Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (21 page)

But that, according to the common wisdom, was about the only kind of lustful insertion you were likely to see in the Clinton marriage. They did not, reportedly, love each other, or even like each other; they were co-workers who’d made a marriage of convenience, or else a contemporary version of Lady Macbeth and her weak-willed husband, an unsexed and dangerous woman pushing her man onto the national stage for the sake of her own ambitions. In private, Hillary was said to be a shrew, a violent and unlovable nightmare. Shortly after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the
Chicago Sun-Times
alleged that she had broken a lamp during an argument, a story that quickly ballooned out—without verification or sourcing—into a tale about how she had
thrown
the lamp at him, which then turned into a story about how she’d thrown multiple objects, including a Bible, which, before long, was a story about the president and first lady punching each other. (In one particularly delightful variant, after the five-foot-five Hillary started a fistfight with her six-foot-two husband and desecrated the Holy Bible by using it as a weapon, she then
“lit up a cigarette to punish her
smoke-allergic husband.” So … I guess she won?) Despite the fact that they had a daughter, no one really believed they had sex; Hillary, at least, was usually presumed not to want or enjoy it. When the rumor mill did allow her some kind of desire, it was always perverse or annihilating. One popular rumor was that Hillary was a closeted lesbian, who tolerated Bill’s girlfriends because she was busy with her own; according to another, she’d had an affair with Vince Foster, and had him killed to cover it up.

So—the thinking went—of course Bill Clinton had affairs. What else was the man going to do? Have sex with Hillary? Still, when the details of one such affair were revealed to the public, they were enough to send the news media, and the public, spinning out into a year-long paroxysm of horror, disillusionment, and disgust. They also mandated the creation of a new villain in the narrative: Rather than sticking Hillary with the blame for every real or perceived problem with the Clinton administration, we began assigning it to the Other Woman.

You know.
That
Woman.

Monica Lewinsky had been twenty-one years old, and a White House intern, when she first met the president. What they did, when they met, was covered in exhaustive and pornographic detail by
The Starr Report
, prosecutor Ken Starr’s investigation of their relationship, supposedly undertaken because the president had denied that relationship under oath. Clinton defended himself by claiming that he’d been
asked about “sexual relations,” which had been legally defined as touching the genitals of another person for sexual gratification, and that—as the recipient of oral sex—he hadn’t, strictly speaking, touched Lewinsky’s. In the immortal words of
The Starr Report
, he argued that
“she engaged in sexual relations but he did not.” (Think about
that
the next time your partner won’t return the favor.) But this maneuver only made things worse: Lewinsky was seized, threatened with twenty-seven years in prison, and interrogated until she gave up specific, humiliating details on each and every way Bill Clinton had ever come into contact with her body. Who touched what,
with
what, who came, when they came, what they said about it, or felt about it, and how often phone sex came into the equation. Soon enough, it was all out there, a matter of public record, reprinted in
The Washington Post
and as a hard-cover book available in Wal-Mart.

But when people read
The Starr Report
, it wasn’t merely the salacious details—the thong-flashing, the blow-job-giving, the cigar going where no cigar had gone before—that sparked their outrage. It was
her
: Monica, the girl whose voice permeated every page.
The Starr Report
was, among other things, an excruciatingly detailed first-person account of how Monica Lewinsky had endured a bad breakup. And her worst crime was not lying, or even having sex with a powerful man; it was that she fell in love with him, and refused to let go of the relationship when he wanted it to end.

The affair hit the rocks when Monica was dismissed from the White House and moved to the Pentagon. Her superiors had noticed how much time she spent alone with the president, and thought (not unreasonably, as it turned out) that rumors of an affair could create trouble for the administration. Monica was “devastated,” not only because sexual harassment laws had been created to prevent women from losing their jobs if they were thought to pose a sexual temptation to their bosses, but because she thought,
“I was never going to see the president again.” In the months after her transfer, Clinton did in fact phase her out of his life, and eventually dumped her outright, something she dealt with by trying—over and over again—to see him in person, to get close again, to change his mind.

Though it was the Clinton camp’s decision to spread the tale that Monica was a “stalker,” a delusional and predatory woman who’d fantasized a relationship with the president, it was the work of Starr and his allies to turn Monica’s lovesick humiliation into news. The report made sure to note that Clinton’s secretary, Betty Currie, called her a “pain in the neck” and complained about the “many phone calls” in which Monica was “distraught and sometimes in tears over her inability to get in touch with the president.” Vernon Jordan, who’d been tasked with finding her another job, was quoted calling Monica a “highly emotional lady.” We got to read copious snippets from Monica’s unsent letters, which ran the full range of embarrassing post-breakup emotions,
from irate to abject and back again:
“Any normal person would have walked away from this and said, ‘He doesn’t call me, he doesn’t want to see me—screw it. It doesn’t matter.’ I can’t let go of you,” ran one such note. By the time the year was up, we would hear a tape of Monica sobbing to Linda Tripp, who was, unbeknownst to her, taping their phone calls on the advice of her literary agent. Monica’s voice was so mangled with snot and pain that you could hardly make out the words:
I can’t take it, I can’t
take
it any more
.

Where Hillary was presumed to be cold and emotionless, Monica was
all
emotion, a throbbing mess of tears and needs. Where Hillary was seen as purely political, happy to accept a loveless marriage if it helped her make national policy, Monica returned to “love,” over and over again, as her justification, even when it made her seem clueless about the political context: In her interview with Barbara Walters, given in March 1999, while Clinton was facing impeachment, Monica called him her “soulmate.” Where Hillary was perceived as being sexless, Monica was all sex, a
“blow-job queen” whose proclivities and underwear preferences were smeared all over every newspaper, magazine, and late-night talk-show monologue in the nation. And where Hillary was presumed to be calculating, all brain and no heart, Monica could seem, at times, crushingly naive—not stupid, precisely, but not tremendously rational, either, led by her heart to the exclusion of even basic common sense. Long after the relationship ended, when he’d been avoiding her
for months, and just after a screaming fight in which she threatened to tell her parents about the affair and he said he wished he’d never gotten involved with her, Bill Clinton made a joke about maybe being single one day. She chose to interpret all this as a sign that he wanted to leave his wife for her:
“I just knew he was in love with me,” she said.

These women had nothing in common. Well, one thing: They were both blamed for Bill Clinton’s cheating. In her 2014
Vanity Fair
essay about how the scandal had ruined her life, Monica made sure to remind her readers of an
Observer
round-table (
NEW YORK SUPERGALS LOVE THAT NAUGHTY PREZ
) in which various women writers discussed the affair. She mentioned her pain at hearing herself described as “not pretty” and “not brilliant” (
“My first job out of college was at the White House,” she noted), and her horror when it was suggested that she could “rent out her mouth.” What Lewinsky did not mention was what those same women said about Hillary Clinton.

She was unattractive, first of all.
“Isn’t it interesting that Bill doesn’t go for women that look like Hillary?” Francine Prose noted. Patricia Marx tut-tutted the fact that
“Hillary Clinton changed her hairstyle one million times, and the one way she didn’t try was the one way that works.” All were agreed that Hillary was probably not loving or vulnerable enough to be truly hurt by the affair:
“I think [Hillary] would actually be more effective if she showed a little weakness,” Katie Roiphe said. “There’s something a little
steely, and people are suspicious because she seems very political.” As always, Hillary was all brain and ambition, without bodily desire or human emotion: Erica Jong advanced the idea that
“she has so much power over his mind that she almost doesn’t care who has power temporarily over his cock.”

Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, predictably, disliked each other. Hillary privately told her friend Diane Blair that Monica was a
“narcissistic Loony-Toon,” which became public when Blair’s papers were published after her death. A few months later, Monica objected to the fact that
“Hillary Clinton wanted it on record that she was lashing out at her husband’s mistress.” In other words, Hillary called Monica crazy and Monica called Hillary calculating, each woman throwing the other’s existing media narrative back into her face. Yet they were also mirror images of each other. They were the Betty and Veronica of sexism: The icy blonde and the overheated brunette, the prude and the slut, the shrewish wife and the trashy mistress, the sexless middle-aged woman and the trampy young one, the frigid, man-hating intellectual and the needy, man-hungry ditz.

But neither woman was acceptable. Neither woman was deemed worthy of love, or even of being liked. While their media narratives were crafted to portray them as opposites in every respect, neither of the two models of womanhood they represented courted anything but scorn, disdain, or vilification. Trainwrecks are, often, photo negatives of acceptable
femininity—the opposite of what a woman is meant to be—but, when you turned Hillary inside out, you got Monica, and when you turned Monica the other way around, Hillary emerged. No matter which side of the coin you found your own face on, you were a wreck. There was no way to win the game; no “good” woman left to be.

Well: There was, potentially,
one
good woman. But finding her would be nearly impossible. She would have to be young, to avoid the stigma of ’70s feminism and middle-aged unfuckability that had tarred Hillary. But she couldn’t be “young” in the way that Monica was, which had involved adventure and experimentation; her youth would have to be clear of youthful folly. She’d have to be hot, and comfortable with getting men hot—she couldn’t be cold or frigid, like Hillary—but she couldn’t actually have sex, as Monica had, because that would taint her with the stigma of sluttiness. The ideal woman would have to be innocent, in both the sexual and the legal sense of the word. She also couldn’t be a stuck-up, ambitious intellectual, like Hillary; but, unlike Monica, she’d have to be sensible and morally upright enough to never make any bad decisions. And she’d have to be conservative, to avoid the stigma and scandal of the Clinton administration; yet, for all that, she couldn’t be prudish or uncool about her conservatism, like actual Republicans, because she would have to avoid the backlash facing them, too.

To save herself from the hatred that defined the public
lives of Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the ideal woman would have to steer between them, like Scylla and Charybdis, navigating the currents without being swept toward either side: Virgin and pin-up, wide-eyed innocent and worldly temptress, icon of cool and conservative Christian role model, she would always have to be both and neither, everything and nothing, and she would have to be able to do all of this when she was still very, very young.

One month after March 1999, when Monica Lewinsky gave her Barbara Walters interview,
Rolling Stone
ran the first-ever magazine cover featuring Britney Spears.

•

Britney didn’t happen by accident. She was what we needed; the answer to a question no one wanted to admit asking. But then, all of the women discussed in this book emerged into the public eye, and became a central and charged topic of conversation, precisely because they embodied the anxieties of their time.

Jane Eyre
, for example, frightened people, not only because it was sexy, or because of the suspicion that it was written by a woman, but because the narrator was a governess; it shocked middle-class and wealthy readers with the uncomfortable awareness that
servants
, the non-persons they invited into their homes and interacted with all day, could also be sexually available women, capable of forming their own affections and ambitions. Valerie Solanas and
Sylvia Plath were the uncomfortable spectres of feminism’s second wave: the crazy, man-slaughtering lesbian and the bitterly vengeful, bile-spilling housewife, given voice, and hence, giving reality to the idea that women might hit back. Billie Holiday was a black woman, a queer woman, a survivor, and an addict, thrown into a culture that was hospitable to none of those identities; Mary Wollstonecraft was a single mother in an era when single motherhood was a tragedy tantamount to death, and a French sympathizer at the moment when the French Revolution and democracy as a concept terrified all of Europe; Harriet Jacobs was, most obviously of all, a freed slave. Each woman was frightening, not just because of who she was, but because of what she was. Each woman had to walk through the world as the embodiment of an era’s fears.

As the centuries move forward, the anxieties change with the terrain. Whitney Houston, one of the first black women to be treated like a mainstream “pop princess,” was a symbol for black women’s upward mobility; she was turned by reality TV and hostile media coverage into a woman that
The O’Reilly Factor
called
“just another crackhead,” a loud, scary, down-market stereotype. You could even make a case for Hillary and Monica themselves as the scapegoats for second- and third-wave feminism, respectively: The second wave told women to work for equality and advance in the workplace, which Hillary did, and was hated for doing, and the third told women to embrace their sexuality and see
femininity as a source of power, which Monica did, and was hated for doing.