Guest post by Grey
It was just a matter of time. First came the nutcracker; then they called her “sister Frigidaire,” crazy, grossly ruthless and a shrill, petulant, whiny spoiled brat.
Hillary Clinton is such a girl that her voice makes “a politically progressive man” fight the urge “to punch her in the face.”
It’s the cackle, you know? Bob Ellis compiled a list of what he doesn’t like about her:
Her towering frigidity, blazing hubris, bellowing mendacity, varying accent from region to region, her high school-standard acting and ceaseless haughty impersonation of Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown have got me properly simmering, and her confident thick-witted fist-in-the-face oratory, in a voice a Spectator columnist once well described as “a half-shout”, puts me in mind on some nights of the full moon like the one outside my window of the baleful, cruel contralto of my old lost love Bronwyn Bishop.
And that’s not even the worst of it:
She is a stranger to consistency, sincerity and (at a guess) oral sex, [...] and (it was wittily observed on CNN this week) knows in the end about as much about the inner workings of Executive Government as the White House pastry cook.
There it is, boiled down for everyone’s easy grasp: she drove Bill to Monica and can’t even bake you a pie to say she’s sorry.
And who can forget Chris Matthews?
Will Wheton, forever identified as snot-nosed Wesley Crusher (he was annoying, but at least he was smart), thinks Clinton is “the psycho ex-girlfriend of the democratic party,” but don’t call him sexist for saying that:
And allow me to just head something off right now that’s already come up on Twitter: I’m not sexist. This isn’t sexist. That’s a stupid straw man, and if you try to make that claim, I will point and laugh at you.
It’s not sexism, because there are so many valid reasons to hate her; after all, who can tell whether the criticism is due to her policies or to her sex? Who can indeed, because it’s apparently impossible to extricate one from the other.
Yesterday, Jake Tapper wrote about the new pattern: Clinton as Alex Forrest in ‘Fatal Attraction.’ Chris Rock, apparently, thought of it first: “Hillary’s not going to give up. She’s like Glenn Close in ‘Fatal Attraction.” Then came Rep. Cohen, an Obama backer, who answered a question about Sen. Clinton this way: “Glenn Close should have just stayed in the tub.” Yes: die, already. (Note: Big Tent Democrat has Rep. Cohen’s apology.) Tapper continues:
All were referring to Close playing the insane, deluded Alex Forrest — the wronged “other woman” who refuses to accept her fate and just go away, and becomes suicidal and homicidal. (And also rabbit-cidal.) [...]
The “Glenn Close in ‘Fatal Attraction’” analogy brings with it a whole carousel’s worth of baggage given the meme at the time of the release of “Fatal Attraction” that, as the late great Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker at the time, the “film is about men seeing feminists as witches.”
“Fatal Attraction,” Kael wrote, “parrots the aggressively angry, self-righteous statements that have become commonplaces of feminist fiction, and they’re so inappropriate to the circumstances that they’re proof she’s loco. They’re also the director Adrian Lyne’s and the screenwriter James Dearden’s hostile version of feminism.”
Are we sure it’s not just plain old sexism, and not Clinton-hate? Really? Not even when Chris Matthews provides the devilish horns and refers to her as a “She-Devil”?
I understand that sexism is a difficult concept for some people to grasp. Would it help to draw a cartoon with thought bubbles and pretty colors? It really should not be difficult to understand that all of this is inveterate, unapologetic sexism, never better illustrated by the fact that every time Sen. Clinton mentions the historic nature of her candidacy, she’s accused of playing “the gender card.” When she talks about being a mother, she’s accused of “pandering to women,” apparently because we’ve all lived in a cave and have never noticed Chelsea.
When statements of fact become the evidence the media and a good part of the blogosphere use to make their case that sexism has not affected Clinton’s candidacy and that it is she herself who has attempted to manipulate the conversation in order to deploy a “sympathy” vote, then one must wonder what else a woman must be put through before the facts become clear to everyone. For now, apparently, there just isn’t enough evidence.
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