Hi, I'm Hillary Clinton. But tonight, in honor of the WWE, you can call me Hill-Rod. This election is starting to feel a lot like "King of the Ring." The only difference? The last man standing may just be a woman. -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, from her opening monologue prior to a World Wrestling Entertainment "joke" match between Clinton and Obama look-alikes.
What has become disturbingly evident in the last few months of the primary campaign is that Hillary Clinton is not merely carrying the torch of the "old politics." She is also the ironic bearer of the old masculinity, a knuckle-dragging version of manhood that is defined in terms of domination. In this view, "the man" is whoever can stick it to the other. It is the one who can eviscerate his or her enemy most savagely and with the least remorse. It is the one on top in a zero-sum world. In this curious mutation of patriarchy, anatomy is not destiny. But being a dick is.
Much is made of the penis. We talk about how to keep it hard, how to make it bigger, and who envies it. The public secret we keep from ourselves -- but at a deep level understand -- is that it is not the penis that matters most. That modest organ is, after all, vulnerable and easily deflated. The phallus is what most men and even some women in a male dominant culture covet, envy, think they possess, fear losing, or try to get back (usually, each of these at different times). In our still patriarchal world, this symbol, in blatant or subtle forms, shows up in our dreams, editorial cartoons, commercials, and political ads. It is often used to represent absolute domination, insensate hardness, omnipotence, unlimited wealth, invulnerability, untrammeled growth, or freedom from all dependency - and sometimes all of these unattainable qualities.
The problem, of course, is that this ancient archetypal monolith of manhood is an illusion. Nobody has one; it only exists if someone sees it. In spite of being an evanescent hallucination, political consultants spend much of their time trying to paint a phallus on their candidate. A line from the Tom Waits song "Step Right Up" could be read as a concise description of what a successful campaign does: "It gives you an erection. It wins the election."
In most electoral contests, the question is often "who's the man?" And the manner in which political manhood gets displayed is tiresomely predictable: macho chest beating, posing with the fetish objects of anxious masculinity (trucks, big machines, and even bigger weapons), humiliating your opponent with castrating insults, calling into question his or her ability to be tough, ruthless, and merciless with the designated enemy of the moment -- in short, phallic strutting. These are the bread and butter performances that keep the 24-hour cable infotainment channels in business, and frequently eclipse the issues of the day.
There is an astonishing irony in Senator Clinton flashing her "Hill-Rod," and striking poses that, in the admiring words of North Carolina Governor Mike Easley, make "Rocky Balboa look like a pansy." During her career as First Lady, Mrs. Clinton was widely reviled by her conservative detractors as a gender outlaw. Being smart, outspoken, a savvy investor, a policy wonk, and a woman who insisted on an egalitarian relationship with her husband, she was seen as a profound threat, a wife who did not know her proper (i.e., subordinate) place.
These sentiments got represented in numerous editorial cartoons that depicted her in male drag, using a men's urinal, and as a riding-crop-wielding dominatrix. Slick Times, a right wing humor magazine, featured jokes about her preferred method of birth control (vasectomy) and the reason she doesn't wear miniskirts ("so her balls won't show"). The cover of the October 1995 issue of Spy Magazine even retouched a photo of her to depict a discernible penile bulge under her clothing. This image accompanied an investigative article on her "dubious investments" that "performed extremely well." The headline, "Hillary's Big Secret," in equating the penis with money, revealed the phallic meaning her powerful financial dealings had for the authors, as well as for many of her conservative male critics.
During this same period images abounded of Bill Clinton as castrated, cross-dressing, feminized, and physically dominated and abused by his powerful wife. Interestingly, once the Monica Lewinsky scandal unfolded, things reversed. He was portrayed in cartoons and late night TV comedy monologues as studly, powerful, and potent. Hillary, now the wounded women standing by her man, was widely depicted in sympathic and stereotypically feminine terms. What may surprise many is that the approval ratings for both the President and the First Lady soared following the scandal. Many citizens, especially men, seemed relieved to see the gender order restored, and the phallus returned to our male leader. But if, unlike the lowly but attached penis, the phallus has a tendency to move around, this can open up opportunities for female politicians to overcome the still lingering impediments of misogynist bigotry. Gender, our cultural experiences tell us, is really only loosely associated with bodies, not tethered to them.
What could not be tolerated in Hillary the political wife turns out to be a significant advantage for Hillary the politician, or so her campaign managers seem to believe. In fact, Senator Clinton appears to have been positioning herself early on to wield the political phallus. Her vote for the Iraq war resolution seems less a mistake based on inaccurate information -- the data was readily available to her antiwar peers in the Senate, not to mention many national security scholars, as well as millions of ordinary Americans -- than a political calculation. She wanted to show her "testicular fortitude," as a supportive labor leader recently gushed at a campaign rally. It's the same reason "fight" has become her favorite verb. Last week she autographed a pair of red boxing gloves at a rally. Perhaps the most disturbing gesture of macho posturing has been her repeated threat to "obliterate" Iran if that nation's leaders attack Israel. Given that the Iranian people are unable to really make their leaders accountable, her threat is not only a genocidal one, but, were she to act on it, would constitute collective punishment.
Hillary Clinton seems not only willing to annihilate Iranians for political gain. She also appears happy to depopulate the Democratic Party in order to ensure her nomination. As I write this, news outlets are revealing her plans for what Thomas Edsall is calling the "nuclear option." In other words, she intends to use her influence on the members of the party's Rules and Bylaws Committee to force the votes that were gathered in the "outlaw" primaries of Florida and Michigan to be counted.
Some may ask a very reasonable feminist question that could challenge this argument: why must toughness, Machiavellianism, combativeness, or even swaggering bellicosity be viewed as masculine? They certainly needn't. But it is, as we have seen, Hillary Clinton herself, along with her surrogates, who have explicitly gendered those traits in the campaign. As the oleaginous Clinton loyalist, James Carville, has said, if Mrs. Clinton gave Obama one of her testicles, "they'd both have two."
What is so interesting and illuminating is that Hillary Clinton is not just engaging in a performance of martial hypermasculinity as a way of shoring up both her phallic and national security credentials. She is also donning the mantel of working class hero, aping every conceivable stereotype of white blue-collar manhood -- from beer swilling to gun toting to preening pugilism -- and, where possible, doing so from the back of a pickup truck. It must be said, however, unlike the many multimillionaire Republican men in power, such as George W. Bush and John McCain, she plays the good ole boy with convincing if increasingly unhinged gusto. Perhaps this is because men in politics so often make the worst male impersonators.
But beyond that, Hillary Clinton has long revealed an intuitive talent for masquerade, an ability to lose herself in whatever role a situation required. Her instincts as a protean politician enabled her to seamlessly shift from feminist intellectual and powerhouse lawyer deriding stay-at-home cookie bakers, to the betrayed housewife still loyal to her man, and beaming with pride over her cookie recipe. She can play the verklempt victim of male critics one moment, and a macho political predator the next. On a dime Senator Clinton can morph from a well informed authority on the nuances of economic policy to a we-don't-need-no-stinkin'-economists anti-intellectualism in response to the near unanimity of expert opinion criticizing her bogus gas tax "holiday" scheme.
Her double masquerade of gender and class has been so compelling to some working class male voters because it taps into a deep vein in the American collective political unconscious that dates from the founding of our nation, and one that Republicans have understood and effectively exploited for decades. In the 1840 presidential campaign, Martin Van Buren said his opponent, William Henry Harrison, was "a man who wore corsets, put cologne on his whiskers, slept on French beds, rode in a British coach, and ate with golden spoons from silver plates." Here in this example of early negative campaigning we have a clear illustration of the link American men have always made between effeminacy and aristocratic manners and privilege. It was, after all, George H. W. Bush's patrician patois and upper class mannerisms that led Newsweek in 1988 to suggest his greatest political vulnerability was "the wimp factor," and thereby coin a term that would become a permanent part of our political lexicon. Not only did this feminine attribution haunt the public career of Bush 41, Bush 43, as many have observed, has struggled to defend against and compensate for this legacy.
More recently, we have the example of Barack Obama, the black candidate raised by a poor single mother, being called an "elitist" because of his grace, equanimity, intellect, dismal bowling performance, and reluctance to completely inhale his Philly cheese-steak. This, along with his willingness to negotiate with enemies, we are told, should lead us to question whether he's man enough to be commander in chief. The Clinton crew, along with their chief ally, John McCain, have made strenuous efforts to define Obama as a cosseted and effeminate toff, whose pretty words only confirm his deficient manhood, and thereby his unfitness to lead the nation. When you think about it, Clinton's complaint against her opponent -- "you always want to talk" -- sounds oddly like the familiar kvetch that so many emotionally constricted sexist husbands direct at their more relational spouses.
In applying the GOP approach to feminizing male opponents, and directing class resentment away from the real elites, Hillary Clinton has gone beyond her more familiar adoption of the ruthless, sociopathic say-anything, dirty tricks politics of her erstwhile Rovian right wing enemies. She is reinforcing the conservative attempt to equate manhood with belligerence and predation. In addition, she is trotting out the well worn but still effective propaganda technique employed by this country's actual ruling oligarchy of wealth -- reducing class to personal style, taste, or the specific products people consume (brie versus Velveeta). Those who actually own or wield control over our shared resources are rendered invisible in this rhetorical sleight of hand.
Barack Obama stands in stark contrast to the attitude of the Clinton campaign. His guiding political ethos has always been one of bridging but not overlooking divisions, while privileging dialogue, debate, and negotiation over conquest. This is not only a new politics. It is a new masculinity, one that is inclusive of those panhuman qualities previously disowned and projected onto women. It remains to be seen if Hillary Clinton, with her Hobbesian hard-on, will succeed in turning the Denver convention into a war of all against all. If so, the life span of the Democratic Party may be nasty, brutish, and short.
Stephen J. Ducat, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist from the San Francisco Bay Area, and has published widely on the psychology of politics. His most recent book is The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity.
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DISGUSTING!!! YOUR ARTICLE SHOULD HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN A SEX MANUAL!
Ductat's column is brilliant, thoughtful, well-reasonsed, smart, interesting.....just what commentary should be. And provocative to boot. Made me think and made me realize some of my problems with this campaign are indeed rooted in all the swaggering, posturing, and name calling. Excellent job. Required reading. But it is clear that even those who DID read it, think it is all about Hillary when it is clearly not:: It is about perception, group psychology, pandering, name-calling, and how shallow-minded too many people in this country are when it comes to matters of personality. Hillary think she needs to act tough and the public, for the most part, eats it up, and the Republicans make fun of Barack (with Hillary adding her two cents) for being not man enough. Good Lord....how can anyone win in this situation? Why is being thoughtful and smart elitest? Why can't women be tough without subverting their own interests by reverting to male versions of toughness. We have an awfully long way to go.
And this is exactly what is so humorous about those women who want to vote for Hellary simply because she is a woman! She is too insecure to behave like a woman; she feels she can win only if she mimics a male. And she does it so well!!!!! No thanks, I'll wait until a woman comes along who is qualified and who can behave like a woman. Enough already with cowboy manners in D.C.
Remember when Gloria Steinem, in a NY Times op-ed piece, told us we should vote for Hillary because she doesn't have to prove her masculinity?
ImHotep PhD Ducat and forum contributors,
Why is that over the past eight years, I have never seen, or heard a psychologist like yourself, or a psychiatrist like Dr. Francis Cress Welsing speak out in the media as to the mental health of the Bush regime, and all those people who support it devilish policies?
Is it mentally to think and behave in that manner?
How about people who get on TV and state that "They reserve the right to attack any Nation without the approval of the UN..if they have a gut feeling that some Nation is out to get us."
Or that "GOD told them to do these evil things"
What about people who call Barack flawed because he cannot get blue collars workers to vote for him?
Why are they calling Barack flawed when the truth is that these so called "Blue collar workers" are hard core anti-Black White Supremacists?
Why do Caucasians always have to shift the blame from their attitudes and blame everything on Barack? Isn't this a very unhealthy mental health position to take?
Just a few things that should make you go hummmmmmmmmmmm.
http://clyde.buildlastingsuccess.com
What about people who adore movie Stars,and give them high government offices just because they killed lots of people and blew up lots of stuff in movies.
Is it healthy to worship violence?
What is wrong with the Caucasian mind?
Why are you all afraid to address these life and death matters?
AmenRA
Why are YOU speaking in generalities about Caucasians?
Me thinks there is a bit of peins envy. Hillary is proud of her "testicular fortitude," she has personally referenced it numerous times.
That was an excellent post. Although it specifically addressed Senator Clinton's efforts to prove she is a regular guy, I did not think the Clinton vs. Barrack aspect of the comments was interesting. What was interesting was the post's dead-on and nuanced discussion of American's love affair with testosterone. I am a man and have spent virtually all of my adult life in male oriented and dominated careers - factory work as a young man, a 20 -year military career and now law enforcement. But let's get a grip folks and leave the coonskin off the wall before we get more people killed in our endless quest to prove how tough we are. When we say somebody's got more balls than brains, it's not a compliment. This whole enterprise would be laughable, if it weren't so dangerous. Remember the alpha dogs need to dominate the rest of the pack.
The other side of worshipping dominance is the need to be dominated. I think one reason people like Bill O'Reilly and William Bennett and all the Judge Joe's and Judy's is because they secretly want a stern parent telling them what bad boys and girls they are. I am a grown-up, reasonably self-actualized man and I don't need a parent anymore. How about the rest of you? Let's all put on on our big boy and big girl pants! That's what democracy is all about. We the people . . .
DaveNoble: I applaud your insight and common sense! We would have a much better Country, and world, if others would follow your example and evolve.
"Being smart, outspoken, a savvy investor, a policy wonk, and a woman who insisted on an egalitarian relationship with her husband, she was seen as a profound threat, a wife who did not know her proper (i.e., subordinate) place."
How ironic. These were all the qualities that I LIKED about Hillary Clinton back in 1992.
I had my eyes opened quickly enough. It must be a very rare person who can project an assertive public image AND hold a progressive political viewpoint. Perhaps I imagined that the fact that this smart, assertive person was a woman would help her to remember the disadvantaged as she pursued her career in politics. Not so.
Once Bill and Hill got down to work -- crafting a "health care policy" which would have turned big insurance companies into public utilities, cutting and running on carbon taxes, gay rights, and Lani Guinier, compromising with Republicans every time they coughed politely, and otherwise "feeling our pain" -- then I knew that we had been fooled. Whatever the political outcome, the Clintons wanted to be the ones leading the band. Power, not principle, was all that mattered.
Dr. Ducat, you are no stranger to me as I have read your major publications. How great it is to be so true and do it so well. Thank you. And to Solar Power Guy, hey, I was thinkin' the same thing as I was reading the article. Bravo.
On another kinda supportive note, we need to stop talkin' in terms of white working class and blue collar and white collar and educated and illiterate or male or female or gay or straight. Seems Hilrod is stuck on the hard workin' white, white Americans.......... i realize she's pandering here, and this sort of thing doesn't work for her nor does it work for anyone of us.
HILLARY talks about domestic and foreign issues and MY GOODNESS she knows what she is talking about. That's what you get from being around DC and around the world so many times.
Meanwhile---OBAMA tells us what a wonderful president he will make and how there will be this MYSTERIOUS CHANGE. His experience comes mainly from LECTURING and CAMPAIGNING for the state then the senate and now for the presidency so he has the SPEAKING down pat. but he has to train for the rest of it.
Relax, janmB!
Was I singing Obama's praises? No. Please go back and read my note again.
I WAS pointing out that Senator Clinton is rather wanting.
Maybe we need to call in a psychologist to analyze the demeaning behavior of Hillary Clinton. In my experience, a person who changes what they are for the benefit of others is a sick person. True, many people have the ability to do this, and women are probably the best known for it. Some women alter their personas to attract and keep a man. It is a long standing problem for women, which has, thankfully, begun a downturn in a world where women have begun to find themselves.
However, Hillary Clinton isn't doing her unending performance of assuming the characteristics, of whatever is necessary to secure the votes of specific groups, because of reasons like acceptance or holding a marriage together. She is insulting the American voter by assuming we are all so stupid that we'll buy into her West Virginia act of talking like a coalminer or like a farmer in the Midwest or, unfortunately portraying the baseness in human beings by using race to get what she wants.
To the American voter: Hillary Clinton is insulting your intelligence. Wise up. She is a player and a fraud of the worst kind.
give me a break, already. Has the whole world jumped on the obama band? Hillary is doing nothing more than campaingning, just as Barack. Nobody talks about his lies, and there are plenty to talk about. Most of you people who write these comments are just repeating what some hillary bashing reporter has said, and dont have a clue what you are talking about. If she just stayed home and shut up, would she win then. Seems to me its become a fad to hate Hillary, and everybody knows how fickle people love fads!
Oh please, give me a break!!!!!! If Obama campaigned like Hillary, he would NOT be in the lead!!! He knows how to CONNECT with people, and look them in the eye!!! He knows how to TRULY empathize, rather than "pretend" to do so!!!!! He is a REAL man, rather than a "make believe" man!!!!!! That is why the people love him, and it is why he is winning. He doesn't have to keep moving the goalposts, because he wins by the rules that were already in place when the game began!!!
You get that right. She's a fraud and a dirty player. Very bad for this country and I hope we can get her out of the senate also. She is unfit for public poffice
HILLARY CLINTON
(1) Took a $100,000 bribe, camouflaged as futures trades,
from Tyson Foods Inc.
(2) Speculated in Health Care industry futures while overseeing
legislative reform of same.
(3) Failed to correct false testimony by co-defendant Ira
Magaziner in Health Care trial.
(4) Obstructed justice by ordering the shredding of Vince
Foster's documents in the Rose Law Firm.
(5) Ordered members of the Health Care Task Force to shred
documents that were the target of a court probe.
(6) Ordered the removal of documents from Vince Foster's office.
(7) Told aides to lie about their removal of documents from
Foster's office
(8) Obstructed justice by keeping her billing records, a document
sought under subpoena, in the White House residence.
(9) Lied to investigators about her knowledge about billing
records.
(10) Lied to investigators about her involvement in the Castle
Grande land flip con.
(11) Ordered the use of the FBI to discredit Travel Office
employees.
(12) Lied to investigators about her involvement in the firing of
Travel Office Employees.
Nancy, I only have to add being fired from the Watergate Commission to your list. You can go to the website of Jerry Zeifman, Water Judiciary Chef of Staff. He fired her for lying and unethical behavior and refused to give her a recommendation.
The NANCY's of this country who don't SUPPORT other women who deserve it like Ms Clinton who worked for women and children's issues ----should just be quiet then because you send our gender back to the 1800's.
While Obama is talking about change and race and how great he will be---you know important stuff of that nature --there Hillary is talking above most people's heads in details on world-and domestic issues and making us think she is smart.
She went to work often for FREE for women and children who couldn't afford to pay-- after attending law school when the guys in that category were all making big-bucks ---
What a misogynistic statement, "Women are probably the best known for it. Some women alter their personas to attract and keep a man. It is a long standing problem for women." I call bullshit, I am a woman and have dated so damn many chameleon men that I have chosen to opt out of the dating game. You sir, have shown in this one statement why you chose another as your candidate and it is probably because you are insecure with your own masculinity.
" portraying the baseness in human beings by using race ."
I am so tired of hearing that the Clintons have played the race card in this campaign. Anyone with a brain knows that Obama's surrogates have played the race card and blamed it on Hillary. First, Rev. Wrights' "Hillary doesn't know what it feels like to be called a N****r" in a sermon in 07 when Hillary had 67% of the black vote based upon the Clinton history of civil rights. Recorded an sent around the country to black churches. Then there was Jessie Jackson Jr.'s "I wouldn't put any stock in Hillary's tears; she didn't cry for the victims of Katrina" on morning TV shows after Hillary won NH even though Obama had been predicted to win in by a landslide. And that hypocrite, neutral Rep. Clyburn rears his ugly neutral voice before important primaries....SC "Bill should chill out about "race", and NC where he said "The Clintons are alienating the black vote", and now again before these important last primaries...saying I am neutral, but...............What a hypocrit!
And there are millions of women who feel scorned by the deceptive, deceitful, dirty race baiting of the Obam campaign, the Hillary bashing MSM and the DNC not settling of the Florida/Michigan primary vote which Hillary won while it could impact the outcome, 300 delegates and 2 million popular votes disenfranchised by Obama who refused a re-vote in both states.
I'd better go for a fMRI. I think I still have a brain . . .
Actually, Hillary Clinton doesn't appear to have a great deal of respect for any of the groups of people who are said to be voting for her. She says she's the only one to get the vote from the hard working White people, thereby picking up the race card Bill threw out after South Carolina. Then, she dishonors the White working class by masquerading as a beer swilling, gun toting, knuckle dragging mysogynistic neanderthal assuming this exemplifies their values! Mrs. Clinton will assume any role she thinks will get her the vote. Oh, I forgot ignorant and uneducated. I'd hate for the first woman president to be the kind of person Clinton is. I fear it would set back feminism a 100 years.
I'm a 59 y/o White woman and I'm voting for Sen. Obama because I abhor the image Sen. Clinton portrays.
Every political analyst on TV categorizes the voting groups by black, blue collar white, latte drinking
college grads, Women in various age groups,.etc; so why is Hillary racist when she does the same as the analysts? She is criticised because it deepens the racial divide and throws support to Obama..........so the MSM thinks. What they don't know is that it also increases the racial division in this country. Before this race few people had thought in terms of race, now it is about all they do. Having worked the phones in my state, I know race has become a big issue.
Isn't it interesting that we are not nearly as interested in a candidate's intellect? We ask are they studly enough? Are the tough enough? Do we want to have a beer with them? But we rarely ask "are they smart enough?" We expect more expertise and intelligence form our pet's vet than we do of the president. When you need a major medical procedure, do you select your doctor because you want to have a beer with him/her? That G.W. could ever be elected shows how minimal our expectations with regard to the presidency are. The political process has a way of giving us what we want, but we do not seem to want enough. That we are having this sort of discussion at all explains why G.W. happened and why it will keep happening (albeit with a probable interruption this year).
If we chose doctors and lawyers the way we choose presidents, we would all be dead or in jail.
I admire your work very much. However....this analysis is too simplistic. It leaves out what John Edwards did and what was done to him. John Edwards, easily the most electable--and the most populist--of the three leading candidates. First, he was "effeminized" by both the right wing, and the mainstream media, from the "Breck Girl" to the "haircut" memes. Then, he was attacked by Obama in Iowa over the 527 ads from unions, an attack that allowed Obama to come in first in Iowa and destroy Edwards' viability. To not understand that the Obama campaign has fought as intensely as has Clinton is to swallow the media spin, that one candidate has been noble and rejected "old politics," while the other jumped into the gutter--well, the facts just don't bear that myth out. John Edwards wanted to fight the corporate elites who wreck people's lives (masculine approach) but was disqualified as too feminine. Hillary picked up the title of "fighter" because it was left when Edwards left the race to Obama, praising Reagan and bipartisanship (feminine approach). White people like Black men who don't seem hypermasculine. There are many levels to all this, but the bottom line is,
the future of the world is on the line, and the most inexperienced candidate (Obama) is going to be left to win or lose, for all of us. I find that frightening and very sad.
Posted May 12, 2008 | 06:10 PM (EST)