2016's Manifest Misogyny

By Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker

16 October 16

At the second Presidential debate, Trump declared Clinton a fighter. But what she’s had to fight all along is sexism like his.

t the end of the second Presidential debate, on October 9th, in St. Louis, when an audience member asked if each candidate could say something positive about the other, Donald Trump declared Hillary Clinton a fighter: “She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up.” It was a surprising admission—Trump had spent the previous several weeks castigating Clinton for her weakness, her lack of “stamina”—and one of the few unassailably true things he said all evening.

Plenty of the attacks levelled against Clinton over the years have been policy-oriented and substantive, stemming from her mishandling of health-care reform during her husband’s first Administration, or from her initial support for the war in Iraq, or from her use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State—criticisms that could have been lobbed in the same terms at a male politician of similar ambition. But much of what Clinton has had to battle, for decades, is sexism. She has not, as Trump noted, given up, but the fight has been a wearying spectacle, and one that may explain, at least in part, why people complain of Hillary Clinton fatigue.

When Patricia Schroeder, the former Democratic U.S. representative from Colorado, was campaigning in the nineteen-eighties, she was asked whether she was “running as a woman.” She replied, “Do I have a choice?” Clinton has certainly never had a choice; she has been scrutinized and judged as a woman in every possible way from the moment she appeared on the national stage. She’s been criticized for using her maiden name, for her decision to continue working as a lawyer after her husband became governor of Arkansas, and for her lack of interest in cookie baking—not to mention for her hair, her ankles, her clothes, her smile, her laugh, and her voice. The conspiracy theories about the Clintons often partook of old fears and suspicions regarding women: that Hillary was a lesbian; that she was a Lady Macbeth, responsible for the murder of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. (Trump has revived that rumor, calling Foster’s death, a suicide, “very fishy.”) And some would not accept her as a genuine icon of female empowerment, because she had obtained her national standing as an adjunct to her husband, and stood by him after it became clear that he had been having sex with a twenty-two-year-old White House intern and lied about it.

It’s always been dispiriting to see the latent resentments that Clinton’s political ambitions brought forth—she’s like one of those chemical solutions which make invisible writing manifest, only to reveal a message that we’d rather had remained hidden. In 2007, during the Presidential-primary campaigns, when she was the presumptive Democratic nominee, a supporter of Senator John McCain, the eventual Republican nominee, asked him at a gathering in South Carolina, “How do we beat the bitch?” McCain looked fleetingly uncomfortable, then called it an “excellent question.” The terms “bitch” and “witch,” and the associations they stir up, are slurs that Clinton’s detractors have resorted to freely. The political commentator Tucker Carlson said of Clinton, “Something about her feels castrating.” Rush Limbaugh asked his listeners, “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?” Bumper stickers appeared bearing slogans such as “KFC Hillary Meal Deal: Two Fat Thighs, Two Small Breasts and a Bunch of Left Wings” and “Even Bill Doesn’t Want Me.”

During Clinton’s lifetime, institutionalized discrimination against women has retreated markedly. So has the routine sexism that assumes that a woman can’t, by definition, do a given job as well as a man, or that she shouldn’t be working outside the home at all. But what lingers is misogyny—the kind of hate- and fear-filled objectification of women that flourishes in corners of the Internet, and in the rhetoric of Trump and some of his supporters. It turns out that what some of them seemed to have meant when they said they were tired of being politically correct was that they were tired of addressing others with a modicum of respect. Trump encourages people at his rallies to chant “Lock her up!”—in the second debate, he vowed to do just that if elected. Such rhetoric, in its vulgarity and its rawness, is a radical break from conservative norms. Mitt Romney and Ronald Reagan are not exactly celebrated as feminists, but it’s impossible to imagine either of them publicly invoking a newswoman’s menstrual period, or calling women “fat pigs,” or acquiescing to a request from Howard Stern to refer to his daughter as a “piece of ass.”

Trump has been defending the boasts he made on the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape—that, as a “star,” he could “do anything” to women—by saying they were just words. That does not seem to have been the case: in the past week, a number of women have come forward with allegations that Trump groped or kissed them without their consent. But, in any event, words do matter, and Trump’s words about women, immigrants, and Muslims incite bigotry and fear. As Michelle Obama told a Clinton rally in New Hampshire last week, this is a campaign characterized by “language that has been painful for so many of us, not just as women, but as parents trying to protect our children and raise them to be caring, respectful adults, and as citizens who think that our nation’s leaders should meet basic standards of human decency.”

Clinton’s reputation has also been prone to another unfortunate pattern: she was often more popular when she was seen to be suffering a traditionally feminine humiliation. As First Lady, her approval ratings rose after the Monica Lewinsky revelations and during Kenneth Starr’s investigation of them. In 2008, many people rallied to her after she was excoriated for seeming to tear up at a campaign event. Trump was clearly seeking to humiliate Clinton by inviting women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment or assault to be his guests at the second debate. But this time it felt like she was long past embarrassment of the sort he was trying to induce—the stakes were too high, and Trump’s insults to women too categorical.

There’s something both grotesque and bracing about the confrontation between Clinton, with her disciplined professionalism, and Trump, with his increasingly frenzied assertions of male prerogative. Like the female protagonist of a quest narrative—or, perhaps, of a dystopian fantasy—Clinton has made it through all her challenges to face the bull-headed Minotaur of sexism at the end of the maze.