The XX Factor: What women really think.

Since All Things Come Back to the Orbit of Hillary-Obama

Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go. Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate—not Hillary’s tears, nor her scolding—to make me less dismissive of the feminist “obligation” to vote for a woman. The Spitzer scandal reminded me of a comment a friend repeated to me after her (married) boss from a political internship flirted heavily with her at a fundraising event, something that clearly disturbed her a little despite the gossipy retelling. The comment, from her (nonwhite) father: The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women. The subtext, of course, was that she should learn to manipulate power.

There are all kinds of reasons why that very bald statement is infuriating, but perhaps chief among them is the very reason it stuck in my head—that it seems true all too often. That’s been something that’s easy to forget in a primary race between a middle-aged woman and a younger black man, but during my supposedly post-feminist lifetime, the women who’ve created the biggest political stir have been the young women who’ve ruined the careers of powerful old men. The Madeline Albrights and the Nancy Pelosis, no matter how much they work to build something of substance, have never grabbed the headlines the Monicas and Paulas got from tearing something down, in a very passive fashion. Obviously, power and sex (in both its meanings) are never going to be fully disentangled, in Washington or elsewhere, but Spitzer’s yet another ugly reminder of the sort that has dotted the political landscape pretty much since I started paying attention to it. I have to wonder if lots of women and girls haven’t internalized certain lessons along the lines of the one my friend’s dad spelled out.

There’s always—rightly—lots of talk about the wife’s perspective when scandals like this happen, but it’s certainly not a great feeling if you’re a twentysomething or younger, trying to figure out the way things operate, to be told, implicitly or explicitly, that your chance at having any sort of real influence might already be on the wane. I’m not saying I’m for Hillary now, and I’m not saying that Hillary’s history with sexual peccadilloes is uncomplicated, but it certainly makes me appreciate the fact that she’s learned other ways of manipulating power.