Picture this: Bill Clinton walks alongside Hillary, she’s a bit sheepish, naughty girl, but keeps her head up nonetheless, and their dog and their daughter dutifully tag along. Hillary has just announced to the world that she did, in fact, have sexual relations with that young intern. Is that Bill taking her hand?
Or Elliot Spitzer, the cuckolded sex crusader, looking stoically into his wife’s face, giving a nod and slight smile to someone in the audience, as Silda announces her regret for having slept with men much younger and much hotter than her husband, and spending enough money to have sent one of their daughters through college, or help a bunch of the rich kids in her husband's charity find their compassion. Silda would let the world know that they have work to do and that they need to heal, and Elliot would let the world know that he is standing by his woman.
Or John McCain’s first wife saying he was just too used up after he returned from Nam, and her wandering eye just happened to land on a young (superduperrich) hottie to further her career – and then she still had a career to further!
After all that! She wore no A on her sweater. In fact, after cheating on her devoted husband, John, with many men and picking up the trophy husband, she would go on to be a senator, and then have a real fighting chance for the presidency. She would be known as a woman who lived by her ethics and values. A real stand up gal. Honorable.
Can you imagine any of this really being the case?
A woman in politics surviving after having had affairs: with numerous other men, young interns, prostitutes? True, Spitzer had to resign, but he got to have his wife standing there, by his side. I am certain that no woman would be granted that gesture of solidarity after publicly humiliating her husband. They would laugh him off the carpet. Laws have been made to protect men after crimes of passion, for it is understood that a man needs to protect his honor at all costs.
Women with big, important husbands are expected to endure, to forgive and move on – as long as that moving on includes staying by their man. True, they might leave their man, but how many do? So much of who they are is invested in who their husband is and they often give up their own careers to support their husband's. Those who dismiss Hillary's years as first lady are fools: everyone knows that she invested as much time and energy to her husband's White House as he did. To ignore her input is sexism indeed.
I would like to see what would happen if the reverse was true. What if Silda Wall Spitzer frequented prostitutes? The media and fellow politicians and the public at large wouldn’t be calling her a joan; they would denounce her for what they know she is: a whore.
The contrast between Silda Wall obediently standing by her man brings up the Clinton years. And the image of Hillary enduring. Enduring - we as a society granted her that, despite some sniping, but she was stained by it; will we allow her to be president? The racist tone of the Clinton campaign has for the time muddied the undeniable sexism that she is faced with as a female candidate. I don't know if that was intentional, if the plan was to remind everyone that Obama is black while forgetting that Hillary is female, but I do know that come summer, when we are certain who is going to represent the Democrats, he or she is going to have to run twenty laps to McCain's one. And while Clinton will always be tainted by her husband's philandering, the fact that McCain was a serial adulterer will not be an issue. He is a man, after all. If his wife had an affair, on the other hand, that could be news, maybe that would make him look bad.