What Do Women Want? Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bill probably had a lot to do with the excitement of finding such a fearless man. Later, it seems, she had invested so much of herself in the marriage that she wasn’t willing to throw it all away, even in the face of his compulsive, repeated infidelities.
    Here is the strangeness of the public image put forward by this revolutionary presidential couple. They were elected as a team, deliberately stressing their teammate spirit in the first campaign, but they have absolutely refused to make the terms of their marriage public, except to admit early and later that “he caused pain.” It is the inconsistency of this position that accounts for a great deal of the confusion. If you vote for a couple, you feel entitled to know about the bonds that hold them together. But Hillary and Bill insist those bonds are private. People resent their determination to have it both ways. But how on earth can the Clintons own up to the details of Bill Clinton’s sex life?
    The more you read about Bill Clinton, the more it becomes clear that he did use his position to facilitate affairs and that women were not as unwilling as they protested they were. Women love players and then we love to denounce them. Let’s admit it. Men like Bill Clinton turn us on—but knowing we can’t really possess them, we have to attack them verbally. They make us feel utterly powerless. Nobody likes that.
    Bill Clinton was a player long before Monica Lewinsky came along and forced the nation to look at his philandering. But can we really scream sexual harassment when it seems clear that Bill Clinton, like Jack Kennedy, was always surrounded by adoring females? Isn’t sex one of the perks of power for men? Isn’t this why the role of alpha male is so appealing? I find Bill Clinton sexy myself, not that I would ever act out my fantasies with him. His combination of boyishness and lasciviousness can be adorable. We all have fantasies of saving him from himself—getting him to treat his sex addiction and grow up—like Warren Beatty with Annette Bening, or Mr. Rochester with Jane Eyre. In the eighteenth century they used to say a reformed rake makes the best husband. I doubt we have progressed much beyond that. Look at Jack Nicholson’s character in Something’s Gotta Give. (I myself would have taken the young, adoring doctor, but Hollywood is still behind the times where women’s evolution is concerned.)
    I assume that Bill Clinton’s erotic life is no better and no worse than any other male politician’s. At least his legislative and executive initiatives are consistently pro-woman and pro-choice. Like all of us, he’s a mixed bag. I appreciate his humanity, with all its contradictions—contradictions are, after all, the soul of humanity. Of course, I don’t approve of Bill Clinton’s piggish behavior with women, but since I assume the piggishness is merely the norm among male politicians, I’m glad his political agenda is feminist. If that seems like a copy of his own wife’s take on him, it tells you why I feel enormous empathy for Hillary Clinton. She is in the same bind as many strong, intelligent women. She has made her deal with the devil, and now she must live with it.
    Hillary Clinton’s history is full of paradoxes. A baby boomer who grew up in a straight-arrow Methodist Republican family in an all-white, upwardly mobile suburb of Chicago, she became a left-leaning Democrat at Wellesley. At Yale Law, she was studious, solitary, solemn, given to wearing flannel shirts and thick glasses, noted for her brilliance and hard work. (Remember, this was the seventies—that halcyon and brief feminist period.) Her mother had compromised with life and did not want Hillary to do the same—a familiar mother-daughter story (it is also mine). Her father was stern, tight with money, and difficult to please.
    Imagine a girl like that winning the good ol’ boy who has been dating beauty queens! It gives you an idea of how much his “locking in on her” (as