Dear Editor:
I can't tell if Kevin Pennell is being serious or not in his March 23 opinion column on Bill Clinton, in which he alleges that "women have been electing fools ever since the passage of the 19th Amendment" and that Warren G. Harding won his election simply because "millions of women's hearts went pitter-patter whenever they pulled his lever in the voting booth." I choose to believe that he is not being serious because how could a mind that bigoted have managed to survive more than a few days in our society?
However, even if Pennell was being sarcastic, I have a problem with his sense of humor. The information he presents is misleading and, in my opinion, insulting.
For one thing, while Pennell is correct in reporting that "women... are the majority in this country," he then links this fact to Clinton's election (implying that women won him the presidency). However, he presents no facts to truly support this statement, like whether women are a majority of the voting population (they are not) or whether a significant number of women actually voted for Clinton at all.
Secondly, the generalization that women vote with their libidos is appalling to me. So, did women simply blunder into John F. Kennedy, who is widely regarded as a good president, simply because they thought he was "cute?"
I choose not to believe that all women - or any one woman - would base her vote for president solely on facial features and "cute smiles" - especially in a country in which the national government controls, to a large extent, her reproductive rights.
But what insults me most of all about Pennell's article is the absurd leap he makes from the fact that, in his words, "Clinton physically tried to seduce (Kathleen Willey) when she came to him for help" to the idea that "Bill Clinton, for whatever reason, is attractive to women."
Perhaps Pennell subscribes to the belief that any victim of sexual abuse wants what she gets; this is the only explanation I can find for tying together these two statements.
The only "evidence" in his column to support the fact that women supposedly like Bill Clinton is the fact that he "pawed a woman who came to him in dire need" and a depiction of him "groping (Vietnamese) females." Nowhere does Pennell suggest that Clinton did anything but force his will upon these women, and then he suggests that women like him for it!
Whether or not Clinton did anything improper inside the bedroom or outside of it is yet to be proven, and I will not offer any speculation until it is. However, I would ask that people like Kevin Pennell stop perpetrating the idea that women can only think with their estrogen levels - and the appalling belief that females rally in support of their abusers.
Ellen Simonson, freshman creative writing major
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