The Disappointing Femaleness of Hillary Clinton

THE BEST reason to vote for Hillary Clinton is, apparently, that she is a woman. Who is wowed by her platform, record, leadership? And yet, much as I would love to see a woman become president, it would crush my soul for Hillary Clinton to be that woman. (It would also crush my soul to have a terrible president for 4-8 years, and as that is a likely alternative I'm braced for heartbreak in any case.)

It would crush my soul because Hillary Clinton does not own her femaleness. She dons and doffs it in that shape-shifting manner aptly called Clintonesque. When she hopes to prove her capability she sheds femininity, wearing her dour Serious Face, and when she hopes to demonstrate kindly relatability she puts on a softened, grandmotherly smile. Neither feels genuine. She wears her pantsuits not in a badbitch-butch Ellen DeGeneres way, but as if aiming for the least-offensive common denominator.

Where is the pride in electing a woman as president if her demeanor conveys the message that being powerful must mean acting like a man?

It dismays me, too, that we call her by her first name, since her last name is, well, kinda already taken. I find this symbolically fraught, an uncomfortably unfeminist reminder that she is ever in the shadow of that other one. She occasions much use of "in her own right," a meekly complimentary phrase whose accidental patronizing grates on my ears.

HILLARY EMITS a vibe of obligatory sisterhood. She nudges, like, Don't forget: I'm female! It would be historic! This seems in rather poor taste. Is it not more honorable, more feminist to want to be measured on the merits?

Barack Obama got no easy pass with African American voters in 2008. On the contrary, they were pointedly skeptical of any assumption that Obama repped them by default. He had to earn that support, in part by demonstrating that he truly had grappled with and got what it means to be a black American. Clinton should be held to the same standard. Has she truly grappled with what it means to be a woman in an often anti-feminine society? If not, why should she presume she represents me, or any woman?

Hillary came up in an era when it was extremely rare and difficult to be a woman in power, and seems never to have transcended the contradictory weirdness and defensive posturing inherent to that struggle. She never found her individually-crafted path to female power as did other trailblazers of her generation, like Gloria Steinem, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ann Richards, Nancy Pelosi.

This is not whatsoever to say all female people ought to be girly. (If Rachel Maddow ran for president I'd steal identities and vote ten times.) It's about being one's authentically gendered self. Hillary Clinton's authentic self is notoriously elusive. And nothing about her sends the message, You can be whatever kind of woman you want to be, and be powerful. Michelle Obama telegraphs that every time she opens her mouth, or bares her elegantly muscled arms.

Hillary Clinton is not, to borrow Maya Angelou's lovely phrase, 'a woman phenomenally.' She is a woman hesitantly, awkwardly, convolutedly, focus-groupedly. There are rich, beautiful possibilities in female leadership. Hillary, alas, does not embody them.

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The Good Old Thug Love Duet

REMEMBER the video for "I'm Real"? JLo in hoops, bun, pink velour jumpsuit, smiling over how real she is. Ja Rule in a white do-rag, growling Ja Rule-isms. It epitomizes a classic rap sub-genre: the thug love duet.

Turn-of-the-millennium thug love duets have a bubblegum quality that predates the darkly complex sex-love relations of the Drake era. Think of Cam'Ron's bouncy "Hey Ma" or Jay and Bey's "'03 Bonnie & Clyde," from before she was Ms. Carter.

IT'S A WORLD where men rap hard and ladies sing nice. The guys are wild and profane, but the women are endlessly sweet, holding them down with smiling hooks. Down to ride to the very end. Thug love duets are about badboys and the good girls who love them; only the earnest heart of the good girl can melt a thug. All I need in this life of sin.

Undisputed princess of the genre is almond-eyed Ashanti. She mighta been singing "Foolish" over these fools later, but she made an ideal thug lover, her innocent smile the perfect foil for rapper grimaces.

The ladies aren't just relegated to hook duty these days; they rap hard as the dudes when they feel like. Thug love bangers may be naughtily retrograde, but they are so delicious. It's that polarity of masculine and feminine, hard contrasted against soft, plus a notion of love that's wonderfully simple: opposites attract.

Listen to my Thug Love Duets playlist

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Lana Del Rey and the Forbidden Feminine

LANA DEL REY evokes a world of red lips, intoxicants, deceptively innocent dresses, punky badboys and slick-haired sugar daddies who take you on fast drives down the coast at night. Her songs sound so lushly beautiful that you almost wish to be in them--until you remember how miserable that would be, since they are made of gilded angst, as dark-skied as pop can be. Lana has a Mad Men-esque knack for slathering glamor on turmoil until it's gorgeous. Her new album Ultraviolence is darker even than previous releases and edges into a hazily adulterous, abusive space. Even when she's cooing Ooh baby ooh baby/I'm in love it sounds like a scary place to be.

Her fascinations with quicksand sexuality, meekness and a badgirl variety of transactional romance are irksome and anti-feminist to some. "If we as a society accept the disempowered form of femininity that Del Rey embodies, young women are truly in trouble," read a recent denunciation in Ms.

I think such irking is important. Feminist thought tends to wish away some common, deep-rooted habits of the female mind, like yearning for male attention, fearing aloneness, being enticed by wealth, and that ancient craving for the protection of muscles. (He holds me in his big arms/Drunk and I am seeing stars/This is all I think of, Lana disempoweredly sang on "Video Games.") Even if we choose to sensibly repress such brain habits, lifting the rules to see what may lie beneath serves a real-keeping purpose.

Lana keeps it thusly real. Her sisterly defenders point to every woman's (feminist!) right to be screwed up, and I do not disagree. Lana's music contains disturbing scenarios, which should be heard as earnest art, dark subject matter handled with nuance and skill, rather than judged as bad role modeling. But her words are rarely as shocking as He hit me and it felt like a kiss; she is mostly criticized for the submissive fragility and phallocentric romanticism of her lyrics. The singer Lorde said of Del Rey, "It's so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: 'I’m nothing without you.' This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff."

But surely many a woman has had not-proud moments of "don't leave me" shirt-tugging, if only in her own head. Weakness, fear, neediness--and the use of seduction to paper them over--are authentic parts of female experience, and it is valuable to hear a voice that admits to loving foolishly. Lana, singing Need you, baby, like I breathe you, baby, takes us to vulnerable corners of the female psyche that feel forbidden. Her unfeminist vices let us question the unflappable power pose of contemporary womanhood.

WITH HER bombshell image and helpless romanticism, Lana sings sex and love in unusual ways. She doesn't care about uprightness, suitability. She sings desire, desperation, unseemly devotion. She sings the kind of sex that makes you feel unpowerful in a good way (In the land of gods and monsters I was an angel/Looking to get fucked hard) and the kind that makes you feel powerful in a wrong way (Fucked my way up to the top/This is my show.)

She has sufficiently intact romantic sensibilities to remake the deliciously treacly Disney classic "Once Upon A Dream," darkening it almost beyond recognition but still honoring the love dream of the original. The punky badboys and sugar daddies are her antagonists, but also her romantic heroes. This is an artist captivated by love, in all its soaring and crashing. The Lana of her songs is exquisitely, sometimes tragically, vulnerable in love, but savvy enough to know that vulnerability carries its own form of honest power.

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On Gender

Gender is not a crime.

Feels a tad controversial to say so, as many nowadays consider gender roles oppressive, and condemn 'gender essentialism' in favor of some sort of neuter ideal. We humans do have a sordid record of forcing each other into restricted roles based upon gender, skin color and so on; I suppose our skittishness on the matter is understandable.

No one should be pressured to adhere to any rules of gender. We ought to all be free to express ourselves, gender-wise and otherwise, as we like. This seems an obvious platitude. And yet, we might remind ourselves how widely it applies, scolding not just icky misogynists with retro notions of femininity, but also Women's Studies majors who would denounce my tight jeans. Both, after all, implicitly impose their own gender ideas on others. My ass is mine to objectify as I please.

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SUMMER BOOK REPORT: Cleb Does Bellow

I WAS PRETTY SURE I hated Saul Bellow, vigorously and justly. Hated him for his sexism, which is to say he seemed to hate me first. My gag reflex was not Bellow-specific. I felt the same revulsion toward other macho American novelists, who struck me as oversexualizing and insulting and apelike.

However I had at some point to admit that I also found these same writers: fascinating. This attraction-repulsion required further investigation, preferably in post form. So here goes.

Bellow seemed like a fitting launchpad for said investigation, and I picked up a copy of his renowned 1964 novel Herzog. Both being Jews, I figured Bellow and I could bond over quaint Yiddishisms, having little else in common. Which worked out nicely when his character Moses Herzog reminisced on singing "Ma Tovu" with his brothers as a child. I was humming it all the next day. ("Ma Tovu" is a pleasant song to have in your head, since it means "How Good." Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov, mish'knotecha Yisrael: How good are thy tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.)

I opened the test case macho novel with apprehension. The plan was to face the erection, hoping I'd know what to do with it. And mostly I did, noting the sense in which the hyperactive male sex drive ought to create a happy situation for us heterosexual women. I suppose the rub lies in our ambivalent role as object of those desires. Desire can beget derision, as I am wont to lecture. And too, horniness may beget creepiness. Reading Bellow was at times like being inside the head of some lecherous great-uncle; I did not want to know what was going on in there.

In the Herzog era, the Mad Men era, there seems to have been some glamorous sexual crackle, and simultaneously the sexes were warring. Usually it seems we get along better nowadays, but sometimes it seems men are stewing in their caves while women appear smugly victorious but are privately unfulfilled.

And I worry that our present era has warped and vilified some of the natural distinctions of gender, and that certain prevailing wisdoms attempt to subdivide relationships into unrealistically tidy, sterile compartments (sex, communication, housework, and so forth), neglecting the pulsating, organic whole that is the ever-tenuous but uniquely magical bond between men and women.* I kept these ruminations to myself, however, until I read a wonderful essay in the book review section of the New York Times.

*Sorry, beloved gays. This one's not about you.


IN HER ESSAY "The Naked and the Conflicted," Katie Roiphe observes that today's male novelists "have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors." Predecessors like Norman Mailer, John Updike, Phillip Roth and Saul Bellow. (Among these Bellow is, incidentally, the most demure, as indicated in the below graphic, which accompanied Roiphe's essay.) She goes on:

The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex...Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing.

Of that last she provides an excellent example from Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections: "He could hardly believe she hadn’t minded his attacks on her, all his pushing and pawing and poking. That she didn’t feel like a piece of meat that he’d been using."

Ladies, if we have given guys the impression that their sexual aggression is loathsome, we have failed grievously to communicate. And communication is supposed to be our specialty. Furthermore, if we have given such an impression, that we want our men de-balled, does that not betray a cowardice of our own?

It is fashionable to speak of men being *threatened by strong women,* but what of insecure women feeling threatened by strong men? Mightn't we women be quick to judge a delicious specimen of masculinity as a jerk or a dolt or a cad, similar to the way some men are quick to condemn a dauntingly attractive woman as dumb or bitchy?

Speakinawhich, check out Herzog's flagrantly displayed desire/derision vortex in this passage from the book:

He saw twenty paces away the white soft face and independent look of a woman in a shining black straw hat which held her hair in depth and eyes that even in the signal-dotted obscurity reached him with a force she could never be aware of. Those eyes might be blue, perhaps green, even gray--he would never know. But they were bitch eyes, that was certain. They expressed a sort of female arrogance which had an immediate sexual power over him; he experienced it again that very moment--a round face, the clear gaze of pale bitch eyes, a pair of proud legs. [Emboldenings mine.]

Sheesh! What threat can this stranger possibly represent? She's just like sitting on a bench in a train station and he hates her.

I found a possible answer in a description of Herzog's ex-wife, Madeleine. Recalling the beauty of the woman who left him, Herzog is flooded with venomous resentment. "Such beauty," he thinks, "makes men breeders, studs and servants." Stands to reason that Bitch Eyes, likewise, would be a threat to power. A threat to freedom. Bell Biv Devoe said it straighter: "Never trust a big butt and a smile."

Here's another Bellow desire/derision gem, describing a photograph of Madeleine as a child: "In jodhpurs, boots and bowler she had the hauteur of the female child who knows it won't be long before she is nubile and has the power to hurt." I assure you, no twelve year-old girl has ever thought any such thing.

But I appreciate knowing Herzog has these notions. What makes the insidiousness of the contemporary male novelists is their reluctance to be real for fear they'll be caught thinking wrong. This is artistic cowardice, though also understandable. By contrast, in Herzog Bellow ruthlessly exposes the twisted consciousness of an often-despicable character who seems a damn lot like Bellow himself. It reads like plain truth; artless, and thus good art.

Funny thing--Franzen tries to do this, or something akin to it, in The Corrections*: creating a mildly despicable doppelganger with whom the reader must inevitably empathize. But Franzen's Chip comes off wanting to be pitied or sheltered or something. He backhandedly begs absolution, whereas Herzog is (at least in his stream of consciousness narration) guileless. Herzog's not trying to manipulate the reader into secretly liking him; he owns to being half schmuckish and is strong enough not to whiningly finagle your forgiveness. He only asks that his faults be accepted. Who can say no to that.

*I read The Corrections several years ago and did not re-read it for this essay. That was wrong, I know. Just I was loathe to rekindle so odious a relationship. By way of apology, I offer this interesting recent Franzen article.

At any rate, this business of shipping one's self-loathing out into the world in charismatic written package is an excellent trick, one I use often. But I digress from the point, which is: I'd sooner do Saul Bellow than Jonathan Franzen. And the former is dead. (Counterobjectification. Try it.)


I LEARN things from Bellow because he tells the truth, however ugly. I have some idea now how a person of Herzog's ilk, a muddled misogynist mid-century man of ideas thinks. Communication can only be born of honesty, of course. If someone avoids saying in order not to be caught harboring incorrect (politically or otherwise) thoughts, only frustration can result.

But it wasn't only Bellow's honesty that I appreciated. Reading Herzog, I felt a less inhibited version of the attraction to mid-century macho novelists that had formerly evoked feminist shame. Indeed the very things that might make men sexist--strength, dominance, a bit of brutishness--might also make them sexy.

The loins are rarely in accord with the politically correct brain. Trust me. I've read Superhead's memoir. (Sup's writing game can't match Sup's head game.) But I do believe this conflation of sexy and sexist, what we might call the Nigel Tufnel Paradox, can be overcome. It just requires effort on both sides. A male friend once told me it is not easy to find the balance of being a guy. And I believe him. Just as, he kindly added, it is surely not easy to do same as a woman.

In saying such things there is always the fear one's fellow woman will accuse one of letting men off easy, indulging in another pathetic effort to please them. Herein paragraph constitutes my plea for sisterly mercy, so let me reassert that yeah Bellow's sexist. Classically so. Herzog's ideal woman is geishesquely servile, delighted just to please him, bathe him, remove his shoes. And he thinks some mean shit, like, "But this is a female pursuit. This hugging and heartbreak is for women. The occupation of a man is in duty, in use, in civility, in politics in the Aristotelian sense." Ouch! (Resolved to watch PBS News Hour each evening in full. No TMZ.)

And yet Moses Herzog, wandering the existential desert, is also a decent person. And indeed decent people have often been sexists, racists, slaveowners and Nazis. How many must there be today who hate gays? Prejudice is one of those peculiar quirks of humanity.



CHEST-THUMPING authors, like Mailer especially, do also use sex and misogyny the way certain rappers do: to flex a disfigured masculine pride. I distinguish such cheap knocks from genuine expressions of imperfect sentiment. And as Roiphe points out, contemporary male novelists can be sexist too; just their version is "wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out." Which is kinda worse, for its camouflage. (BTW, if you ever make your girlfriend mad, just drop five stacks on that makeup bag; it worked on my cat.)

My unsolicited advice to male authors: Writing is not macho. Novelists are not rock stars, not boxers. If writing novels threatens your manhood, perhaps prescribe yourself some other activity to restore it rather than jizzing all over the manuscript. Oh, and tell the truth. Even if someone might hate you for it.

To all the ladies worldwide, I say we have to be strong enough to let men have their strength and know we can handle it. They, in turn, have to promise not to be assholes and to treat us with respect. But the respect has to be genuine. As in literally 'look again'--not some blathering bullshit self-congratulatory fake sensitivity. Beware the man who announces his feminism. I never ever tell people who are not white that I'm nonracist.

What do women want? wonders Herzog. "What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood." At another point he lists what women around him seem to expect: "nightly erotic gratification, safety, money, insurance, furs, jewelry, cleaning women, drapes, dresses, hats, night clubs, country clubs, automobiles, theater!" But a woman of Herzog's day could easily have made a much longer list of what men then expected from women, including but not limited to: looking pretty, being the cleaning women themselves, rearing young, smoothing down hackles, pleasing in bed, living in suburban traps and resigning themselves to the denigrating attitudes and limited roles of their time.

I presume to speak for all contemporary women in saying we want strength without oppression, sensitivity but not 'paralyzed sweetness,' to be protected and appreciated and understood. And I cannot know but can guess that the men want care without stiflement, independence but not indifference, to be nurtured and appreciated and understood. Tall orders on both sides, but something can probably be worked out.

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Melanie The Incorrigible

MEET MY LATEST BESTIE, Melanie Fiona. She’s Guyanese-Canadian, because in the Obama era hybrid vigor is the new black.

Melanie says everyone recognizes the beat from her first single, “Give It To Me Right,” but can't place it, so I’m proud to proclaim that I called the sample—“Time Of The Season”!—right away.

“Give It To Me Right” could be mistaken for a standard radio skank track, and while I think it’s more than that, I also bear no grudge against skank tracks. “Ill Na Na” is way more *empowering* than any India.Arie kandy korn. Or try Cassie’s “Me & U,” which pulls off the ultimate coup of being slutty yet sweet. The trick is maintaining your charm and your halo; Kelis taught me that, and she only charged 99 cents.

I would say “GITMR” manages the same tightrope act, but Andrea Martin, who wrote the song for Mel, declares that it's not about sex. Yeah no of course not. It’s just about like wanting people to keep it real and stuff. (Don’t tell the guys, but such eyelash-batting innocence is part of the trick.)

This introduction may paint Melanie as a sexpot temptress, but that’s just her radio persona. The slightest scratch at the album’s surface reveals the hopeless romantic underneath. “You Stop My Heart” is pure malt shop swoon. It pairs well with my running favorite “Johnny,” a song that is girl groupy (= Cleb catnip) and makes heartbreak sound somehow fun.


SOUL SINGERS are practically the only ones who believe in love these days. We are meant to worship at the altar of the sensible, antiseptic Relationship; that full-cardio arduous, hideous, glorious thing called love is too sloppy and impractical for any adequately-analyzed modern citizen. We speak ruefully of 'partners,' of 'making it work,' and are so wise to the perils of infatuation as to damn near eschew its joys. As diligently as we lecture about the grinding labor a Relationship requires, the A-student could come to view cohabitational partnership as one more over-achiever's trophy, and love as mere irresponsible folly.

It can be jarring, then, to hear naive Melanie singing, I'll walk these streets all night until I bring my baby home. You can just picture her enlightened friends raising one eyebrow, like, Giiirlheainworthit. Because today’s faux-strong woman doesn’t deign lower herself to “Ain’t Misbehavin’” on the happy hand, nor “Black Coffee” on the sad. And then we have the audacity to whine from our impenetrable towers about where have all the Lloyd Doblers gone.

We are comfortable instead in the To the left to the left/Everything you own in a box to the left mold, in which despair curdles straight to vengeful stiletto anger—a move we presumably cribbed from old-fashioned faux-strong men, and the insipid Sex and the City. (And who but ventriloquist dummy Beyonce would sing a song called “Irreplaceable” that means “Replaceable.” Still, I do enjoy singing it with my garden class girls. It’s pretty cute when fifth-graders say, Baby you dropped them keys/Hurry up before your taxi leaves.)

Melanie is also under the woeful misapprehension that hotness and tender-heartedness need not be mutually exclusive. Sorry, Mel: if you're hot you must be an evil temptress. It’s just that simple.


EVEN WHEN THE impression is flawless, it’s boring to replicate the old. Sharon Jones may be good, but she just makes me think, Hey, I could be listening to Mary Wells right now. Melanie--like Amy, like Leela--knows how to engage the authenticity of the classic but make it new. Hence the album's title, The Bridge.

“Johnny” mixes scratching with an American Bandstand sound, and she's dialing on her cellphone begging Johnny to bring her back her heart. (Wow, how contemporary and high-tech!*) “Cry Baby” samples the Vandellas' “Jimmy Mack,” which makes me very happy. It also uses cool distorted vocals and so sounds rather like that old-timey Fergie song "Clumsy," but with the merciful excision of Fergie. And just to flaunt her hybrid vigor, Melanie throws in some reggaeish tracks, and breaks out her Debbie Harry swagger for "Bang Bang."

*That was my inner critic teasing me.

OF COURSE, poetic injustice, “Single Ladies” bested Melanie’s “It Kills Me” for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance at the Grammys. What kills me is that the former, despite its goddamn stupid lyrics, actually is the better song, although Melanie is by far the superior artist. (Or even merely deserves the word.) Factory-farmed crap is sometimes tasty, I suppose.

“It Kills Me” is now making the radio rounds, and while she delivers the song with heart, I think Melanie's nature is more joyful than mournful. For a badboy lament, I’d sooner recommend Keyshia’s classic “I Should’ve Cheated.” And when you really need dark depths, put Amy on. Melanie is more suited to making the best of things.


Beware the evil temptress.


Cute real Melanie. Equally a threat.

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Men Necessary, Alas

I'VE BEEN THINKING about men a lot lately. This is not unusual. I don't mean that any untoward way. Just that I try to understand them, as I try in general to understand people who are different from me. You know--like it's a good mind exercise.

I quite like men. Sometimes they make more sense to me than women. Men like to verbally joust, roughhouse and trade quips, whereas many women seem so delicate and polite that I can't relate. I often imagine there is some soft sisterhood out there to which my application is yet outstanding.

And men usually seem to like me back. So all is swell, right? Alas, no. Because it's always fraught. Probably something to do with sex. Specifically, the conjoined twindom of desire and derision.

Ladies, you probably already figured out, consciously or un, that being an object of desire is a form of power. Conversely, to desire is powerless. So when some guy harasses you in the street, maybe what he's really shouting is that he hates you because he wants you. Come to think of it, how much of sexism is just men trying to reassert power over those who rob them of it? (My research thus far indicates that power is very important to men.)

I often get the vague impression that older men in particular want to think I'm at least a little stupid. And I wonder if that isn't because if I'm cute and younger and smart it's just going to piss them off. I'm thinking, for example, of a co-worker with whom I share undeniable mutual fondness (and respect, or so I thought) who, in venting about his job stress, once remarked that it must be nice to, as receptionist, "just sit there and look pretty."


IT'S EASY FOR heteros of both genders to team up against one another. Like Frenchy telling Sandy that men are amoebas on fleas on rats, or Rowlf singing to Kermit that you can neither live with nor without 'em. The generalized group wielding the power to hurt you makes a ready target. (Man, I guess that's one more way it's a challenge to be gay. Who do you scapegoat?)

I'll say it plain: I've had a lot of men treat me like shit. Enough to make me wonder if there isn't something about me that turns otherwise decent guys into hole-in-wall-punching, insult-yelling, heart-breaking assholes. Not a pleasant thing to wonder.

Surely there are many reasons for this, many of those to do with my own many faults (not least among those many, the fact I think it's my fault [thanks, Dad!]) and just as surely I am one of many, many women to wonder approximately the same thing. (Just for the hell of it, here's that word one more time: many.)

But to unabashedly side with my own sex for a moment...All too often when men treat us this way, it is, once again, a bid for power in a situation in which they find themselves lacking it. When, in addition to a body and a mind that attract them, you possess various skills (kitchen, bedroom, couch, &tc.) that would make them want to stick around...Well, that is power indeed. And it may piss them off. And make them want to cut you down to size by hook or crook--by objectification, by possessiveness, by cultivating dependence, by infidelity, or simply by rejecting you before you ever get the chance.

But ladies, if we're being honest with ourselves we will admit it goes both ways. That a man who attracts us also scares us. And our fear may become self-fulfilling.

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