[DEBATE] : american politricks / white men who vote for hillary are feminists (susan faludi)

[Sean Jacobs]

May 9, 2008
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Fight Stuff

By SUSAN FALUDI
San Francisco

NOTABLE in the Indiana and North Carolina primary results and in many  
recent polls are signs of a change in the gender weather: white men  
are warming to Hillary Clinton — at least enough to vote for her. It’s  
no small shift. These men have historically been her fiercest  
antagonists. Their conversion may point less to a new kind of male  
voter than to a new kind of female vote-getter.

Pundits have been quick to attribute the erosion in Barack Obama’s  
white male support to a newfound racism. What they have failed to  
consider is the degree to which white male voters witnessing Senator  
Clinton’s metamorphosis are being forced to rethink precepts they’ve  
long held about women in American politics.

For years, the prevailing theory has been that white men are often  
uneasy with female politicians because they can’t abide strong women.  
But if that’s so, why haven’t they deserted Senator Clinton? More  
particularly, why haven’t they deserted her as she has become ever  
more pugnacious in her campaign?

Maybe the white male electorate just can’t abide strong women whom  
they suspect of being of a certain sort. To adopt a particularly  
lamentable white male construct, the sports metaphor, political  
strength comes in two varieties: the power of the umpire, who controls  
the game by application of the rules but who never gets hit; and the  
power of the participant, who has no rules except to hit hard, not  
complain, bounce back and endeavor to prevail in the end.

For virtually all of American political history, the strong female  
contestant has been cast not as the player but the rules keeper, the  
purse-lipped killjoy who passes strait-laced judgment on feral boy  
fun. The animosity toward the rules keeper is fueled by the suspicion  
that she (and in American life, the regulator is inevitably coded  
feminine, whatever his or her sex) is the agent of people so  
privileged that they don’t need to fight, people who can dominate more  
decisively when the rules are decorous. American political misogyny is  
inflamed by anger at this clucking overclass: who are they to do  
battle by imposing rectitude instead of by actually doing battle?

The specter of the prissy hall monitor is, in part, the legacy of the  
great female reformers of Victorian America. In fact, these women were  
the opposite of fainting flowers. Susan B. Anthony barely flinched in  
the face of epithets, hurled eggs and death threats. Carry A. Nation  
swung an ax. Yet they were regarded by men as the regulators outside  
the game. Indeed, many 19th-century female reformers defined  
themselves that way — as reluctant trespassers in the public sphere  
who had left the domestic circle only to fulfill their duty as the  
morally superior sex, housekeepers scouring away a nation’s vice.

While the populace might concede the merits of the female reformers’  
cause, it found them repellent on a more glandular level. In that  
visceral subbasement of the national imagination — the one that  
underlies all the blood-and-guts sports imagery our culture holds so  
dear — the laurels go to the slugger who ignores the censors, the  
outrider who navigates the frontier without a chaperone.

Certainly through the many early primaries, Hillary Clinton was often  
defined by these old standards, and judged harshly. She was forever  
the entitled chaperone. But that was then. As Thelma, the housewife  
turned renegade, says to her friend in “Thelma & Louise” as the two  
women flee the law through the American West, “Something’s crossed  
over in me.”

Senator Clinton might well say the same. In the final stretch of the  
primary season, she seems to have stepped across an unstated gender  
divide, transforming herself from referee to contender.

What’s more, she seems to have taken to her new role with a Thelma- 
like relish. We are witnessing a female competitor delighting in the  
undomesticated fray. Her new no-holds-barred pugnacity and gleeful  
perseverance have revamped her image in the eyes of begrudging white  
male voters, who previously saw her as the sanctioning “sivilizer,” a  
political Aunt Polly whose goody-goody directives made them want to  
head for the hills.

It’s the unforeseen precedent of an unprecedented candidacy: our first  
major female presidential candidate isn’t doing what men always accuse  
women of doing. She’s not summoning the rules committee over every  
infraction. (Her attempt to rewrite the rules for Michigan and Florida  
are less a timeout than rough play.) Not once has she demanded that  
the umpire stop the fight. Indeed, she’s asking for more unregulated  
action, proposing a debate with no press-corps intermediaries.

If anyone has been guarding the rules this election, it’s been the  
press, which has been primly thumbing the pages of Queensberry and  
scolding her for being “ruthless” and “nasty,” a “brawler” who fights  
“dirty.”

But while the commentators have been tut-tutting, Senator Clinton has  
been converting white males, assuring them that she’s come into their  
tavern not to smash the bottles, but to join the brawl.

Deep in the American grain, particularly in the grain of white male  
working-class voters, that is the more trusted archetype. Whether  
Senator Clinton’s pugilism has elevated the current race for the  
nomination is debatable. But the strategy has certainly remade the  
political world for future female politicians, who may now cast off  
the assumption that when the going gets tough, the tough girl will  
resort to unilateral rectitude. When a woman does ascend through the  
glass ceiling into the White House, it will be, in part, because of  
the race of 2008, when Hillary Clinton broke through the glass floor  
and got down with the boys.

Susan Faludi is the author of “Backlash,” “Stiffed” and “The Terror  
Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.”