when millions of women cast their votes for hillary clinton on tuesday, they may have been thinking about male power as much as female equality <u+2014> about the sleazebags who never heard <u+201c>no,<u+201d> or the male bosses who lowballed them in salary negotiations, or those men in positions of authority who patronized them or ignored them altogether. there was a sense of collective curiosity and anticipation: would having a woman serve in the most powerful role in the country make any of those scenarios less likely for women going forward? that question may be answered one day, but not with hillary clinton. already the consensus about why she lost seems to have moved away from gender and toward her, personally: she was the wrong candidate from the start, she never adequately addressed issues of her integrity, she represented a party too closely aligned with elites, in ways the mainstream media vastly underappreciated. but we will also never know how much of her candidacy was derailed by the fact of her being female <u+2014> not just the way she was victimized, but the way she suffered, even, for other women<u+2019>s victimization. and by that, i mean, that her campaign was derailed over and over again by a phenomenon perhaps best characterized as the penis ex machina <u+2014> the unpredictable and unlikely plot twist provided by men accused of sexual assault or harassment. no fewer than five of these men played crucial roles in handicapping clinton<u+2019>s campaign. the most determinative, in the end, was probably anthony weiner: because he allegedly sexted with a 15-year-old girl, the f.b.i. stumbled on a trove of emails they felt compelled to investigate, resulting in headlines , critical lost support (according to her campaign) and ultimately no charges. that weiner<u+2019>s sexual exploits most likely cost clinton precious votes is the bitter coda to a campaign that has been strangely <u+2014> and somehow appropriately <u+2014> dominated by men accused of assaulting or harassing women, from roger ailes , whose running of fox news was bent on crushing clinton, while he was allegedly crushing the women in his employ, to trump himself. the campaign also faced unprecedented, unforeseeable challenges from the likes of julian assange, the head of wikileaks, who has been holed up in the ecuadorean embassy in london for more than four years to avoid extradition to sweden for questioning on rape allegations. and then there is the original penis ex machina, the one that has defined her marriage and, to some degree, her public profile: that of her husband, whose sexual conduct was such that hillary clinton could be confronted, at the third debate, with the presence of three of his accusers . for all her discipline and that of her campaign, she could not head off the unruly and unexpected repercussions of the men in or close to her life. in some perverse way, both hillary and huma abedin may have found some motivating energy in their husbands<u+2019> chronic sexual exploits. they were strong second fiddles and then survivors who struck out on their own to try to change the world for women, having recognized all too clearly the limits of the powerful men in their lives. that is how the historian doris kearns goodwin, in <u+201c>no ordinary time,<u+201d> explains the political rise of eleanor roosevelt, who came into her own in the years after she made a painful discovery: a packet of love letters her own social secretary sent to her husband. following that revelation, roosevelt proceeded as if <u+201c>a path had opened, a possibility of standing apart from franklin,<u+201d> writes goodwin. margaret chase smith, who was married to a congressman before serving as a congresswoman herself, recognized, writes the historian ellen fitzpatrick, that <u+201c>women loved my husband, and he loved them,<u+201d> before going on to become the first woman to be placed in nomination for the presidency by a major party, in 1964. hillary clinton first considered running for a prominent office <u+2014> governor of arkansas <u+2014> around 1989, at a time when her marriage was at a crisis point. it is heartbreaking that in the end, clinton and abedin were unable to escape their husbands<u+2019> pasts, at least in this election. the fallout from their husbands<u+2019> alleged sexual transgression was among the forces that thwarted their hopes and the hopes of the women (and men) counting on their leadership. it is easy enough to see a metaphor in weiner<u+2019>s alleged actions <u+2014> he is a man accused of undermining a 15-year-old girl just as she is at the age when she is about to come into her own power, and it is her gender that makes her vulnerable. the headlines about the emails forced clinton, in the last days of her campaign, to turn away from the one issue that seemed to move non-college-educated white women <u+2014> the economy <u+2014> and instead spend those last days defending herself or trying to attack trump, said the pollster stan greenberg. and her own campaign believes that suburban white women turned out in lower numbers than expected because the email issue arose. that segment of the population was the one most perturbed by the video that emerged of donald trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. that a subsequent news story of alleged sexual assault <u+2014> a crime in which clinton was obviously blameless <u+2014> would then lead some of those same suburban white women to discount the female candidate is a painful, paradoxical quirk of history. during the election, there was hope that all the stories of sexual assault or harassment would at least force members of both parties to consider the gravity of the issue and its shocking prevalence; there was a momentary sense of women rising up to demand better and to refuse to stay silent. and yet even that seemingly noncontroversial issue took on a partisan feel, as trump supporters dismissed mere <u+201c>locker room talk.<u+201d> a brutal lesson of this election, for so many women, may be that there is no escaping the direct or indirect effects of the male libido. now that hillary has lost, it is hard to shake the impression that the leches have won. susan dominus is a staff writer for the magazine. sign up for our newsletter to get the best of the new york times magazine delivered to your inbox every week.
hillary clinton, a woman dogged by men<u+2019>s misdeeds
susan dominus