Post on the Clintons while awaiting the delivery of Harry Potter at Pandagon: Digby asks a question that I think, now that I’ve had my coffee, I can answer.
But I think what surprises me the most is the fact that Washington DC is still fascinated by Clintons’ sexuality at all. They are 60 year old’s, fergawdsake. I say this as a person of a certain age myself, so I don’t mean to imply that they are not sexual beings, but it seems odd to me that they still get this particular kind of attention. Big Bill has had a quadruple bypass and practically all he talks about these days is his low cholesterol diet. Hillary is the busiest woman in the world — she’s running for president. At this point in their long and accomplished lives, sex is, by far, the least interesting thing about them — as is true for most 60 year olds.
As it happens, they both look as good as they ever have in their lives (they do love campaigning) and they seem in robust good health and good spirits. Hillary, in particular, looks just great these days. But they are not sex-symbols (not even Bill, who is about ten years past his Kissingerian “power is an aphrodisiac” appeal.) So this ongoing obsession with the sexuality of Bill and Hillary Clinton has gone way beyond the mere sophomoric, tabloid obsessions of yesteryear and has morphed into some kind of kinky beltway fetish.
First of all, they are sex symbols; what pushes someone into “sex symbol” status is often not just how hot he or she is, but whether or not they capture a certain sexual fascination, and the Clintons do. But the question at hand is why. I think it’s two things. The first, more minor reason, is that both of the Clintons have far more sexual charisma than D.C. watchers are used to. People readily admit it of Bill Clinton, except maybe the few delusional Clinton-haters, but not so much of Hillary Clinton. But she’s always been sexy, even when she dresses dowdily, because she carries herself with a certain self-assuredness. I think all the obsessing about her headbands and ankle size has been an attempt to tear apart this confidence, but it basically failed, because instead of really submitting to the humiliating narrative of the nerd who whips off her glasses and lets down her hair and finally becomes an acceptable sex object, Clinton just learned that nice clothes and hair can be bought. You don’t get the impression that she really worries too much about her clothes in the way a woman is supposed to, which is in a way that distracts from more important issues. Paid for, done. She has better things to do, so she still has a lot of her charisma.
But in the end, it’s not them as individuals that draws such fascination. It’s the very existence of their marriage, which offends the reactionary story about the fate of women who dare embrace feminism and demand to be respected as full human beings, even by their husbands. Believe me, I get the story emailed to me by various misogynists all the time, who recite it to me like a mantra: No man could ever want you, women who aren’t obsequious are unloveable, etc. The Clintons not only give lie to that myth, they basically blow it apart. Hillary Clinton didn’t run off every man in sight with her intense intellect and her feminist ideas. On the contrary, she married the D.C. equivalent of the homecoming king, the sexiest guy in the class. (Considering how the beltway journalism is soooooo high schoolish, I think the metaphor applies.) And it wasn’t an accident. Not only was he attracted to her mind (women’s brains are sexy, oh noes!), but he is not crippled into picking someone more subservient to shore up his ego. The Clinton marriage makes every male politician who’s got the standard-issue glazed-eye, no-thought political wife look small-minded, petty, like they can’t handle living with their intellectual equals.
Even the infidelity with Monica Lewinsky failed to create the hoped-for counter-narrative that Bill Clinton secretly doesn’t love his brainy wife. I read the Starr report at the time, figuring it would be a tale of some ongoing, lust-filled affair and it ended up reading as the story of a rather half-hearted infidelity, indulged more for novelty’s sake than out of desperation. It basically established that Bill Clinton cheats not because he’s dissatisfied at home, but because he’s got a taste for novelty, which is more common than not, but doesn’t undermine the notion that he loves his wife and is attracted to her. I think over time, it ended up reinforcing the ugly truth the Heathers-media hates, which is that yes, the Clinton marriage is real, and yes, brainy women can be sexy.
Now, for a lot of us, the idea of a couple that is (gasp!) mutually supportive, where they’re both attracted to each other intellectually, is commonplace. But for some reason, it’s still treated as an unheard-of novelty in the news media. Think of poor Maureen Dowd, who seems to really believe that it’s her ambition and not her choice in men that has left her single in middle age. The novelty of the Clinton marriage endures; maybe Barack and Michelle Obama will be spared some of the freak show treatment if he wins the nomination, having had the path carved out for them by the Clintons.
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