I Thought For a While I Wanted to Be a Blogger
"I Hope Hillary is Having Good Sex" by Kendra DeColo
A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to write a post that was connected to this election, and then I kept second-guessing myself. Back when I blogged about politics specifically, I found it easy to take on the scolding voice of the mediocre keyboard warrior that raged online before Facebook killed off most of them, and I didn’t like that version of myself very much. It wasn’t healthy for me to be that mad all the time, and it wasn’t helping the world very much either. The internet doesn’t need yet another guy who doesn’t actually know as much as he assumes he does hectoring into the air about the political decisions others should make.
So instead, I’ll briefly tell you about why I chose to vote for Kamala Harris for President a couple of weeks ago and then get into a poem or two.
The first time I voted for President was 1996, and I voted for Harry Browne, the Libertarian. I had just left the church I’d grown up in, a church that forbade voting in elections because they believed that the kingdom mentioned in the Lord’s Prayer was literal and that we owed our allegiance to it, and not to any earthly rule. We owed the earthly government our obedience to its laws so long as they didn’t conflict with God’s laws, but no more than that. And so maybe it’s understandable why, my first time out of the gate, I went for the candidate that asked for the least amount of government to give allegiance to.
But every time I’ve voted since then, it’s been for the Democratic candidate up and down the ticket, except for one time in San Francisco when I voted Green Party for Mayor. I vote for the team more than the person, in the general election at least.
Which is why I voted for Joe Biden in 2020. He was the captain of the team. Nothing about him excited me, and I had some grudges against him from his time as Senator, more for his bankruptcy bill than for his crime bill though mostly connected to his support for the Iraq War. I was an Elizabeth Warren supporter in the primaries. But the party wanted Biden and I voted for him and he won and he turned out to be a way better president on a lot of things than I ever would have imagined. He disappointed as well, the way all presidents do, but more good than bad in very tricky times, I’d say.
I’ll be blunt here. I didn’t like the way Biden was pressured out of the race by some powerful forces in the news media. I thought a lot of their criticisms of how they perceived his mental state were overblown and that they were basically trying to prove themselves still relevant in an ever-changing media landscape.
Anyway, enough of that. It would be easy at this point to say I voted for Harris because she’s now the leader of the team. And that’s part of it. But her being the leader of the team isn’t what got me to the polling place on the third day of early voting, and it’s not why we had an unofficial yard sign up within days of Biden withdrawing, and it’s not why I am now the owner and regular wearer of the only piece of camo gear I’ve ever owned despite having lived many years in rural and small-town Louisiana.
I voted for Harris because she’s done a good job as VP, even though there’s not a lot of stuff for the VP to do. I voted for Harris because she comes into her interactions with others seeking conversation and connection, not confrontation. She rarely falls into what my wife Amy calls “the language of grievance,” which is what makes so much of online discourse so poisonous.
Harris has taken a lot of criticism in certain online areas for the support she’s received from conservatives like Liz and Dick Cheney, especially for campaigning alongside the former, but that willingness to engage on the topics that they can agree on is important to me. There’s no indication that Liz Cheney will be making policy in a Harris administration, nor that Harris has had to compromise on something important to get Cheney’s support.
But also, there’s the way my daughters light up when we mention the possibility of the US finally having a woman president, and the potential that they’ll have full choice over their bodies by the time they’re grown (though it will take much more than just this election to get that moving again).
I haven’t talked any about her opposition, and that’s deliberate. I don’t need to set Harris up in contrast to him to make her worth voting for. She’s a good candidate, qualified and experienced and with solid policy plans. That’s the reason to vote for her.
When I pulled my copy of Kendra DeColo’s book I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World from the shelf, I had every intention of writing about the poem “I Would Like to Tell the President to Eat a Dick in a Non-Homophobic Way,” but I changed my mind on it because, as with the piece above, I didn’t want to spend any time talking about him, even in the hilarious way DeColo does in that poem. Seriously, go read it if you haven’t before or even if it’s been a while.
Instead, I offer you “I Hope Hillary is Having Good Sex,” which appeared in The Account Magazine.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, a lot of the talk online among Clinton supporters was about her sense of humor, about her laugh, about how she wasn’t the caricature of the humorless feminist that the right-wing had painted her as since at least 1988 when her husband ran for President. They were right, of course. Hillary Clinton is funny, and very human, and if this country elected its President like most other countries with presidents do, she’d have been president for at least 4 and possibly 8 years and we’d be in a whole different world right now.
But I don’t ever remember anyone, in all the years she was in the spotlight, ever really talking about her or with her in sexual terms, except perhaps as the long-suffering wife of a cheating husband. People commented on her appearance, on her haircuts and pantsuits, but the idea that she might be a person who enjoys sex was never there. I feel like the combination of Clinton and sex only appeared in the caricatures of the Limbaugh’s of the world who said she could not possibly be interested in sex because she was a feminist and feminists hate sex.
Kendra DeColo throws all that out the window and into the faces of anyone who assumes Clinton could not possibly be a sexual being, but I appreciate the way she moves there at the start of the poem.
I hope Hillary is having good sex
I say to myself at the farmers’ market
While fingering the over-ripened bustier
Of an heirloom tomato
So close to rot it nearly sucks
My pinky into its dappled maw
The image of fingering a bustier and the sucking a pinky in the opening lines makes it clear that DeColo isn’t going to half-ass the raunchy potential of this poem. That this happens at the farmers’ market as opposed to a grocery store feels to me like she’s playing up the boho-chic, crocheted hobo bag carrying stereotypes of liberal women, but that’s probably a stretch. That the tomato is over-ripe and close to rot can be read as a symbol of how overdue the country is for a woman to be president, but at this point I’m starting to feel like I’m in grad school again and I’m going to move on before I start musing about the importance of it being an heirloom tomato as opposed to, I don’t know, a beefsteak or Roma.
I hope at least she’s getting decent head I say again
Now that she’s proven a woman
Can win the popular vote
And still lose to an imbecile
And I, never having considered this part of Hillary Clinton’s existence before, nod and think to myself “she deserves that much at least, after all the shit she’s dealt with over the last 30-40 years however long it’s been.”
But now we hit the first turn in the poem. DeColo gives us a list of reasons why this happened and it’s interesting the way she presents it.
Because sexism
Because Russian interference
Because my grandmother
Who worked for LBJ and then
Nixon and was harassed by male coworkers
Until she had to quit
Even she said of Hillary, “There is something
About that woman I just don’t trust.”
Oof. There’s so many ways DeColo could have turned this moment into a righteous rant about all the structural inequities that Clinton and other women politicians have faced, could have written a book’s worth of reasons and not run out of them and they would have all been true and we could have all nodded sagely along with them and it would not nearly have had the same effect as that story does in six lines. It’s powerful because all of us know someone who, for reasons we don’t understand, hold beliefs that are in direct contradiction to their own experiences. We probably do that too, on something. So the poem makes us sit with that, with that uneasiness around someone we love having done something that hurts us.
Having put us in that moment, DeColo shifts back to the primary subject of the poem.
I hope Hillary is getting it in
By Bill or someone better at listening
Who asks her what she needs
Then gets directly down to business
Without preamble or pussyfooting
Someone who emerges
Only for a sandwich or a breath of fresh air
So, great use of pussyfooting, almost certainly the best use of pussyfooting ever in a poem. Also, I like that she starts with Bill here but then immediately tosses him aside in favor of someone better at listening and who is interested in what she needs. And while (am I really going to do this? I guess so) I read “getting it in” at the start of this run of lines as referencing penetrative sex, I read getting down to business combined with emerges only for a sandwich or a breath of fresh air as more like oral. The important part is that Hillary here is able to get what she wants and needs in the manner she desires it from someone who is attentive and ready to get after it.
Do I seem uncomfortable here? This is what I get for choosing this poem to write about. Let’s move on.
I hope she has multiple sidepieces
Each a different build and scent
And when they ask
To see her closet full of immaculate suits
Organized and shimmering on their racks
Like a god’s molted skin
She lets them touch just the hem
Yeah. I’d say Hillary Clinton deserves all that if she wants it. But what I like best about how this poem closes is the way DeColo plays off the way Clinton has been talked and written about for decades now. The media on the whole but especially the talking heads and pundits and especially the right-wing assholes who built careers off of bashing her have consistently treated her as not human. She’s a machine, she’s a devil or demon, she’s a monster, but never human.
And it’s like DeColo says in this moment, okay, I’ll play that game, except no, she’s a god with worshippers who want to just bask in her presence and receive the tiniest part of her glory. The suits as the thing that protects mere mortals from burning up should they see her in her true glory is a great image, and I’m sure some readers are uncomfortable with the allusion in the last line to the woman in Matthew chapter 9 who was healed by touching Jesus’s garment, but hey, we all have our kinks.
Thanks as always for reading. Please, if you haven’t voted yet and you’re able, go do so. And if you can help someone else vote, do that too. And then look out for each other as the votes come in and the noise gets loud. We’re constantly bombarded with reasons to be angry and combative. We have to look for the moments to be kind, sometimes, but they’re worth holding on to.
beautiful piece about people of somewhat leftist learning, whether they discover it from organisations who don’t like the identities inherent to them or otherwise — could you tell us more about ‘the language of grievance’? sounds instrumental to the whole ordeal. much love to your family from a queer poet who grew up in the church :)