Tonight, my dad and I had the only conversation we’ve really had about the election.
“What time are you voting tomorrow?” he asked.
“Whenever I manage to wake up,” I told him.
He told me about a piece he’d seen on TV — something on Nightline or Frontline or Dateline, something-line, one of those newsmagazine situations — where 25 people in a room were asked if they were voting primarily against something. The majority, he said, copped to that. Only three people said they were voting for their candidate. In trying to parse their differences, this group apparently ended up in scary shouting matches multiple times. “How did we get to this point?” Dad asked.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know. But I actually am voting affirmatively for my candidate. And I feel good about it.”
“Good,” Dad said. “That’s all that matters.”
Eleven years ago, I wrote a research paper for a theatre history class in undergrad titled “Medea, Hillary Clinton and the Getaway Car”. It was inspired by Deborah Warner’s production of Medea, with Fiona Shaw as Medea. I saw that production at BAM when I was eighteen years old and it changed my life. It illustrated a painful reality that I’d spent my entire adolescence trying to name: the notion that powerful women are creatures to be feared, not celebrated, and that within a strict patriarchal framework a powerful woman cannot win.
The radical conceit of Warner and Shaw’s Medea was that it stripped away the Ancient Greek histrionics and dispensed with the deus ex machina, forcing Medea to sit with the consequences of her brutal act of vengeance in the end. I argued that much as Euripides was calling upon the original audience’s deep knowledge of Medea’s divinity in myth to explore gender politics, Warner and Shaw tied her power instead to celebrity, drawing instant parallels to the scorned woman in the spotlight.
The most obvious frame of reference for such a scorned woman, of course, was Hillary Rodham Clinton. My conclusion in the paper was that in the face of gendered insult, there are only wrong answers. By which I meant: forcing a woman to take responsibility for her husband’s actions when those actions actively hurt her is a no-win situation for that woman. Or as I put it in the final paragraph of the paper:
“Social equality is achieved only through mutual responsibility, and if that’s the point Euripides wanted to make, the getaway car should not come. Until society as a whole allows for that much, Medea needs to stay in the pool, surrounded by her murky handiwork, and the audience needs to see it. Otherwise, society is putting its hopes in a dragon-drawn chariot, and progress is but a myth.”
(I re-read this paper tonight for the first time in almost a decade. It’s awfully good. It won me a handful of awards, and I later presented it at a women’s studies conference. Anyway.)
When I was writing the paper, I’d picked up a handful of reference materials at Half Price Books for cheap, including then-Senator Clinton’s autobiographical Living History. If I remember right, I got my used copy for $4.99. It wasn’t until I got it home and was halfway through writing my paper that I happened to flip to the very front and saw this:
At first I thought maybe her signature was just printed like that on the inside of the book, but if you look at the back of the page, you can see where the ink bleeds:
(Also, if you sniff the page, it still smells strongly of permanent marker, all these years later. It’s real.)
In that moment, it dawned on me: you’re writing about a real person, not a myth. She once held this book, if just for a moment. She’s real, too. In that moment, I felt pretty keenly the need to make my point as clearly as possible — not just for academia’s sake. For hers.
As someone who came of age during Bill Clinton’s presidency, I only remember Hillary as a demonized figure. I grew up in and around Louisville, Kentucky, a mildly progressive blue oasis in the middle of a sea of deep red conservatism. (Typified today by the Kentucky 3rd’s congressman, the honorable John Yarmuth, a hero among heroes. Look him up. He’s great.) Yet despite the area’s center-leftness, one thing seemed universal: people hated Hillary Clinton. I didn’t understand why until I was much, much older.
Around the same time I wrote that paper (2005), I remember Hillary coming up in conversation once with my dad. I don’t remember the context; I just remember him characterizing her as “the worst” and me shrugging and saying, “Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree.”
In that same conversation, I said, “You know who I think would be a great president? Barack Obama.”
My dad snorted. “That’ll never happen in my lifetime. Maybe yours. People of my generation are too racist.”
(Hold for laughter. Tears? Both? On one level, he sadly wasn’t wrong. And I recount this with gentle amusement, not mockery. My dad’s one of the most decent and wonderful people you could ever know. Hi Dad.)
(This is a total digression, but I can’t be the only one who thinks about Tom Hanks’s “hello, it’s Mr. Nasty” speech in You’ve Got Mail every time the Nasty Woman thing comes up, can I?)
I stopped going to the church I was raised in when I was in high school. It was (well, is; it’s still there) an evangelical megachurch, the sort of place jokingly referred to around town as “Six Flags Over Jesus”. It has a congregation of roughly 30,000 people.
I stopped going to the church I was raised in when I realized I was not welcome there.
(Well, no. That’s not true. I stopped going regularly when I realized I was not welcome there. I stopped going full stop in 2004 when the main pastor at the time claimed that then-President Bush was without question doing God’s will by invading Iraq, and then received a deafening standing ovation after making a snarky joke about Michael Moore. In church. It was one of the most shameful things I’d ever witnessed.)
There was a certain sense in this church that goodness — holiness, even — was easily quantifiable. That by living a certain way, you would be blessed by God, and by “blessed by God”, they mostly meant “comfortably rich”. The congregation is made up largely of upper middle class suburban white people. These people achieved their “holiness” through tithes to the church and adherence to a strict brand of privileged heteronormativity with zero margin for error. If you were a woman, the expectation was that you would find a husband as soon as possible and submit to him and his will in all ways. (Ugh, I just shuddered even typing that.) You would bear children, if you were lucky. If you had any role outside of the home, it was in service of the family or the church, with no exceptions.
I knew from a very early age that I was different. I was IQ tested at the age of three and scored well into what is considered the “genius” range. (My mother has said that with that knowledge came both excitement and despair, because, as she put it, “I knew things were going to be hard for you from the beginning.” She was right. She usually is. Hi Mom.)
Although I was straight and therefore not superficially rejected by the church’s teachings like some of my closest friends, I had no plans to fall into the submissive role the church was pointing me towards. I believed in God, yes (still do — spoiler alert?), but I believed that to believe in God was to believe in my own God-given potential, and as such, I was not meant to submit to anyone in the process of fulfilling that. I’ve discussed this quite often recently with female-identified friends, not just in light of Hillary’s run but also the women-led Ghostbusters reboot. We all agreed that if lady!Ghostbusters had come out when we were kids, it would have been life-changing for us. We postulated that the roots of the culture of violent misogyny of our time can be partially found in the media our generation consumed as kids — that because we as little girls had no problem identifying with male protagonists (the Marty McFlys and Indiana Joneses and Ghostbusters) but our male peers were not given the same reverse opportunities, it created a gendered empathy gap. We strong-headed girls didn’t for a second even think to identify with Marty McFly’s drippy girlfriend just because she was a girl — we identified with the heroes, only to grow up to be told by society that we weren’t allowed to be the heroes themselves.
I knew where I was meant to be, and it wasn’t where the church wanted me to be. So I trusted my heart and my gut and I left.
In spite of this, I was fortunate enough to grow up nurtured by parents who saw the hero in me and kept her mind and spirit fed. Working as I have to establish myself in a field in which women are embarrassingly and disproportionately underrepresented has been tough, but easier to face with their unwavering support and with the support of friends and likeminded peers. But a familiar theme has constantly emerged and re-emerged: powerful women are creatures to be feared, not celebrated, and within a strict patriarchal framework a powerful woman cannot win.
As I get older, I realize that I’m okay with being feared. It’s arbitrarily losing because of someone else’s fear that I’m not okay with.
When I was 13, the neighborhood association of the subdivision we’d moved into threatened to sue my mom and stepdad over my little brother’s clubhouse, which was a professionally constructed shed that looked like a mini house that we’d moved into our backyard. They argued that the neighborhood bylaws forbade any kind of detached structure to be moved into the neighborhood, claiming it would send property values plummeting. (Oh, for that to be the worst of my worries!)
I remember my mom getting into a heated argument in our front yard with one of the members of the neighborhood association — a man her age — about the clubhouse. She was able to shut down each of his arguments point-for-point, and as I stood there at her side, I was so proud of how easily she was holding her own.
Sensing he’d lost, the angry neighbor was about to leave when he turned around and suddenly yelled something so unexpected I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it:
“WHY DON’T YOU TRY TALKING TO ME WHEN YOU CAN STAY IN A MARRIAGE!”
My mom, who up until that moment had been the clear victor in the argument, crumpled in shock, sobbing as the jerk walked away. I’ve never been that angry at a stranger in my life.
First of all, it takes a real asshole to yell that at a woman in front of her kids. Secondly, I don’t care if my mom had been divorced ten times at that point — it was irrelevant to my brother’s clubhouse and his property values, and, more to the point, none of that guy’s damn business. But most importantly: it was a gendered insult, primed for maximum impact to a woman. He would never have yelled that at a man. And he knew it. And in that moment, so did I.
I thought of that moment a lot during the debates, particularly during the second debate when Trump sat several of Bill Clinton’s accusers in the front row. The fact that Hillary could stand there with a hundred million people watching and not so much as blink amazes me. If it had been me, I would have roared “I AM NOT MY HUSBAND!!!” and knocked over a bunch of chairs. And maybe started setting small fires until Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz were forced to emerge from behind their desk with fire extinguishers and/or tranquilizer darts. (I’m never running for President. You’re welcome.) To stand up there with the clear objective of only discussing the issues without taking the bait took a fortitude beyond comprehension, and the knowledge that comes from having to withstand that kind of bullshit day in and day out for your entire adult life.
After decades of putting up with this very brand of insult, Hillary did the only thing she could: she didn’t play the game. It was more than wise, more than strong. It was presidential.
This is what I carry with me when I go in to vote in a few hours. Not just the historical weight of the thing — a seismic paradigm shift. Not just the defense of our basic values and civil liberties against a bigoted fascist bully. No, what I’m really bringing in with me is personal weight. In her final pre-election day video statement tonight, Hillary said, “It has to be our mission together to give our kids and every American the chance to live up to their God-given potential.”
That’s right, ladies. We get to be heroes now too.
I’m a lady hero, and I’m voting for a candidate I believe in. And that’s all that matters.
(And thanks, Mom and Dad, for raising me to be a lady hero. Even when we disagree, I still hope I do you proud. Just don’t expect me to run for president -- I tend to knock over chairs.)
