July 24, 2005
An easy lesson about criticizing Hillary.
Naomi Wolf, riffing on Edward Klein's "The Truth About Hillary," makes an extended comparison of Hillary Clinton to the 19th century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Basically, there's a standard underhanded way to attack women, which was around in the 19th century and is still around today. There's an easy lesson here, and most respected writers have already learned it: if you want to attack a woman, don't taint your legitimate criticism with crap about how she's not feminine enough.
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...and the corrollary to the "unfeminine" critique is the frequent accusation that any successful or powerful woman is *secretly* a total bitch.
For example, even if every nasty story about Martha Stewart is true, if she were a man, her behavior--if it was even noticed--would be characterized as "aggressive" or "a laser-beam focus" or something similarly non-pergorative.
Other analogues to "bitch" are "idiot," "Alfred E. Neuman," and "chimp."
My guess is that Mr. Bush long ago internalized Wollstonecraft's wisdom: ''Those who are bold enough to advance before the age they live in,'' [Mary Wollstonecraft] wrote, ''must learn to brave censure. We ought not to be too anxious respecting the opinion of others.''
It's true, men are often called creeps and assholes. And Bush is called a chimp, idiot, etc.
What I'm talking about is criticisms aimed at powerful women that specifically target female traits.
Sorry, but criticisms that specifically target male traits don't surface nearly as often. Bush, for example, is not being criticized for his physical appearance or an effeminate affect.
I think both men and women are insulted by associated them with the opposite sex. But it is mainly in the case of women that displaying an urge to attain power brings out the insult. Men draw the insult when they do things associated with not being competitive and ambitious enough. So it's in the case of women that the problem is connected to power-seeking.
Most of the criticism of powerful women not being feminine enough seems to be coming from the left these days. The feminist idea of "feminine", of course -see Heather Mac Donald's takedown of Dahlia Lithwick in a recent NRO article:
"Real women do not separate their emotions from their reason. This is the central feminist insight propounded by legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick in a recent New York Times op-ed on Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Lithwick's op-ed demonstrates yet again that there are no more faithful proponents of the Victorian view of women than modern-day feminists...
...Justice O'Connor has a big problem, according to Slate editor Lithwick: She didn't act as a female justice should."
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/mac_donald200507050802.asp
So do we conclude that Dahlia Lithwick is not a respected writer? I personally don't find her worth reading, but the word "respected" seems to imply that there is a consensus to that effect.
I could point to the word "most" in "most respected writers," but really, the truth, as I see it, is that liberals so assume that everyone understands they are on the side of women and conservatives aren't, that they have a special dispensation to say sexist things about conservative women.
Above and beyond HRC's politics, I have some personel problems with her. Dick Morris, in his book on her, brought out a couple of things.
First, corruption. He pointed out that if the Clintons were involved in a sex scandal, it was Bill's, but if it involved either money or abuse of power, it was invariably Hillary.
On the money side, we have the commodities trading, Whitewater, billing irregularites, and all that stuff that disappeared when they moved out of the White House.
On the abuse of power side, we have pulling all those FBI files on Republicans and siccing the IRS on political opponents. Also, it has invariably been she who hired the PIs, invariably the best in the business, to, for example, handle the "Bimbo Eruption".
The second, alluded to above, is the parallel with Nixon, and that is her paranoia. She is the one in the family who, when things start going badly, thinks that everyone is out to get them. And that is one big thing she has in common with Nixon, the president she helped bring down. And, when she gets paranoid, that is when the abuse of power side comes out.
Obviously, a lot of this is through the eyes of Dick Morris. But much of it rings true, from all that we have learned of her.
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