Hillary Clinton’s Rape Culture Problem

Published: Good Men Project (July 30, 2015)

Hillary Clinton has a rape culture problem… and her supporters need to ask the right questions.

Hillary Clinton has a problematic record when it comes to the issue of rape culture in America. Any politician with a similar background – regardless of party, ideology, or gender – should be expected to answer for them.

Unfortunately, as I learned last week, there is the disturbing possibility that many of Clinton’s supporters will be content to give her a pass.

On Saturday I published an article for The Good Men Project (which was subsequently picked up by The Daily Dot) about the multiple rape allegations that have been made against Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton. Because recent history has shown that public figures with a large number of sexual assault charges are often guilty of at least some of them, I argued that liberals have a moral responsibility to ask the same hard questions of Bill Clinton that they asked of Bill Cosby. In addition, because Hillary Clinton wishes to be America’s first female president, I observed that it particularly behooves her to address the legitimate questions that exist about the possibility that her husband is a serial rapist.

Since then, two important details have come to my attention:

1. Hillary Clinton’s problematic history on the issue of rape culture extends beyond her husband’s actions. As a 27-year-old lawyer in 1975, Clinton represented a man who was accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl. It was her first case as a criminal defense attorney, and to win Clinton accused the victim of being “emotionally unstable,” making “false accusations” against other persons in the past, and exhibiting “an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.” She even claimed that children “tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences,” which would be problematic enough… if it wasn’t for her subsequently released tapes that show Clinton acknowledging her client’s guilt (at one point even laughing about how his ability to pass a polygraph test) and bragging about getting him exonerated, particularly by finding a forensic expert who could get the physical evidence proving her client’s culpability thrown out because he was “willing to testify so that it came out the way you wanted it to come out.”

2. Many of the self-described feminists and progressives who responded to my first article were outraged… not at the prospect of America electing its first female president without asking her to account for the personal misogyny potentially perpetrated by her husband, mind you, but at the fact that I would risk undermining Clinton’s election at all. Needless to say, that made me think very carefully about how I wanted to present the additional point I’m raising in this piece.

In response to all of this, I would like to advance the following proposition as (hopefully) self-evident:

For gender equality to be a reality, it is necessary for half of America’s future presidents to be female. It is not necessary that Hillary Clinton be one of those presidents.

The election of America’s first female president, though historically significant, will primarily be a symbolic milestone rather than a substantive one. After all, the only direct beneficiary of that event will be the woman who becomes president as a result. For that election to have symbolic importance for all women rather than only the one who becomes president, the narrative in which she becomes president must contain a message that – at the very least – doesn’t implicitly undermine the cause of women’s rights.