More than just a double standard
The case of Katie Hill, the Democrat congresswoman whose career just ended over errors of judgment, is more complicated than it seems at first. Maybe it’s not just a double standard that forced her resignation, but a cluster of issues thrown up by her private life that cast a shadow.
Hill looked like a breath of fresh air in politics; pretty (it helps), young (unusual), bisexual (which she didn’t see the need to conceal), and smart (rare). That she was bound to be observed through skinny eyes by the narrow-minded, who are always the most excited by anything to do with illicit or unusual sexual practices, should have signalled caution.
By this point in history most of us surely feel well inured to reports of sexual explorers, but sometimes they expose vulnerability that prompts concern over other kinds of judgment.
In the context of the Trump government her bedtime antics are trivial. I get that. But holding up egregious bad behaviour in public life isn’t a valid yardstick. All of us come up clean in that comparison.
One problem is privacy. Former US president Franklin D Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, got away with a lot in the 1930s-40s in the White House, she with an extra-close relationship with a female aide, he likewise, also with a female aide. Did anyone care? They were both impressive people, who kept up a united front as a couple and caused no harm. What’s more, the fact that he lived in a wheelchair was also concealed from the public, who might have thought a disabled man would be incapable of exercising an intelligent mind.
There were no cellphones or internet. The public had no need to know about their musical beds, and I would beg not to know about President Donald Trump’s since he’s been in office. If he ever goes to bed, that is, what with his ongoing blizzard of tweets.
So, a 32-year-old clever woman whose husband betrayed her in the most disloyal, offensive way by sharing compromising photographs, of her naked, with news media. They’d been in a three-way relationship with a female campaign staffer, which had ended, and Hill wanted a divorce. The images could only have made their way to media though malice.
Iadmit to not understanding why people pose for photographs that could cause them distress if they make it online for the world to view. It may be fashionable, but it’s reckless, and there’s no point in saying a man in public office would get away with it, because he wouldn’t.
One photograph showed Hill naked, brushing her aide’s hair. I have every confidence that a male politician caught doing something similar would have to resign. That’s not just because of perceived sleaze, and openness to blackmail: it’s abuse of an employer/employee relationship no matter what the genders involved and who the people are.
Fellow female politicians called Hill’s forced resignation a double standard, and claimed women were unfairly shamed by their sexuality. They must be forgetting former president Bill Clinton, and the matter of Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress that hung over his wife’s presidential campaign. Such errors of judgment tarnish everyone involved. Hillary arguably paid for his.
Hill sees herself as being victimised, and has attacked a ‘‘misogynistic culture’’ that seeks ‘‘to push a young woman out of power’’ while allowing men accused of sexual misdemeanours to stay in office, as Clinton did.
My issue is that she didn’t set a more demanding, and ultimately safer, goal for herself, and take herself as seriously as she expected others to.