President Clinton’s attempt to lift the ban on gays in the military revived the culture war, never quite dormant, and shed some new light on its source. The issue seems less the acclimatization of gays to the culture of military service—structured, hierarchical, overtly aggressive—than the mixing of that culture with another, softer and feminized, that is apparently its reverse.
The friends of the effort to lift the ban are also instructive, starting with the cooptation of the women’s movement as ally: a party whose thrust demands leveling, giving dolls to little boys and trucks to little girls, neutralizing the female as the movement pursues its real interest of negating and containing the male. Attached to these is a whole train of causes linked by revulsion toward man-the-aggressor: anti-fur, anti-red meat, anti-blood sports, anti-contact sports, anti-football, anti-army, anti-navy, anti-war.
They all converged at the Clinton inaugural in January, where a war resister married to a much tougher woman who had made much more money than he was sworn in to effusions by the entertainment and fashion industries, amid galas where people wore aprons to protest species-cruelty, men could wear dresses, and women black tie. Forget taxes, forget industrial policy. The Democrats have become the Androgyny party, whose cultural trend is to blur gender differences.
The Clintons are born leaders of this party. Sharing the office, they shift gender roles. He insinuates. She orders. He seduces. She demands. He wants people to love him. She wants to be feared. Her hunger for power is open and palpable; his, buried in layers of charm. She does not bake cookies. He does not draw blood. If men’s lives are action, his has been talk. His professional world is the meeting and seminar. His issues are education and welfare, not state or defense.
The Clintons’ political traits seem in marked public contrast. She is brash, single-minded, tone-deaf to nuance. He is malleable, pliant, eager to please. His features are soft, hers much harder. Her smile is avid, his sly. An old photo shows her leaning into him as he pulls back, smiling. Seemingly, little has changed.
The military suspects Clinton as an outsider to its culture, and indeed he has spent his life avoiding the arenas where men face each other or nature in either real or faked combat, the battle or the playing field. Running for political office is the great exception to this, and yet Clinton campaigned for the presidency in a feminized operation located somewhere between consciousness-raising and chat. Called at first “alternative media,” it really was fem-speak, a talk at the table about family problems, an extended coffee klatsch among friends and neighbors discussing matters of emotion. His fortes were connection, compassion, empathy, an approach that softened the aggressive nature of his quest for power even as its aims were being advanced.
The same approach was also used to soften Al Gore, who at first looked like trouble for the Androgyny party: a certified hunk who had served in the army, with a pretty, blonde wife who had stayed home to raise the children; a backer of the decision to use force in the Persian Gulf. To counter this threat of gender-distinction, Gore played up the tree-hugging part of his character and at the nationally-televised Democratic convention gave a let-it-all-hang-out speech in which he spoke at length about family trauma and asked all to share in his pain.
Maureen Dowd, of the New York Times, caught the point of departure between the “John Wayne Republicans, never crying or blinking,” and the “Iron John” Democrats. The latter held their national convention in New York, where people bitch for a living; the former in a deep-macho Southwestern city, where people dig holes in the dirt. Dowd quoted a Bush-person as saying, “Real men don’t get on the couch.” But real men were what the Democrats were not seeking, and had long since stopped trying to find.
Long before Clinton, before Al Gore was Tipperized, there had been signs of the new tendency: Walter Mondale, browbeaten by women in power suits; the reflexive problems with the Gulf war, and before that Grenada; the leniency on crime and welfare; the 1987 memo by the Democratic pollster Pat Caddell to the effect that the Republicans had cornered the testosterone franchise while his own team was now thought of as “soft.” Christopher Matthews, writing in the New Republic, dubbed his fellow Democrats the “Mommy party,” absorbed in the world of the kitchen and nursery, unfit for and afraid of the street.
To call all this female is a slander on women: feminism is not a womanly movement, and many real women do not buy feminist politics (see Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir). The new Democrats are not so much female as neutered: a party of aggressive women and sensitized men, where Eleanor Smeal of the National Organization for Women gives marching orders to Senators Howard Metzenbaum and Ted Kennedy (whose older brothers are now thought of as swine). This is not the party of Lyndon Johnson, who between civil-rights bills went out and shot things, or of Jack Kennedy, who fought to get into the navy, and once swam three miles towing an injured shipmate to safety. It is the party of Adlai Stevenson, offended no end by the Kennedy machismo, the first in a long line of sensitive Democratic candidates, victorious now through defeat.
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How this will play in the long run remains to be seen. The Androgyny party began emerging in 1972 and since then has lost four contests, winning two, it now seems, in disguise: with two Southern governors who vowed to be “different” and then bowed to the interests, and to dominant wives. In the latest election, the signals were mixed: Clinton won in part because he and Gore seemed stronger at times than their GOP counterparts, more focused, energetic, and controlled. After the touch-me convention, they got on a bus and toured Tom Sawyer country as two boys from the heartland, hunks in plaid shirts, muscles showing, flanked by winsome blonde dates. Hillary, who in spring wore blazers and shoved Bill aside in her dash to the podium, in summer was a small blonde in a sundress, giggling, small blonde in a sundress, giggling, mute.
Was this a con? Clinton as President is giving the country more in the way of unisex than it wanted or ever knew it had bought. The first casualty may be his own pledge to lift the ban on gays in the military. There is a case that gays who adapt to the culture of the military forces should be allowed to stay in them. But it is one that Bill Clinton—draft evader, co-President—does not appear able to make.
