May 12, 2007
What Do Women Want? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:35 PM EST I’m afraid I will just have to leave my thought experiment as it is. If Joshua Zeitz thinks that feminist leaders would have had the same reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal had Bill Clinton been a Republican, then that’s fine with me. It’s a free country, and one can believe what one wants: in a flat earth, that the world was created in 4004 B.C., in Santa Claus, that the moon is made of green cheese, that pigs can fly, you name it. To use her as an example, it seems to me that Gloria Steinem is a partisan Democrat first, a feminist second. After all, she has referred to Kay Bailey Hutchinson as a “female impersonator.” Senator Hutchinson is another woman who, one would think, would be a feminist hero, having climbed the greasy pole of Texas politics all the way to the United States Senate on her own, with no pathbreaking from a husband or father. But, no, she’s not even a real woman in Ms Steinem’s view, let alone a hero. Why? She’s a Republican. I think the problem here is that Mr. Zeitz is taking a very lawyer-like attitude towards the scandal. It wasn’t sexual harassment under the law and therefore there’s no problem. Legally, as I said, he’s right. Politically, he and the leaders of the modern feminist movement who kept trying to change the subject are dead wrong. Bill Clinton’s desperate attempts to evade responsibility for his actions—including wagging his finger at the American people and telling them a bald-faced lie—is, I think, all the evidence one needs of that. Had Bill Clinton been, say, president of the Kiwanis Club in Frozen Sneakers, Iowa (a mythical town invented by William F. Buckley, Jr.), then perhaps his behavior would have been a matter for him, his wife, and his awestruck employee. But Bill Clinton was not president of the Frozen Sneakers Kiwanis Club, he was President of the United States. Only a lawyer with a hopeless case to win or a hopelessly partisan Democrat could fail to see how that makes a profound difference. He had no right whatever to do what he did, even if it was not technically illegal and Monica Lewinsky welcomed his advances with open arms, if that’s the relevant part of the human anatomy in this case. Mr. Zeitz attributes the crack about Leonard Woodcock in my post to me. I’m flattered, but it was coined by Garry Trudeau. I merely drafted it and sent it into rhetorical battle. I did, however, come up with “Real women don’t do housework; cleaning ladies do housework.” Since honesty forces me momentarily to set aside my characteristic modesty, I must say I rather like it.
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