I remember her books, though I don't think I ever read them. I had no idea she was so much older than us.

I seem to have missed her entirely, even though I was exposed to stuff I would think of as adjacent. May have been a little too young for my parents, too old for my peers.

Anyway, it's interesting the places she was published: that's very much how the zeitgeist gets made, voices turning up in unexpected places, expressing that "everyone" is, if not exactly on board, at least in conversation with these ideas.

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll is still the preferred method of dieting. Trust me, I'm (sort of) a doctor.

I didn't recognize her name but I certainly recognize the titles of her books from countless thrift stores!

Osteopath?

Heimel stated in Advanced Sex Tips for Girls, her final book, that she was not accepted by the feminist movement; that being too sexy to be an academic feminist and too angry for "women's" magazines, she sometimes had difficulty finding outlets that would publish her work; and that for this reason, she accepted an offer to work for Playboy and was the writer of its "Women" column for decades from 1983.[3] Her column was ended around 2000 when the editors of Playboy expressed concern that Heimel's feminist attitudes would put off male readers.

This from Wikipedia, suggests she didn't fit as comfortably with the feminism of her time as LB implies.

How can 1983 to 2000 be "decades"?

7: 1.7 decades.

Looks like three decades to me, the 80s, 90s and 00s.

Mickey Rooney: Hi, Milhouse. The studio sent me to talk to you, being a former child star myself, and the number one box office draw from 1939 to 1940.

Bart: Wow, spanning two decades!

I wish they included one or two of her comics in the article.

But it's a continuing conversation, not a sharp break with prior generations of feminists.

I know every generation thinks it invented all sorts of things, (I certainly didn't know about, say, explicitness in pre-Code movies), but it can be supremely irritating.

Sex And The City was revolutionary in terms of women talking openly about sex

I missed this, else I would have spluttered alongside you. Eventually I would have spluttered my way to Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Erica Jong, plus, you know, that whole sexual revolution thing.

I thought Erica Jong wrote about not wanting to go on airplanes.

SATC was funnier than Erica Jong, at least.

"Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye" was a book that I had and reread several times, though it's been long enough that it's hard to remember.

I can still picture the cover. It was in every bookstore.

Extremely yellow.

I wish they included one or two of her comics in the article.

She was a humor writer, not a cartoonist. No comics.

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/cynthia_heimel

Maybe this is the philosophy underlying my comments.

Somebody should make ceramic Heimel figurines and sell them via ads in the Sunday supplement.

I drew a total blank on the name, but I definitely remember those books being all over the place when I was a teenager.

I loved her column in the Village Voice back in the 80s. I think I absorbed a lot about women and sex and feminism from reading it in my late teens and twenties.

What was it -- Dear Problem Lady? Ask Problem Lady? But I don't think it was meant to be an actual advice column, she seemed clearly to be writing both sides of it.

I heard a great story last night on this podcast episode - in the shooting of Coming Home, Jane Fonda specifically wanted a crucial sex scene to be only cunnilingus as opposed to the PIV that director Hal Ashby envisioned, and in collusion with Jon Voight, she made this happen by refusing to act consistently with the body double scenes already shot. Both her husband and father were disgusted with the result, because apparently focusing on female pleasure was "pornographic", whereas humping would have been just fine.

19 was me.

Woke AF. Laydeez.

Didn't you endorse our current shithead?

Heimel was very active on the Well when that was a thing; one story she told there was about going to the church in Swinbrook where Unity Mitford is buried because that was the Mitfords parish church, and I think her then, short-lived, husband had a thing for the English aristocracy; Heimel found the grave and pissed on it in a gesture of Jewish solidarity.

I don't write the lines, I just say them.

That's a great story and I don't even know the Mitfords enough to know which ones were evil.

[having sex]

23: Tying this back to the thread, Heimel hated Jane Fonda, because during an interview, Jane told Cynthia that her hair was frumpy.

Get a room.

30: these are comments, not closed captions.

31: Based on the picture in the OP.....

Yes, the link was such a hilarious example of American newspaperese:

"You must just acknowledge deep in your heart of hearts that people are supposed to [have sex]," Ms. Heimel wrote in her best-selling first book, "Sex Tips for Girls" (1983), using a characteristically blunt four-letter word. "It is our main purpose in life, and all those other activities -- playing the trumpet, vacuuming carpets, reading mystery novels, eating chocolate mousse -- are just ways of passing the time until you can [have sex] again. Well, maybe not eating chocolate mousse. If it is made with good Swiss chocolate and topped off with Devon cream, eating chocolate mousse is almost as good as [having sex]."

[Have sex] me pink with a soft [sexual organ]

29: According to wikipedia, Unity and Diana were the evil Nazi loving ones. Jessica became a communist, and Deborah was active with the Social Democrat Party, which might or might not count as kind of evil, depending on how you feel about the Lib. Dems.

Not sure about nancy's evilness quotient, but Love in a Cold Climate was a reasonably entertaining read.

To beat a decomposing horse, there's a big difference between "edgy youth communities in large metropolises" and "general society." Relatedly, just because YOU encountered X in 1983 doesn't make it universal.* SATC didn't *invent* explicit sexual discourse, but it mainstreamed and popularized it. How many married Republican women in "middle America" were reading Our Bodies Ourselves vs. watching SATC?

*In 1983 I was being raised by gender queer socialist Norwegians in an African-American community in Portland OR. I know better than to claim that "the 1980s was a decade of racial desegregation, gender-bending, and socialism" simply because those people did exist in America in the 80s (and 60s and 70s and 90s).

There was a salon article about an author of a history of feminism I read a while ago that stated that this type of inter-generational conflict over "sex positivity" issues was super common and cyclical through the history of feminism. I can never find it though

This book looks good if not exactly on point https://books.google.com/books?id=V0m96bhnEwYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Sheila+Jeffreys&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiTtor318bZAhUFwVkKHemyBAoQ6AEINTAC#v=onepage&q=Sheila%20Jeffreys&f=false
(the author may be a bit TERFy though?)

I bet my students hold SATC in approximately the same distant regard as I held Jong. That is, I did venture and read some of her stuff, but on my own, and it felt dated.

I had never heard of Heimel or any of her books until now.

You're young.

39

It's aged horribly as a TV show.

40: Me neither, until this morning. And now I feel like I'm an expert!

41 to 40, 39, and 37.

Heebie and I are closer in age than Heebie is to you, I would guess. Or possibly equidistant. Heebie seems older because she's gainfully employed and has children and a home, whereas I am a perpetual grad student free spirit.

Relatedly, just because YOU encountered X in 1983 doesn't make it universal.* SATC didn't *invent* explicit sexual discourse, but it mainstreamed and popularized it. How many married Republican women in "middle America" were reading Our Bodies Ourselves vs. watching SATC?

Well sure, Our Bodies Ourselves was written specifically from a leftist feminist perspective. I think it's an artifact of how the television industry works that SATC didn't come out until the late 90s (and it was still on an exclusive pay cable channel). Didn't the movie, novel, magazine equivalents of SATC all came out decades earlier? Fear of Flying? Peyton Place? Looking For Mr. Goodbar? Sex And The Single Girl, which sold 2 million copies in a month in 1962? What about the hardcore porn movie craze of the mid-70s?

Soon heebie's house will wash away and you'll be indistinguishable.

How many married Republican women in "middle America" were reading Our Bodies

My Republican mom had a copy in the 70s. Also The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (which was mind-blowing reading to then young teenage me.)

Not that the porn movie crazy of the mid-70s is equivalent to SATC, but it suggests a certain openness.

42: Right - it's not some eternal cultural touchstone that speaks to all forever and ever. It had its sexually explicit moment, same as Fear of Flying and all the rest.

Heebie and I are closer in age than Heebie is to you, I would guess.

I am 40 and 24 days!

48 + Ourselves

22 "Dear Problem Lady" which according to Wikipedia alternated with "Tongue in Chic".

Rim jobs weren't something most people talked about back then.

How many married Republican women in "middle America" were reading Our Bodies Ourselves vs. watching SATC?

What about reading Cosmopolitan, which was sexually frank and directed at women from sometime in the seventies on? It wasn't strongly feminist, but of course neither was SaTC.

Her column in Playboy was very funny back in the day. Probably less fun now that I can't masturbate to it.

Heimel was a touchstone for me as explicitly combining genuine feminism with frank sexuality from a straight woman's perspective, but there was certainly plenty of frank sexuality from straight women's perspectives in the culture before SaTC.

Also, while the dead horse abuse is going on, this "edgy youth communities in large metropolises" seems to subscribe to the Republican fallacy about attributing political influence to acres of land, rather than people. One thing about large metropolises is that lots of people live there - something that has cultural impact only among people in large metropolises? Reaches a fairly large part of the population.

We didn't even have a pornography in 1983.

Not even one of the old handcranked pornographs?

To understand influence, you have to understand reception. It's notoriously hard to study, but noting that things existed at X time tells you almost nothing about what sort of influence it had.

My actual argument was that the 80s and 90s were a time of rising conservatism and backlash against 2nd wave feminism of the 70s (not my argument, but Susan Faludi's), and that Gen X women grew up in a time that was in key ways less open to women's healthy sexuality than either before or after. In the 80s and 90s, you had pressure to be sexual (as a woman), but not necessarily pressure to enjoy or feel "empowered" in your sexuality. For people who came of age in the 2000s, the conversation around sex, sexual empowerment, and consent (though not necessarily other forms of gender equality, like body image) had shifted for the better, and the #metoo movement that we're seeing is in part led from women who've grown up to not ignore sexual harassment or blame themselves for sexual assault speaking out.

This doesn't mean ALL Gen X women grew up in a certain way vs ALL younger women, but it's about general cultural and social trends.

Didn't the movie, novel, magazine equivalents of SATC all came out decades earlier? Fear of Flying? Peyton Place? Looking For Mr. Goodbar?

My vague memory is that Looking for Mr. Goodbar was a great deal more grim and a great deal less funny than SATC.

Just reread coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and try to imagine that same conversation playing out, where on one side feminists are arguing that a powerful man forcing himself on a female subordinate but not ultimately raping her is an example of "sexual freedom" or that in a relationship between a 23 year old intern and a 50 year old president, the 23 year old holds all the power, and on the other side you have conservatives arguing that people who have sex outside of marriage or give blow jobs should basically be stoned. Now picture this conversation in the midst of #metoo, and argue that the 90s were in the same place re. sexual consent as the 2010s are.

feminists are arguing that a powerful man forcing himself on a female subordinate but not ultimately raping her is an example of "sexual freedom"

On behalf of the feminists of the nineties, really? Who were you thinking of?

Didn't the movie, novel, magazine equivalents of SATC all came out decades earlier? Fear of Flying? Peyton Place? Looking For Mr. Goodbar? Sex And The Single Girl, which sold 2 million copies in a month in 1962? What about the hardcore porn movie craze of the mid-70s?

And Lusts of the Libertines came out centuries earlier!

Given that my argument is actually about a backlash to a more feminist moment, pointing out that sexually explicit things were published in the 60s and 70s actually makes the point.

But pointing out that they were published in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s doesn't so much.

46 - yes. SATC was a mildly big deal for being (a) an episodic television show with (b) nudity, but I lived through its reception and it wasn't some novel form of female empowerment, just a somewhat novel television show. Its impact on perceptions of New York was probably more novel than anything in it about sex, which in turn wasn't wildly different than anything on any earlier Darren Star show, ie 90310 or Melrose Place, just with more nudity.

61 - I think you are misremembering Faludi's argument as I recall it, which is that the 80s saw a return to oppressive beauty standards, norms of femininity, etc, but specifically without devaluing sexuality or women's sexual enjoyment. "Sexual empowerment" a la SATC was probably the one kind of feminism (whatever that means) that was least affected by the 1980s; indeed much of the feminist movement at the time was devoted to showing that that kind of liberation wothout more was a trap.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/opinion/eq-steinem.html

For another, there was and is a difference between the accusations against Mr. Clinton and those against Bob Packwood and Clarence Thomas. Commentators might stop puzzling over the president's favorable poll ratings, especially among women, if they understood the common-sense guideline to sexual behavior that came out of the women's movement 30 years ago: no means no; yes means yes.

It's the basis of sexual harassment law. It also explains why the news media's obsession with sex qua sex is offensive to some, titillating to many and beside the point to almost everybody. Like most feminists, most Americans become concerned about sexual behavior when someone's will has been violated; that is, when "no" hasn't been accepted as an answer.

My entire understanding of women's views about sexuality in the 80s comes from Pat Benatar lyrics. So, does "Before I put another notch in my lipstick case, you better make sure you put me in my place" mean he'd better make sure she comes first or he should degrade her somehow?

"Misremembering X as I recall it" is a totally ridiculous thing to say but it's so useful and stupid I'm going to store it away for future use.

Also "90310"? I fall on my sword in shame, others can take up the cause from here.

If we're talking about generational sexual attitudes and experiences, then as someone right in the middle of GenX, I'm going to go ahead and claim that the influence of AIDS was so large that it basically swamped everything else.

Other GenXers in this thread may feel free to argue.

Also "90310"? I fall on my sword in shame, others can take up the cause from here.

I think you also are going to get your So Cal citizenship stripped.

72: What's wrong with Inglewood?

Yes, AIDS fear was certainly a big thing, though notably not coterminous with "the 80s" or the "backlash" argument.

...where on one side feminists are arguing that a powerful man forcing himself on a female subordinate but not ultimately raping her is an example of "sexual freedom" or that in a relationship between a 23 year old intern and a 50 year old president, the 23 year old holds all the power

I recall people saying that, but I don't recall it being the dominant feminist position.

69: So, you're importing your current understanding of the power differential to describe the Clinton-Lewinsky affair as him 'forcing himself on her' despite her contemporaneous insistence that it was consensual?

And then shaming Gloria Steinem for having relied on Lewinsky's unambiguous statements to that effect? Steinem should have known to disregard Lewinsky's stated belief that she had been a fully consensual participant in the affair, and because she didn't she was approving of Lewinsky having been 'forced' into sex?

That's fucked up.

The Lewinsky scandal is really hard to talk about in current #MeToo terms, because it's really strongly factually distinct from any of the current scandals. It is possible both to believe both on the one side: (1) that Clinton acted very wrongly in having an affair with a much younger woman in a circumstance where he had all the power; (2) that she was horribly abused in the aftermath, in a way that wouldn't have happened if he hadn't acted badly to begin with, but that was mostly the result of Republicans using her as a weapon against him; and (3) that she in no way deserved what happened to her. And on the other side, that her unambiguous and consistent statements about how the relationship went would meet any current #MeToo-informed standard of enthusiastic consent.

Clinton acted very wrongly, but not all sexual wrongdoing can be meaningfully conceptualized as a violation of consent.

They fuck you up, your Gloria Steinem and Cynthia Heimel.

78

You missed the OR as being about different events. I was talking about the multiple women who accused Clinton of sexual harassment and rape when I referred to "forcing himself on her." The Lewinsky-Clinton affair was consensual, insofar as an affair between a 21 year-old subordinate and her much older boss is consensual. Also, Steinem isn't even defending herself anymore, so not sure why you are.

To 77
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1998/05/williams199805

Sexual harassment and rape applies to Paula Jones, Kathleen Wiley, and Anita Broadrick. Setting aside their politics, treating women like garbage because they claimed a man "on our side" sexually assaulted them is gross. It was gross but socially acceptable then, but not so much now.

That's a review from 2007. Thinking of what was being said at the time, I certainly recall feminists minimizing it based on political calculations, but that's very different from saying it was part of "sexual freedom."

And then shaming Gloria Steinem for having relied on Lewinsky's unambiguous statements to that effect? Steinem should have known to disregard Lewinsky's stated belief that she had been a fully consensual participant in the affair, and because she didn't she was approving of Lewinsky having been 'forced' into sex?

I thought that was the standard now. Consent is impossible between a superior and a subordinate, even if both parties think they are consenting. Like between an adult and a minor, or a professor and student.

Oh Christ, is this just some dumb proxy for a 2016 primary battle? If so, I'm out. If not, the mainstream feminist position -- as demonstrated precisely by the quote that you excerpt! -- in the 90s w/r/t Bill Clinton was (a) that there was a broad and clear line between consensual and non-consensual sex, and (b) that there was very good reason to believe that the allegations of non-consensual sex, which everyone agreed were bad, were ginned up by the right-wing anti-Clinton noise machine for political purposes. Both (a) and (b) were quite clearly true, though in the specific case of Juanita (not "Anita") Broaddrick (unlike Jones and Wiley) there is an absence of specifically discrediting evidence, so if you take "believe the victim" as gospel you would probably believe her, which in turn is why that particular accusation has gotten more attention recently.

83

Not sure what you're talking about, I linked to Steinem's 1998 op ed, where she says that Clinton respects "yes means yes and no means no" (aside from the women he raped and sexually harassed, I guess), and a 1998 VF article by a woman criticizing mainstream feminist organizations for supporting Clinton in this.

I guess the article has a date it was updated on? It says 1998 in the URL, but the text had 2007.

There, I think you are just completely misunderstanding the news environment at the time, in a way that does Steinem a serious injustice, although she's not completely in the right.

As of 1998, the news had been dominated by batshit insane fraudulent accusations against the Clintons for six years or so. And most of those were straightforward lies (cocaine dealing, murders, so on). The Lewinsky thing was well established, and scandalous, and an indication of wrongdoing, but consensual.

From the point of view of someone like Steinem in 1998, simply disbelieving the accusations of sexual assault (and I think at that point it was only Jones? I don't think Broaddrick's story was out yet? Not sure about Willey, but if it was before the Steinem op-ed it was barely before it) wasn't nuts. It may have been wrong in retrospect, but it certainly wasn't defending sexual assault short of rape as an expression of sexual freedom. That op-ed was defending the Lewinsky thing as consensual, and implicitly disbelieving Jones as not credible.

Oops, I mean Juanita Broadrick. But just because Republicans are evil doesn't mean Clinton isn't also a sexual predator. And the evidence in favor of Juanita Broadrick is pretty damning. Not "court of law" damning, but if you take that women tend not to be lying harpies about sexual assault, it's pretty damning. I also believe that in these sorts of cases, there is rarely never one instance, as we've seen with Cosby, Weinstein, or Franken. If coming forward means you're getting slut shamed or taken to be a Republican puppet, I can imagine the pressure for a Democratic women not to come forward would be immense.

But anyways, the Clinton scandal would play out differently today, probably along the lines of Al Franken, and that is because we have different norms towards sexual consent and believing women.

Oh, Halford beat me to it. But specifically, Broaddrick, which is the most credible of the sexual assault allegations, didn't come out until after the Steinem op-ed.

the Clinton scandal

If you're going to be blaming 90s feminists for retrograde attitudes, you really have to be talking about their reactions to specific events that happened before the reaction you're talking about.

There wasn't one Clinton scandal, there was a firehose of them, and while some were real, most (murders, cocaine dealing, illegitimate biracial children) were pure invention.

90 = very important point.

88

I was far more politically involved in 1998 than I am now, so I am more than familiar with the media environment back then. I absolutely remember feeling like Bill Clinton was all we had protecting us from the forces of darkness Newt Gingrich, and that our options were the New Left or the Contract With America, so we had to cling to the New Left, despite all its problems. And I absolutely remember how batshit insane and Clinton deranged the media was. They were accused of everything and anything under the sun, including murder. That said, that *doesn't* mean that Clinton wasn't a sexual predator, and it doesn't mean that sweeping his numerous accusations under the rug (Willey was March 1998) would not happen now in the same way.

Yeah, the 90s were a really dark time for the left. People felt trapped between a rock and a hard place. AGAIN, that's part of my point (the 80s and 90s were a conservative backlash).

I'm not blaming feminists for retrograde attitudes; I'm pointing out that *even* feminists had retrograde attitudes that would not be considered possible for feminists to hold publicly today, which was a product of the general zeitgeist. Steinem so much as said so herself.

I agree that it would not happen the same way now. But I don't think that was because in the 90s somehow every time a man ejaculated, it was a home run for sexual freedom. That was the 70s. I think it played out that way because it was the first time anything like that had played out for a president, because Clinton was very effective at defending himself, and because Linda Tripp's blocking the dry cleaner meant that defense collapsed after years of being largely convincing.

Very plausibly things would have played out differently. But conflating Steinem's disbelief in the Jones and Willey stories, in the context of the firehose of demonstrable lying about the Clintons, with considering 'forcing himself on a female subordinate' an example of sexual freedom, is terribly unjust to her, and does not in any way represent how feminists thought about consent in the 90s.

Disbelief in those two stories, at that time and in that context, may look regrettable in retrospect, particularly in light of the additional accusations that came out late. But it wasn't about excusing the conduct, it was about disbelieving the accusations.

Specifically with Willey, while it broke before Steinem's editorial, March to May is a short time, and so, so, so, many stories about Clinton broke and evaporated quickly, as having been reported based on second-hand information that turned out to be someone just telling unsupported lies. That Steinem didn't bake that story into her evaluation of the situation is very unsurprising.

96

In the other thread, we had a long conversation about how enthusiastic consent has replaced "no means no" for precisely the reason that doing what you want to a woman and waiting until she asks you to stop is at best bad sex, most likely coercive, rapey sex, and at worst actual rape. This is especially cases where you have an age and power gap. My students are all in their mid 20s-mid 30s, but if I slept with them I would get terminated immediately and it would be a Title IX violation, because we've decided that people in positions of direct power over other people can't have truly consensual relations with them. To argue that an older man in power hitting on a younger woman is fine because "no means no" is the sort of things rapey conservatives say today.

Secondly, I haven't looked into Paula Jones's story like I have Broaddrick's, but in an age where we assume women are telling the truth about sexual harassment, Jones, even if she were nothing more than a Republican operative, would deserve a chance to have her story at least considered by feminists. In this day and age, dismissing the multiple claims of sexual harassment in the cursory way that it happened in 94 and 98, even if it's part of a Rightwing smear campaign, just wouldn't be possible for feminists at this point.

I'm not saying what Steinem did was not understandable, but it doesn't rise to modern standards of acceptable feminist behavior. Apologizing it away with "times were different then" is exactly my point. Times *were* different then.

I'm pointing out that *even* feminists had retrograde attitudes that would not be considered possible for feminists to hold publicly today, which was a product of the general zeitgeist. Steinem so much as said so herself.

But you are horrifically misrepresenting the attitudes actual feminists in the 90s held. Your 63 is a grotesque slander against Steinem, who erred in what she should have believed about the facts, but certainly did not applaud sexual assault as sexual freedom.

Or to be most faithful to what apparently happened, arguing that a younger subordinate woman hit on her older boss and he went for it is totally fine is the sort of thing not argued by feminists in this day in age.

It's also important to emphasize the novelty (and, probably, precariousness) of the #metoo thing. It's what, six months old at this point? The weirdness isn't so much "Bill Clinton would have played out differently in the #metoo environment," which, sure, probably, since there is now a cultural moment in which we have a background assumption of belief in accusations of sexual misconduct against prominent celebrities. It's "Gloria Steinem's statements in 1998 about Bill Clinton reveal how backwards understandings of female enjoyment of sexuality were, until Darren Star's Sex And The City changed everything."

...because we've decided that people in positions of direct power over other people can't have truly consensual relations with them. To argue that an older man in power hitting on a younger woman is fine because "no means no" is the sort of things rapey conservatives say today.

Yes. But it was actually against the rules (and creepy) even back then, even if it wasn't a firing offense (or something that people would report unless there was some larger problem). I remember what all the women in the department thought about the professor dating the undergraduate. This was 1994/1995.

In the 90s, I didn't want to be a feminist because I was worried the boys wouldn't like me. Today, I am a feminist. Ergo, feminism has changed a lot.

have her story at least considered by feminists.

What's your basis for saying that feminists didn't consider and evaluate the credibility of Jones' story? I did, and didn't believe it at the time because of the volume of other lies about the Clintons, the fact that she was unambiguously working as a Republican operative, and because until March 1998, as far as I'm aware there were no other accusations of sexual assault, only of consensual adultery.

After the Broaddrick story broke, I reconsidered my evaluation of the Jones story, and moved from affirmative disbelief to being absolutely uncertain. But with what I knew at the time, in the full context, I don't think I'd evaluate the Jones case differently now.

Or to be most faithful to what apparently happened, arguing that a younger subordinate woman hit on her older boss and he went for it is totally fine is the sort of thing not argued by feminists in this day in age.

That is not unambiguously true. I'd have to look around for it, but I bet you I could find current feminist writers talking about the possibility of freely choosing to enter into a relationship even with a power differential. That's a situation where I, personally, think there should be a bright line, and I get squicked out by age and power differentials possibly even more than most. But I wouldn't call identifying the situation you describe (in general, not with Lewinsky's name attached) as necessarily improper under all circumstances a current feminist universal.

105

Sure, "feminists" isn't a coherent label. I've been using it as shorthand for mainstream professional feminists, which include people like Steinem and today someone like Valenti, the people who run NOW, etc. I can't think of a feminist with much of an audience who would argue that it's an example of feminist liberation, even if they wouldn't be squicked out by the power differential. (I'm one of those people who isn't totally squicked out all the time, depending on context).* I do think that, once the affair was public, Lewinsky was treated very shabbily by women who should have known better, and that includes Steinem.

*E.g. an older chaired faculty member dating a first year grad student is very different from an older grad student dating a postdoc who then gets hired as TT faculty.

104

I didn't really consider Jones to be plausible back then either, for the same reason. And now I feel differently for the same reason. I don't hold myself as representative for my generation, but that is a way I do see myself as a part of the times. Even someone spent her early teens hanging out in the feminist bookstore made fun of in Portlandia was not immune larger cultural conversations.

Lewinsky was treated very shabbily by women who should have known better, and that includes Steinem.

This is something that I see aimed at 90s feminists a lot -- having maltreated Lewinsky -- and while you're right, it's not a coherent label, and I'm sure some did, I'm not sure what you're thinking of. Do you think the op-ed you linked is Steinem attacking Lewinsky? Because I don't get it, if you do -- I see Steinem, without mentioning Lewinsky's name, characterizing Clinton's sex with her as consensual, which was how Lewinsky herself was describing it.

Or is there a different place where Steinem attacked Lewinsky?

107: But I don't see that change in evaluation of Jones' credibility as any sort of change in my feminist beliefs, it's because I learned different facts about Clinton. If I had an exactly similar situation -- male politician who'd been the subject of a tsunami of lies, being hit with a first, uncorroborated, sexual assault allegation from someone who was deeply engage with his political opposition? I'd be skeptical about that today, still.

On the Lewinsky scandal specifically, there really does seem to be a lot of revisionism going on. She both initiated and asked to continue the relationship. In no way except the most formal sense was Bill Clinton her "boss," i.e., he was obviously a powerful person and in charge of the federal government but in no direct way involved in her work life. No one AFAIK at the time thought that this was an instance of "feminist liberation," just that it was a sleazy but entirely consensual affair and that it is important for feminism that Lewinsky should be treated differently than a rape victim and Bill Clinton (in this context) differently than a rapist. And no one thought that it excused workplace sexual relationships generally -- just that there was a difference between workplace relationships that are terrible ideas and ones that are affirmatively sexual harassment, require quid-pro-quos, or are otherwise non-consensual. That is, in fact, true.

I often don't agree with Paul Campos but he gets a lot of things right here.

I think a lot of that comes from backcasting the later allegations against Clinton into people's reactions to the Lewinsky thing. The Broaddrick story was very late, but casts everything before it into an extremely different light.

I also don't remember the supposed feminist attacks on Lewinsky. As for Lewinsky herself, she has always been insistent that she was fully consensual in, and fully complicit in, the affair. She's of course permanently scarred (but reflective) about having her life turned upside down, but AFAIK she blames the people who actually did that -- Linda Tripp and Ken Starr and everyone else who exploited her sex life for political gain. I don't think she views Gloria Steinem or "90s feminists" as a big problem in her life and I don't think the "90s feminists" had a problem with her personally.

112

Read the 1998 VF article I linked to, and my attitude was also present at the time. This isn't just me revising things.

112: Where in that article are attacks from feminists on Lewinsky? I'm not seeing them.

That is, the article attacks feminists for not speaking out against Clinton, for exactly the reasons I've talked about -- that the Lewinsky affair was consensual, and the other allegations weren't all that credible (which looks bad now, but seems very excusable to me in light, again, of the prior firehose of lies about Clinton specifically). I'm not seeing any feminists saying that sexual assault short of rape is generally acceptable, and I'm not seeing attacks from feminists on Lewinsky.

I've tried to read the article linked in 81. Every time I get past the first couple of screens, it drags me back to the top. I did get far enough to see how she allows that NOW switched its position when Willey went public. I couldn't see why she didn't think NOW represented institutional feminism.

Apparently, 84% of Americans believed Juanita which is way more than I remembered.

''It didn't matter. We were a tired people, tired of pornographic imagery on the evening news, tired of feeling we were mired in filth. This was the worst . . . and we didn't want to hear it.''

On a related note, I just realized that when I updated my browser, I somehow lost adblock.

114, 115 -The article is a hit piece and nicely reminiscent of the horrors of 90s mainstream journalism, but has a few feminists saying things vaguely dismissive of Lewinsky suffering consequences as a sexual harrassment victim -- which of course she wasn't. I read the statements not as attacks on Lewinsky but on the (then propogated by Congressional Republicans, and false) idea that she was equivalent to a victim of actual sexual harrassment.

Here:
http://observer.com/1998/02/new-york-supergals-love-that-naughty-prez/

Jong publicly apologized for bullying Lewinsky who contra 112, wrote a VF article explicitly stating she felt attacked and bullied her:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/erica-jong-apologizes-to-monica-lewinsky

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/society/2014/06/monica-lewinsky-humiliation-culture

Again, I'm not arguing that professional feminists are the worst people here (not by a long shot), but rather that they're people who we would expect to behave differently now.

I also like how I come up with actual evidence and everyone else uses, "well, my personal memory of 20 years ago is different, therefore you're wrong. Prove it." I guess I'm the sucker for trying to make evidence-based arguments.

Here's a new one. Based on my memories of 1995, the most popular political figures in America at the time were Hilary Clinton, Winnie Mandela, and Ho Chi Min. Prove me wrong, Mofos.

"well, my personal memory of 20 years ago is different, therefore you're wrong. Prove it."

The reason is because it is easy to find an editorial supporting almost anything. The job is to write to a given ideological paradigm on command about whatever is in the news today.

No, I'm pointing out that your characterization of the things you're linking to is slanderous. Are you really standing by what you said in 63 as being supported by the Steinem editorial you linked to? Because that's not 'actual evidence' because you link to something, if it doesn't say what you claim it said.

122

Here's the full article. Steinem is explicitly talking about Jones and Willey, and she's characterized claims of sexual assault as a "clumsy pass." Again. It's sexual harassment apologia.

https://www.scribd.com/document/336603458/Feminists-and-the-Clinton-Question-The-New-York-Times

121

Oh look! Here's actual scholarship that agrees with me!

https://books.google.com/books?id=Rhl4ckfoeOoC&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=steinem+lewinsky&source=bl&ots=RUJEyX5bIR&sig=P15JtUbZJ0zY1Kt5Mofv2gncjHg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwig-I-M_sbZAhVp5oMKHaMeCZwQ6AEIYDAG#v=onepage&q=steinem%20lewinsky&f=false

63 is a very strong claim (i.e. on one side feminists are arguing that a powerful man forcing himself on a female subordinate but not ultimately raping her is an example of "sexual freedom" or that in a relationship between a 23 year old intern and a 50 year old president, the 23 year old holds all the power) and simply does not fit what people were saying back then. That things would have played out very differently if it happened today isn't something I would argue with, but it is also a much narrower claim than 63 .

The insults lobbed at Lewinsky in the other piece you link to are a forum in which Erica Jong, Kate Roiphe, Nancy Friday, ans someone else, known for being not the mainstream feminist movement but a group of women who wrote frankly and positively about sex, joke (meanly) about Lewinsky guving a blow job. Lewinsky's beef with them isn't that they failed to respect her status as a harrassment victim (which she wasn't) but that they failed to sufficiently value her private life. Jong has since apologized for being mean.

If anything the articles confirm exactly the opposite of the point you've been making -- this particular group allowed themselves to be non-privacy-respecting jerks precisely because they were OVERcommitted to some notion of sex as empowerment.

The Observer piece from February 98, before the Willey or Broaddrick allegations, is dismissively unpleasant about Lewinsky in a way that does read badly now -- that's fair, and Erica Jong and Nancy Friday count as feminists. The panel seems to have been writers about sex specifically, rather than political feminists, but that doesn't excuse Jong.

Was it Jong or Friday who wrote the story about the woman who has sex with a gorilla?

121

Right, but "my personal memory of X period is more accurate than your personal memory of X period" is an argument that goes nowhere fast. There's no real way to compare the objective reality of subjective experience. Again, you can tell me that Ho Chi Min, Winnie Mandela, and Hilary Clinton were not the most beloved people in 90s America, and I'll claim that I experienced different.

128: Which comments are you talking about that are relying on memory of the 90s? I've been relying on memory of the nineties to remind you about the order in which events happened, but that's checkable.

I'm going to have to re-read "Notes on a Balinese Cockfight", aren't I?

From Steinem:

Her lawyers now allege that as a result of the incident Ms. Jones described, she was slighted in her job as a state clerical employee and even suffered long-lasting psychological damage. But there appears to be little evidence to support those accusations. As with the allegations in Ms. Willey's case, Mr. Clinton seems to have made a clumsy sexual pass, then accepted rejection.

1) You could argue that Jones wasn't slighted in her job, but arguing that she had no long-lasting psychological damage would be considered not believing women.
2) Willey accused Clinton of forcibly kissing her, groping her, and putting her hand on his erect penis. Dismissing it as a clumsy pass and Clinton as "accepting rejection" by not fully raping her after assaulting her is nothing but straight up rape apology. I'm sort of embarrassed for the people defending it on this blog. It's ok to admit some parts of the past are best left there.

Read the full op ed. Steinem is writing about Jones, Willey, and Lewinsky. She published it March 22, a week after Willey's accusations. Again, if we return to the facts known to Steinem at the time, then she knew what Willey was accusing Clinton of. I would buy that you could dismiss Willey as completely inventing facts, but there is *no way* minimizing the facts as they stood (forcibly kissing, groping breasts, making someone touch your penis) is just "a clumsy pass" for someone who takes "no means no" as an answer.

Perhaps we have a responsibility to make it O.K. for politicians to tell the truth -- providing they are respectful of ''no means no; yes means yes'' -- and still be able to enter high office, including the Presidency.

She's arguing that Willey's treatment by Clinton, as put forward by Willey, exemplifies "no means no."

128: I spent the same period with many people who thought Newt was the most beloved person in the 90s, who didn't about South Africa either way, and who thought man-on-woman sexual harassment was better than Teh Gay or even Teh Single Woman Not Obeying Her Parents. They had every reason to argue that feminists were doing what you characterized in 63. But most of them did not put the argument that strongly.

The Wiley story was almost certainly false, whether or not it makes one a bad feminist for not believing a falsehood.

123: Oh, damn. I am so sorry -- I relied on reading what you linked to in 69 to support your claims, which of course it doesn't remotely, and I didn't independently remember the Steinem editorial word for word.

But reading what you link in 123, as the fuller version of the Steinem thing, yeah, it's worse than I remembered, and she has more to apologize for. What it looks like to me is that she was driven by more skepticism than she was willing to own, and so minimized the severity of the Jones and Willey claims rather than explicitly doubting them. I still read that as specific to the atmosphere around Clinton, specifically: not in terms of strength of allegiance to him in a vacuum, but of misplaced pushback against the scandal machine.

I still don't see where you're getting Steinem having treated Lewinsky shabbily, though.

Also, I'm confused about whether I'm supposed to be defending feminists' defense of Clinton in which accusation.

It certainly wasn't a moment for anybody's highlight reel.

The early coverage was very different from what it eventually became by 1998 because when the first accusations came out there was no internet and because you couldn't say "blow job" in the press. The details such are openly debated in #MeToo simply were not there the way they are now. The only accusation I knew in detail early on was that of Gennifer Flowers, which I read because I was a feminist. A feminist with friends who subscribed to Penthouse.

135

Right, I don't disagree. Feminists felt like they had to choose between someone who is probably a serial rapist with OK politics or Newt Gingrich. Even in this day and age, that's a hard choice.
Luckily, we have Trump who manages to combine the sleaze of Bill Clinton without the charm with the politics of Newt Gingrich.

Feminists felt like they had to choose between someone who is probably a serial rapist with OK politics

No you incredible idiot. At that time no one had accused Bill Clinton of rape.

Halford's stalwart defense of his enemies' enemies WRT the Clintons reminds me of my grandmother. I imagine she'd be pretty down with at least parts of Halfordismo.

140

It's called humor.

Also, reading comprehension! I said "is probably," not "was known at the time."

Steinem's editorial is fucked up, in that she's minimizing two events of sexual assault/harassment short of rape. I would bet that she was doing so because she felt more comfortable minimizing the severity of the accusations than being straightforwardly skeptical about their truth, but if I'm right about that, she made a bad decision there. If she were straightforwardly skeptical about their truth, it would have been very defensible at the time.

142: Nope. I've seen humor.

Also for someone who got pretty worked up about something pretty indefensible, you might not want to be so quick to pull the trigger with name calling.

144

Yeah, I already said that in 132 (again, reading comprehension!)

I would buy that you could dismiss Willey as completely inventing facts, but there is *no way* minimizing the facts as they stood (forcibly kissing, groping breasts, making someone touch your penis) is just "a clumsy pass" for someone who takes "no means no" as an answer.

Right, and I did already apologize for having mistakenly relied on your initial link.

Anyway, if you want to take Steinem's reaction to specifically the Clinton scandal machine, in the context of the political atmosphere at the time, as a generally applicable picture of the state of feminist thought on consent at the time, I can't stop you.

148

Right, and I was accepting your apology with an attempt at wry humor and a Trump joke. I think in general you and I see most things the same way, and it's clear I struck a nerve with my characterization of Gen Xers as not representative of your experience, and I'm sorry if it offended you. I think I'm right, and you think I'm wrong, and I'm not sure there's a whole lot to be gained from arguing about this, except maybe from the inherent fun of arguing on the internet.

Well, I think you're not only wrong, but unjustifiably slandering lots of people who are still around to be injured by it, and in a way that destroys internal solidarity among people who should be allies. So I'm not hoping to convince you that second wave feminists were less benighted and culpable generally than you think they are, but it's not a lighthearted 'agree to disagree' moment.

I've only read the last few comments, which positions me perfectly to contribute to the discussion. At the time, "all these women are making things up to take down the president" was a solid guideline. I imagine a lot of good feminists had to work hard to weigh in in an environment that really was the "buncha lying bitches" of any stone sexist's imaginings.

For someone who seems interested in this issue, you seem to have changed the ostensible point you've been trying to make a bunch -- I notice that the "sexual empowerment" thing has left the building. Since you've now retreated to the limited point of "1998 Gloria Steinem talking about Bill Clinton was inconsistent with current #metoo" standards, I concede that much, Gloria Steinem was probably dismissive in a heated political climate in the wrong way about what ultimately turned out to be demonstrably false and dismissable accusations from Wiley and Jones, but I strongly suspect that's because she (and everyone else around at the time) had good reason to think that the accusations were flatly false. Which, it turns out, they (almost certainly) were.

A bigger point, for me, is that it does a big disservice to the people who have come forward about e.g. Harvey Weinstein to lump them together with Wiley and Jones -- I don't think the #metoo standard works if it means "believe an accusation made in a heated political climate even despite a strong preponderance of the evidence going the other way."

Broaddrick is another story; though there's not anywhere near enough there for a criminal conviction, there is not affirmative contradictory evidence (that we know of, though there just wasn't much evidence gathering on that accusation period), so if your baseline is that an accusation like Broaddrick's generally should be believed then that one should be too.

But the bottom line is that the use of reactions to Bill Clinton to support your initial point just ... doesn't.

but unjustifiably slandering lots of people who are still around to be injured by it, and in a way that destroys internal solidarity among people who should be allies.

Wow, just what sort of power do you think I possess? I doubt repeating a point already made in places like the Guardian on an eclectic web magazine no one reads is bringing down Gloria Steinem. She's actually a wealthy famous person, and she's doing just fine.

I'd also point out that the *idea* that my criticizing Steinem for fitting into mainstream 90s sexual mores is somehow "ruining internal solidarity" is fucking offensive, in the face of the much more damning critiques of mainstream feminists like Steinem by women of color and working class women (e.g. see the Womenist movement). If what I'm doing is "ruining feminism," then I don't know what you'd say about that sort of thing, but "you're wrong and stupid and need to be taken down" isn't how you build coalitions. In general thought, you're clearly reading something else into what I've written that has nothing to do with me as a person (online persona?) or the words I've actually written on the page, if I'm a threat to feminist solidarity.

Also, it's sort of...uncomfortable to claim that feminism isn't monolithic and then shit on people who have slightly different takes on feminism than you do.

Secondly, I haven't looked into Paula Jones's story like I have Broaddrick's, but in an age where we assume women are telling the truth about sexual harassment, Jones, even if she were nothing more than a Republican operative, would deserve a chance to have her story at least considered by feminists.

Points to a difference today, where Leeann Tweeden, who is also in fact a Republican operative, was presumed from day one to be telling nothing but the truth by feminists. Of course Al Franken isn't the president.

She had pictures.

Well, she had one picture.

And Al hadn't been relentlessly bombarded with bullshit accusations by liars for the preceding 8 years.

Maybe everybody is a Bayesian?

But seriously, do you think attacking younger feminists for feeling differently about things by telling them they [destroy] "internal solidarity among people who should be allies" is a way to build up solidarity?

In terms of slander, I really don't care if you think I slandered Gloria Steinem, and I doubt she cares either. If we're talking about real people commenting here, who feel personally attacked, then I apologize because I am not trying to make people feel bad. I was in general talking about limits of social acceptability, and we're all creatures of our times. For example I loved Will and Grace in the 90s, and I tried watching it again, it was painful. I was able to find it funny in the 90s and not now because I am a product of my times, and like the times I've also changed.

And honestly, I bet Franken would have ridden out the Tweeden allegation on a mixture of doubt about what the picture actually showed (harassment or friendly horsing around she'd mischaracterized after the fact) and thinking it wasn't that big a deal. What took him down was the seven other women who showed up right afterward.

Also, make that Womanist. I thought it looked funny when typed out.

The real nadir of the 90s was when NOW and Gloria Steinem hailed Hilary Clinton's murder of Vince Foster as a feminist act.

That was a bridge too far.

I think what took Franken down was that his replacement was going to be selected by a Democrat. I think that standard would have been the same in 1998 or 2017. I think that Clinton would have easily been forced to resign if he were a senator.

163

Though, that was the case with Clinton too. If he'd been removed from office he'd be replaced by Gore.

Look, Buttercup, in your 63 you called feminists generally in the 90s, not just Steinem in that one op-ed, willing to defend Clinton for rape ("I was talking about the multiple women who accused Clinton of sexual harassment and rape when I referred to "forcing himself on her.""), not just the lesser assaults Jones and Willey alleged.

I initially overstated my defense of Steinem because I relied on your mistaken link, and misremembered her as doubtful rather than minimizing. But she certainly didn't dismiss credible allegations of rape, which hadn't been made yet when she wrote that op-ed, and she's one feminist, not feminists generally -- as noted in the Vanity Fair article you first linked, NOW as an organization flipped on Clinton when the Willey story broke ("The National Organization for Women (NOW), which until then had found itself "unable to comment responsibly," averred that "Kathleen Willey's sworn testimony moves the question from whether the president is a 'womanizer' to whether he is a sexual predator.").

You don't think calling 90s feminists generally rape apologists is a big important deal, because you're just one unimportant person, which is absolutely true. But it's not a way to build solidarity.

If he'd have been removed from office by impeachment, he would have been the first president to have had that happen. If he resigned to avoid it, the second to have had that happen.

And of course, Gore's replacement would have been subject to a Republican Congress.

Maybe someone else with memories of the 90s can speak to how outrageous it would have been if the Starr investigation/discovery of the Lewinsky affair had forced Bill Clinton from office. It was effectively an attempt at a coup, the supposed high crime and misdemeanor being lying under oath about oral sex with Lewinsky itself the product of, essentially, a sting operation designed to take down a sitting President whom the Republican elite didn't like and thus deemed unfit for the Presidency. If feminists hadn't resisted that attempted right-wing takeover of the government (almost uniformly, because they're not idiots or people trolling twitter, but people who actually care about policy results, they did resist it) it would be to the eternal shame of the American feminist movement. Where is Stormcrow when we need him.

Since nobody answered 127, I looked it up. It was Friday and I guess it wasn't a story she wrote but one she put in an edited volume.

168: It's complicated! That is, you're right as it applies to literally the Lewinsky thing -- while he definitely acted badly, removing him from office over it would have been, as you say, essentially a politically motivated coup, and it made perfect sense to push back against that for policy and sane governance reasons even for those who thought his behavior was wrong.

On the other hand, if Starr had, using the same tactics, established a case of sexual assault with the same level of certainty that the facts of the Lewinsky matter were established? At some point, even if the investigation was wrongful in itself, if it had established a real crime, that would have been a legitimate reason for him to have been removed from office. That didn't happen, but I wouldn't want to imply that it would have been wrong for him to have been removed from office if it had.

170 - Oh, I wasn't trying to imply that -- if, hypothetically, evidence of an actual crime had, hypothetically, been established, of course impeachment would have been appropriate. But of course that was not established, at all. My only point is that given that lack of evidence in the actually-existing world it would have been absolutely outrageous for the feminist movement to have called for impeachment/resignation because they were, e.g., worried about the "power differential" in Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky, or whatever. Fortunately feminists neither were nor are idiots, so they didn't do that.

I would say that Erica Jong, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan*, and Katie Roiphe, and Nancy Friday represent a list of fairly prominent "feminists." I'm not including Tina Brown and Maureen Dowd, even though at the time she (Dowd) was pitching herself more as one than she is now. They don't consist of every single person who got paid to feminist in the public sphere, but they're definitely more than "just one" or "nobody." If it makes you happier, reread it as, "many prominent feminists think"

If it makes you happier, I'll write, "One prominent feminist (Steinem) characterized specific claims of grabbing a woman's breast, forcibly kissing her, and forcing her hand on his penis a woman as a "clumsy pass." Other prominent feminists (Jong, Friedan, Roiphe, Brown Friday) thought that Monica Lewinsky was an ugly (Roiphe) with gum disease (Jong) who seduced the poor hapless Bill Clinton."

*Who called Monica Lewinsky a little twerp

172 - none of those people were, even arguably, rape apologists. At worst they were excessively invasive/dismissive of Lewinsky's privacy, by (being writers known for writing erotica) being dismissive of the costs to Lewinsky of giving fully consensual blow jobs, suggesting literally precisely the opposite point of the one you started the thread with. Not sure what's motivating you here but maybe it's time to quit.

No, the sort of thing that would make me happier is if you said something acknowledging that accusing feminists in the 90s generally as having been rape apologists was off base, and kind of horrifically overstated in a way that suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of feminist mores at the time. When you open a conversation with that sort of thing, it really poisons everything that follows it.

If that still seems to you like a reasonable thing to have said, I can't help you from here.

171

I never said they should. As I pointed out repeatedly on the Azari thread, if you're not doing something illegal or violating a specific contract, the price for being a creep is generally that people know you're a creep. I don't think Clinton should have been impeached, but I also think he was a giant idiot for lying about the affair in the first place.

With Juanita Broaddrick, it gets dicier. Obviously Clinton getting impeached and removed from office would be a coup for Republicans, but then allowing men to get away with rape because "they're on our side" is something I'm categorically against. I think as it stands, I believe that Broadderick probably was raped but there's not evidence that would hold up in a court of law. I guess in that instance I wouldn't push for impeachment of a sitting president, but I also wouldn't be so down with a cushy post-presidential career of paid speeches. I'd hope that women's organizations at the minimum would boycott him.

https://www.vox.com/2016/1/6/10722580/bill-clinton-juanita-broaddrick

173

Please read Steinem's Op ed (second link). Otherwise you're making a fool of yourself.

Not a rape apologist, I've read it, and frankly it's pretty obvious who the fool is. At worst she made some misstatements (which you omit the context for entirely) which we've already discussed above. There's nothing even remotely suggesting "rape apology." Aren't you purportedly some kind of academic?

174

You yourself acknowledged that Steinem was dismissing rape in a pretty unpleasant way. Where was the immediate backlash against that? There was almost none, and nothing like you'd see today. Silence is tacit consent. I don't back down from my claim, because I would say the mainstream collective response was one of silence and tepidness to the point it counts as rape apology. Feminists could get away with calling other women ugly sluts and it was "edgy." This. Simply. Couldn't. Happen. Today.

You're response is "you're an idiot times were different then and feminists had to defend sexual assault." Ok then, but that absolutely means that times were different then.

Note! In 2014, Tina Brown wrote a piece about Monica Lewinsky, and it was completely excoriated by mainstream corporate feminism for being sexist slut shaming. This is because Times. Have. Changed.

https://jezebel.com/tina-brown-uses-bad-sexist-cliches-to-describe-sexist-l-1574505843

177

The context being that sexual harassment only counts if it's a repeated thing in the workplace? A one-time assault is NBD?

You're not covering yourself in glory here, and you're not doing yourself a favor by defending something not very defensible. Aren't you supposed to be a lawyer, or something?

Sorry. Dismissing sexual assault. I'm clearly ruining feminism by not keeping the casuistic distinction between sexual assault and rape abundantly clear.

You yourself acknowledged that Steinem was dismissing rape in a pretty unpleasant way.

No. At the time she wrote that, no credible allegations of rape had yet been made. She was reacting to two very questionable allegations of assault very far short of rape -- she minimized them in a way that is definitely wrong, but calling that 'dismissing rape' is insane nonsense.

On second thought, defending the indefensible is exactly what lawyers are supposed to do. Though that's generally supposed to be for pay.

180 to 181.

And you're very very bad at the use of quotation marks.

177: The context being that the Clintons' Republican enemies were trying to drown them in an ocean of shit, and you're quibbling about whether feminists did an adequate job of recognizing that there might have been a candy bar or two floating on top of all the shit.

But more importantly...after Broaddrick's claims came out, where was Steinem? Where were feminists pointing out that even though Republicans were evil swamp monsters bent on destroying the Clintons, credible claims of rape needed to be acknowledge and women needed to be believed? Again, silence is tacit consent. If feminists are going to watch women get slut shamed and dragged through the mud and say nothing, they are being rape apologists. This is really feminism or any sort of social justice 101. If you watch injustice happen and say nothing, especially if your job is to say things, then you are part of the problems.

Again, there are many things to defend about the 90s, so I'm not sure why shitty gender politics vis a vis rape victims is the hill you want to die on. I'm also not sure how acknowledging *in this particular way women like Steinem and Jong were sort of shitty* ruins feminism, unless feminism is supposed to be a movement solely made up of middle class white women over age 40.

Where were feminists pointing out that even though Republicans were evil swamp monsters bent on destroying the Clintons, credible claims of rape needed to be acknowledge and women needed to be believed?

Like NOW's position after the Willey testimony came out?

179 - That's not what I said at all, but you seem to have a problem with either reading for comprehension or writing for precision and accuracy.

The deliberate conflation of "rape apologist" and "insufficiently attentive to a clearly wrong but not-even-sexual assault" act, which is what Steinem actually does in the op-ed you mention, is telling.

If you read her op-ed, her context that the entire framing of the article is that (a) you should believe women and that (b) "no means no and yes means yes." That is literally what Steinem says! She then does not describe the Wiley allegations,. She says that the Jones allegation, which supposedly involved Bill Clinton dropping his trousers, and then accepting rejection without more, constituted a "clumsy pass," even accepting the allegations as true. Of course, those alleged actions would not be either "rape" or "sexual assault" under any modern standard -- they might well be indecent exposure, or a lesser form of sexual misconduct. But on Steinem's telling it's clearly not "rape" or an "assault" and Steinem is not actually dismissing sexual assault. She is claiming that Clinton was a jerk but accepted a "no" and moved on, and that this is therefore a lesser crime, even as alleged.

To be clear, she is being excessively dismissive of the harm as alleged, instead of taking the far better (and accurate) tack, which was that Paula Jones was lying. That is a totally fair criticism of Steinem! But to call her a rape apologist based on that op-ed is preposterous.

185

But for that sort of context to matter, you'd have to show that prominent figures saying something like, "this is complicated and we don't particularly respect or condone Clinton's behavior, but we don't think he should be impeached and removed from office" would have made a material difference in outcome. Republicans already hated people like Steinem, if she came out in full force for impeachment they'd have used it against him, but if she said that it was complex but not grounds for impeachment, I doubt it would have had any real effect.

Secondly, calling Lewinsky ugly and saying she has gum disease and the general digs on her weight, or the slut shaming that didn't originate from people like Steinem but that also wasn't condemned by them either has nothing to do with the concrete political outcome. Vilifying Monica in sexist ways doesn't do anything to push back against Ken Starr or Newt Gingrich.

As with the allegations in Ms. Willey's case, Mr. Clinton seems to have made a clumsy sexual pass, then accepted rejection.

Actually she does.

190 - As I said, she mentions but doesn't describe the details of the Wiley case. Steinem may well have gotten the details of the Wiley accusation wrong, but she certainly does not in that op-ed try to apologize for either rape or sexual assault. She does say something stupid and minimizing, which is why I agreed that THAT was a fair criticism above.

The link in 134 brings back a lot. And has a lot I'm glad I didn't know. Seriously, everyone in this conversation should read it.

NOW on Brodderick.

But for that sort of context to matter, you'd have to show that prominent figures saying something like, "this is complicated and we don't particularly respect or condone Clinton's behavior, but we don't think he should be impeached and removed from office" would have made a material difference in outcome.

While the women activists condemned Clinton for his adulterous relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, they argued that his behavior did not rise to the level of high crimes or misdemeanors necessary to remove him from office. "Women are angry and do not condone his conduct. Women want President Clinton to remain in office," the statement said. "We believe, and the women of the nation concur, that Mr. Clinton's actions are not impeachable."

Only nobodies like Patricia Ireland, NOW, the Feminist Majority, Betty Friedan, were saying that they didn't particularly respect or condone Clinton's behavior but also didn't want him driven from office.

189, 194: The context also matters because it affected people's perceptions of the various allegations. "Republican accusation against Bill Clinton = lie" was a useful shortcut in the context of the time.

193

That's a good statement from NOW.

Does it affect your sense of what mainstream feminist mores were in the 90s?

I feel like we're letting the ghost of Cynthia Heimel down by not including more sex-related puns here.

Haven't read any of the comments yet, but I'm glad LB wrote this. Cynthia Heimel's books were one of my first avenues to feminism as a young teenager.

Bob Packwood seems relevant here somehow. If only to note that it's not as though sexual misconduct couldn't bring down senators until just recently.

Bob Packwood's porn name was "Bob Packwood."

And, like clockwork, some young friend of a friend is posting on Facebook that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Daria and the Riot Grrrl movement were "feminist ahead of their time" "shockingly advanced" for the 1990s and "could even be something from today." That LITERALLY WAS THEIR TIME YOU JACKASS THOSE WERE NOT OBSCURE THINGS. I know most young people are ahistorical and self-congratulatory but this is some next-level shit.

They don't even have a lawn.

I really have to watch Buffy. I've been putting it off for years.

202: Holy shit, wait until they hear about Ani Diffanco and the Indigo Girls!

Aaagh. "Closer I am to Fine" earworm.

Now we need somebody who is 107 to mention Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.

Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

The Beatles ruined everything.

Fun fact--I performed Heimels A Girls Guide to Chaos for duet acting in speech tournaments in high school in 1988

I reread my 63. Is it the most nuanced thing ever written? Would it pass peer review? No. Do I fundamentally stand by my claims? Yeah.
I'll reproduce it for ease of conversation:
Just reread coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and try to imagine that same conversation playing out, where on one side feminists are arguing that a powerful man forcing himself on a female subordinate but not ultimately raping her is an example of "sexual freedom" or that in a relationship between a 23 year old intern and a 50 year old president, the 23 year old holds all the power, and on the other side you have conservatives arguing that people who have sex outside of marriage or give blow jobs should basically be stoned. Now picture this conversation in the midst of #metoo, and argue that the 90s were in the same place re. sexual consent as the 2010s are.

Let's revisit the Steinem article:

Let's look at what seem to be the most damaging allegations, those made by Kathleen Willey. Not only was she Mr. Clinton's political supporter, but she is also old enough to be Monica Lewinsky's mother, a better media spokeswoman for herself than Paula Jones, and a survivor of family tragedy, struggling to pay her dead husband's debts.If any of the other women had tried to sell their stories to a celebrity tell-all book publisher, as Ms. Willey did, you might be even more skeptical about their motives. But with her, you think, ''Well, she needs the money.''

For the sake of argument here, I'm also believing all the women, at least until we know more. I noticed that CNN polls taken right after Ms. Willey's interview on ''60 Minutes'' showed that more Americans believed her than President Clinton. Nonetheless, the President's approval ratings have remained high. Why? The truth is that 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 asupporter 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. In her original story, Paula Jones essentially said the same thing. She went to then-Governor Clinton's hotel room, where she said he asked her to perform oral sex and even dropped his trousers. She refused, and even she claims that he said something like, ''Well, I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do.''Her lawyers now allege that as a result of the incident Ms. Jones described, she was slighted in her job as a state clerical employee and even suffered long-lasting psychological damage. But there appears to be little evidence to support those accusations. As with the allegations in Ms. Willey's case, Mr. Clinton seems to have made a clumsy sexual pass, then accepted rejection.This is very different from the cases of Clarence Thomas and Bob Packwood. According to Anita Hill and a number of Mr. Packwood's former employees, theoffensive behavior was repeated for years, despite constant ''no's.'' It also occurred in the regular workplace of these women, where it could not be avoided.
...

As reported, Monica Lewinsky's case illustrates the rest of the equation: ''Yes means yes.'' Whatever it was, her relationship with President Clinton has never been called unwelcome, coerced or other than something she sought. The power imbalance between them increased the index of suspicion, but there is no evidence to suggest that Ms. Lewinsky's will was violated; quite the contrary. In fact, hersubpoena in the Paula Jones case should have been quashed. Welcome sexual behavior is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one.

The first bolded section is nothing other than saying sexual assault is fine if it only happens once and the assaulter eventually says no. Arguing I'm "slandering" Steinem for calling her sexual assault apology a "rape apology" is really fucked up.

The second bolded passage is less problematic, but wouldn't fly today. Very few feminists would agree that if a 21 year old feels super into having sex with her older powerful boss, the imbalance of power shouldn't bother us.

The specific attacks on Lewinsky that I lumped in with Steinem's shitty op ed were actually said by the likes of Erica Jong and Betty Friedan, among others, and not Steinem specifically, but I hardly think it takes away from my general point, which was that there was a really shitty public narrative. Did I paint the brush too broadly? Very possibly. But I'd argue that if Steinem tried to publish it today, she'd be loudly denounced by anyone who considered being a feminist their job. The silence, the tepid and muted (even if good!) responses, and the overwhelming willingness to let Lewinsky get dragged through the mud to protect Clinton were a failure of 90s mainstream feminism.

You are explicitly calling someone a rape apologist whonis explicitly not apologizing for rape. That is pretty much the definition of slander. Either you don't know what slander means or you are deliberately trying to mislead -- either way, you should walk away from that one.

Or, I should say, you called several people rape apologists who did not apologize for rape.

Sexual freedom was the wrong word, but Steinem clearly implied that if it what happens in private should stay private, something that goes against "the personal is political," especially when it comes to powerful men behaving badly with women:

The real violators of Ms. Lewinsky's will were Linda Tripp, who taped theirtalks, the F.B.I. agents who questioned her without a lawyer and Kenneth Starr, theindependent prosecutor who seems intent on tailoring the former intern's testimony. What if President Clinton lied under oath about some or all of the above? According to polls, many Americans assume he did. There seems to be sympathy forkeeping private sexual behavior private. Perhaps we have a responsibility to make it O.K. for politicians to tell the truth -- providing they are respectful of ''no means no; yes means yes'' -- and still be able to enter high office, including the Presidency. Until then, we will disqualify energy and talent the country needs -- as we aredoing right now.

This final paragraph is saying that we shouldn't judge people for their private lives if they respect no means no and yes means yes. The given example of no means no was Willey, which, according to Steinem, even if all the facts were true, would still be an example of this. The example of yes means yes is a man having an affair with a subordinate a few years older than his daughter and having her reputation maligned when the affair became public. The last line implies that energy and talent are good reasons to overlook sexual predation or general ickiness.

This is just not something that could be published by a woman considered to be at the forefront of feminism and not be ripped to shreds by other feminists. Yeah, the Republican machine was awful, but that doesn't excuse this Op Ed.

which was that there was a really shitty public narrative

There was a really shitty public narrative. It was a narrative not dominate by people I would consider feminist. In addition to the Republican side, there were people like Carville ('drag a hundred dollar bill through the trailer park') and Dick 'smell you feet' Morris. There were horrible people around Clinton in a way that really helped make me a fan of Obama when I noticed he didn't seem to have anybody like that around him.

I just don't see how blaming that horrible narrative on feminism because not every feminist was arguing correctly helps feminism.

I saw Indigo Girls play at the whatever theater on State Street in Madison in 1988 or 1989. I can haz feminist cred?

I believe the name of that theater has changed in subsequent years. Perhaps to protect the innocent.

I also saw Public Enemy play at some venue in Milwaukee. I don't think it was the Bradley Center, but maybe it was? Some guy hit me in the back of the head with a pool cue after the show ended. I still have a scar.

The real violators of Ms. Lewinsky's will were Linda Tripp, who taped theirtalks

I don't see how #MeToo would see this any differently. Forcing somebody into the press by taking their tale, which you taped without their knowledge, to the FBI is not seen as a way to help a possible victim. Demanding women go public is very much not the same thing as supporting those who do.

218: Was the venue a pool hall or did he bring a cue with him?

Some guy hit me in the back of the head with a pool cue after the show ended. I still have a scar.

For this, you can haz feminist cred.

215

It really doesn't. I know that people are upset at 63, which I could have worded more carefully, but I've gotten in this long dragged out and pointless argument with people mainly because I was offended by the claim that I'm actively harming people like Gloria Steinem and ruining feminism, or something. I'm also procrastinating like crazy on stressful projects, and somehow this seemed like it would be less stressful (not).

My biggest ire is aimed at Republicans, who were pure evil, then the media and Clinton's people, who were terrible, Clinton himself and near the bottom are mainstream feminists, who were to varying degrees only mildly terrible to decent, but not very vocally, and not in a way that they were actually willing to speak up against people "on their side." IMO, Steinem's Op Ed should have caused a major career hit, but it didn't.

I think one legacy of the Clinton era is that powerful men figured as long as they were on the right side, they could enjoy the relative protection from mainstream feminists and get away with harassing women, who would use silence to not support any woman who dared to take on a powerful man. Watching Lewinsky get slut shamed, weight shamed, looks shamed, etc, and either saying nothing or joining in sent a powerful message to women in the late 90s that if it came out you had sex with a powerful man not only would the media ruin you, but the people who were supposed to be on your side would just let it happen, if the man were powerful enough. It worked for Weinstein, Cosby, Franken, until it didn't. I get these conversations are hard because it feels like giving fodder to the enemy, but it's necessary to reckon with these things. Monica Lewinsky just had some interesting and nuanced things to say about #metoo.

I saw that piece, but I didn't read it.

I think one legacy of the Clinton era is that powerful men figured as long as they were on the right side, they could enjoy the relative protection from mainstream feminists and get away with harassing women, who would use silence to not support any woman who dared to take on a powerful man.

You think this was a legacy of the Clinton era??? You really are the most preciously presentist person who ever presentisted, aren't you? (That's not to let Clinton off the hook. He was a vile human being, a vastly overrated president, and very likely something of serial sexual predator.)

I, too, am procrastinated. I should be finishing up a grant application. Actually, I'm going to do that.

It wasn't the most needlessly heated argument here. For some reason, that was about national park attendance figures.

I guess I didn't read Playboy for the articles, as I'm among those who haven't heard of Heimel.

I guess I'm going to read that recent Lewinsky retrospective. I was a college student, interning at a US government agency (not the White House), having just arrived in DC for the semester, when the scandal broke. I did a fairly good job of not following it at all.

The thing is, the Gloria Steinem op-ed is dumb and terrible! There are very obvious, very legit criticisms you could make -- specifically, that she (a) didn't pay enough attention to the specifics of Wiley's (ultimately demonstrably false) account before writing an "assume this was true" argument, so she wasn't sufficiently attentive to an allegation of sexual assault; (b) more importantly, she was too quick to label something that was (correctly) neither sexual assault nor sexual harrassment in the hostile-work-environment sense as minimal, as opposed to awful. Those are huge problems, albeit problems driven by the broader political picture of the moment. But the desire to use it as your dispositive Exhibit A for a general argument that "90s feminists [really, in Steinem's case, a 70s feminist] were awful rape apologist Clinton-slaves, but thankfully due to Sex and the City women have eacaped the nightmare of the Clinton apologists and are sexually empowered again" is just pure unadulturated bullshit.

Honestly, what I did was make a bunch of really obvious cigar jokes and laugh a great deal at John Goodman's Linda Tripp. A part of the reason I'm not looking down on feminists of the time is that I would have been worse if I was contributing to the narrative. .

229

I made a set of Clinton scandal paper dolls for my sister's birthday in 1998. I bought Tom Tierny's Clintons presidential paper dolls, and then added Ken Starr, Linda Tripp, and Monica Lewinsky. I did a fine job on the likenesses, if I say so myself. I had no idea what the blue dress looked like, so I made it a sparkly party number, but it turns out it was actually a long sleeved plain cotton dress. I'm not sure I got the semen stain in the right spot either.

But the desire to use it as your dispositive Exhibit A for a general argument that "90s feminists [really, in Steinem's case, a 70s feminist] were awful rape apologist Clinton-slaves, but thankfully due to Sex and the City women have eacaped the nightmare of the Clinton apologists and are sexually empowered again" is just pure unadulturated bullshit.

That would be a shitty argument, if it were to remotely resemble what I was actually saying.

That was me, obviously.

In more recent news, Gloria Steinem has found a useful place in the #metoo movement.

https://jezebel.com/why-is-gloria-steinem-defending-vice-1823080944

I'm not sure I got the semen stain in the right spot either.

Said the actress to the archbishop.

The moral of the story is to always keep up with your laundry.

I'm not sure if halford is still around. If so, he should probably check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR2RVaXKQiE

I can't tell if they are stoned or happy.

Why choose?

Because nobody will tell me where to buy pot.

Anyway, good night. I don't have any drugs, just 11% beer, and I'm sleepy.

I only accept one Crazy Train cover. Which should be enough to bring comity and peace to the universe.

https://youtu.be/JPBrA3sV90A

I have nothing to add on the substance, but want to note how rich it is for LB to (1) write a front-page post guaranteed to reopen a fruitless argument, and (2) accuse other people of undermining solidarity.

I'd like to thank this thread for reminding of MTV's old "Sex in the 90s" series and this promo in particular.

234 is too twee.
239 is great.

I read her columns in the Voice and enjoyed them. I later confused her with Candace Bushnell. I'm no longer confused.

230: Wait, now you don't think 90s feminists generally thought a man forcing himself on a subordinate was an example of sexual freedom? If you're not committed to that as an example of how social mores and understandings of consent have changed since the 90s, then it's definitely going to be easier for you to work with people over 45 or so.

Why even bother? They spend all day on the internet.

1-132: Does anyone else find it odd that Steinem, b. 1934, is being held up as an examplar of "90s feminism"?

35 is indeed hilarious. Especially since I've been watching The Wire again.
MCNULTY-- What the [HAVE SEX] did I do?
BUNK -- You gave a [HAVE SEX] when it wasn't your turn to give a [HAVE SEX].
MCNULTY -- [HAVE SEX]. I am so [HAD SEX].

133-244 as well, mostly.

205, 216: I also saw the Indigo Girls in the 1980s, though it was the 1990s before I had a beer at the same table as Amy.

In the department of bright lines, I know of two young professor - newly former undergraduate marriages from a very small college in a small window of time. Both are coming up on or recently passed 25th anniversaries. People are complicated.

I remember being fixated during the Clinton era by the "alt.politics.*" usenet newsgroups. Apparently these (or some of them) still exist as Google Groups. Who knew?

I'm fairly sure they were even more contentious than this thread, though less polite.

133-244 as well, mostly.

Now that's how to comment, folks. No need to get bogged down in specifics.

I'm starting to look at things that I in fact remember being considered normal at their time, and thinking "That was ahead of its time". Wow, Salt-n-Pepa's "Shoop" is ahead of its time! Look at them turn the tables and objectify men while not appearing particularly feminine themselves! No it's not.

I think that's a natural way to feel, but it does set us up for being overly sanguine about how good things are now. "Now that pop culture has come this far, misogyny is on its last legs!" seems plausible, but when you remember how good lots of pop culture was even thirty or forty years ago, and how misogyny keeps on ticking along just fine alongside it, it's a little less cheery.

I'm starting to look at things that I in fact remember being considered normal at their time, and thinking "That was ahead of its time". Wow, Salt-n-Pepa's "Shoop" is ahead of its time!

I was thinking that we need a corollary to Gibson's, "The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed." applied to social change. I'm not even thinking about the geographical distribution (though, as discussed up-thread, that matters), but the fact that any time you're looking backwards you're going to see things which, from the current perspective, look like they're on the right track but just clumsy or not fully worked out or just has obvious blind spots which are apparent in retrospect. In that context when you look at something which, for whatever reason, has less of those clunky elements it appears to be ahead of its time.

For example, in the previous thread I was thinking about Salt-n-Pepa's "Let's Talk About Sex" which is great but very much of its time -- it's so obvious what it's pushing back against that it caries its context with it. But if those elements are less visible in the foreground for "Shoop" it feels more ahead of its time, but that's mostly an illusion.

Or, consider Buffy mentioned above. I was recently looking at the cast page for Buffy on IMDB and struck by just how damn white the show was (particularly for one set in CA). If you look at Buffy with that in mind it looks much less ahead of its time then it does if you are just interested in the smart feminist messages.

That said, 250 is also a good point.

Yeah, there are different rates of change on different issues. Anything on gay issues, or way, way more on trans issues, the genuine level of change since the 90s is remarkable.

That was probably because of "Sex and the City."

I'm not even thinking about the geographical distribution (though, as discussed up-thread, that matters)

When I drove for my interview at Heebie U, back in 2006, it felt like the decades were peeling off as I drove down. I still stand by that sensation - Heebie U is maybe 3-4 decades behind the rest of the world and Heebieville (different town) is half that. Now that it's been twelve years, I worry occasionally that I've lost a sense of what 2018 feels like in city.

There are some distinct advantages to lagging behind in time - when Heebieville implements some new technology or solution, we can thoroughly research what works best and what doesn't work because it's established terrain by now. There are a lot of disadvantages as well, but it's hard to identify exactly what they are, because I've lost my sense of what 2018 feels like in a city.

||

the Daoguang emperor believed he would be able to resist the corrupting influences of the river conservancy. But his tenure as imperial watchdog was short-lived. When floodwaters threatened the southern dike near Kaifeng in 1841, Wen-chong's ignorance of emergency procedures proved disastrous. For his ineptitude, Wen-chong was stripped of his rank, sentenced to three months standing on the bank of the Yellow River wearing the cangue, and then exiled

The river conservancy, most debaucherous of all nature charities.

I've lost my sense of what 2018 feels like in a city.

||

He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.

|>

I feel like I should know how many decades Pittsburgh is behind things, but then I realize that my main basis for comparison is Nebraska.

I've been wearing the same clothes since about 1996 and I'm just now feeling like I need to buy different stuff.

Mossy! Where did 256 come from, please?

Hydraulic Evolution and Dynastic Decline: The Yellow River Conservancy, 1796-1855

249, 251

Right. My original point on the earlier thread (i.e. my actual argument and not the ridiculous strawman) was that cultural trends unconsciously seep in and define what we see as the limits of acceptability, to an extent that we can't control and aren't aware of, except in retrospect. We can't notice at the time and generally don't remember them as "problematic," because they weren't at the time, and its only by revisiting them later that we realize how much culture has moved on. (It's akin to thinking of oneself as a child; one imparts a level of adult awareness to one's actions that didn't actually exist, but it's impossible not to do so.)

In some ways, things often become dated because they "won the war" so to speak. Fights that were cutting edge 20 or 40 years ago are now commonly accepted wisdom, and the taken-for-grantedness-of-what-used-to-be-edgy is irritating for older people, who still remember that feeling of it being edgy, and irritating to younger people, who feel chastised for taking the movement to the next step. (As someone who's taught undergrads on gender studies, I know what it's like to feel irritated by The Young People, and as someone apparently ruining feminism by disrespecting Gloria Steinem, I know what it's like to feel irritated by older people.) I don't fully agree with everything this woman says, but she's describing the dynamic from the perspective of an older person.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/intergenerational-feminist-divide-over-metoo-both-painful-necessary-ncna838936

An analogy I made in the last thread was to fashion. When you see runway fashion, it feels remote and extreme and distant. But after a few seasons or a few years, when you look back, it looks pedestrian as the elements that seemed edgy have already been incorporated into popular styles, and pretty soon the squarest square who ever squared is wearing mullet hems or harem pants or whatever. Every generation has touchstone elements that then become influential to differing degrees (or not). It doesn't necessarily mean they were the best or most radical or most interesting work, but that somehow they became a touchstone that influence pop culture. And if its truly been successful, it necessarily becomes dated, because that's itself a sign of its own success. Was SATC the edgiest show ever made, even at the time it was produced? No. Was it extraordinarily influential on the cultural zeitgeist of the late 90s/early 2000s? Yes. As someone who didn't actually watch the show, the genre of sexually vulgar, no-holds-barred "girl talk," consciously modeled on the show, was ubiquitous and pervasive, and actually transformed how women interracted with each other vis-a-vis sex. (Does this mean this transformation would have happened without the show? No. It means that this show, for whatever reason, resonated with the times in a way that it became an object through which cultural change could happen. If SATC never happened, another show may have, or the change may have happened differently. Or perhaps not at all, but the argument isn't a directly causal one.) This doesn't mean that no one had sexually explicit talks with their girlfriends before, but rather, the sort of language and verbal sexual expression which had been considered edgy or appropriate for intimate contexts was now considered the default genre of conversation for a group of women in a social gathering. Not only Oberlin women's studies majors, but "basic bitches" were now comparing one night stands discussing rim jobs and tea-bagging and complaining about the amount of pubic hair a man had). Working class young women in provincial China, were, for the first time ever, venturing out to bars to have virgin cosmos with their group of lady friends. Today, SATC is a massively problematic dinosaur, and I doubt any undergrad would find it remotely compelling. That's not because they're ungrateful brats who are ruining feminism, but because it's simply no longer a show that's relevant to the zeitgeist of our times.

Actually, fashion is in general a great analogy. No one gets dressed thinking in the moment they look bad or dated, but inevitably you look back at photos of yourself 10 or 20 years ago and think, "I can't believe I thought that ever looked good." The same applies to cultural, social, and even political stances. Also, like fashion, change is cyclical and doesn't map on to any narrative of clear progress, which is again, why I think the 80s and 90s were in some ways more conservative than the 60s and 70s.

It should say, "does this meant the transformation would not happened without the show."

Thank you!

someone apparently ruining feminism by disrespecting Gloria Steinem

It really was about identifying feminists in the 90s generally as considering a boss forcing himself on a subordinate as an exemplar of sexual freedom, and explicitly including rape as part of what you were thinking about. Now that you seem to regret having said that, I'm not 100% clear on what you're talking about, but it seems much less inflammatory.

As someone who didn't actually watch the show, the genre of sexually vulgar, no-holds-barred "girl talk," consciously modeled on the show, was ubiquitous and pervasive, and actually transformed how women interracted with each other vis-a-vis sex.

But this is still wrong.

We can't notice at the time and generally don't remember them as "problematic," because they weren't at the time, and its only by revisiting them later that we realize how much culture has moved on.

I think that's true, and I was making a separate point as well -- that even in places where the original impulse isn't problematic (much) the expression can feel clunky and dated because it doesn't use the shorthand or the vocabulary that will become associated with those ideas (and so something which is entirely of-its-time in terms of content but happens to not include clunkier phrasings will feel ahead of its time in ways that aren't entirely justified).

An analogy I made in the last thread was to fashion.

I thought we established in a long ago thread that fashion hasn't actually changed much since the 90s.

266

I made a comment that was written hurriedly about what I saw as the failure of prominent feminists in the 90s in the context of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. I stand by Steinem's OP as rape apologia, though if you want to quibble it's not rape if you don't stick it in, then mentally read it as sexual assault apologia. It was an example of a really shitty cultural moment in the 90s for women where even people who might have behaved better didn't. The comment format doesn't lend itself to great nuance, and I would have phrased it differently had I realized what a giant shitshow it would produce, but I stand by my general point. I figured it was so obvious I was talking about the particular context that I explicitly mentioned that responding to clear bad faith trollery was unnecessary. Again, I don't mind even heated debate, but I do mind bad faith so I try to ignore it.

Again:
If I write, "Just reread coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and try to imagine that same conversation playing out,"

I'm talking about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, not everyone for all times. That you couldn't figure that out, from the context, felt bizarre and oddly hostile.

It also felt weirdly and unnecessarily hostile for you to specifically name me in the OP, misrepresent what I had said, and not even link to the original post, but whatevs. If I didn't have at least somewhat thick skin I wouldn't comment on the internet.

266.2

Can we agree to disagree or does you thinking I'm wrong still mean I'm ruining feminism and have to be destroyed?

I mean, heated feelings aside, there is something flattering about the idea that I might have movement-ruining powers through blog comments. I wonder if I could use those powers for good, such as by taking down the MRA movement or neo-Nazism or something.

|| For the culture folks:
Amazon's answer to 'Altered Carbon' is Iain M. Banks' space opera It's adapting the first book in his Culture series for television.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/21/amazon-crossover-sci-fi-thriller-the-culture/

|>

266 But this is still wrong.

SAtC was set in NY, which is (as heebie points out) several decades ahead of Texas. My suspicion is that the sort of sexually vulgar, no-holds-barred "girl talk" you were commenting on was much more common in NYC, SF and a few other places than in Chicago, Denver, Washington, and Atlanta, much less Heebieville. So in that sense, it was indeed transformative (novel and eye-opening) for people in those places. Not to claim it wasn't both an effect of changes in attitudes as well as a cause, but that those attitudes weren't well-distributed when SAtC debuted.

but I stand by my general point

That feminists in the nineties were generally rape apologists? That's a hell of a point to stand by.

Can we agree to disagree or does you thinking I'm wrong still mean I'm ruining feminism and have to be destroyed?

I certainly don't have any power or desire to destroy you. I do think that the willingness to dismiss feminists during the nineties. as a class, as willing to endorse rape/sexual assault as an exemplar of 'sexual freedom' is extraordinarily stupid, and extraordinarily hostile toward anyone who was a feminist in the 90s. (Steinem wrote a really regrettable op-ed, which is fucked up, but I think in a way that made sense not in terms of the mores of the time, but of the specific facts she was reacting to. Doesn't make what she said anything but fucked up, but it makes it weird to read her minimization of the Jones/Willey allegations as stating a general rule about what's all right. But that fucked up op-ed is on Steinem, not on all feminists who made different statements about sexual assault).

You obviously can't ruin feminism by yourself -- very likely no one's listening to you or taking you seriously. But being willing to show that level of broadbrushed hostile contempt for feminists of that era generally as having been corrupt apologists for sexual assault is an attitude that would be very damaging to anyone trying to build solidarity between feminists of different generations.

The SaTC stuff is unimportant, just dumbassed -- I was surprised when you said it initially, and then Heimel's death reminded me of it as something from long beforehand, that I thought was great at the time but not even revolutionary then.

And for a more fun and productive hobby, I might take up banging my head against a brick wall.

feminists of that era generally

The transition from influencer in an outsider movement fighting clear injustice to media presence is hard on many people, not just on Steinem. Jesse Jackson maybe.

anyone trying to build solidarity

Who is doing this? The democrats could use someone like this, UK labor as well.

276

All the Democrats are trying to build solidarity. On their own terms, of course.

268 What we established is that the guy who said that is a dope.

Was that me? I don't think so, but I'm also wearing pants from 1996 right now.

279

On the veldt, men who wore pants from 22 years ago attracted higher quality mates by signalling their pants size hadn't changed in two decades.

That and that they are too much into the life of the mind to care about a huge ink stain.

In the paperless office the ink has to end up somewhere.

I like fountain pens.

very likely no one's listening to you or taking you seriously

I am! This is a really interesting conversation that I've just gotten around to reading and to which I have nothing intelligent to add.

But when have I ever let that stop me? I find myself wanting to ask this question: in 1998 or thereabouts, the opposition to Clinton was firmly rooted among people who thought Bill was insufficiently sexist and too respectful of women.

(Hillary had the same opponents, though she really was non-sexist and respectful of women.)

Would the country have been better off if feminists had made common cause with Republican hypocrites and forced Bill from office in the '90s? Would feminism have been better off?

Bill Clinton's accusers, including Broderick, showed up at a Trump-Hillary debate and have accurately accused Hillary of being dismissive of their grievances. Fox News treated them sympathetically; feminists, much less so. What should feminists have done there?

have accurately accused Hillary of being dismissive of their grievances.

It seems very worth remembering that they have grievances against Bill; what Trump and Fox News were attempting to do by hauling them out is to make Hillary responsible for Bill's sins. (Broaddrick says Hillary threatened her, but what she says literally happened is that Hillary said something neutrally pleasant at a fundraiser and the threat was implicit. Broaddrick might sincerely believe Hillary meant to threaten her, but I don't think there's any requirement that anyone else agree with her.)

Overall, I think it's a perfectly reasonable feminist position that a woman isn't responsible for the bad acts of herhusband or other male associate unless she actively participated in the bad acts or profited from them, and I don't think there's meaningful evidence that Hillary did much of either. She defended Bill during the 1992 campaign when the Gennifer Flowers story of consensual adultery came out, and said something unpleasant about Lewinsky in a private email to a friend that got leaked, but other than that there isn't all that much.

what Trump and Fox News were attempting to do by hauling them out is to make Hilary responsible for Bill's sins

True, and for the most part this effort was bullshit; but Hillary was publicly indifferent, at least, to the alleged victims' complaints in a way that I think we agree would have been unacceptable had the accusations not involved her husband.

That silence did not disqualify her from public life. Should it have done so, at least among modern current-wave feminists?

Would the country have been better off if feminists had made common cause with Republican hypocrites and forced Bill from office in the '90s?

Yes, actually, because in that timeline Al Gore gets re-elected in 2000 and the Iraq War never happens.

Well, in a way that would have been weird if they weren't an unjustified attack on her. That is, if Broaddrick and the rest hadn't been hauled out as an attack on Hillary, she wouldn't have been in the public sphere in 2016 for Hillary to have been indifferent to -- whatever happened to her happened forty years or so ago.

So I don't think we do agree about the "would have been unacceptable" unless you do a whole lot of tweaking the stories -- if they were current, and somehow relevant to her campaign, sure it would be weird for her not to talk about them, but you'd need that.

I mean, an interesting counterfactual, and something that might have been really hard for Hillary, is what her campaign would have looked like if the #MeToo stuff had hit in 2016 rather than 2017. There, she would very reasonably have been expected to speak up in support of the movement, but would absolutely have gotten pummelled mercilessly for Bill's sins if she did. She might have managed it okay, but it would have been brutally difficult.

I don't know if the #MeToo movement starts without her having lost to Trump.

I don't know if the #MeToo movement starts without her having lost to Trump.

Probably (and sadly) true, but even a major story about Harvey Weinstein in the summer of 2016 would have been brutal for the Clinton campaign.

Yeah, it probably doesn't. But if it could have happened beforehand it still probably would have hurt her unless she was super graceful about handling it, and I'm not sure at all what I think handling it decently and gracefully would have entailed.

Major stories about Bill Cosby were happening in 2016, but I can't remember when.

But he wasn't a major donor.

Perhaps a more realistic future-factual - Chelsea Clinton runs for or is nominated for a government position, and then faces the same ?s as Ivanka Trump re father's conduct. Drags us out of the battles of the 90s, i know, but could well come to pass. Personally think absolutely fair to ask (would be) policy makers their views in this situation as relevant to power they (seek to) hold.

Yes, actually, because in that timeline Al Gore gets re-elected in 2000 and the Iraq War never happens.

90s feminists are responsible for the Iraq war!

Don't you remember? Dsquared proved geometrically that Gore would have started it even harder than Bush.

One of the things that was painful about watching the Clinton campaign was being reminded just how difficult it is for a politician to try to apologize for or explain anything. There were a half dozen issues in which it seemed like the honest position would be, "Yes, that was probably a mistake at the time, and I apologize, but it was understandable, and we should all move on" (from the 90s crime bill, to the e-mail server, to her fainting in NYC) and yet, it seems impossible to make that statement in a way that satisfies people.

The Clinton campaign was bad at threading that needle, so it was easy to think, "if only they weren't so ham-handed they should just be able to put it behind them" but I think that was (mostly) a mirage and that there's a good reason for the conventional wisdom of, "if you're trying to explain you're losing" but it makes any discussion of a complex issue deeply unsatisfying.

No idea what Chelsea would do with attacks on Bill, but for that reason among others, I'm kind of not expecting her to pop up with a political career. I could be wrong, but I'd be a little surprised -- isn't she old enough to be on the entry stages of the ladder if that was the plan, and she really doesn't seem to be.

298: With Clinton there's the added factor of having been the target of an entire industry dedicated to attacking her and smearing her with insane lies for decades. I assume that tends to inculcate a "never show any sign of weakness" state of mind.

Part of the reason I ask is that I'm a little vague on part of Buttercup's point. What Buttercup thinks of as '90s feminism looks an awful lot like 2016 feminism to me -- but not like 2018 feminism.

Feminists have always been wisely reluctant to adopt similar-sounding arguments when they were made in bad faith by their enemies. But the bar seems to have moved.

But he wasn't a major donor.

He was also essentially, if not actually, a Republican. So it's okay.

298

At the time I think it was a problem of the narrative her campaign constructed, which boxed her in. The narrative was "Hillary has always been a liberal" which might have been true in some sense in terms of her personal beliefs, but it makes it hard to publicly apologize for wrongdoing and still present a coherent sense of self.

I think if she'd gone for a sort of redemption narrative, it may have worked because Americans love a good redemptive narrative arc. All bets are off because she is Hilary, after all, but reading on the Millennial-sphere there was a lot of irritation and incomprehension from younger women about attempts to double down on past mistakes and frame what is now viewed as white mainstream feminism as always already having been #woke or whatever, rather than apologizing for the obvious problems and moving on.

Putting whatever it is Buttercup thinks to one side this seems weird to me: looks an awful lot like 2016 feminism to me -- but not like 2018 feminism.

That is, are you thinking that in 2016, feminists were indifferent about sexual harassment, and then #MeToo hit and they suddenly figured out that it was a problem? I don't think feminists changed position on that in any noticeable way from 2016 to 2018 (leaving changes from prior decades, again, to one side). What changed in 2017 was that the media, and public opinion, and so on, suddenly flipped to take preexisting feminist concerns seriously.

. . . attempts to double down on past mistakes . . . rather than apologizing for the obvious problems and moving on.

I'm just saying (speculating?) that's something that's much harder to pull off successfully than we might think.

301

You do realize I was talking about 90s feminists in the context of the Lewinsky scandal, right? Not 90s feminism more broadly?

(Sorry, I just want to make sure we're on the same page here if words are going to be attributed to me.)

I don't think feminists changed position on that in any noticeable way from 2016 to 2018 (leaving changes from prior decades, again, to one side). What changed in 2017 was that the media, and public opinion, and so on, suddenly flipped to take preexisting feminist concerns seriously.

I do think there was a change in what was seen as possible -- not because of an ideological change but just because of a sudden breakthrough. I was thinking this morning about the quotation which San Antonio Spurs coach Greg Popovich has cited in the past.

"When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the blow that did it, but all that had gone before."

That's part of what happened with #MeToo. Suddenly the rock started to split (and we don't know how much it has split).

What changed in 2017 was that the media, and public opinion, and so on, suddenly flipped to take preexisting feminist concerns seriously.

Kind of like how we keep hearing people say that 2018 had the first openly gay Olympic athletes. More like 2018 was the first time the media was happy to talk about openly gay Olympic athletes being gay, instead of avoiding the subject.

He was also essentially, if not actually, a Republican.

I assume you're being glib. If not, this is a weird thing to say, because respectability politics, to which I assume you're referring, aren't at all unusual among African American Democrats of Cosby's vintage. Actually, they're not unusual among younger people either. Obama got a ton of heat from black activists for sounding an awful like Cosby/Moynihan when discussing young men in the black community.

The Clinton campaign was bad at threading that needle

There would have been no Clinton campaign had she not been unusually talented at threading that needle. She had a long history of saying things -- "super-predators," "Sure, let's go to Iraq," etc. -- that didn't stand up very well to the test of history.

I assume you're being glib.

Correct! But Bill's version of respectability politics echoed Republican talking points in a way that Republicans themselves found very simpatico.

Barack Obama (and Jesse Jackson and many others) said the same sorts of things, but for reasons that seem obvious to me, they didn't appeal to the Republicans the way Bill did.

310

That's why I think a redemption narrative would have been more productive for her. She could have said something along the lines of, "I said some problematic shit in some problematic times, and like the rest of America I've learned a ton in the 20 years since then and 2016 me isn't 1996 me or 2003 me. That I'm willing to admit that I've been wrong and learn from my mistakes means I'll be the best president I can be." Instead, she had to weirdly defend things that she probably wishes she hadn't said, and play to her weaknesses that she's insincere. If she'd pointed out that growth and is perfectly normal for people over the course of their lives, I think she could have neutralized the "political positions through marketing focus groups" attack.

I think that would have been a powerful and persuasive line for her especially against Trump, and I think it would have gone a long way towards energizing key portions of the base. Again it's Hillary and she was fighting Russian bots and a media that hated her so who knows if the final results would have been better, but it's the way I thought she should have spun her campaign in 2016 and I still think it would have been better than what she did.

We could play a game: Richard B. Spencer or Bill Cosby:

Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.

OT: Teachers with guns.

"I said some problematic shit in some problematic times, and like the rest of America I've learned a ton in the 20 years since then and 2016 me isn't 1996 me or 2003 me. That I'm willing to admit that I've been wrong and learn from my mistakes means I'll be the best president I can be." . . . I think that would have been a powerful and persuasive line for her especially against Trump

I think that's terrible advice. We can agree to disagree on that but, out of curiousity, when do you think would have been the best time to start working on that narrative? When she announced (or during the primaries before Sanders was a significant force), in the middle of the primaries against Sanders, or sometime after the NV or CA primaries? I feel like the first would have been a weirdly high-risk move by a front-runner, the second would have had every Sanders supporter saying, "why not vote for the person who got it right the first time" and the third would have felt opportunistic and weird to try a new narrative (about her personally, not just about her policies) after the primaries.

314: We're gonna have to arm the students.

312: I'm puzzled. I can't think of an instance where she didn't do something much like that. Certainly she did in the two cases that I cited: super-predators and Iraq.

Critiques about Hillary's style generally strike me as blaming the victim. She was an extraordinarily adept candidate who was running after two Democratic terms. She kicked Trump's ass in three debates; successfully mitigated a troublesome history; and ran an extraordinarily successful convention even in the face of fervent, highly visible opposition from some delegates.

The only time she had trouble is when the media was interpreting her to the public -- that is to say, the entire rest of the campaign.

317 was written with the idea that 312 wasn't literal, but rather a general statement that Hillary should acknowledge past error. Taken literally, I agree with Nick:

I think that's terrible advice.

It's also hard to make a narrative when people won't go along with you. For example, she apologized for the 'superpredator' language. Maybe not well or completely enough, but she didn't defend it as justified. But that kind of apology wasn't enough to shift the narrative about her.

Oh, pwned by politicalfootball.

316: We should raise the age for purchasing a gun to 21, except make an exception for everybody over 13 if they promise they will only take the gun to school.

315

She would have had to start it early. I don't think she could say,
"I was right from the beginning, except now I'm switching narratives to do a redemption arc," and have it do anything but hurt her. I disagree too in that actually don't think Sanders was actually ever a threat to Clinton. He wildly overperformed expectations and got a lot of media attention but it was never that close if you look at the numbers. Sanders was also himself a flawed candidate in a way that turned off a lot of Clinton primary voters outside of how she campaigned, and I feel that if Clinton had run on a redemption arc, she might have, say, won the female millennial vote and not lost all that many people to Sanders.

A wordy way of saying, I actually think more Sanders voters were willing to vote Clinton in the primaries than vice versa. That's impressionistically the case for a lot of my older millennial female friends, were were sort of turned off by Sanders but also found Clinton a turn-off in her unwillingness to admit mistakes of the past. (And Steinem wasn't helping matters.)

When you really think about it, what ISN'T Gloria Steinem's fault?

Am I the only one starting to see the OP title as a three part name? Or as Cynthia Heimeldied?

Hillary also called her Iraq War vote a mistake in her 2014 book, and in later statements. Not sure which of her bad decisions in the past she doubled down on defending.

Yeah, she had the media stacked against her. That said, if she made the central narrative of her campaign "I was blind and now I see," rather than, "I've always been really liberal, except for when I said those horrible things I now apologize for," it would have allowed her to get ahead of her weaknesses and frame herself as an evolving and flawed but authentic person rather than being reactive. Again, this isn't about who she is in her heart of hearts, but about how she crafts a public persona for people to relate to. The media are terrible to her, but at the same time if she wanted to run for president she needed to figure out how to proactively frame how to get ahold of her narrative.

323

Maybe she can replace Kim Cattrell in the third SATC movie.

The great mystery of 2016 is how Hillary Clinton went from one of the country's most-universally-liked figures in 2012-2014 to someone whose extremely high unfavorables were only eclipsed by Donald Trump's. Obviously some of that loss was just partisan polarization (i.e., no major party candidate in the current US will have favorables like she did in 2012), but it went far beyond that. I don't know why, and don't really have a clear answer, and I don't think anyone else really does, either. But I am absolutely sure that it had very little to do with her specific campaign presentation (since she hadn't changed much of anything since the campaign began).

314: This one really looks like a teacher's political statement against the idea of teachers having guns. It's about three days after Trump starts talking about the issue. The teacher locked himself in an empty classroom, and fired one shot in a direction where it didn't hit anyone. He didn't want to hurt himself or anyone else.

328: I think the email scandal was incredibly effective. She couldn't really effectively apologize for it in any comprehensibly rational manner, because there was literally nothing improper about what she'd done. But the purportedly liberal, objective media kept on hammering on it as if there was real wrongdoing that they understood. She couldn't surrender and admit wrongdoing, because there was nothing to admit, but she couldn't win against the unified media head on.

If that wasn't it, I'm stumped too.

I don't think anyone else really does, either.

I do! I bet Stormcrow knows, too.

LGM flogs the Hillary/Trump wordcloud with good reason. There are a lot of factors that led to the choices the media made, but there's no question that coverage of Hillary and Trump was grotesquely slanted against Hillary.

328, 330

I think that's right, but it's also out of Hilary's control. She can't really undo the fact she's worse than Satan to about 30% of America or that the "liberal" media gets their jollies from picking on her. The only thing she really had control of was how she spun her own campaign. If that makes literally no difference, then it's hard to see how picking Hillary Clinton as a candidate was anything other than a losing enterprise from day one.

no question that coverage of Hillary and Trump was grotesquely slanted against Hillary

Certainly, and certainly emails too. But the shitty coverage and the email nonsense had weirdly, immediately receptive ground. My own sense is that there was some worldwide, not just in the US, zeitgeist of "competency and ameliorative social democracy is boring, let's go crazy." And, also, somehow, in a big complex but decisive way, sexism. She was very badly positioned to deal with both. But panning out to some broader zeitgeist obviously just raises more questions than it answers, and is bullshitty.

Saying she really shouldn't have run feels a bit victim-blamey, since most of her weaknesss were that she was irrationally hated, but at the same time elections are about winning and choosing a candidate who loses where a default Democrat might win isn't being pragmatic. It's then hard to argue that we should be idealistic about Clinton hatred but hard-nosedly pragmatic on everything else.

I have a goal of using the word synecdoche correctly in a sentence. I think "e-mail" is a synecdoche for every stupid thing the media did in 2016.

Note that after "e-mail," Hillary's wordcloud contains prominent mentions of "health," "lie," "scandal," and "foundation."

And note that the charitable foundation was exclusively discussed by the media because it was a bad thing. It was a scandal!

Had there been no e-mails, there still would have been Benghazi or whatever. The behavior of the media regarding e-mails had nothing to do with the underlying gravity of the "scandal."

Did I get "synecdoche" right?

Yes. But could you have said it outloud correctly? (I say as someone who couldn't have with confidence. I check the pronunciation every so often, and then I forget.)

Democratic Party strategists in 2013: "Hillary ratings have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

She can't really undo the fact she's worse than Satan to about 30% of America or that the "liberal" media gets their jollies from picking on her. The only thing she really had control of was how she spun her own campaign. If that makes literally no difference, then it's hard to see how picking Hillary Clinton as a candidate was anything other than a losing enterprise from day one.

I'm not sure anyone could have foreseen just how damaging this tendency of the media to spin her a certain way was going to turn out - or how perfectly it would mesh with malicious actors free-riding on this tendency. (No need even to cite Russia; see NYT's publication of Clinton Cash).

Hilary's curse was that nobody thought she could possibly lose. Her opponent was an unqualified clown, and, though he had loads of scandals, there was little point in covering them in depth because he would never be president.

On the other hand, serious journalists could prove their serious journalism bonafides by holding the future-president's feet to the fire on every little issue. In doing so, they tipped the scales for the unqualified clown, consigning the planet to oblivion.

337

Yeah, I found this:
http://www.people-press.org/2015/05/19/hillary-clinton-approval-timeline/

Not an auspicious start for a presidential candidacy.

I think it's a mistake to suppose that horrid media behavior is tied to Hillary, and not to Democrats or liberals in general.

Hillary was vilified partly because she is a woman, but mostly because she is fundamentally sympathetic to the concerns of women. Had Bernie ever been a serious electoral threat, he would have received similar coverage. Had John Kerry been hostile to women and/or minorities, that Swift Boat shit wouldn't have gotten anything near the traction that it did.

The question isn't why Hillary was abused so badly, but why Obama was not. I think that unlike sexism, racism can't be too naked. The media could get away with irrationally hostile coverage of Bill Clinton. Irrational hostility toward Obama would have been too obviously racist.

339

Yeah, I am guilty of this too. I of course voted for her but had I known how she was going to lose I would have volunteered in Wisconsin in the final weeks. I assumed that of course she'd win Wisconsin because it's a reliably blue state and Trump was a cartoon insane person.

341

Do you think Elizabeth Warren would have been vilified in the same way? Do you think it would have worked?

On the plus side, #Metoo makes it much harder for Biden to run in 2020

336: In looking up the spelling, I learned for the first time that it is four syllables.

Hilary's curse was that nobody thought she could possibly lose.

Yes, this too, of course. One saw a lot of it not just from journalists in 2015-2016 but from regular people; "what difference does it make if I call Hillary a corrupt deathmonger/deeply flawed candidate, she's going to win anyway, I'll probably vote for her, and I'll have helped push her to the left." Most of those people who voted did indeed vote for her anyway, but so much of the discourse would have changed had the race been seen as a truly close one.

I pronounce it based on my assumption that the title of the Charlie Kaufman film is a pun. Am I right?

I'm not sure anyone could have foreseen just how damaging this tendency of the media to spin her a certain way was going to turn out - or how perfectly it would mesh with malicious actors free-riding on this tendency.
Well, I hate to say I told you so (and I'm too lazy to search the archives to see if I left any evidence) so I'll just ask if we can agree that now that we've seen this tendency in action we shouldn't make the same mistake?

343:

1. Unquestionably
2. Hillary -- like Kerry, Gore and Bill -- was a particular, specific case. Because these things are literally made out of nothing -- Whitewater, Swift Boat, inventing the Internet, etc -- it's impossible for someone like me to understand what will actually get traction.

Despite my effort at explanation, it's still a bit of a mystery to me how Obama got off the hook. Rev. Wright should have sunk him. His collaborations with both bin Laden and Saddam should have ended his candidacy. And, of course, he was born in Kenya.

So I feel no confidence in any opinion of mine about how Warren would have done. I do think Trump/media would have mopped the floor with Bernie, but who knows? There are certainly plausible counter-narratives.

Because there is such a thing as charisma, and Obama and Bill Clinton have it, and Kerry and Gore do not. I think Warren has it, and similar attacks would not get traction against her.

348.3

I think in large part it was his charisma but also his incredible skill in controlling his narrative. I think that this allowed him to appear proactive and made his opponents appear reactive, whereas in the case of other candidates they ended up looking defensive. Defending yourself against unfair attacks is obviously warranted, but it doesn't a calm cool in-charge persona to people not really paying attention.

I think something that happened with the Obama thing is that the insane attacks were too simple. The born-in-Kenya/secret Muslim thing is yes or no, it happened or it didn't. Whitewater and emails and inventing the internet were all much slipperier -- you could not believe the full crazy version, but still believe that some moderate, middle-of-the-road version was probably true and said bad things about the candidate.

But I'm not sure if there's a structural reason why the crazies came up with a simple attack on Obama rather than the usual complicated cloud of dust.

Pwned by 349.

I think the issue of Hillary collapsed the charisma issue, because women are less able to have charisma in the same way men are and also Hillary is legitimately not a charismatic person.

If she had charisma, she probably would have just used it to get back at Bill by persuading other men to have sex with her.

Well, there can be different charismas for different settings. Lots of people testified that Hillary is very charming in small group settings. But perhaps because she became guarded after decades of irrational personal attacks, she did not have the same charismatic command of large crowds.

I'm just doomed not to get this. I thought Hillary was really charismatic, but when everyone disagrees with you on something like this, you are, more-or-less by definition, wrong.

Here's my charisma ranking for presidential candidates in my lifetime:

1. Reagan
2. Obama
3. Bill Clinton
4. JF Kennedy
5. Hillary
6. Romney
7. Kerry
8. T. Kennedy
9. Gary Hart
10. McCain
11. Gore
12. Ford
13. Goldwater
14. Nixon
15. W. Bush
16. HW Bush
16. Carter
17. LBJ
18. Dukakis
19. Muskie
20. Dole
21. McGovern
22. Mondale
23. Trump

We can reasonably debate the places on this list, but was Hillary really in the bottom half?

I thought Reagan was a smug piece of shit and Clinton was shifty. I usually get charisma wrong.

Charisma's complicated. Like, I don't think she had any trouble holding a room, even a huge one -- her big speeches and the debates went great. What she didn't get, seems to me, is something that I don't know an exact word for -- people in a position to do her some good being 'on her team' even when they were supposed to be neutral. Bill, half the press was out to get him, but all of it was sort of charmed by him, and same with Obama. And W. got that too -- the press just liked him, even if they didn't agree with him.

It's different from having people you're working with like and respect you, and it's different from being able to command a room, but it's a real thing.

355

Huh I'd probably go something like this. I'm relying not really on other people's judgments of Reagan, Mondale, and Dukakis.

Each tier is fairly randomized in the particular order listed.

(Top 3)
Reagan
B. Clinton
Obama
(Above Average)
GWB
(Middle of the pack)
McCain
Kerry
Romney
H. Clinton
(Bottom tier)
GHWB
Mondale
Dukakis
Dole

I always thought Bob Dole had charisma. The scowl, referring to himself in the third person, barely concealed disdain for others. The whole package.

I mean, I'm relying on other people's judgments of Mondale, Dukakis, and Reagan.

359

Only a Nebraskan would think that.

(I got to be a Bob Dole delegate at the 1996 mock Republican Convention in my city. Your state depended on how much money you paid, and our school could only afford to be Nebraska.)

After the election he was a cult hit with The Youths.

Was that the cheapest state?

I'm pretty sure it was. IIRC a wealthy private school was Texas.

Of the candidates I've met in person, Bill Clinton had by far the most charisma in a small group (indeed, the most of any person I've ever seen, it was uncanny). Obama and HRC were, in that setting, about equal, both charming and charismatic but not close to Bill Clinton level. Gore, whom I've seen the most, is not at all without charm but is basically like hanging out with a normal person. I've met Dukakis since he ran and it is kinda mystifying that he was a Presidential candidate, he just seems like he could be the guy in the next cubicle over. I guess I actually did meet Mondale in '84 but I was a kid so I have no real memory -- he seemed cool at the time.

I didn't have very strong feelings about Dukakis back in 1988, but I'm very fond of him now.

I didn't have very strong feelings about Dukakis back in 1988, but I'm very fond of him now.

Did you ever read Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes? It has a number of stories about Dukakis in that vein which are both charming and make one reflect that perhaps a presidential candidate needs to have less humility than that.

One of the memorable parts of that book for me (along with really appreciating Dole's wicked sense of humor).

I realize I left out Trump. I find him disgustingly horrifying, but apparently some people claim he's charismatic.

Like Ed Anger, but without the emotional restraint.

Back in 2015 and 2016, I didn't physically recoil from Trump's voice - I knew he was a dumbass, but I saw his personal presentation (to the extent you could separate these things) as almost-refreshingly colloquial.

Now, I do have the visceral disgust reaction - I guess because what he represents has been better built up in my mind.

Halford, are you making predictions for the CA governor's race? Is there a candidate you like?

I am in looooooooooooove with John Chiang, but fear that he too has no charisma.

Does Jerry Brown (these days) have charisma? I too like JC and think he could fit in the quiet-competence groove we've come to appreciate. But yeah, most likely it's Newsom unless some big new scandal (or worse aspects of the paltry known one) decks him.

But he's so smarmy.

Gotta head out now. But I totally want to talk about possible CA governors. I like the 'quiet-competence' assessment.

I really hope nobody's sitting on a scandal until after June in the hope that a Republican has made it to the top two and they can throw the election to him.

370 is me too. I didn't exactly find him entertaining, but I found the idea of him in politics - making the other Republican candidates deal with him - amusing. Boy do I have egg on my face.

One lesson I got from the 90s Clinton thing was the obsession of the punditry with the idea that a group of Wise Men could/would step in and straighten everything out was utterly without factual basis. I think made me a lot more scared of Trump as 2015 turned into 2016. OK, sure, she was still going to win -- really, what kind of country would elect Trump -- but there wasn't any machina or any deus to emerge from it.

There've been lots of comings and goings over the last year, but today really feels to me like an unraveling. The stories about Kushner are awfully damning, and the security clearance thing sounds like a shift in the mandate of heaven. There's a rumor that Hicks was fired, which I'm not ready to discount, even if the court scribes are selling a different line. The axios story that folks are feeling like this round of insults to Sessions is different from the previous rounds -- maybe that shouldn't be rejected out of hand either.

Trump's gun babbling is exactly the sort of thing that could get him into some real trouble. If/when Kelly, Sessions, McConnell, Pence, and Ryan all agree that it's time to pull the plug, the plug gets pulled. I'm not saying this time has arrived, but it's hard to guess what the next two months looks like.

371 - I will vote for Chiang and gave him a teeny bit of money. Everyone up North seems blah on Newsom and I can't see why anyone would vote for Antonio over those two even though I like Antonio fine. Ultimately any would be good, but I like Chiang. Plus there's still a chance he could use "Unleash Chiang" as his slogan.

There've been lots of comings and goings over the last year, but today really feels to me like an unraveling.

Yes, I was wondering about that also. I'm also wondering what they are thinking about the elections later this year. I don't think there's enough time to do anything and hope to have it not turn a bad election for them into a disaster.

Oh, and the Trump hotel in Panama thing. Historians of the future are going to think it's all a set of myths we've made up.

I'm also wondering if Trump's "we're giving back the foreign profits" statement wasn't basically "Fuck you, I got mine" or something. The press had no details, but I would imagine people in government know how much it was.

If Elizabeth Warren were to win the Democratic nomination, the media would immediately declare her uncharismatic, and the Unfogged consensus would fall in line. I mean, she is legitimately described as "professorial" for God's sake. In the imagined America of the US media, what could be less charismatic?

570, 576 if you grew up in NY in the 80s you would definitely have known what a monumental asshole he is.

Either that or if you had a sub to Spy magazine.

383: Oh, he showed the world exactly what he was the first day of his candidacy. I was speaking purely to his verbal style.

355 and thereabouts in re charisma: I saw Bill on the campaign trail in 1992 at an outdoor rally in suburban Atlanta. The only other person who spoke that afternoon who was anywhere near as good with the crowd as Bill was Michael Stipe. Moving a crowd is fellow humans is a talent as well as a skill, and Bill had both. (Obama, too, though I didn't see him until after his presidency.)

317: "The only time she had trouble is when the media was interpreting her to the public..."

A media in which major figures with large roles in shaping campaign coverage were, less than a year later, discovered to be not just garden variety dudes with slightly sketchy views on women but actual serial harassers and assaulters.

324: "Or as Cynthia Heimeldied?"

Edward Said is dead. Unless it's Said, in which case he dieed.

328: "The great mystery of 2016 is how Hillary Clinton went from one of the country's most-universally-liked figures in 2012-2014 to someone whose extremely high unfavorables..."

She went from viewed very favorably at the end of her time as first lady to having high unfavorables when seeking the office of Senator. Once in office, she went back to being seen favorably. More generally, women are often viewed unfavorably when they are showing ambition that is seen as normal in men.

377: "the security clearance thing sounds like a shift in the mandate of heaven"

The specificity about the four countries means the story has bullet-proof sourcing among people who have spent decades defending the national interest and aren't standing idly by while the Trump family pours it down a storm drain. The Project for a Post-American Century, i.e., the current administration, may yet come to grief.

249: "Now that's how to comment, folks. No need to get bogged down in specifics."

It's only take a dozen years of practice.

279

I'm going to the gym later today, and I'm going to wear running shorts from 1996, paired with a free shirt from circa 2003. I'll also wear running socks I stole from my sister that my mom probably bought for her in 2000 or so.

Also a student today noted I now have a mullet. I'm hoping it looks like an edgy hipster mullet, but that would probably require hair product.

"If Elizabeth Warren were to win the Democratic nomination, the media would immediately declare her uncharismatic, and the Unfogged consensus would fall in line. I mean, she is legitimately described as "professorial" for God's sake. In the imagined America of the US media, what could be less charismatic?"

Elizabeth Warren has better policy ideas than Clinton and would have been able to reach out to economically dissatisfied voters. She also wasn't irrationally hated by the right-wing smear machine for 20+ years. Would she be made fun of by SNL for the next 8 years as being professorial? sure

Also, questionable claims of Native American ancestry would be weaponized.

Yeah, I think the folks who suppose that the press would have been any better for Warren or Sanders or Biden are whistling past the graveyard.

Well, Sanders only jumped into the ring after the "draft Warren" thing fizzled. He did unnaturally well by running on a left of the Democratic center stance even though he mostly lacked clear policies beyond "break up the banks!". I'd guess that Warren would have done at least as well running in the ideological space that Sanders occupied.

Also, a lot of people who are not Fox news watching wingnuts nevertheless seem to have some sort of irrational lizard brain level distrust and dislike of Hilary Clinton. I don't understand it, but I think that really did take decades to create on a large scale. I doubt that the same thing could have been whipped up overnight for Warren.

392

I don't know. 30% of Americans really really hate Hillary in a way they don't hate your average Democrat. Reading National Review comments (shudder), people didn't like Obama, but they didn't hate him nearly as much as they hated Hillary (sorry, Hitlery, Killary, Shrillary, etc.) I also think that more people are scared by Hillary than by the word socialism or actual socialist positions. Sanders would have had trouble with moderate UMC college age voters, and Warren would have had problems with sexism, and Biden might have had issues motivating the left, but none of them would have whipped up the level of enthusiasm among Republican voters as the chance to vote against Hillary.

I'm also not sure the standard mud slinging would have stuck to any of those three the way they did to Hillary. I think Kerry isn't as comparable because the media landscape was so different in 2004 and I think less controllable by pundits now.

That is, a lot of people who weren't very impressed with Trump voted for him anyways as a "lesser evil" type thing. That wouldn't have happened to the same extent with Sanders or Biden or even Warren.

Clinton may have been uniquely vulnerable, but we now live in a world where Russian trolls can persuade some people that the Parkland students are actually hired actors or are being paid by Soros, so if anything it's easier to spread lies than ever before.

396

Oh sure, but at the same time there's persuading on the fence people and then motivating them to vote. I think with a non-Hillary candidate, you would have had lower turnout among potential Trump voters, and I don't know if the people who believe Russian trollery wouldn't already be hardcore Trump voters anyways.

I think if Sanders had been the nominee, we might have seen a lot more explicitly antisemitic Russian trolling, which I honestly don't know what it would have meant for 21st century America. It might have failed though it could have produced an even more toxic alt-right dynamic than we already have.

I came to relitigate the sexual politics of the last 40 years, but I left for the relitigation of the 2016 election.

Heh.

If Cynthia Heimel had been running in 2016, she'd totally have won.

Running up the score in Oregon, Massachusetts, Illinois, and especially California doesn't get it done. We'll see who tosses hats in for 2020, but I doubt too many will think the reserve army of uninspired blue state leftists is going to get them through.

I'll be at an event with Joe Biden weekend after next, and will report back.

Gov Bullock is kind of doing stuff that might raise his national profile. I hope his Washington itch, if that's what happening, is about the Senate seat. That's a tough go, but not delusional. Maybe he'd be a credible vp candidate for someone from the east.

I generally like the guy, but who knows what darkness lurks in his past that Russian bots might work with.

What about the reserve army of uninspired Texas, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia leftists?

How gerrymandered are they in each?

As a serious, non-rhetorical, non-trolling question: Is there an election at the non-local level (say, not municipal, not a tiny constituency) that has been won, in a general election, in the last 20 years by mobilizing a reserve army of uninspired leftists?

There are clearly tons of non-voters out there whom, if you could hypothetically get them to vote, would make a big difference in many big elections. And, clearly, "leftist" (however defined) voters can swing a primary. But I am not asking about theoretical possibilities, and not asking about primaries. I am asking a different question -- is there a general election of a decent sized-constituency in the USA, in the past 20 years, in which there is good reason to think that mobilizing disaffected left-voters turned a defeat into victory? There could well be a few, maybe more than a few, but I can't think of one.

403 If the horrors of Republican governance in those places haven't been enough to bring them out in force, I'm not sure there's a pitch anyone can make. I'd like to see some sort of objective polling numbers on this -- a mini-Pew, I guess.

405: Clement Attlee?

In the USA! And past 20 years.

I can't be expected to read two whole paragraphs. Besides, the way things are gerrymandered and divided by state, that's probably only 600 competitive elections or so.

Make it 40 years?

How about 73 years and include the United Kingdom.

I feel this strip is relevant to one thread or the other.

I guess maybe the first Paul Wellstone election. That would probably count, though I don't know the "disaffected leftist" army vs other factors.

I have this conversation IRL, in one form or another, at least monthly, and more often in the primary season. I think our 2014 senate race to replace Baucus (and the placeholder who held his place for a bit) was a great opportunity for the experiment, but proponents have a lot of excuses.

Actually I have a mini-political ATM, if you folks want to weigh in on something I'm wrestling with.

405: carolyn Shea-porter in New Hampshire was a lefty and won an unwinnable race, in a state with many disaffected lefties.

Arguably obama v. Romney. Not so much disaffected lefties as disaffected African-Americans.

Obama v. Romney definitely does not count! And reading a little more, I doubt that the first Wellstone race does either (because there was an anti-incumbent wave). Maybe Carolyn Shea-Porter it is.

Mini-Political ATM:

When there's a vacancy in the legislature, the county central committee of the prior incumbent's party, where the district is located, is charged with submitting 3 names to the county commission. The commissioners chose from the list, and the person takes office until the next election.

One of our senators just resigned. She was termed out, and a house member was already running for the seat. We sent the county the house member's name, and the name of two central committee members who dedicated themselves to telling the commissioners that the house member is the guy. The commissioners appointed him, and everyone is happy.

Now we have to fill the house vacancy thus created. Four people have filed for the seat. No Republicans are going to run, so the result of the June primary decides the matter. But the timelines don't line up: we'll have to send over 3 names, and the commissioners pick one, before the primary. None of the 30 or so cc people who are going to vote on this, nor any of the 3 county commissioners, live in this legislative district. (Well, maybe 1 cc member who rarely attends meetings will come.)

Here's the question: do we send over 3 of the 4, telling the 4th tough shit, you're out, and let the county government effectively pick the rep for the district? Or do we send the county three people who are not running for the seat, to act as placeholders, and let the voters decide?

It's not definite that an appointment will be decisive in the primary, but really, how could it not be. Our selection and then the commissioners' will definitely be the only non-incidental TV and newspaper coverage of this race between now and the primary.

Why don't you pick the next rep for the district by picking whichever one of the four is best and sending that name along with two obvious non-starters.

Do you know, in that first Wellstone race, it was a significant boost to his campaign that some pro-Boschwitz group put out material that Wellstone was a "bad Jew" for marrying a Gentile? That people were actually shocked by that. Or the fact that Grunseth had to bow out of the Governor's race because he had once hosted a pool party where some teenage girls took their tops off. Oppressive cyberpunk dystopia indeed.

Of course, a friend of my dad got his job by being Mr. Obvious Non-Starter when the governor wasn't happy about being manipulated.

I mean, ethically, I think you're on better ground to send three names of people willing to be placeholders.

You have a rare opportunity to actually operate like a competent power-brokering party theoretically should operate, so you should pick the candidate who you believe best reflects the Democratic party of [] and two weaker candidates and encourage the county commissioners to pick your guy. Or, if you think there's a danger of being too annoyed by some group of annoying jerks who will call you corrupt sellouts, pick 3/4 declared candidates who you think are the best, and if #4 complains tell him sorry, those are the breaks and the rules. No reason to send all four.

Have there even been Democratic Party campaigns that have tried to mobilize "uninspired leftists"? I guess Obama sort of did in his first campaign, but it's hard to say he needed them. But mostly the mark of a serious Democratic candidate is to demonstrate they're not trying for the left vote because by avoiding that no Republican will ever attack them as a radical socialist bent on destroying America with bathroom signage.

I think the impact of the left can be seen more on the level of policy changes (like minimum wage, marriage equality, taking down the symbols of the confederacy) and less on candidacies.

417: Can't the sheriff sort this all out? Or is this at all likely to go to court? Is it going to affect the balance of power in the legislature?

We can only send three. But we have to send three.

423 - but my point was that there are people arguing for "army of disaffected leftists" as an electoral strategy in general elections. It would be interesting to know if that had been (a) tried and (b) worked.

"It's a f**king valuable thing*, you just don't give it away for nothing."

* Kind of.

426: I get your question. But I'm doubtful about the tried part. A related question is, has any serious candidate lost because they tacked too far left in the general?

423 Our US House primary has candidates arguing about whether the better strategy for the general is running left or running center.

Disaffected leftists and disaffected lumpenproletarians are all we have in my ward, but as I was saying w/r/t Keith running for statewide office, I wouldn't bet on our few neighborhoods to count for much.

I mean, it certainly has been tried. I know of at least one candidate who tried the strategy in 2012 (in a reasonably competitive upstate NY congressional race) and lost (though maybe not because of that strategy). It would be interesting to know of examples of it working.

424 -- No effect on balance. The Leg isn't in session, but there are interim committee meetings, votes on bills to propose in the next session, so there's stuff to do. It won't go to court, unless I start taking bribes.

I spoke to all 4 today, which is why I'm thinking about it now, to make sure they knew to come to our March 13 meeting to make their pitches. I don't have any problem choosing the weakest link, but the best candidate isn't so easy a choice.

Yes. The nice thing about an actual campaign is that it has a way of showing who is best as a candidate.

Now that I think of it, I was surprised that my state Assembly Rep won in 2016 when the other (also Democratic, though) candidate seemed much more centrist and tech company friendly, and got more votes in the primary. But arguably he appealed to what's traditionally been the Democratic party left - labor unions, working class, recent immigrants, etc - not any more radical left than that. My district is much more "work at tech companies" than "run startups, want to change the world with an app that will replace schools" than some other districts.

Further back, I think when Ventura and Santa Barbara was turning from Republican to Democratic in 2006-2010 or so (IIRC), appealing to the left was a successful strategy. But redistricting also played a huge role.

Adding to 434.2, I think some of the first "successes" there were actually losses, but losses in races that were not expected to be so close. I could actually look up the results, but if I didn't do that before posting 423, I'm not going to do that now.

"Oh sure, but at the same time there's persuading on the fence people and then motivating them to vote. I think with a non-Hillary candidate, you would have had lower turnout among potential Trump voters, and I don't know if the people who believe Russian trollery wouldn't already be hardcore Trump voters anyways.

I think if Sanders had been the nominee, we might have seen a lot more explicitly antisemitic Russian trolling, which I honestly don't know what it would have meant for 21st century America. It might have failed though it could have produced an even more toxic alt-right dynamic than we already have."

The Russians hated Hillary because they hated her policy towards Russia as secretary of state.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-russia

They supported Bernie in the primary (because they hate Hillary)

54 clicks baby

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hayesbrown/russia-promoted-buff-bernie-sanders-coloring-book?utm_term=.yvVqzgYQK#.ofygPVwde

433: " The nice thing about an actual campaign is that it has a way of showing who is best as a candidate."

For example, the one who could not overcome the powerful shenanigans of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz but would totally have blown away the feckless ratfuckers of the Republican party. Just for example.

Further to 436: With Hillary and Merkel in power, there would have been two women at the world's top table who well and truly have Putin's number.

Although Germany avoided the kind of debacle that the US is experiencing, it still only has a caretaker government almost six months after the election. The AfD was not solely the creation of Russian resources, but Russian efforts amplified some strands of the AfD message in communities that were receptive. Turns out it's hard to form a majority coalition with six parties in parliament.

Preventing a Hillary Clinton presidency was definitely a high priority for Putin. It was a specific aspect of a more general effort to sow discord and distrust in the institutions of states he considers rivals. Considering how well that aligns with the priorities of the Republican party in the US, it's surprising they didn't work together before.

438.last: yes. If Sanders had won the nomination he would almost certainly have faced massive amounts of Russian trolling for exactly that reason. Don't forget that the Russians were promoting pro-Trump and anti-Trump content simultaneously after the election.

Related: remember how Obama mocked Mitt Romney publicly in the 2012 debates for saying that Russia was the US' greatest geopolitical foe?
"Gov. Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida. You said Russia ... the 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years."

Yeah, that hasn't worn well. It's the one thing the Republicans can't use against Obama, of course, but it's one of the stupidest things he ever said.

Mobilizing an army of disaffected right-wingers has certainly worked well for the other side. What is so structurally different as to indicate that such a strategy would not work on the left?

What is so structurally different as to indicate that such a strategy would not work on the left?

As you well know, the disaffected right are authoritarian followers, whereas mobilising the left is herding cats. Especially since the left intelligentsia has thought it wise to prioritise identity politics over economics.

Disaffected right wingers are stupid and fearful, and the mobilization has consisted of a now decades long disinformation campaign designed to play to fear and ignorance. And the people who were running it are scared of and now dominated by the followers they've summoned through disinformation.

"Preventing a Hillary Clinton presidency was definitely a high priority for Putin. It was a specific aspect of a more general effort to sow discord and distrust in the institutions of states he considers rivals. Considering how well that aligns with the priorities of the Republican party in the US, it's surprising they didn't work together before."

Putin didn't wan't a Russia Hawk like McCain or Clinton to be president so he promoted candidates like Trump and Bernie that were not Russia Hawks. And, by leaking the DNC emails, he possibly (and surprisingly) tipped the election to Trump.

https://slate.com/culture/2018/03/an-appreciation-of-author-cynthia-heimel-by-julie-klausner.html

I always liked Cynthia Heimel. Perhaps somewhat in slight disagreement with LB, I vaguely remember her books being some of the first jumping off points in my college friend group where the women were openly discussing want to get laid. (mid to late 80s) Still in very tentative ways. Maybe we were just not as advanced as the New Yorkers.