Posterity may well remember the Hillary Clinton campaign as the nearest that a member of the female gender got to the nomination of a major political party.
But the episode will also be recalled for many other salient features. The first time that the wife of an ex-president leveraged her first-lady status into a senatorial seat and then a bid for the presidency. The first time that the candidate’s spouse (and campaigner-in-chief) was a person who had been disbarred for perjury and impeached for — among other things — obstruction of justice. The first time since the 1960s that a Democrat seeking the nomination implicitly relied on a ”Southern strategy” of appealing to the rancor of the ”white working class”.
The first time since the lachrymose Ed Muskie that a candidate’s eyes welled up with tears in New Hampshire. The first time that a woman candidate was married to a man who had been believably accused of rape and sexual harassment (see my book No One Left To Lie To). The first time that a candidate said of her half-African-American rival that he was not a member of the Muslim faith ”as far as I know”. The first time that the loser in the delegate count failed to congratulate or even acknowledge the winner on the night of his historic victory.
These are quite a lot of firsts to have accumulated. But now Senator Clinton’s partisans are crying foul and saying that the Democratic primary voters, incited by the media, rejected her only for something known as ”sexism”.
This indistinct and vague offence, portentously invoked in many recent articles and ”news analyses,” is supposed to be revealed (as a New York Times report on its own reporting so masochistically phrased it) in such outrageous ways as the following: ”The New York Times wrote about Mrs Clinton’s ‘cackle’.”
Other cited examples of the poison at work were Chris Matthews’s use of the term ”she devil” (which can only be a female equivalent of a ”he devil,” unless only the prefix ”he” can denote a devil), a remark by Mike Barnicle to the effect that Clinton was ”looking like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court” and more than one joke about the way in which her fanatical persistence and denial was reminiscent of the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction.
None of these things will bear the smallest comparison with racism, which must be strictly defined as the attribution of inferior characteristics to the members of a distinct ethnic group. One reason why the comparison almost never works is a very simple one: no anthropologist, ethnologist or geneticist of any reputation really believes that the human species is subdivided by race, whereas it would be a very incautious person who did not regard the human species as separated for reproductive purposes into two sexes or genders. One distinction is false, the other is real.
Replay some of Clinton’s less spontaneous moments of laughter during the Democratic debates. How would you describe them? To refer to them as merely mirthful would be to do violence to language.
The word ”cackle”, which is really an onomatopoeia, is easily the best, because it conveys what her awkward noise sounded like. It also perhaps conveys hens rather than roosters, but that’s exactly why our language has so many words for our great species distinction, which is the ability to laugh. The range from ”guffaw” to ”snigger” or ”giggle” is huge and some of it will imply ”male” just as some of it will imply ”schoolboy” or, as the case may be, ”schoolgirl”. So what?
Try the same test with the more edgy stuff, such as the Fatal Attraction gag. Is it being alleged that to be a stalker is to be a female? Not at all. As with serial killers, stalkers are almost always (and are almost always assumed by the police and the press) to be men. Perhaps this makes it appear to some people that it’s almost unnatural for a female to be a stalker.
But, then, how ”sexist” is that assumption? Going as far as it dared on the point, the same sternly disapproving New York Times report found the courage to say The Washington Post, in mentioning Clinton, had also alluded to ”her cleavage”. Living as we do in an age of the easily offended and the aggressively innocent, we were not regarded as sufficiently adult to be informed whether this cleavage was in the front or the back (something in me makes me hope very devoutly that it was not the latter).
But I think I see the emerging pattern. People who favour Clinton are allowed to stress her gender and sex at all times and to make a gigantic point of it for its own sake. They are even allowed to proclaim that she should be the president of the United States in time of war only because she would be the first vagina-possessing person to hold the job.
But Â- and here’s the catch — people who do not favour her are not even allowed to allude to the fact that she is female and has feminine characteristics. In this way we prepare our brave daughters and granddaughters and even disenfranchised grandmothers for a future that is sex-free and gender-neutral or, at any rate, something like that.
How pathetic can you get? When will we learn that there is more to political and social emancipation than the simple addition of the ”ism” suffix to any commonplace word?
In common with quite a lot of men, I have or have had a mother, wife, grandmother, mother-in-law, daughter — more or less everything female except a sister, which I wish I had had — and given all this feminine backup, I decline to be talked to in such a condescending fashion.
There are many ways in which to be a bad person and I don’t think that I would ever deny that the Y chromosome especially encodes some of these. I certainly don’t know any feminists who wouldn’t agree with me that some regrettable traits are forever associated with the male sex.
But in that event, it will not be easy for Clinton’s supporters to argue that she can’t be identified as womanly, or even as a woman, unless (or do I mean until?) the word ”woman” becomes more coterminous with the word ”saint” or ”angel” or the term ”nurturing person” than it is now.
Her whole self-pitying campaign, I mean to say, has retarded and infantilised the political process and has used the increasingly empty term ”sexism” to mask the defeat of one of the nastiest and most bigoted candidacies in modern history.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate Magazine, where this column originally appeared