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.
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
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 . . .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'm a 59 y/o White woman and I'm voting for Sen. Obama because I abhor the image Sen. Clinton portrays.
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.
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.
I don't get that at all. I think Obama has shown a capacity to roll with the punches and make course corrects to an impressive degree. He has a first rate organization made up of smart, talented and decent people.
He'll be fine and the country will be fine.
This absolutely is an illusion. Saint Obama let his campaign, surrogates and supporters run the
most deceitful, deceptive and dirtiest of campaigns by surrogates, while he sounded like McCain saying anything negative was not acceptable to his campaign but short of denouncing it. i.e. Hagee.
you are right on when you say "the most inexperienced candidate (Obama) is going to be left twin or lose, for all of us. I find that frightening and very sad."
If one looks at his resume.......2 years in Illinois state legisture,
ran for US Congress and lost
6 more years in state legislature..vote 126 times present.
Ran after 8 yrs total for President against crazy Alan Keyes...won
with no competition
In US Senate 1 1/2 yrs.....started his run for POTUS , has under
50% voting record and name on two bills.
Scares me big time considering what we are inheriting for GWB, and it looks like he with his terms as Gov. has more experience then BO.
In a patriarchal society where the male dominates the stage and invariably brings the world to its knees, a balance is needed. If women were mor willing to be women, rather than filling the void disguised as women, we would, perhaps, be somewhere else right now. Being manly is not a sign of strength. It's a copy-cat design, again, without real change.
Demi Moore won respect in GI_-Jane by saying: suck my dick. Even I, at the last, have been known to say: If I had one, you could suck it. This is gutter talk and street fighting. We need a representative with a cool and steady handle on US policy. Suck my dick just doesn't make it.
Thanks again for adressing this aspect of HRC.
Hillary should be ashamed of herself for dragging this campaign down into the mud. It's amazing how so many people want to reward her with VP, Sen Majority leader, or a seat on the Supreme Court after she has waged one of the dirtiest, most dishonest primary campaigns.
The contrast in tone and conduct between Obama and Hillary is incredible. Obama is acting like Jackie Robinson while Hillary has morphed into a combination of George Wallace, Jesse Helms, and Strom Thurmond.
Thank you for your post.
After witnessing the campaigns, I see that Hillary's tactics, following the male advisors, have set back my kind of egalitarian feminism WAY back.
And (this is heartfelt and positive), I see that Barack Obama is the better woman. And I cannot wait to have a mother, Michelle, in the WH.