Why Hasn't Hillary?

[Content Note: Rape culture.]

It has been revealed that a famous man is a sexual predator and yet why hasn't Hillary Clinton, a private citizen who has been widely told to retire to Grey Gardens and shut up forever, condemned him on-demand, whilst using the correct tone and words, after the appropriate time interval, and while donating money to charity in an amount and on terms precisely-determined by men, after the revelations were made public?

You might have also heard that the U.S. head of state is a man who has admitted on tape to sexual assault and that his second-in-command is a man who admits he can't be trusted to be left alone in the presence of women, and yet why hasn't Hillary offered to chaperone the two men so they don't accidentally assault any of the, admittedly few, women who find themselves in the presence of these men?

Why hasn't Hillary Clinton stopped re-litigating the 2016 election, when she should instead just be quiet and let pundits and political foes re-litigate every aspect of her personal and professional life dating back decades for their own professional gain?

For that matter, on exactly two occasions in my life, random men have exposed their genitals to me in public, and yet why hasn't Hillary Clinton publicly condemned these men in my precise and unspecified terms and conditions? Doesn't she have psychic knowledge, and at least adjacent responsibility for, all acts of male sexual misbehavior? Doesn't the fact that she hasn't yet returned every donation made by every single predatory man who has contributed to her campaigns, the Clinton Foundation, or the Democratic Party since she has been a Democrat only further prove that she is, indeed, History's Greatest Monster?

While I'm at it, why hasn't Hillary Clinton, private citizen, taken on more of the wrongs of the Liberal Hollywood Establishment to my exact and circumscribed liking?

Mel Gibson, obviously. But also, in that one movie, Meg Ryan had absolutely no business riding her bike like that, eyes closed and arms outstretched. What did she even expect to happen and where was Hillary on that? And seriously, fuck those bees in My Girl. Yet did we ever hear a peep from Hillary? And don't even get me started on Dottie Hinson "dropping the ball." Hillary quoted that particular movie in her book, What Happened, so all I'm saying is, connect the dots, sheeple. Why hasn't Hillary Clinton offered definitive proof that she's not a shill for the Racine Belles?

The bigger question is, what did Hillary know, and when?

Okay. I'm being deliberately absurd, because these are absurd times. Pundits and politicians demanding that a woman who lost the electoral vote to a sexual predator under questionable circumstances answer for the actions of a famous, predatory man seems like the arrival of something quite close to Peak 2017. As I said to a friend recently, the Trump years are turning out to be even worse than I imagined, and I imagined them to be like diarrhea sauce on a shit sandwich. See also:

2017 has meant living each day with existential dread of nuclear war and the reminder that people hate women more than they like being alive

— Fannie Wolfe (@fanniesroom) October 12, 2017

The dynamics of rape culture aren't often logical. For one, rape culture goes hand in hand in with the hatred of women. And, the hatred of women has largely been both incredibly stupid and nihilistic. Many Trump voters' lives already are, or are going to be, materially worse — and possibly completely destroyed — because they voted for the "lock her up" carnival barker rather than the highly-qualified lady with the binders full of practical policy proposals who was ready to hit the ground running as president.

Secondly, rape culture is grounded in a self-perpetuating demand that abusers be coddled and victims silenced. The mawkish, and largely male, reactions to Hillary Clinton's Response to Harvey Weinstein's Predation are evidence of a seemingly-widespread notion that living in a world in which Hillary Clinton exists somehow means that shitty, abusive men, and their "whudabout Hillary" hot-take media enablers, never have to task themselves with being part of the solution. This notion is closely related to the bizarre obsession some have with getting Hillary Clinton to admit that she, and she alone, is responsible for her electoral college loss to Donald Trump.

It's a good rule to keep in mind, I suppose. If you make any mistake in life, whether it's running repeated stories in your newspaper about emails or spreading ridiculous moral equivalencies, you can deflect all accountability with three magic words: Hillary Clinton though!

Make no mistake, though, when it comes to rape culture, if it weren't Hillary Clinton, it would be someone or something else detracting from the abuser's responsibility: the histories and credibility of the victims, concern for the man's solid reputation and future, the deflection that women elsewhere in the world might have things worse and so forth. And, while many men ignore and/or the harass women who speak publicly about rape culture, we also know that the prime time — indeed the only time — many men will actually listen to a woman talk about rape culture is if she's reassuring, rather than confronting, these ingrained, deep-seated rape myths.

Otherwise, men are talking. So much talking.

Many men barge into conversations about rape culture and, even if some have good intentions, nonetheless act as though the conversations don't predate their interjections, demands, musings, and analyses:

But Hillary! I regularly read exactly zero feminist writings, but let me play devil's advocate here! Now that I have a daughter, I suddenly care! I never write about rape culture, but watch me use women as political footballs! I don't know anything about this, but here are my random thoughts (i.e., Give me kudos for performing "being a good guy" on social media!), say the guys with hundreds of thousands of followers, as though there aren't knowledgeable women whose voices they could instead be amplifying.

So, all around, let's forget about locking her up. Isn't it high time we just cast Hillary Clinton into the desert and be done with it so that men can feel absolved of their complicity once and for all? They've made it abundantly clear that a solution along these lines would be far preferable to the alternative of collectively expecting men to do any real emotional, educational, or moral labor on this front.