We've been saying that the Clinton scandals feminists ignored in the 1990s are likely to play quite differently in the yes-means-yes world of today.
Now the New York Times is reporting that indeed these scandals may be eroding Hillary Clinton's support among women. Lena Dunham, for example, donned a "Hillary" sweater dress to sing Mrs. Clinton's praises for overcoming sexism. Despite this, the Times reports:
But at an Upper East Side dinner party a few months back, Ms. Dunham expressed more conflicted feelings. She told the guests, at the Park Avenue apartment of Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO, that she was disturbed by how, in the 1990s, the Clintons and their allies discredited women who said they had had sexual encounters with or been sexually assaulted by former President Bill Clinton .
The issue of the former president's sex scandals emerged after Mrs. Clinton accused GOP frontrunner Donald Trump of having a "penchant for sexism" and he shot back that she was a hypocrite given her husband's treatment of women and her destruction of the women involved. Trump called her an enabler of her husband's behavior. But is this fair?
“It’s not about Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes,” said Camille Paglia, a feminist author and professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and a supporter of one of Mrs. Clinton’s rivals, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “It’s about Hillary Clinton’s behavior towards her husband’s accusers for all those years.”
It would also be instructive to look Mrs. Clinton's handling of a rape case back when she was a young lawyer–and clearly before she decreed that women who claim they had been sexually assaulted were to be believed (here and here ).
