DROIT DE SEIGNEUR: Wonkette dismisses Bill Clinton’s alleged rape of Juanita Broaddrick as “alpha sex,” because, hey, it was the ‘70s, man: “I can absolutely see Bill Clinton doing this (then, not now) and not even thinking of it as rape, but thinking of it as dominant, alpha sex. I can see a LOT of men doing that during that time period, before we started telling them in the ’80s, ‘hey, that is rape, do not do that,” Rebecca Schoenkopf, editor of Wonkette sniffs.
As Betsy Newmark responds, “Well, alright then. Now we know. If you raped a woman in the 1980s and then apologize, that’s okay. You were just being an alpha sort of guy. Right. I’m sure that is what any feminist would have believed about any man, Republican or Democrat. But if that’s true, why get so upset about the accusation that Clarence Thomas once made a joke in the 1980s about a public hair on his can of coke? That was regarded as a major transgression. Rape by Bill Clinton? Not so much.”
But that was pretty much a feminist leitmotif of the 1990s, as they pivoted overnight, Oceania-style from attacking Thomas, John Tower, and Bob Packwood in the early 1990s to defending Bill Clinton and his scandal-plagued trousers during the rest of the decade.