By Jessa Crispin
In the Hulu show Mrs America, there’s a scene where a fictionalized Gloria Steinem is dancing around her apartment, relishing her solitude and independence, remembering the time her back-alley abortionist made her promise him that after the procedure was over, “You will do whatever you want to do with your life.”
That scene took up about 90 seconds, so I guess it’s understandable that they didn’t have time to cover all those years she worked for the CIA, which gave her the money to start Ms Magazine in the first place.
Yes, we have a television show about Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan going on wacky adventures through American politics, we have a novel by Curtis Sittenfeld called Rodham that reimagines Hillary Clinton’s life had she never married Bill, and we have grown women on social media fantasizing about what it would be like to have brunch with Dr Jill Biden, the ventriloquist working extra hard to make sure her dummy husband looks lifelike on their Zoom conference calls with America. All we need to complete the girlboss set is a biopic of a reimagined Susan B Anthony – probably played by Meryl Streep because why not – as a hard-talking, hard-drinking woman who breaks the fourth wall whenever a male mansplains something to her, looking directly at the camera with a “can you believe this guy?” sneer.
How did our culture get like this, filled with feminist paper dolls, all shiny and flat, easy to dress up in whatever flattering outfit you please? What makes someone take up the pen (or laptop I guess) to write fan fiction about their favorite failed presidential candidate? What makes women fervently fantasize about downing bottomless mimosas with a woman who has a doctorate of education and exceptionally white teeth?
In Rodham, we meet a “who me?” Hillary in law school, a woman insecure about her looks, uncertain about her ambitions, dazzled and overwhelmed by the clarity of Bill’s desire to become president. She is willing to sideline her own dreams (vaguely defined) to move with him back to Arkansas to help facilitate his political future. But once he starts to cross ethical lines – a little bribery here, a little rape there – she realizes she needs to live her own life. She runs for office herself, pursuing a Senate seat because, as her character explains, “our government makes a lot of important decisions, and I’d like to be involved in them,” which is more the language of a 12-year-old girl than a 43-year-old professor of law.
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Our reluctant politician is a lot like Mrs America’s reluctant activist Steinem, who repeatedly insists she is not a politician and she hates politics but keeps somehow finding herself at conventions and in meetings with senators, advocating for women’s rights (vaguely defined). Rodham and Steinem share similar obstacles to their ascension, which are mostly just micro-aggressions rather than anything structural. Romantic partners are not supportive, male colleagues underestimate them, they have to meet unfair standards of beauty and decorum. But each woman is, deep down, a good girl. They only get angry about injustice, they are only ambitious for change (vaguely defined). The mistakes they make along the way – in both cases this involves sidelining a woman of color, Shirley Chisholm for Steinem and Carol Moseley Braun for Rodham – are not about any character flaw, they’re about the greater good and a little naivete. These women are powerful, yet harmless.
These are self-empowerment fantasies, which have always been a popular form of women’s entertainment. But instead of dreaming of being a sex columnist with great shoes and an impossible apartment in a New York City before it was just a collection of CVSes and bank branches, now I guess we’re dreaming of being a woman who wants to be president but doesn’t want to be seen wanting to be president, like the girl who dreams of being homecoming queen, but would never try to be homecoming queen by actually campaigning, she just really hopes that everyone in her school wants her to be homecoming queen and will spontaneously vote for her because she deserves it and she can wear her crown with grateful surprise and a pure heart.
But politics is not about self-actualization. Becoming president is not the top of the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs; it’s not the reward for being a really good person or making all of the right romantic choices, such as leaving your marriage after the first rape allegation against your husband and not like the eighth or whatever. Politics is about the distribution of resources, and those resources, whether it’s money or food or bombs, decides who in our society lives and who dies, who has abundance and who barely scrapes by.
Depicting women who have real ambition, who long for power, who have compromised any basic human decency to defend the activities of the CIA in the 1950s and 60s or destabilize governments in order to maintain that power, as just doing their best is not only objectionable, it’s boring. Plus, I read in Rodham a fictionalized Bill Clinton referring to the fictionalized Hillary’s fictionalized vagina as a “honeypot” and I think I lost consciousness for a minute or two.
In Rodham, a mentor gives Hillary a little pep talk. “If you’re not the beneficiary of the women’s movement, who is? More than any other young woman I know, you have the freedom to choose your own path.” Like our dancing Gloria, whose abortionist really just wants what is best for her, this Hillary and her creator seem to understand feminism, instead of being an ideology of true equality and dignity, as being about letting women do whatever they want. It turns out that in our world, what Hillary really wanted was to destroy social welfare programs that allowed single mothers to have food for their children and to give money that could have been used to keep families in their houses to big banks instead. What a queen. We can’t help but to stan.
Source: From Mrs America to Rodham, America’s in love with feminist paper dolls | Jessa Crispin
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