Hillary Clinton has a unique talent to make people viscerally angry. Just look at the footage from Trump rallies: supporters carry “Lyin Hillary” dolls hung from miniature nooses, cry “Lock her up” and “Hang her in the streets”, and wear Trump That Bitch T-shirts. You could chalk this up to Trump’s toxicity, but some of it also haunted the Democratic primaries, in the over-the-top depictions of Clinton as a cold-blooded murderer or criminal mastermind promulgated by the most fanatical Bernie Sanders supporters.
So why is it, exactly, that Clinton gets under our skin? We could blame it on sexism – personally, sexism is one of my favourite things to blame stuff on; I recommend it highly – and that would be correct. Still, that diagnosis is a little too blunt to really get at the problem. Women and men, left-wingers and right-wingers alike, all dissolve into spasms of rabid conspiracy theorising and ranting when Clinton’s name comes up.
I would argue that Clinton irritates people not just because of her gender, but because we simply can’t process her narrative. There are no stories that prepare us for her trajectory through life and, therefore, we react to her as if she’s a disruption in our reality, rather than a person. We love public women best when they are losers, when they’re humiliated, defeated, or (in some instances) just plain killed. Yet Clinton, despite the disapproval that rains down on her, continues to go out there and chalk up wins.
Aversion to successful or ambitious women is nothing new. It’s baked into our cultural DNA. Consider the myth of Atalanta. She was the fastest runner in her kingdom, forced men to race her for her hand, and defeated every one of them. She would have gotten away with it, too, if some man hadn’t booby-trapped the course with apples to slow her down, which is presented as a happy ending. By taking away her ability to excel, he also takes away her loneliness.
Then, there’s the story of Artemis and Orion: He’s the most handsome hunter in all Greece, and she’s the Virgin Goddess of the Hunt, who’s ready to get rid of the “virgin” portion for him. Until, that is, her jealous brother Apollo tricks her into an archery contest – she’s so proud of her aim that she lets Apollo taunt her into shooting at a barely visible speck on the horizon and, therefore, winds up shooting her lover in the head.
The lesson is clear, and has been reiterated in countless hacky comedies about cold, loveless career women ever since. Success and love are incompatible for women. For a woman, taking pride in her own talents – especially talents seen as “masculine” – is a sin that will perpetually cut her off from human relationships and social acceptance. She can be good, or liked, not both. The only answer is to let a man beat her, thereby accepting her proper feminine role.
It’s no coincidence that the people who insist there’s “just something” off about Hillary Clinton as a politician are so eager to buy the idea there is something sexually wrong with her: frigidity (Hillary Sucks, But Not Like Monica, as per one popular T-shirt); or top-secret lesbianism (why is she so often photographed with political staffer Huma Abedin?); or simply an Artemis-esque tendency to slaughter her boyfriends, as with deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, who conspiracy theorists have long claimed she had an affair with, then had him killed to keep him from revealing her dark secrets.
Yet, though Clinton activates the darkest parts of her critics’ sexual imagination, our yearning for her downfall goes beyond even that. It’s not just that her success makes her unattractive or “unlikable”, it’s that, on some level, we cannot believe her success even exists.
You hear that disbelief in the frantic insistence of certain Sanders supporters that the primary was “rigged”, simply because Clinton won it. You hear it when Trump sputters that Clinton “should never have been allowed to run”, making her very presence in the race a violation of the accepted order. You can hear it when pundits such as Jonathan Walczak argue that even if Clinton is elected, she should voluntarily resign after one term “for her own good”. (Also, presumably, good for George Clooney, whom Walczak offers up as a plausible replacement.) Even when we imagine her winning, we can’t imagine her really winning. Unadulterated female success and power, on the level Clinton has experienced, is simply not in our shared playbook. So, even when a Clinton victory is right in front of our eyes, we react, not as if it’s undesirable, but as if it is simply not real. And the thing is, it might not be. Or at least, it might only be temporary: the rise before the big, spectacular, sexism-affirming fall.
When I wrote my book, Trainwreck, I was interested in how our culture treats failed women. The answer is that we rarely allow women to be anything else. From the moment a woman arrives in the public eye, we scrutinise her for signs of deviant sexuality, out-of-control emotions, or both. Not surprisingly, when put under constant surveillance and deprived of meaningful privacy, most people eventually reveal human flaws. Which we then broadcast and publicise – the nip slip, the up-skirt, the broken engagement, the drinking binge – until the flaws become more famous than the woman herself, until they come to define and contain her, and render her a trainwreck.
We don’t just want women to fail, we need it. Female failure is a live demonstration of all our stereotypes about female weakness, and a confirmation of all our old prejudices against women entering the public sphere. When I say old, I mean Paleolithic – injunctions against female self-expression or fame are everywhere in ancient history. The Christian New Testament “[suffers] not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man;” Pericles wrote that the greatest womanly virtue was “not to be talked of for good or evil among men”. In the colonial United States and Britain, women who talked too much and started fights were labelled “common scolds” – recommended punishments included making them wear gags or repeatedly dunking them in water to simulate drowning.
Nowadays, we can’t literally outlaw the act of women becoming visible, successful or famous. But we still punish the women who do – by turning their very visibility against them, and making their time in the public eye a reputation destroying misery. The more successful a woman is, the more pleasure we take in demolishing her and turning her into a two-dimensional villain. Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary success may only be tempting the God of Trainwrecks to make her our biggest and best catastrophe yet.
If elected, Clinton would not be the first or only female head of state in the world. As the existence of Germany’s Angela Merkel shows, it is possible for female leaders to get along — with a practiced dullness that prevents them from attracting too much of the limelight and, therefore, too much public rage. But Clinton’s presidency is not likely to follow those patterns. For a look at how her time in the Oval Office might go, and how it might go wrong, we’d do best to look at the fate of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Gillard, too, was the first woman of her kind – at least as far as her home country was concerned. And Gillard, too, was greeted with a tremendous amount of resentment, even hatred, when she made it to the top. Most notoriously, conservatives held a fundraising dinner with “Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail” on the menu. It featured “Small breasts, huge thighs and a big red box.” (The same joke has been repurposed at Trump rallies: the “KFC Hillary Special” contains “Two fat thighs, two small breasts… left wing.” Look, no one ever said sexists were a laugh riot.)
Gillard’s response, initially, was to ignore all this, and attempt to rise above it: “My essential view was that it was because I’m the first woman, I’m unusual, and it will wash itself out of the system,” she said. This attempt at nobility was her fatal flaw. Without resistance, the sexism escalated to epic proportions. “Ditch the Witch” signs were distributed, pornographic cartoons of her circulated online, and her childless status became a national topic, with some commentators alleging she’d rendered herself “deliberately barren”. Meanwhile, her political rivals whipped up false charges of corruption – widely regarded now as sheer political calculation – and began calling her “Ju-Liar Gillard”. She responded to some of this in a speech about her experience with sexism that went viral, but it wasn’t enough – by that time, the trainwreck narrative had firmly taken hold and the speech only made things worse, with rivals declaring she had “demeaned every woman in [the] parliament” by “playing the gender card”. Within three years, her own party had ousted her from office, and Gillard not only resigned as prime minister, but left politics for good.
Gillard, in other words, provided us with the spectacular flameout we were looking for. She failed publicly and therefore affirmed that female success and ambition would always rebound on the woman in question, and ruin her life. Of course, these kinds of humiliation aren’t inevitable. They’re consciously inflicted by sexist people on female targets. But the illusion of inevitability comforts us. Witness: as soon as Gillard had been publicly demolished to the point she could not recover, people started liking her.
It’s this, the tendency to hate women when they’re up and love them when they’re down, which is the most perverse feature of trainwreck culture and our aversion to female success. Often, with the true centrepieces of trainwreck media – mentally ill or addicted women, like Amy Winehouse or Marilyn Monroe – we loathe and mock them until the very day they die, then transform them into beloved angels and martyrs after their deaths. Alive, Diana, Princess of Wales was a tabloid fixture, a madwoman who featured in stories about throwing up all her food and driving through Paris in only her underpants. Dead, she was England’s Rose.
Clinton may not have to go quite that far to win us over. But she fits the pattern. Over and over, we embrace her once we think she’s down for the count. When Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed – making Hillary appear before the nation as the betrayed and humiliated “little woman” she’d infamously sworn never to be – her approval ratings soared, from 42 to 64%. When she ran against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, people hated her even more feverishly than they do now, yet when he beat her, and she accepted a subordinate position in his administration, she became one of the US’s most popular politicians.
So why does Hillary still get up and apply for the big jobs? Why, when she could so easily garner our love by accepting humiliation and a role in the background, does she persist in stepping forward and aiming for what she wants? All she has to do is let a man beat her – any man; her husband, a political opponent, anyone – and she can be loved again. Why does she insist on winning?
It’s a feverish gender-politics Catch-22. If Clinton gives up and lets herself be beaten, she’ll experience less sexism which will, in and of itself, be proof of sexism. If she continues being openly, visibly successful, she’ll experience more sexism, but the very fact of her success will demonstrate that sexism is less powerful than we thought.
Given the option, Clinton has apparently chosen the harder road – to keep warping the narrative, keep challenging the idea that disreputable women always end in ruin and wreck and flame. She still may, of course – there are many, many people rooting for her to fall. But there is something profoundly admirable to how she keeps plugging ahead, looking to provide the world with a new kind of story.
Trainwreck by Sady Doyle is published by Melville House at £18.99. To order it for £15.27, go to bookshop.theguardian.com