So *why* do men hate women?

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A slur and an outrage

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2070272,...

A slur and an outrage

The reporter who blew open Watergate is part of a misogynist conspiracy against Hillary Clinton

Zoe Williams Wednesday May 2, 2007 The Guardian

All you ever read about Hillary Clinton is how the American electorate hates her, and yet the only reason you're reading about her in the first place is that she is, in effect, 50% of the candidacy for leadership of the Democratic party. Somebody, surely, must like her. It can't just be the internet. Is the net even allowed to vote?

Carl Bernstein is dishing the dirt in his forthcoming unauthorised biography, entitled A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bernstein is now known as "the one played by Dustin Hoffman" in the Watergate film. He is a seminal investigative journalist, and claims to have the unexpurgated truth, culled from 200 sources - one of which, wince-inducingly, is Clinton's closest confidante, Diane Blair. Or rather not the woman herself; she (and now you can wince) died of lung cancer seven years ago. Bernstein has filleted her papers and personal effects, which are being sorted for the University of Arkansas library. He stops short of calling Clinton a liar, apparently, but suggests that she played fast and loose with the truth. Well come on then, how would the truth look if she'd played slower and tighter?

The gobbet that's meant to stir us up and keep us going until publication next month is this: contrary to what she's said, she did know about Bill and his affair with Gennifer Flowers. Or at least, she probably knew. This is according to an uncredited writer who has followed her career closely. "She always knew about her. Anyone who has approached the subject of Hillary Clinton with a clear eye will run across many examples of stories that are not true."

It's a tricky one, isn't it? Maybe she did know, but there might be a question mark over how she knew - was it actual information, or a hunch? When exactly should she have announced that she knew, in order to keep her veracity slate clean in the eyes of the voting public? When she'd got hold of some DNA evidence, or just when he came home with a naughty look on his face? Never mind that this is his transgression, not hers. Never mind that he paid his debt for his lively undercrackers some time ago, as I think even the most stalwart conservative would agree. How can this possibly be a relevant test of her, as a person or as a politician?

This is so far beyond the old "does it matter what they do in the bedroom?" debate. It's outrageous even to suggest that her husband's sex life is salient to her career in the first place, let alone that she should be held accountable for it. The whole book, ranging across "everything" from Clinton's "complex relationship with her disciplinarian father" to "her courtship with Bill Clinton and the amazing dynamic of their marriage, during the most trying of circumstances", is a slur on Hillary Clinton, refracting her through the prism of the men around her to a nexus of feminine roles: daughter, wife, blah.

The greatest outrage is that the next accusation will be that she isn't a "heavyweight". Misogynist opinion sees no contradiction in reducing any given woman to a series of soap opera and/or biological roles - and then, using this as "evidence", levelling at her the charge that she isn't serious-minded!

The same has happened to Ségolène Royal, the socialist contender for the French presidency, who has found even members of her own party incapable of comprehending how someone can both be a mother and understand foreign policy. Oh, that we had time to caper through the various German responses to Angela Merkel's childlessness.

In the UK, our tabloids are still capable of this sort of thing, but in Westminster, in soi-disant quality journalism and publishing, it would be laughed off the page. At the risk of unseemly nationalism, it's worth remembering how far we've come.

mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk

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Choppa's response:

So, *why* do so many men fear women?

For the same reason many US-icans fear socialists and communists.

US citizens are so afraid of their peers - of each other -- and you can see this in any piece of US mass culture, which is full of organized bullying and brutality (Them) against weak and trembling individuals with a desirable goody to be stolen (Me) -- that they can hardly conceive of the Evil that must be inherent in Double Thems (Emperor Ming, Lex Luthor, the Joker, Saddam Hussein, Huns, Nips, Bogey de Jour).

Men likewise are so afraid of each other, so terrified, so browbeaten, so cowardly, so corrupt, so squishily yellowy-brown, that the Alien Other, the Double Them confronting ManHood, Woman, must be of an Evil so inconceivable that their balls clench and they shrivel up in the face of it (la Fica Dentata).

And the culture of fear is nurtured by a society of alienation and terror. Change society from Dog eats Dog to woMan helps woMan, live and let live instead of kill or be killed, and you drain the cesspit of fear we all splash around in.

Voilà.