Well, the third sexting scandal was the charm. Anthony Weiner’s wife, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, announced she was leaving him last week after the New York Post splashed a front-page photo of the former congressman sending provocative shots of himself to an Internet stranger. This time Weiner upped the ante; on the bed next to him in the photo was their sleeping child.
Vanity Fair called Abedin a “feminist hero,” though of course the article also made clear that she was also a feminist hero for not leaving the prior two times Weiner was caught on his smartphone with his pants down.
“Abedin put her own desire to work to elect a female president before her own pride, before spending more time with her son, before disarming the firing squad of critics shooting at her for her personal decisions for the last five years,” the Vanity Fair author writes. Feminists aren’t usually as transparent about their desire to see marriage and motherhood take a backseat to politics. As for Hillary Clinton’s prospects, just think how empowering it will be for future generations of women to know that being a dishonest buck-raker is no impediment to becoming the most powerful person in America.
Unlike with Abedin’s slavish devotion to Clinton, Inc., The Scrapbook doesn’t have much to say about her marriage. We presume she was trying to make it work despite Weiner’s gross conduct; Weiner’s perversion, from what has been reported, at least seems not to have involved physical contact with other women.
Which brings us back to Mrs. Bill Clinton. In contrast with Weiner, the former president has been credibly accused of rape, has had multiple affairs that he’s lied about publicly, has almost certainly sexually harassed women, and racked up frequent flier miles on the private jet of Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy man who pled guilty to soliciting sex from underage women.
Yet we’re going on 25 years of Hillary Clinton’s being hailed as a feminist hero not just for—apologies to Tammy Wynette—standing by her man, but actually enabling him. She had her husband’s paramours dragged into the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas so her partners could threaten them into silence. And when it emerged that her husband was entertaining an intern in the Oval Office, she hit the talk show circuit and blamed not her lecherous husband but a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
What’s more, other “feminist heroes” joined in this defense. A reporter at Time notoriously said women should bestow sexual favors on Bill Clinton in gratitude for his devotion to the cause of keeping abortion legal. And the passage of time hasn’t changed things much. Rebecca Schoenkopf, a writer for Wonkette, recently forgave Bill Clinton because it was a less enlightened time “before we started telling them in the ’80s, ‘hey, that is rape, do not do that.’ I can see YOUR NICE GRANDPA doing that, back then.”
Despite all this, we’re supposed to be cheerleading the election of a woman who willingly subjected herself to the repeated humiliation of her more talented husband’s pathological satyriasis to use him as a stepping stone to the White House. If we must measure our “feminist heroes” by political success, we suppose Hillary Clinton qualifies. But by any other yardstick, she sure seems like a bad role model and a terrible person.
