WASHINGTON \u2014 Would the war against preying on women be blazing so fiercely had Hillary Clinton been elected?<\/p>\n
When I interviewed women in Hollywood about the ugly Harvey Weinstein revelations in The Times and The New Yorker, they told me that feelings of frustration and disgust at having an accused predator in the White House instead of the first woman president had helped give the story velocity.<\/p>\n
When I talked to Susan Fowler<\/a>, after her blog post<\/a> about sexual harassment at Uber that toppled its C.E.O., Travis Kalanick, she said that before Donald Trump\u2019s election, women in Silicon Valley were speaking up but no one was listening.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it was different this year because Trump won and people felt powerless,\u201d she said. \u201cI know I did. I felt super powerless. Because I felt, with Obama in the White House, I could just take for granted that good people were in charge.\u201d<\/p>\n It is also interesting to speculate: If Hillary were in the Oval, would some women have failed to summon the courage to tell their Weinstein horror stories because the producer was also a power behind the Clinton throne? As Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, told me, when Barack Obama stepped off a stage and into Weinstein\u2019s arms for a big hug after giving a $400,000 speech as an ex-president in the spring, it sent a signal that the ogre was in a protected magic circle.<\/p>\n And, finally, would Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and other liberals still be saying in the past few days that Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency over his own sexual misdeeds if he now occupied the first lady\u2019s quarters and reigned over a potent Clinton political machine?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Or would feminists and liberals make the same Faustian bargain they made in 1998: protect Bill on his retrogressive behavior toward women because the Clintons have progressive policies toward women? So what if a few women are collateral damage, they might ask \u2014 again. Wouldn\u2019t you rather have Bill and Bill\u2019s enabler, Hillary, than Donald?<\/p>\n You may wonder why in the year 2017, after so many graphic and scalding national seminars on sexual predation over the last 26 years, we are still trying to come to terms with it.<\/p>\n Perhaps because in those earlier traumatic sagas, both the left and the right rushed in to twist them for their own ideological ends. The stench of hypocrisy overpowered the perfume of justice.<\/p>\n First, with Clarence Thomas, a feminist lynch mob tried to kill off a conservative Supreme Court nominee over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics. Then, with Bill Clinton, a conservative lynch mob tried to kill off a Democratic president over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics.<\/p>\n Institutional feminism died when Gloria Steinem, Madeleine Albright and other top feminists vouched for President Clinton as he brazenly lied about never having had a sexual relationship with \u201cthat woman\u201d \u2014 Monica Lewinsky. The Clintons and feminists were outraged when Thomas\u2019s supporters painted Anita Hill as \u201ca little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.\u201d Yet that was precisely the Clintonian tact when women spoke up about Bill\u2019s misbehaving.<\/p>\n Time and again, Hillary was a party to demonizing women as liars, bimbos, trailer trash or troubled souls when it seemed clear they were truthful about her philandering husband. She often justified this by thinking of the women as instruments of the right-wing conspiracy.<\/p>\n As I reported in \u201998<\/a>, even some veteran Clinton henchmen felt a little nauseated about the debate inside the White House on a slander strategy for Lewinsky: Should they paint her as a friendly fantasist or a malicious stalker?<\/p>\n Following the Clintons\u2019 lead, Trump dismissed the more than dozen women who stood up to accuse him of sexual transgressions as politically motivated liars.<\/p>\n The president has also politicized the accusations against Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and Democratic Senator Al Franken. In the first case, despite heinous reports painting Moore as haunting a mall to cruise for teenage girls, Trump has refused to disavow the Stephen Bannon-backed candidate, at one point claiming he didn\u2019t know enough about Moore to comment because he does \u201cnot watch much television.\u201d (!!)<\/p>\n