Men (23 page)

But more of the time it's an intermittently compassionate portrait of a gawky, brainy, well-intentioned midwestern girl swept off her feet by a charismatic southern charmer who migrated to the backwaters of Arkansas—or Dogpatch, as Brock likes to call it—to advance Bill's political fortunes, sacrificing herself and her principles for love. Bill repaid her by having sex with everyone in sight. But Hillary wasn't a phony, and shouldn't have had to play the part to advance Bill's career, Brock insists—he even says that her physical appearance should never have become a political issue, notwithstanding the amount of time he devotes to cataloguing it.

One of the fascinating aspects of Brock's employment situation was that he happens to be gay and the
Spectator
happens to regularly fulminate against gay rights, as did his yappy boss Tyrrell whenever given the chance. When Brock speculates that Hillary might have been “perversely drawn to the rejection implied by Bill's philandering,” willing to accept compromises and humiliation in the sexual arena because of the greater good she and Bill could together accomplish, Brock—who'd once thrown a gala party to celebrate the hundredth day of Newt Gingrich's anti-gay Contract with America—could have been describing his own career arc too. The big problem for him was that he ended up identifying with Hillary when he was supposed to be vilifying her, and it turned his life upside down. Some mysterious alchemy took place in the course of his writing this book: instead of exposing Hillary to the world, she exposed Brock to himself. The result was a stormy breakup with his pals on the Right: he became persona non grata in his former circles, or maybe he dropped them first.

But he and Hillary had some sort of imaginary bond, at least in Brock's imagination. He describes waiting in line for several hours at a bookstore for Hillary to sign his copy of
It Takes a Village
, and where he hoped to stage their first face-to-face meeting. The question on his mind, he confesses, is
what she thinks of him
. No doubt it's the private question every biographer entertains at some point about his subject. But when he reaches the head of the line, faces up to the real Hillary rather than the imaginary one, identifies himself and asks when he could have an interview, Hillary's wry reply is “Probably never.”
4

*   *   *

“All biography is ultimately fiction,” Bernard Malamud wrote in
Dubin's Lives
, his novel about a biographer. What would he have said about this particular collection of writers: all biography is ultimately a Rorschach test? The various Hillaries that emerge are fictive enough, yet clearly they have some inner truth for their creators. Each invents his own personal Hillary—from baroque sexual fantasies straight out of
The Honeymoon Killers
and girl–girl sexcapades, to big sis—then has to slay his creation, while paying tribute to her power with these displays of antagonism and ambivalence. They're caught in her grip, but they don't know why; they spin tales about her treachery and perversity, as if that explains it. Except that the harder they try to knock her off her perch, the more shrill and unmanned they seem.

A clue comes our way from Dorothy Dinnerstein, who wrote some years ago in
The Mermaid and the Minotaur
of the “human malaise” in our current sexual arrangements—namely, the arrangement where men rule the world and women rule over childhood, and mothers are the “first despots” in our lives. To her haters, Hillary is nothing if not a would-be despot making an illegitimate grab for power. She wants to run the world!

Now, I'd never say that men who hate Hillary are treating her like a bad mother, since it would sound like a huge cliché. But according to Dinnerstein, the psychological origin of misogyny is simply the need for mother-raised humans to overthrow the residues of early female dominion. Or to put it another way, men aren't going to give up ruling the world until women stop ruling over childhood, meaning that if political power is ever really going to be reapportioned between the sexes, child rearing would have to be reapportioned too. For the most part, this has yet to happen, meaning that it's not hard to see why the prospect of women ruling
both
spheres, a woman with her finger on the button of world destruction
and
in command of the home, prompts such massive anxiety.

Power isn't a geopolitical matter alone. It inheres in the very experience of being ruled—and that's what being a citizen means. But we were also all children once, who got pushed around by big despots with their own agendas for us. Too often it can seem like adulthood is just one long reprise, with a slightly larger cast of characters. As to how this plays out in terms of political psychology—well, that's what's being renegotiated at the moment, in a predictably bumpy way.

Or
is
it really something about Hillary in particular? It's hard to deny that for this collection of men, the very sight of her, ankles to hair, just puts them in a dither. What female colossus is this they're all flailing at, what oversized mythic figure? She's monstrous, Gorgon-like; not feminine enough,
or
, conversely, deploying feminine wiles to further her nefarious ambitions. She's their Medusa—who had her own hairstyle issues, let's recall. Her snakelike hair made men stiff with terror—turned them to stone, as Freud aptly put it in an essay about male anxiety. So stiff, in fact, that images of Medusa's decapitated head were often emblazoned on Greek shields as a reassuring emblem for soldiers going to war.

If only Hillary could have the same salutary effect on today's embattled men! Or maybe that's the point of these slashing biographical portraits—cut her down to size and stiffen your own … resolve? What's clear is that the specter of loss looms large for these men of the Right: a woman has run (and will probably run again) for president, and the small matter of who's in charge of the world and how power is divided between the sexes is up for grabs.

*   *   *

As speculation about the 2016 lineup builds, commentators on both sides continue to focus below the belt for portents. One of the narratives currently being floated is that disappointment in Obama's performance as president helps reposition Hillary on the gender spectrum, or as Democratic strategist James Carville recently remarked, “If Hillary Clinton gave Obama one of her balls, he'd have two.” This was pretty provocative—and intended to be, obviously, on all sorts of levels.

The relation between the sexual organs we've been assigned and what happens to us in the world as a consequence is fruit for a constantly evolving orchard of metaphors. Though of course what happens to us in the world isn't metaphorical: it's simply the case that fewer positions of power go to the humans with the vaginas than the humans with the penises.

At the end of the day, whether you have one or the other thing going on down there hasn't yet stopped mattering. There may be a small number of people who've traded in the sex organ they were born with, and a small number who are otherwise ambiguously situated (and have their own battles to contend with because of it), but generally it's been a binary universe we're born into and mostly still is. Even as gender has supposedly become more mobile, even as there are all sorts of exciting new roles available on either side of the divide—women senators, male nurses and strippers—what's evident from reading Hillary's biographers is that we're nowhere close to giving up the idea that what's down there is the key to everything.

But if Carville's metaphorical reassignment of genital equipment means that, going forward, whenever someone says that someone else has “balls” we have to rethink the relation between power and manhood, because metaphorically speaking, women have balls too, then maybe the categories do start looking more arbitrary, or “fungible” as the lawyers say. And maybe the cause–effect relationship between genitals and power isn't an arrow moving one way or another anymore, but starting to look more like a Venn diagram, with lots of weird angles and unexpected possibilities.

 

Women Who Hate Men

Sex with men is bad for women, and I mean
bad
in every sense of the word: from the dismal quality of the experience itself, to the lasting harms it inflicts—psychological, social, and existential. At least this is a premise with a certain traction in the cultural imagination, and seems in no danger of losing its hold, even in an era that simultaneously pays frequent lip service to the polar opposite premise, that sexual parity between men and women is now an established fact, and sex is finally good for women, so let's all party. In short, there are lots of conflicting stories making the rounds about what women are getting up to in bed, and how much they're really enjoying it, and whether proclaiming enjoyment is even a reliable indicator of anything when it's a woman doing the proclaiming; we are the gender, after all, notorious for faking enjoyment. In fact, if you're a woman, even good sex may be bad for you in ways you can't begin to calculate.

The literature of bad sex is alarmingly extensive (as is bad writing about sex, though these aren't necessarily the same thing), and a mainstay of the genre is the cautionary tale aimed at dissuading women from having sex, or sex of the wrong kind, or with the wrong people. The arguments vary, the politics varies, but the message keeps coming around again, like a hit single on the Top 40 station. By far the most interesting variation on this theme is Andrea Dworkin's 1987 radical feminist classic,
Intercourse,
now repackaged in a twentieth-anniversary edition. In case you've forgotten, Dworkin was the notorious anti-pornography activist and theorist most famous for having said that all intercourse is rape, though she claimed she never actually said that.

The reprint arrives with a new introduction by Ariel Levy, the author of
Female Chauvinist Pigs.
Levy was less a fan of Dworkin's in
Pigs
, labeling her an extremist, which is undoubtedly true yet also a little backhanded, given that Levy was reprising so many of Dworkin's arguments, albeit in more measured tones. But I too must admit that I never had much use for Dworkin and have ranted against her in print on a few occasions, though rereading her this time around was strangely enjoyable. She's the great female refusenik, and just because sex disgusted her it doesn't mean she isn't often funny and even profound on the subject.

Previously I was under the impression that it was only heterosexual sex that disgusted Dworkin, but that's not the case. As Levy's introduction helpfully informs, Dworkin, who died in 2005 at the age of fifty-eight, may have proclaimed herself a lesbian but she wasn't known to have clocked any hours in the actual enterprise, either romantically or sexually. Additionally, she was an unorthodox enough lesbian to have loved and secretly married a man, her soul mate, with whom she cohabited for over three decades—he, too, was gay, and happened to have health insurance. A soul mate with health insurance and no sexual demands! Happily, Dworkin found the kind of love she either believed in or could tolerate: one that didn't involve bodies or the messy meeting up of alien genitals. She had far less confidence in the ability of other women to hew to similarly nonconformist paths, I suspect not without reason.

Dworkin was an extremist because she kept harping on the nasty undercurrent of inequality in sexual relations between men and women, and she wouldn't let it drop. In fact, she seemed to revel in it. Of course, more mild-mannered and even anti-feminist writers keep strumming this same banjo too: namely, the idea that men get more out of sex than women do, even when women think they're operating in some liberated fashion, turning the tables and having recreational sex just like the guys. Nope, they're dupes and doing irreparable harm to themselves in the process. The difference is that for Dworkin, intercourse isn't a personal thing or a private folly; it's a form of political occupation equal to what all colonized peoples have endured over the centuries. At least this meant she refrained from dispensing chirpy advice on how to get more foreplay, or land a man by playing hard to get, or other quick fixes to female dilemmas. Dworkin didn't believe in individual solutions, and she didn't think a little freedom was enough: she wanted to overthrow the whole fucking system.

This seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, but Dworkin is still an excellent philosopher of the bedroom, if a fumingly vitriolic one. Even if you disagree with everything she says, she's great exactly because her work resists all practicality.
Intercourse
is a furiously unreasonable book, and usefully dangerous for just that reason: it forces us to look at sex without trying to
solve
it.

Dworkin's premise is startling and will always be radical: in short, that sexual intercourse itself is what keeps women mired in a state of social inequality, because a “normal fuck” is an act of incursion. Perhaps a few of you female readers previously thought of sexual intercourse as a “natural” act; maybe even thought you liked it. Dworkin will have none of this. Sex, along with the desire for it, is forced on women to subordinate us. During intercourse

a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overwhelming her and at the same time penetrating her; and this physical relation to her—over her and inside her—is his possession of her. He has her—or, when he's done, he has had her.… His thrusting into her is taken to be her capitulation to him as a conqueror; it is a physical surrender of herself to him; he occupies and rules her, expresses his elemental dominance over her, by his possession of her in the fuck.

Note the passive construction—“is taken to be”—a hallmark of the Dworkin style. Elsewhere: “The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation.” Taken … by whom? The passive voice combined with the punch-you-in-the-face argument, the vacillation between victimization and militancy: this is Dworkin distilled to her essence.