Putin Kitsch in America by Alison Rowley

Author:Alison Rowley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

A year after the invasion of Crimea, references to Vladimir Putin began to creep into discussions of the upcoming American presidential election. The two pieces of fake fiction that I will talk about here – Hillary’s Personal Emails: Secrets of State, Exposed (The Erotic International Politics of Sex) by Trashcan Jones, and Mission F@ck Putin by Nick Beyond – use explicit sex to revisit many familiar criticisms of Hillary Clinton as she ran for the nation’s highest office. The texts have an ironic undertone, of course, because the relationship between Clinton and Putin is a particularly acrimonious one. In 2008, then senator Clinton was heard joking about former president George W. Bush’s comment that he had gotten a glimpse of the Russian leader’s soul when they met at a summit in Slovenia in 2001. Clinton said that was impossible because the former KGB agent does not have one.17 Two years later, when Clinton visited Moscow, the pair had an uncomfortable meeting, followed by a press conference where Putin launched into a litany of complaints about American policies towards Russia. Later, Putin blamed Clinton when protestors took to the streets in Moscow in December 2011 to show their displeasure with Russia’s election results. Putin’s hackles had been raised after Clinton issued a statement indicating that she believed there had been widespread fraud and vote-rigging. In fact, Clinton took a hard line on Russia throughout her tenure as secretary of state, and it is fair to say that she and Putin loathe each other. In other words, there is no one less likely to have a sexual relationship with Hillary Clinton than Vladimir Putin, which makes the scenario a perfect “what if …?”

Unfortunately for Clinton, Americans have been making jokes and innuendos about her sex life for more than twenty years. Given that Hillary Clinton’s ambitions obviously extended far beyond the traditional roles of first ladies – namely, to be wives and mothers – one way for critics to chastise her for those desires was to attack her femininity. In the 1990s, for instance, political cartoonists regularly suggested that she had usurped the pants in her marriage and was in fact running the country instead of her husband. The emasculated president, in some images, was depicted wearing a dress or carrying a purse.18 A significant number of cartoons also posited that the Clintons somehow did not have a normal marriage by showing the couple reading policy documents in bed rather than enjoying any romantic time together. Such drawings implied that Hillary Clinton was not a desirable or exemplary woman. Moreover, since Clinton was “held up as the representative feminist,” in the words of professor Charlotte Templin, she could be “used as a stick to beat feminism and to scapegoat feminism for various ills of the modern world.”19

By running for a Senate seat as her husband’s time in the Oval Office drew to a close, Hillary Clinton ensured that she remained at the centre of American politics. This also meant that she continued to be subjected to sexually charged rhetoric.

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