Sexual Smears and Political Trash
This is a newsletter about the history behind today’s debates over sex and sexuality. I’m grateful to each and every one of you who subscribes, reads, and shares these posts. And for the most part, I keep it clean. I use my historian nerd brain to show examples, add images and citations, and generally aim to enlighten or at least offer you food for thought.
So I need to preface my comments for this week to say: I can’t believe we still have to talk about this shit.
This week, the GOP candidate for president reposted on Truth Social another person’s “Truth” that showed photos of a young Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, with the snarky caption, “funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently.” [I refuse to link to these posts.] For Harris, the allegation refers to her romantic relationship with Willie Brown, a former speaker of the California State Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, whom she dated more than twenty years ago. Brown is about 30 years older than Harris. GOP supporters have taken to saying that the relationship, which occurred when Brown’s power was at its apex and when Harris was running for district attorney, was the only reason Harris got her start in California politics.
The smear against Clinton relates to the sexual relationship her husband had with Monica Lewinsky, who got to know Bill Clinton in her early 20s while working as an intern in the White House and subsequently found a job at the Pentagon. Lewinsky and Clinton began to meet clandestinely at the White House after the internship ended. Meanwhile, Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, sued Clinton for sexual harassment for behavior that occurred during his time as governor. When Lewinksy confided in a work friend, Linda Tripp, about her affair with the president, Tripp (who hated the Clintons) recorded their phone conversations without consent and shared them with Jones’s lawyers. Clinton’s denials (that he never had “sexual relations” with “that woman”) became the basis for perjury charges that led to Clinton’s impeachment in the GOP-controlled House. Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr prepared a report with minutely detailed descriptions of the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual encounters (reprinted in full in the New York Times), which included multiple instances in which Lewinsky performed oral sex on the president. Lewinsky, who was barely 25 years old, was pilloried. In a scene captured in a 2001 HBO documentary, an audience member at a Q&A at New York’s Cooper Union College asked Lewinsky, “how does it feel to be America’s premier blowjob queen?” And Bill Clinton? He finished his second term, in 2000, with some of his highest approval ratings. From Lewinsky’s statements at the time and since, it’s clear that she thought of herself as a sexually empowered person, choosing and enjoying her erotic encounters with the president (although she subsequently offered profound regret about her liaison with a married man who had been her boss). The media portrayed her as a slut.
More than two dozen women have accused Donald Trump of rape or assault. In January 2023, a jury in New York City held him criminally liable for sexual abuse. Weeks before the 2016 presidential election, previously undisclosed footage from a 2005 Access Hollywood episode taping revealed Trump’s crass description of the actress he was about to meet as well as his boast to host Billy Bush that “when you’re a star, they let you do it… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” The release of what became known as the Access Hollywood tape initially seemed to tilt the election in Hillary Clinton’s favor. But at the second presidential debate a few days later, Trump left his podium to creep up behind Clinton while she spoke, leering at her. When Clinton brought up her opponent’s obvious disdain for women, Trump turned the conversation to her husband’s behavior. Trump had invited to the debate several women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct—including Paula Jones. There was no one worse “in the history of politics,” Trump sneered, than Bill Clinton.
During her CNN interview yesterday, when Dana Bash asked Vice President Harris about her opponent’s attacks on her racial identity, Harris replied that his comments draw from the “same old tired playbook.” The same is true of attempts to impugn the sexual reputations of powerful women. Rather than providing a millennia-long overview of misogyny, let’s take a quick look at how these smears played out about 150 years ago.
In the nineteenth century, the term “public woman” was a euphemism for sex worker. Any woman who spoke out about women’s equality or really any issue publicly was morally suspect. Satirical cartoons portrayed women casting ballots as either hatchet-faced monsters or harlots. An 1868 Currier & Ives print, “The Age of Brass: Or the Triumphs of Women’s Rights,” showed women lining up to vote as a scene of absurdities. The candidate is dressed in pantaloons and a low-cut blouse, and she holds a riding crop. Next to her, a sign urges people to “vote for the celebrated man tamer, Susan Sharp Tongue.” A terrified gentleman holds an infant while his angry wife appears about ready to tweak his nose. The cartoonist portrays women’s political empowerment as a sexual violation and an inversion of traditional gender roles. The riding crop veers on the pornographic (by nineteenth-century standards, at least), implying that this “man tamer” will, if elected, become a dominatrix.
Victoria Woodhull was an iconoclastic and infamous journalist, brokerage operator, and free lover who declared her candidacy for president in 1872. The press depicted her as a sex worker. Leaders of the women’s suffrage campaign distanced themselves from Woodhull and from anyone else associated with sex radicalism (even divorce reform was a bridge too far) because they already faced ridicule that portrayed them as sexually loose. As Allison K. Lange observes in Picturing Political Power, when Woodhull posed for a studio photograph in 1872 to promote her campaign, she wore “a top hat with a bow and military-style jacket,” mimicking the fashions of several of the women shown in “The Age of Brass.” Lange argues that Woodhull’s unbuttoned vest and unladylike pose are meant to convey that she is wearing men’s attire, which does not accommodate her breasts, and is rejecting the trappings of traditional feminine decorum. Intentionally provocative, Woodhull made no secret of her plans to bring women into traditionally male spaces.
These attacks on politically active women also did the dirty work of white supremacy. After the Civil War, Black men in the United States faced escalating threats from vigilantes who terrorized Black people who had attained a modicum of economic or political power. Saying that they acted to protect the purity of white women, these terrorists falsely accused thousands of Black men of sexual assault as a pretext for violently beating, hanging, and burning their victims. White women participated in these attacks, often as participants in large crowds that gathered to cheer the lynchings, and believed that they benefitted within a culture that prized their purity. Allow only white men have the vote, they said, if these men protected them from Black people. Women like Victoria Woodhull threw a wrench in white supremacist logic (not for nothing, the Equal Rights Party, which nominated her, chose the brilliant Black freedom fighter Frederick Douglass to be her running mate) by refusing to concede that her political agency undermined her sexual morality.
The Harris campaign has largely avoided taking any of the Trump/GOP bait about her sexual history (or her racial identity). This is a shrewd decision from a political strategy standpoint. Trump thrives by diverting attention from his own crassness and instability; responding to these social media posts only helps his campaign. But that does not mean the rest of us should tolerate or normalize this garbage. These attacks have nothing to do with the individual woman’s actual sexual history. They are sexist tactics intended to silence all women—and genderqueer and LGBTQ people, who are also ridiculed for their sexualities—and keep us out of the political process. They are today, and have been for centuries, closely tied to white supremacist efforts to disempower Black people and other people of color. Kamala Harris might bear the brunt of these attacks right now, but make no mistake, they reflect a strategy designed to silence and sideline anyone who challenges a sexual double standard that has benefitted powerful white men for eons.
Book news!
An exciting week over here at FIERCE DESIRES HQ. Rebecca Mead’s review of the book is in this week’s issue of The New Yorker! The book has also been on several “must read” lists for the fall, which is pretty cool. I keep a running list of this stuff on my website, www.rebeccaldavis.com.
The book launch is just a few days away! Use this link to preorder from your preferred book-buying site. Here are some of my upcoming book events:
Tuesday, September 3, 6 pm, at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia, in conversation with activist David Acosta, for the official launch of Fierce Desires! Books available from Giovanni’s Room, the country’s oldest feminist and LGBTQ bookstore.
Saturday, September 7, 4:30 pm, I’ll be at the Swarthmore Campus and Community Store chatting with Leanne Krueger, a Democratic leader in the PA General Assembly who is a champion of women’s and LGBTQ rights.
Thursday, September 12, 7pm, South Euclid–Lyndhurst branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library
Please visit the “Events” section of my website for additional events and details.