Clintonia

Women's Quarterly, Spring, 2003 by Noemie Emery

I Knew JFK and Clinton's No JFK

Taki on the President's womanizing.

TRY AS I MIGHT, I do not want to do or say anything that might give credence to the concept of "sexual harassment." Of all feminist inventions, this one has been the most pernicious. For it has sought to prevent men and women from ever getting together. Since time immemorial secretaries have married their bosses, air stewardesses--or their equivalent before air travel--have married first-class passengers, young aspiring actresses have married film producers. Marriage was the most effective way of advancing socially for women. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with that. Everyone has to make the best use of his or her strengths. The feminists decided to do away with all that

~ Summer 1998

Feminist Doormats

Noemie Emery shows it didn't start with Hillary.

HAS ANYONE NOTICED that exposure to feminist women and their lore seems to make men behave badly? John F. Kennedy was a womanizer, but he was effectively housebroken, restrained, and polite in public. It took younger brother Teddy, champion of so many feminist causes, to paw in public, walk away from the scene of a fatal accident involving a woman, and drive his first wife to drink and depression.

It took Bob Packwood, one of the staunchest supporters of abortion rights ever to sit in the U.S. Senate, to drive his first wife to depression and sexually assault the office help. And it took Bill Clinton, the first feminist president, not only to boast of "hundreds" of affairs but also to trash the women later and even to be plausibly accused of rape. Perhaps the problem is that the androgyny that is at the core of the feminist project cannot be sustained in real life. Have you noticed that the women in Clinton's life tend to be either short on traditional femininity or feminine to a fault? They are either scarecrows or blow-up dolls. Either Dolly Parton or Marjorie Main....

Women who start out too loudly asserting autonomy often end up giving up too much, for all the wrong reasons, to the wrong kinds.... Our most independent and assertive First Lady suffered humiliations no other would have countenanced. Does anyone doubt that, at the first reports of a semen-stained Gap dress, Jackie Kennedy or Nancy Reagan would have been out the door, having first smashed the china and furniture? Not Hillary, the feminist doormat, who stood stoically by her louse of a husband. She lied for him and he let her. But she didn't bake cookies, and this was what mattered.

~ Spring 1999