January 12, 2008

• Hillary's "Emotional Moment"

  I got carried away writing a comment over on civildis' blog, so I decided to make my comment a blog entry here.  Hope you don't mind.  I'm such a lazy writer that I always try to "kill two birds with one stone". 

  I've been thinking quite a bit about Hillary's "emotional moment",
  trying to be totally honest about my own response to it and also trying
  to decide what would be an appropriate response.  Among other things, I'm attempting to walk the very thin tightrope between inappropriate sexism and legitimate analysis.

  We tend to hold our national politicians to impossibly high and artificial standards.  I certainly don't think that emotion is always inappropriate, and I think Hillary's
  relatively minor display of emotion was somewhat exaggerated and distorted by her
  critics for their own political ends.  I cry too, a lot more than Hillary did there in New Hampshire, though of course I'm not a public figure.  I don't think
  strength and emotion are mutually exclusive.  Not at all.

  We're also somewhat selective about how we respond to emotion in our politicians, depending on how we perceive them in general.  We as a nation seemed to rather like it when Bill Clinton would bite his lip and say, with ostensible sincerity just dripping off of him, "I feel your pain."  Now in retrospect we know that he probably didn't really feel anyone else's pain all that deeply; he was just a pretty darned good actor.  But we liked him as a person, just as we liked Jimmy Carter before him.  A bit of emotion was permissible from them.

  On the other hand, politicians like Richard Nixon, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton are generally perceived, for legitimate or not so legitimate reasons, as being stiff, stern, unfeeling, uncaring.  Should they happen to display a bit of "softness", we don't quite know what to make of it.

  All that said, I had this vague feeling that Hillary's "emotional moment" was somewhat bogus
  and exploitative, but I couldn't understand quite why until I began to
  examine the CONTEXT in which Hillary got emotional.  I'm not convinced
  that anyone has done that satisfactorily, though Jesse Jackson Jr.
  provided me with a hint.  She did it in reply to a question about
  herself.  The questioner, another woman of approximately Hillary's age, asked in essence and very empathetically, "How do you
  do it, woman?  How do you make yourself get out of the house?"

  Now
  good God.  It wasn't a question like, "How do you feel about all those
  Iraqi children getting killed and maimed needlessly for the past 17 years?"  Or
  "How do you feel about the way the poor have suffered since Hurricane
  Katrina?"  No, it was a self-referential question, and a relatively
  banal one at that.  And Hillary exploited it for her own purposes.  The question allowed Hillary to feel sorry for herself.

  You heard me correctly.  At
  the risk of incurring the wrath of all women everywhere, I submit that Hillary's
  emotion was a form of self-pity, and it was one that only a woman could
  get away with.  She was saying, in essence, "Yes, I am deeply touched
  by my own heroism.  I am an incredible, incredible woman, and it makes
  me cry just to think about it."  Of course, I'm sure she was thinking about all of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that she has suffered through her years as a public figure.  But it was still an expression of self-pity.  She wasn't crying for Iraqi children, or indeed for America.

  Think about it.  What would have
  happened if Hillary had been a male politician, asked the same question
  and responding in similar fashion?  "How do you do it, John McCain? 
  How do you make yourself get out of the house in the morning?"  In reality we can't even IMAGINE anyone ASKING a male politician such a ridiculous question, but bear with me.  Suppose McCain had teared up and said, "It's...it's because I care so very deeply." 
  People would have thought he was nuts, and that would have been the end of his candidacy.  He's not even allowed to cry
  about being tortured in Viet Nam, for God's sake.  Bravery for a man is quite a different thing than it is for a woman.  So is emotional display.

  I'm reminded of an experience I once had with my mother, who was a veritable expert at self-pity and at making her life seem heroic.  (And I confess that my reactions are colored to an extent by having been raised by her.)  I was already an adult by this time, in my thirties.  Sitting on the family sofa one evening, my mother said, a propos of nothing, "You know, I've had the hardest life of any woman I know."  My dad and I just looked at each other.  As usual it was I who dared to speak, to my detriment.  I didn't say ALL that I was thinking, which was this: 

  My mother raised only one child, me.  After she had me she never worked outside the home, and she barely worked INSIDE the home.  My dad did fully half of the housework in the evenings and on weekends, in addition to his full-time job, and he did it without complaint.  My mother, on the other hand, after doing a little housework in the morning, watched a couple of soap operas while eating her lunch, then retired to her bedroom, where she watched another soap or two while eating chocolate candy before taking a nap.  Between three and five PM she emptied three cans into three saucepans and heated them up; that was dinner.  And that was it for her.  In the evening she watched more TV.  On the weekends she'd give my dad a lengthy list of chores to do, which included virtually all of the shopping, home maintenance and lawn care, endless painting, etc.  My mother was the "organizer" in the family; she sat in the house and made lists of things for my dad to do.  And she courageously pecked my father on the cheek as he left the house to go and perform his assigned tasks.  That was her "hard life".

  I also thought about other women I had known, women who had raised six kids, often with absent or abusive husbands,  while working full-time jobs and getting college degrees, all at the same time.  No, my mother didn't have the hardest life of any woman she knew, not by a long shot.  But my even daring to suggest that she might be exaggerating just a tad made her burst into tears of self-pity and imagined self-sacrificing heroism.

  And that, I submit, was analogous to the context in which Hillary Clinton had her "emotional moment" in New Hampshire.  Women resonate with it, because the bar of "heroism" and permissible emotional display is set so low for them.  Men just look at each other and try to keep their mouths shut.

  Now feel free to tear my head off, ladies.  Or educate me, as you see fit.

  • 6:41 am
  • 44 Comments