How offensive can Hillary foes be?

WASHINGTON, D.C. - In coming months, America will decide whether to elect its first female president. And amid a techno-media landscape where the wall between private vitriol and public debate has been reduced to rubble, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D.-N.Y.) is facing an onslaught of open misogynistic expression.

Step lightly through that thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Hillaryland and you are soon knee-deep in "bitch," "slut," "skank," "whore" and, ultimately, what may be the most toxic four-letter word in the English language.

We have never been here before.

No woman has run quite the same gantlet. And, of course, no man has.

Thanks to several thousand years of phallocentric history, there is no comparable vocabulary of degradation for men, no equivalently rich trove of synonyms for a sexually sullied male. As for the word beginning with C? No single term for a man reduces him to his genitals to such devastating effect.

In times past, this coarser conversation would have remained mostly personal and subterranean. But now we have a blogosphere, where no holds are barred and vituperative speech is prized. We have social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, with their limitless ability to make the personal public.

What's permissible?

"Part of the way a culture asks, 'Where are the boundaries?' is somebody makes it the topic of a meta-conversation -- let's talk about the talk," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. That's what happened after Don Imus slurred the Rutgers University women's basketball team.

"It's a discussion we are going to have if Hillary Clinton is nominated," said Jamieson, who originally went searching the Web for racist invective aimed at Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, only to find the raw sexism being directed at Clinton far more common and virulent.

"I've been waiting," Jamieson said. "When is somebody going to make this stuff visible enough to have that conversation?"

She thought the moment had arrived in mid-November when, at a campaign meeting in South Carolina, a woman of patrician bearing asked Arizona Sen. John McCain, "How do we beat the bitch?"

A surprised McCain laughed along with the rest of the small crowd.

Viewed nearly a million times on YouTube in just the week afterward, "How Do We Beat the Bitch" has entered the lore of the 2008 campaign, but with barely a hint of soul-searching about what it means.

"Can you imagine if that woman had said, 'How do we beat the "n-word'?'" asked Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics. For McCain, said Walsh, "it was a terrible missed opportunity" -- or at least it was for those who think the nation might have benefited by examining why that woman felt so free to say what she did so publicly,

A conservative Republican woman running for president might provoke a far less angry male response, said sociologist C.J. Pascoe, a researcher with the Digital Youth Project at Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change. "This would not be happening if it were Elizabeth Dole," Pascoe said.

But, she said, Clinton offers young men on social networking sites a ripe target for their aggression.

The political impact of all this is uncertain. But Pascoe warns that the broader society ignores the implications of the conversations being conducted on these sites at its peril.

Delighting in heaping abuse

Facebook, popular with high school and college students, has dozens of anti-Hillary groups, many of which take great, sweaty delight in heaping abuse on Clinton as a woman, imagining her reduced to a subservient role, and visiting violence upon her.

One is "Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich," with more than 23,000 members and 2,200 "wall posts" -- Internet graffiti in which participants have fantasized about Clinton being raped by a donkey.

Another Facebook group, more temperate in tone and with about 13,000 members, is "Life's a bitch, why vote for one? Anti-Hillary '08." Like several other anti-Clinton sites, this one promotes a T-shirt: "Hillary for President. She Puts the C--- in Country."

What's going on here?

The proprietors of the Facebook group "Hillary Clinton Shouldn't Run for President, She Should Just Run the Dishes," with 2,159 members, offer a preemptive disclaimer to offended visitors:

"Do not message just to say how sexist we are and how the Lord will strike us down for hating women. That is just ignorant. It's been really hard to respond to all of the e-mails without saying the C-word, don't make us start now."

But in an interview, Daniel Jussaume, a 20-year-old junior studying politics at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, gives a more nuanced reply.

Jussaume was not among the creators of "Just Run the Dishes." After he joined, however, he volunteered to chair its "Feminist Liberal Complaint Dept."

"Words only have the power you give them," he said, describing himself as a moderate-conservative leaning toward either McCain or Rudolph Giuliani for president.

Moreover, Jussaume said, "I'm not against women in politics. I hope in my lifetime I can live to see a female president."

As for the c-word, he says he doesn't use it and that people posting online need to recognize that they bear responsibility for what they write. "I know people who were turned down for jobs because of what they have on their MySpace page from the week before," Jussaume said.

Reflecting the mainstream

Jamieson said the tone of sex-specific "vilification" of Clinton is set in the mainstream media.

On his radio show, which reaches 14.5 million people, Rush Limbaugh talks about Clinton's "testicle lock box." On his MSNBC show, Tucker Carlson says, "There's just something about her that feels castrating, overbearing and scary," and a guest, Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, says that if Clinton is going to appeal to women for support on the basis of her gender, "at least call her a vaginal-American."