Women’s rights activist Gloria Steinem practically wrote the book on how to reconcile feminist principles with supporting accused sexual predator Bill Clinton.
But now that the former first family’s political fortunes have all but evaporated following the 2016 presidential election, Steinem is slowly backing away from her previous position. Kind of.
She hasn’t quite jumped aboard the increasingly popular bandwagon that says it is time we get serious about Bill Clinton’s storied history of sexual misconduct, but she’s getting close.
Such bravery.
“We have to believe women,” Steinem told the Guardian this week after she was asked about her previous defenses of Clinton.
This is rich response considering the content of her infamous 1998 New York Times op-ed, “Feminists and the Clinton Question.” In that particularly shameful act of partisan theater, Steinem victim-blamed Clinton’s accusers. She mocked their ages. So also said pretty clearly that the feminist movement exists to serve the Democratic Party.
“Even if the allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb, and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer,” Steinem wrote.
Ah, yes. It’s not harassment or assault, as Clinton’s accusers categorized it. No, the former president is guilty only of making “passes.”
“[F]eminists will still have been right to resist pressure by the right wing and the media to call for his resignation or impeachment,” she wrote. “The pressure came from another case of the double standard.”
Believe women indeed.
To be fair to Steinem, her disgraceful op-ed came out one year before the most serious accusation surfaced against Clinton. Former nurse Juanita Broaddrick, who alleges she was raped in the late 1970s by the then-Arkansan governor, didn’t go public with her story until 1999. That’s not much of a defense for the supposed women’s rights activist who says today, “Believe women,” but it is what it is.
Perhaps realizing at last that her 1998 op-ed is at odds with her professed principles, Steinmen has started the process of disowning her earlier defenses of Clinton.
“I wouldn’t write the same thing now because there’s probably more known about other women now. I’m not sure,” she said this week. “What you write in one decade you don’t necessarily write in the next. But I’m glad I wrote it in that decade.”
She added, “The problem at the time was, the sexual harassment law was in danger. If Clinton had resigned, that would have endangered the law. I’m glad I wrote it at the time. Because the danger then was we were about to lose sexual harassment law because it was being applied to extramarital sex, free will, extramarital sex, as with Monica Lewinsky.”
Nothing says “principled advocate” quite like having a moral compass the blows with the political winds.
She’s not quite there yet, but it’s only a matter of time before Steinem becomes a full-fledged member of the 20-years-too-late “Bill Was Bad” movement. The only thing holding her back at this point is probably the fact that she was one of his most prolific defenders. Steinem will have to clarify or outright mea culpa her 1998 position at some point, especially now that the “Me Too” movement is in full swing. After she does that, it wouldn’t be surprising if she joined the growing chorus of supposed women’s rights advocates who now say Clinton is problematic.
The targets of the former president’s sexual predations probably could’ve used some of that “Believe Women” support back in the 1990s when they first came forward, but whatever.
Better late than never, right?
