-appointed,” though unfortunately one of his soignée dates is mistaken for a hooker when he drops by a conservative gathering at the Lehrman Institute on his way to Au Club, a then-happening Manhattan nightspot. (A friend explains to Tyrrell that when a conservative shows up somewhere with a beautiful woman, he’s usually paying by the hour.)

  Tyrrell has actually been quite the gallant about aging female Republicans in the past, waxing lyrical about right-wing sex kitten Phyllis Schlafly’s foxiness and Nancy Reagan’s large beautiful eyes, both of whom are perhaps a quarter century his senior—to which one can only say, “You go, Bob.”

  But could he ever go for a Democrat? As most agree, Hillary’s aging well, and Tyrrell hasn’t been entirely critical. On the plus side, she reminds him of Madame Mao, the “white boned demon” who was never more dangerous than when wearing a seductive guise, and Tyrrell is on record as a man who likes a seductive guise. However, in an exceedingly strange passage toward the end of the book, we learn that Hillary’s ultimate dream is to be commandant of a “national Cambodian re-education camp for anyone caught wearing an Adam Smith necktie or scarf.” Or perhaps it’s also an extermination camp, since he adds: “Welcome to Camp Hillary. Please remove your glasses and deposit them on the heap. (Was that a flash of gold I saw in your teeth?)” Yes, it’s off to the killing fields for Tyrrell and his kind—having received her political education at the feet of Pol Pot, it’s definitely curtains for the bourgeois enemy once Hillary takes the reins. I think Tyrrell means all this to be witty. He concludes by telling readers he’s “taking the high road, since hatred is an acid on the soul.”

  Here we’ve entered the realm of male hysteria, where reason and intellect go to die, though Tyrrell can be a hoot for those who find this kind of thing entertaining.

  Speaking of male hysteria brings us to the peculiar case of Tyrrell’s protégé at the American Spectator, David Brock, and his biography The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. Except in this case the acorn does fall far from the tree. After Brook received a million-dollar book advance to write a smear job on Hillary similar to the one he’d previously performed on Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill (Brock was famously the author of the “a bit nutty and a bit slutty” line about Hill), a strange thing happened when he tried to plunge the dagger again. Somehow he couldn’t. Sure there was the stuff about the sixties radicalism that Hillary never really abandoned, including a catty analysis of her college wardrobe. And like the rest, he spends countless pages enumerating her bodily crimes and misdemeanors: given her thick legs, she adopted the sort of “loose-fitting, flowing pants favored by the Viet Cong” (just call her Ho Chi Rodham); along with these, she sported white socks and sandals (here, even I must protest), wore no makeup, piled her hair on top of her head, and “came from the ‘look-like-shit school of feminism.’” Even once ensconced in the professional world, she cut a “comic figure” with her hair fried into an Orphan Annie perm and a “huge eyebrow across her forehead that looked like a giant caterpillar.”

  But more of the time it’s an intermittently compassionate portrait of a gawky, brainy, well-intentioned midwestern girl swept off her feet by a charismatic southern charmer who migrated to the backwaters of Arkansas—or Dogpatch, as Brock likes to call it—to advance Bill’s political fortunes, sacrificing herself and her principles for love. Bill repaid her by having sex with everyone in sight. But Hillary wasn’t a phony, and shouldn’t have had to play the part to advance Bill’s career, Brock insists—he even says that her physical appearance should never have become a political issue, notwithstanding the amount of time he devotes to cataloguing it.

  One of the fascinating aspects of Brock’s employment situation was that he happens to be gay and the Spectator happens to regularly fulminate against gay rights, as did his yappy boss Tyrrell whenever given the chance. When Brock speculates that Hillary might have been “perversely drawn to the rejection implied by Bill’s philandering,” willing to accept compromises and humiliation in the sexual arena because of the greater good she and Bill could together accomplish, Brock—who’d once thrown a gala party to celebrate the hundredth day of Newt Gingrich’s anti-gay Contract with America—could have been describing his own career arc too. The big problem for him was that he ended up identifying with Hillary when he was supposed to be vilifying her, and it turned his life upside down. Some mysterious alchemy took place in the course of his writing this book: instead of exposing Hillary to the world, she exposed Brock to himself. The result was a stormy breakup with his pals on the Right: he became persona non grata in his former circles, or maybe he dropped them first.

  But he and Hillary had some sort of imaginary bond, at least in Brock’s imagination. He describes waiting in line for several hours at a bookstore for Hillary to sign his copy of It Takes a Village, and where he hoped to stage their first face-to-face meeting. The question on his mind, he confesses, is what she thinks of him. No doubt it’s the private question every biographer entertains at some point about his subject. But when he reaches the head of the line, faces up to the real Hillary rather than the imaginary one, identifies himself and asks when he could have an interview, Hillary’s wry reply is “Probably never.”4

  * * *

  “All biography is ultimately fiction,” Bernard Malamud wrote in Dubin’s Lives, his novel about a biographer. What would he have said about this particular collection of writers: all biography is ultimately a Rorschach test? The various Hillaries that emerge are fictive enough, yet clearly they have some 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.

  A clue comes our way from Dorothy Dinnerstein, who wrote some years ago in The Mermaid and the Minotaur of the “human malaise” in our current sexual arrangements—namely, the arrangement where men rule the world and women rule over childhood, and mothers are the “first despots” in our lives. To her haters, Hillary is nothing if not a would-be despot making an illegitimate grab for power. She wants to run the world!

  Now, I’d never say that men who hate Hillary are treating her like a bad mother, since it would sound like a huge cliché. But according to Dinnerstein, the psychological origin of misogyny is simply the need for mother-raised humans to overthrow the residues of early female dominion. Or to put it another way, men aren’t going to give up ruling the world until women stop ruling over childhood, meaning that if political power is ever really
going to be reapportioned between the sexes, child rearing would have to be reapportioned too. For the most part, this has yet to happen, meaning that it’s not hard to see why the prospect of women ruling both spheres, a woman with her finger on the button of world destruction and in command of the home, prompts such massive anxiety.

  Power isn’t a geopolitical matter alone. It inheres in the very experience of being ruled—and that’s what being a citizen means. But we were also all children once, who got pushed around by big despots with their own agendas for us. Too often it can seem like adulthood is just one long reprise, with a slightly larger cast of characters. As to how this plays out in terms of political psychology—well, that’s what’s being renegotiated at the moment, in a predictably bumpy way.

  Or is it really something about Hillary in particular? It’s hard to deny that for this collection of men, the very sight of her, ankles to hair, just puts them in a dither. What female colossus is this they’re all flailing at, what oversized mythic figure? She’s monstrous, Gorgon-like; not feminine enough, or, conversely, deploying feminine wiles to further her nefarious ambitions. She’s their Medusa—who had her own hairstyle issues, let’s recall. Her snakelike hair made men stiff with terror—turned them to stone, as Freud aptly put it in an essay about male anxiety. So stiff, in fact, that images of Medusa’s decapitated head were often emblazoned on Greek shields as a reassuring emblem for soldiers going to war.

  If only Hillary could have the same salutary effect on today’s embattled men! Or maybe that’s the point of these slashing biographical portraits—cut her down to size and stiffen your own … resolve? What’s clear is that the specter of loss looms large for these men of the Right: a woman has run (and will probably run again) for president, and the small matter of who’s in charge of the world and how power is divided between the sexes is up for grabs.