What Do Women Want? (2 page)

The world according to Dr. Strangelove is the vision that has led us to a poisoned planet, endlessly in conflict. Women are our only hope. If we don’t save the planet for our children, who will?

Most Americans suffer from historical amnesia,
¹
so they have no idea that longer-lived empires than ours have self-destructed and crumbled. Our leaders are blind and stubborn. They have stopped questioning their right to rule the world. The end of questioning is the end of civilization. We are almost there. Not because of Islamists who wage jihad for Allah, but because we Crusaders are
almost
their mirror image. Christians have forgotten the message of Christ and Jews have forgotten the words of their prophets.

These essays were first published in 1998, so I’ve added some new ones and deleted others. Nineteen ninety-eight seems like a halcyon time compared to 2007. We were not at war in Iraq, our economy was thriving under the Clinton administration, and we had a peace surplus rather than a war deficit.

Seven years of George W. Bush have shown us how bad government can be when cronyism and greed rule and adherence to the Constitution is forgotten. Terrorist attacks did nothing to change politics as usual, but fearmongering ran rampant. Senator Hillary Clinton became an excellent leader and front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, yet her political future remains unknown. I hope we will have the guts to elect her president, but I am dubious that sexism is dead in American politics. I’m deeply concerned about the voting fraud and gerrymandering that accompanied Republican rule. Conglomerization of the media has drastically narrowed our access to information. We may be beyond democracy, having stumbled into authoritarianism under the guise of free-trade capitalism.

In my personal life things have also changed drastically—and for the better.

I became a grandmother. And discovered I’m a better grandma than I ever was a mom. I vowed to battle my narcissistic tendencies and embrace Saul Bellow’s wisdom: “A man should be able to hear and to tolerate the worst that could be said of him.” And that goes for women, too—unlike some of the other things Bellow said. I published a writer’s memoir,
Seducing the Demon,
in which I shared with my readers the demons that make me write. The response was mostly a delight. Of course, I got zapped by some critics who still see me as the Queen of Erotica, but I’m used to that. I discovered that saying what you need to say is more important than praise (
of course the fantasy is always to have both
). I hope to share that with my daughter, my grandson, and my readers.

—Erica Jong
September 22, 2006

—MARGARET ATWOOD

 

 

 

When Hillary Rodham Clinton
first appeared on the national scene in 1992, I found her a blast—not a breath—of fresh air. Here was a woman like most American women: a breadwinner, a working mother, outspoken in her opinions, and visibly strong. Unlike the previous first lady, Nancy Reagan, who secretly manipulated the White House schedule with her astrologer; or Jacqueline Kennedy, who softly cooed that husband and children came first; or Barbara Bush, who claimed she deliberately never tried to influence George with her sensible views of abortion,
²
HRC was a woman of the future—unafraid of seeming as powerful as she was. Her very demeanor said: Times have changed; now even women have to watch their backs. The protection racket of women is over: It’s every amazon for herself.

I admired Hillary Clinton’s fuck-you attitude from the start, and I was initially surprised to find myself in the minority. When she admitted to not giving a damn about clothes, when she proudly displayed her hillbilly taste in decorating, I was thrilled. I myself
love
clothes and care about beautiful interiors, but at last, I thought, someone is publicly acknowledging how much
time
all that fifties femininity stuff
takes.
In HRC we finally had a first lady who didn’t grovel, didn’t kiss up in the fashion press or the food industry, and proudly renounced her role as National Yenta. The only thing that surprised me about Hillary was how deeply unready for her America was at first.

Yes, we had a flurry of delight in her feminism. Remember those buttons that said “Elect Hillary’s Husband in ’92”? That was Hillary phase one. But soon the backlash set in, and we were doomed to endure a period in which women as well as men claimed to hate Hillary.

Here was the amazing part: Even women just
like
her suddenly didn’t seem to like her. Was she giving away some terrible secret we didn’t want to acknowledge even to
ourselves
? Was it a case of kill the messenger? Did we simply not want to hear that
sleep deprivation
had replaced
I dreamed I went to Paris in my Maidenform bra
in the American female psyche?

Perhaps the reason Martha Stewart homecraft and La Perla underwear (Victoria’s Secret is the mall version) appeal to the career-obsessed American woman is an intractable case of nostalgia: nostalgia for the good old days when women had time to bake bread, shop for silk unmentionables, stencil their floors, strip their furniture, and prance about without their clothes while wafting through the bedroom in marabou—instead of lying comatose in flannel.

The nostalgia for “I’m all yours in buttons and bows” dies hard, and Hillary Clinton was (in the first Clinton term anyway) an unfortunate reminder of lost leisure. Even to her staunchest supporters, she was downright depressing. Although I agreed with everything Hillary Clinton said about raising a child in
It Takes a Village,
I was put off by its schoolmarmish tone. (And how could the tone be
otherwise
in an election year? Every base had to be touched, every hand shaken, every hardworking volunteer thanked.)

But what really astonished me was how many
Democratic
Hillary-haters there were from the start—and how many of them were women. Because of this relentless opposition to Hillary’s strength, everything about her was retouched at the dawn of the second Clinton term—the clothes, the demeanor, the photo ops. For a while, Hillary ceased making policy statements and was seen only on foreign junkets with First Daughter Chelsea. This transformation of the first
uppity
first lady into a femme impersonator sent a clear signal to American women: “Back off. The time is not yet ripe.”
³
This was to be phase two in the Hillary saga. And it ushered in the silent Laura Bush.

HRC had initially insisted on her right to be powerful, self-protective, and strong. She didn’t buy into female role-playing. She refused to look weak. In short, she broke the rules decreed for political wives—and for her pioneering she was nearly banished from the public eye during the second presidential campaign.

Even as late as two minutes before the last American presidential election of the twentieth century (November 1996), Hillary Rodham Clinton was still the most problematic first lady America had ever known—admired abroad, hated at home, mistrusted by women journalists even though the Clinton administration had actually done
more
for American women than any administration in our history. She was suspected of being a megalomaniac, accused of perjury, document-losing, spy-hiring, and responsible for the suicide of an aide conjectured to be her lover.

Interestingly, none of these charges materialized as fact. Though HRC was pilloried in the press and jeered at in political cartoons, though she was distrusted even by her admirers, she stood up to her detractors as we all must. She put health care, the rights of children, and the rights of women on the national agenda—no small feats.

Back in 1996 (aeons ago where politics is concerned), I had written an article for the
New York Observer
in which I argued that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the latest victim of America’s hatred of talented, clever women who do nothing to disguise their talent and cleverness. When William Safire of the
New York Times
called HRC a “congenital liar” surely he was subjecting her to a different standard than the one to which he had held other first ladies. Isn’t social white lying one of the
roles
of the first lady? Can anyone in the laser glare of the public eye be expected to be candid all the time? Did anyone ask Pat Nixon what she thought of her husband’s destruction of evidence, or Jackie Kennedy what she thought of her husband’s affairs? Was Nancy Reagan interrogated about Iran-gate? But HRC’s gene pool was impugned at the drop of a document. Clearly she was being put in an impossible double bind: asked to play Marie Antoinette and Madame Defarge at the same time. Nobody could have succeeded at this—not even the most talented actress. For it is true that when we wish women to fail, we decree for them endless and impossible ordeals, like those devised for witches by their inquisitors. If they drown, they are innocent; if they float, they are guilty. This has pretty much been the way America has always tried to get rid of its cleverest political women, from Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman to Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton. And there was no doubt that many people wished HRC ill. She represented the new woman of the twenty-first century, the woman our daughters want to be. Before she got dumbed down and blurred pink and blue around the edges for the 1996 Democratic National Convention (in response to Elizabeth Dole’s southern sugar-baby act), she didn’t see any reason to hide her brains; she expected to run for the presidency as her husband’s full and equal partner; she saw no need to prate of cookery and coiffures (no matter how often she nervously changed her hair).

In the days of “Elect Hillary’s Husband in ’92,” Hillary Rodham Clinton had adamantly refused the obligatory Stepford wife impersonation, the fake flirtatiousness that makes political wives seem safe, the willingness to
pretend
to be the power behind the throne. When America was not ready for her—preferring the duplicitous southern charms of Mrs. Dole—Hillary temporarily retreated into pastels and pearls. Duplicity in women still makes America comfortable, straightforwardness does not.

So Hillary Clinton fell victim to America’s discomfort with powerful women—or so I originally argued before I myself had been handled by Hillary and her handlers. But given my later run-ins with this unholy alliance, I began to think that HRC’s bum rap had a lot to do with her own flair for shooting herself in the foot.

Not that I expected access to be easy. Even when I started researching Hillary Clinton, I knew that both Clintons were press-shy after the beatings they had endured at the hands of various members of the press. But since I was determined to defend HRC against her detractors, I began to approach various friends of both Clintons with an eye to getting an audience with Hillary herself—a full-scale semiprivate interview—with only the requisite spin doctors in attendance. Armed with testimonials to my bona fides from such Clinton pals as Judy Collins and Letty Pogrebin, I wrote to HRC’s press people and top personal assistant, enclosing the sympathetic essay I’d already written and mentioning the publication assignment. There followed a merry chase in which I was tested for my sincerity and tenacity, interrogated by telephone by a series of inquisitors—from Lisa Caputo, Hillary’s then-press liaison, to Melanne Verveer, her personal factotum, to various young staffers in charge of scheduling. I was asked everything from “What do you plan to write?” to “How much time do you need with the first lady?” to “How do you propose to tell the truth in
that
paper?” (The London
Sunday Times,
I should have known, was one of the first to blow the whistle on Bill Clinton’s panty raids.) My assignment caused no little consternation among Hillary’s handlers, who wanted to know early on how I could possibly write “an honest article” for that appalling outlet.
⁴
It was not exactly true that the U.S. media failed in their duty to question Clinton’s “character,” but the
Sunday Times
got there first. This hardly made my job easier. When I explained to Lisa Caputo that I had already thoroughly researched the first lady and only needed some time to talk to her woman-to-woman and get a
feel
for her personality, red flags went up all around. I had the sense I couldn’t have said anything worse.

“I don’t usually do this,” I told Lisa Caputo. “I’m not a member of ‘the press,’ but a novelist and a poet.”

“We
know
who you are,” said Caputo ominously.

“Have you read my piece in the
New York Observer
? I’m
very
sympathetic to the first lady. I think she’s taking the heat for all of us, for all strong women. . . . I want to show her as a worthy successor to Eleanor Roosevelt.” Something must have clicked in Caputo’s head with the magic words “Eleanor Roosevelt,” because it was then that I was scheduled for a brief “rope line” interview with the first lady.

Even this mini-interview took more than a month of planning. Lisa Caputo and I spoke not less than five times to discuss whether I should see Hillary when she received an honorary degree at a college in New Jersey or I should attend a Democratic fund-raiser in New York “with other prominent women.” After much discussion, it became clear that the latter was the preferred venue. So Caputo arranged for me to attend one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign appearances before the New York Women’s Democratic Leadership Conference.

I arrived at Madison Square Garden early, was checked out by the gatekeepers, found to be kosher, and handed over to another Hillary handler. There ensued a half hour of confusion about where I should await the first lady and her minions, which elevator or stairs I should take upstairs, and who would escort me. I crossed and recrossed the arena at aerobic speed, dutifully following my bustling and officious guides. Finally I was hand delivered to an upstairs confab room, complete with central bar, to await, with those “other prominent women,” the arrival of the first and second ladies.