Hillary Clinton's Faux Feminism, by Liza Featherstone

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Paglia on Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem — and why New Hampshire women broke for Bernie Sanders: Sanders' thrilling win dealt Gloria Steinem and old-guard feminist establishment a loss. But it wasn't about sexism
by Camille Paglia
February 11, 2016

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Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton in 1995. (Credit: AP/Joe Tabacca)

With Bernie Sanders’ thrilling, runaway victory over Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, the old-guard feminist establishment in the U.S. has been dealt a crushing blow.

Despite emergency efforts by Gloria Steinem, the crafty dowager empress of feminism, to push a faltering Hillary over the finish line, Sanders overwhelmingly won women’s votes in every category except senior citizens. Last week, when she told TV host Bill Maher that young women supporting the Sanders campaign are just in it to meet boys, Steinem managed not only to insult the intelligence and idealism of the young but to vaporize every lesbian Sanders fan into a spectral non-person.

Steinem’s polished humanitarian mask had slipped, revealing the mummified fascist within. I’m sure that my delight was shared by other dissident feminists everywhere. Never before has the general public, here or abroad, more clearly seen the arrogance and amoral manipulativeness of the power elite who hijacked and stunted second-wave feminism.

The next day, Hillary was accompanied on the campaign trail by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (a Bill Clinton appointee), who proclaimed, to Hillary’s laughter and applause, “There’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women.” Waspishly policing the earth was evidently insufficient for the feminist politburo, who are now barging into the salvation and damnation game.

Never mind that the woman elevated to Christ Redeemer status by Steinem and Albright has a stained and tattered rap sheet five miles long. What genuine principles does Hillary have left, after a public career so light on concrete achievement and so heavy with lies and greed? Yes, she’s been handed job after job, but primarily due to her very unfeminist association with a man. As a senator, she initiated nothing of substance, and as Secretary of State, she stumbled into one disastrous fiasco after another, escalating the destabilization of North Africa and the Mideast.

I enthusiastically support and contribute to Bernie Sanders because he is a man of conviction who speaks from his heart and who does not need paid pollsters and a giant, obsequious, royal staff to tell him what to say or wear every day. He articulates a vision of social justice that should be at the core of the Democratic party, which has become far too cozy with big donors and corporate lobbyists over the past half century. Hillary Clinton, in contrast, is a time-server and trimmer who cynically panders to every audience and who shuffles through policy positions like playing cards.

When and how did Hillary allegedly become a feminist icon, as so many young women evidently think? Her public prominence has always been based not on any accomplishment of her own but on her marriage to a charismatic politician, now in his dotage. Her speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 listed the limitations and atrocities suffered by Third World women and children, but her call to “move beyond rhetoric” has lacked a discernible follow-through. Moreover, in a central passage of that speech, every sentence about Hillary’s encounters with needy women began with “I”, unsettlingly prefiguring her over-use of “I” in her current campaign, in contrast to Bernie Sanders’ ego-transcending focus on sparking a populist movement of political reform.

Hillary was attending the Yale Law School while I was a graduate student across the street. In 1970, a sparsely attended feminist conference was held at the Law School, featuring well-known figures like Kate Millett and Naomi Weisstein. If Hillary was there, she did nothing to stand out. It was at that conference that I realized that second-wave feminism, then barely three years old, was already going off the rails. For example, the radical lesbian Rita Mae Brown said to me, “The difference between you and me, Camille, is that you want to save the universities and I want to burn them down.”

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Enough with the Hillary cult: Her admirers ignore reality, dream of worshipping a queen: Clinton voters overlook money lust, shadowy surrogates, sociopathic policy shifts, horrific overseas record. Why?
by Camille Paglia
April 21, 2016

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What is it with the Hillary cult?

As a lifelong Democrat who will be enthusiastically voting for Bernie Sanders in next week’s Pennsylvania primary, I have trouble understanding the fuzzy rosy filter through which Hillary fans see their champion. So much must be overlooked or discounted—from Hillary’s compulsive money-lust and her brazen indifference to normal rules to her conspiratorial use of shadowy surrogates and her sociopathic shape-shifting in policy positions for momentary expedience.

Hillary’s breathtaking lack of concrete achievements or even minimal initiatives over her long public career doesn’t faze her admirers a whit. They have a religious conviction of her essential goodness and blame her blank track record on diabolical sexist obstructionists. When at last week’s debate Hillary crassly blamed President Obama for the disastrous Libyan incursion that she had pushed him into, her acolytes hardly noticed. They don’t give a damn about international affairs—all that matters is transgender bathrooms and instant access to abortion.

I’m starting to wonder, given the increasing dysfunction of our democratic institutions, if the Hillary cult isn’t perhaps registering an atavistic longing for monarchy. Or perhaps it’s just a neo-pagan reversion to idolatry, as can be felt in the Little Italy street festival scene of The Godfather, Part II, where devout pedestrians pin money to the statue of San Rocco as it is carried by in procession. There was a strange analogy to that last week, when Sanders supporters satirically showered Hillary’s motorcade with dollar bills as she arrived at George Clooney’s luxe fund-raiser in Los Angeles.

The gushy indulgence around Hillary in the Manhattan media was typified by Vanessa Friedman’s New York Times piece, “Hillary Clinton’s Message in a Jacket,” after last week’s debate. Evidently oblivious to how she was undermining the rote sexism plank in the Clinton campaign platform, Friedman praised Hillary for “playing the clothing card” against Sanders: Hillary’s long white jacket made her look like “New York’s white knight,” riding to the rescue.

Gee, that sure wasn’t my reaction. My first thought was: “Why is Hillary wearing a lab coat?” My second was: “Isn’t this a major gaffe—reminding people of abortion clinics?” My third was: “The big belted look is not recommended for those broad in the beam.” For all the complaints about an alleged higher scrutiny suffered by women candidates, affluent politicians like Hillary can afford glam squads of stylists and an infinite range of clothing choices, hairstyles, and cosmetic aids. Male candidates with their boring cropped hair and sober suits fade into the woodwork when the queen bee flies in.

The protective major media phalanx around Hillary certainly extends to her health issues, which only the Drudge Report has had the courage to flag. In assessing possible future occupants of the White House, the public has an inalienable right to know. I was incredulous at the passive gullibility of the media, including the New York Times, last July, when a woman internist, identified as Hillary’s doctor, released a summary letter about her health that was lacking in the specifics one would normally expect in medical records. Does anyone really think that world-renowned Hillary, whose main residence for years has been in Washington and not Chappaqua, has as her primary physician an obscure young internist in Mount Kisco, New York? It’s ludicrous on the face of it.

And what about that persistent cough? “Allergy season,” the hacking Hillary claimed on a New York radio show this week. (“You all right? Any mouth to mouth CPR?” joked a host.) I’m just a Ph.D., not an M.D., but I’ll put my Miss Marple hat on here. Am I the only one who noticed Hillary’s high-wrap collar, pallid, puffy face, and bulging eyes during her choleric New Hampshire primary concession speech in February? (Another unusually high collar followed the next morning.)

My tentative theory is that Hillary may have sporadic flare-ups of goiter, worsened under stress. Coughing is a symptom. High collars mask a swollen throat. In serious cases, an operation may be necessary. Is this chronic thyroid condition disqualifying in a presidential candidate? Certainly not in my view, but I don’t like being lied to—by candidates, campaign staffs, or their media sycophants.

In their political biography, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. tell the story about the National Law Journal and also probe her lawyerly skills when she was at Rose Law. She only tried five cases and confided to Vince Foster -- another Rose Law partner -- that she was terrified of juries. So Foster had to accompany her to court. Because of her lack of prowess in the courtroom, she had to make her way at Rose Law by working her connections as the State’s first lady to bring in clients, and even then her annual partner’s share was mostly below $100,000 -- the lowest in the firm and very small potatoes for one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America.

-- From Nixon Girl to Watergate, by Jeffrey St. Clair, Alexander Cockburn

Hillary’s road map to the Democratic nomination was written by “Tricky Dick” Nixon, who after his acrimonious defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race doggedly restored his standing in the GOP by doing the “rubber-chicken circuit,” building up the grass-roots connections that allowed him to win the White House six years later. Similarly, Hillary has spent the years since her 2008 loss to Obama in deepening and tightening her relationships with state and local Democratic politicians, community leaders, and urban ministers nationwide—for whom she has assets of infinite largesse.

When pro-Hillary media taunt Bernie Sanders about what his campaign has or has not financially contributed to lower-level Democratic races, they are foolishly exposing Hillary’s modus operandi. Nixon’s rubber chicken has turned into one mighty gilded bird.

Dear Camille,

I read your article about abortion, and I read the Naomi Wolf essay. She spoke of bringing the God question into a woman’s private decision to have an abortion.

I once had an abortion in Tokyo. I was living in Japan with my now ex-husband. We were on shaky ground in a new marriage, for the academic program he was in, an elite Japanese language program for Westerners, was the most difficult in the world. It was also a notorious destroyer of marriages because of the nonstop demands. We had discussed having children later in the marriage, when we returned to the States.

Condoms can fail. We were on holiday. I got pregnant. He was not happy. He felt that we were not ready. He felt that I would have to return to the States alone to get the proper pre-natal care. He wanted me to get a Japanese abortion.

So after soul-searching, tears, upset, and my not wishing to leave Japan and him -- I am an East Asian scholar -- I went to a Japanese clinic where they inserted small rods of seaweed into the cervix. These had some kind of reaction with the chemistry of the pregnancy, and the pregnancy ended.

The thing was, the Japanese did not think that abortion was the taking of life because of their Buddhist belief in reincarnation. No one knew for sure when a soul that was reincarnating would enter the foetus. And if the soul could not enter one body, it would choose another to reincarnate. So one was killing the vessel of the soul, but not the soul itself.

Thus, there was no guilt associated with the termination of pregnancy. It was as though there were another foetus available among the millions and millions of sentient beings. It was a karmic loss, for the mother and for the soul in transit in the eternal bus stops of existence. To have a precious human body is important in Buddhism because it is the vehicle through which one can obtain enlightenment. It is a privilege to not be an animal or any lower form of rebirth. One can work for the salvation of mankind as a bodhisattva if one has a human body, so in that sense, there may be karmic repercussions, but in general, the termination of a pregnancy had less trauma surrounding it.

It’s a different perspective, but one I think worth taking a look at. I should say that I have been a Buddhist since school days, although as a lapsed Catholic, I am sometimes a lapsed Buddhist.

Wu Deyan
Florida

Thank you for your extraordinary letter, with its amazing revelation about the non-mutilating use of natural seaweed to induce abortion in Japan. I will never forget the powerful climax of Naomi Wolf’s brave 1995 essay, which still impresses me after all these years: “Memorial services for the souls of aborted foetuses are common in Japan, where abortions are both legal and readily available. Shinto doctrine holds that women should make offerings to aborted foetuses to help them rest in peace.”

Despite its recurrent calls for multiculturalism, Western liberalism remains locked in a narrow secular mindset that I think has proved disastrous for art and culture. I feel very fortunate to have attended college in the 1960s, when ideas about both Zen Buddhism (the legacy of Beat poets) and Hinduism filled the air. Native American and Mexican vision quests were also a common theme. Although I am an atheist, I maintain that the highest form of multiculturalism is the study of world religions. Our present politicized, victim-obsessed multiculturalism has proved to be an abject failure—simply yet another ostentatious platform for the white bourgeoisie to expiate guilt for its own privilege and affluence.

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Feminist Camille Paglia: Hillary Clinton Is ‘Soulless, Incompetent’: 'The woman has never succeeded in any job. She's created chaos after chaos.'
by Bre Payton
April 18, 2016

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Feminist Camille Paglia ripped modern feminism, Lena Dunham, and “soulless” Hillary Clinton in a recent interview published by Spiked.

“People don’t lay a glove on her,” she said. “The woman has never succeeded in any job, she’s created chaos after chaos, including now all of North Africa spilling its refugees into Europe, and it’s due to Hillary for taking out Gaddafi and not thinking about what would happen afterward.”

“I think she’s absolutely soulless,” she said. “I think she’s incompetent.”

Clinton isn’t the only woman whom Paglia thinks has co-opted feminism to use as a tool for her own personal gain.

“Lena Dunham to me is the symbol of neuroticism which masquerades as feminism,” she said. “I mean, Lena Dunham has a lot of problems that have to do with body image that have nothing whatever to do with wider society but have to do with the cast of her own family life and her own family background.”

Dunham uses feminism as a platform to project her own personal struggles, particularly her struggles with her own body image, onto the rest of society and find an external outlet to express them, Paglia said.

“The way she presents herself physically, it’s like: ‘Look I’m just presenting myself exactly as I am,” she said. “The implied blame [is] that ‘If you find me ugly, you don’t understand. I am woman, as she is, and you are sexist!'”

“I’m sorry, no,” Paglia said. “You’re just a big pile of pudding!”

She lamented that modern feminism has encourage millennials to demand coddling from college administrations in an effort to cocoon themselves.

“They think of the world as basically their playpen,” she said. “They’ve been raised in a bourgeoisie buffer. They’ve been raised wrapped in cotton. I think it goes back to their removal from the old working-class realities of life.”