I Read A Bunch of Rodham Sex Scenes So You Wouldn't Have To
In Depth
“I did not know Hillary had a creampie fetish,” a friend of mine replied in the group chat, prompting me to either scream or wince or emit a feral combination of the two as the chat descended deeper into chaos. I had been sending select snippets from Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, Rodham, a speculative look at how Hillary Clinton’s life might have panned out if she didn’t marry Bill. For the record, I haven’t read the entirety of Rodham; I have, however, read a lot of smutty fanfiction, and I have also read the Rodham sex scenes that my colleague Megan Reynolds shared with me. It’s not that the writing isn’t good, but… the gratuitousness, saccharine nature of the sex scenes—the sentimentality of Hillary contemplating Bill ejaculating inside of her—definitely reads like something I’ve read on fanfiction archive AO3 a few dozen times.
While these snippets don’t indicate that a young, 20-something-year-old Hillary Clinton—er, Hillary Rodham—actually had a creampie fetish, they certainly indicate that in Sittenfeld’s imagination, Hilldawg liked to rawdawg. It’s this intimate look at Clinton’s sex life that makes this fictional portrayal feel invasive, to the point where it is sometimes difficult to read.
But damn, does it make for great group chat fodder.
So without further ado, here are some steamy scenes from Rodham. I apologize in advance.
The following takes place at the end of Hillary’s first date with Bill, in the courtyard of a gallery in New Haven. Bill Clinton has yaoi hands:
It seemed he felt it, too, because he removed his arm from my shoulder and took my hand, my left with his right. In addition to being enormous, his hands were beautiful, his fingers long and slender. I could sense him turn his head toward me, and I knew that if I turned my head toward him, we’d kiss, and I wanted this to happen and also was overwhelmed and immobilized. A few more seconds passed, seconds that were silent and massive and terrifying and thrilling, and then his lips were against my neck. Softly but firmly, he kissed my neck over and over. It felt very good, and I was very happy. And eventually I could turn to him, our mouths could find each other, our lips and tongues, and then we were kissing fully.
Reynolds described the following scene as, “The ever-charming Bill takes Hillary out for a late-night ice cream sundae, and then back to her apartment for a different kind of treat ;)” which was too good not to include. Hillary obviously thinks highly of Bill at this point, because she cannot believe that she—little ol’ Hillary Rodham—is getting it in with Bill Yaoi Hands Clinton:
And then I could feel the nudging of Bill’s erection, it was probably going to happen, then it was definitely going to happen, he was entering me, and I gasped—I gasped both because it felt so incredibly good and because I couldn’t believe I was naked with this man. And then he really was inside me, it was happening, and we would eternally from this moment on be two people who’d had sex with each other. Even as he thrust into me, as I arched up against him and gripped his buttocks, there were a few seconds in which our eyes met and we looked at each other, both of us unblinking. Neither of us was smiling; smiling would have been trivial, or beside the point. To be with him in this way was an almost intolerable ecstasy. It was the most precious thing I had ever experienced.
Hillary visits Bill’s bachelor pad near the Long Island Sound. He serenades her, nakie.
I kissed Bill’s bare shoulder. “There’s nothing I need besides you. But what’s that?” Next to the armchair, a black rectangular case about two feet in length had caught my eye. Like a suitcase, it had a handle and two metal clasps.
“It’s my saxophone.”
“You play the saxophone?”
“No, I just left the case there to impress you. It’s empty.” Lightly, he flicked my clavicle with his thumb and middle finger. “Of course I play.”
“You’ll have to show me sometime,” I said, and the next thing I knew, he’d bounded out of bed, and I was offered an unobscured view of his pale buttocks as he bent, opened the case, and pulled out the golden instrument. Still naked, he turned around, inserted the mouthpiece between his lips, and began playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Hillary, angsting after a run-in with one of Bill’s old lovers, seeks comfort from a very horny Bill.
“Your outsides are attractive all by themselves. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this during the women’s movement, but you have great tits. And your little waist, and your nice soft bum, and your delicious honey pot…”
I joined Bill in bed, and when I was lying on my back naked and he was lying on top of me naked, he looked at me and smiled. He said, “Hillary, I really enjoy discussing theology with you. I also enjoy doing lots of other things with you,” and then he plunged inside me.
Hillary has some very thinky thoughts about rawdogging:
As impatient as he naturally was, he never rushed when we were in bed. He was leisurely, and I was the one who became increasingly, gloriously frantic.
And the truth was that when he was thrusting into me, I had such a strong sense of wanting him to come inside me, wanting no barriers between us, wanting the things we did with each other to be different from the things we did in the rest of our lives, with other people. None of this was remotely like what I’d felt with Roy or Eddie. I’d regarded their semen as, if not disgusting, then as messy and mildly regrettable, like a spilled glass of water.
[…]
Yet here we were, with all of his skin touching all of my skin; he was kissing my neck, next to my ear, or we were kissing with our mouths open and our tongues mashing together. His body in my arms, pressed against me, was shocking. Looking into his eyes was shocking. That we were literally fused, that his erection was inside me and my legs were wrapped around him, hooked through the backs of his knees—all of this was shocking.
Bill, the titty fiend, as always:
“Eddie Shinske is moving out of a place on Edgewood Avenue that I always liked. It has a fireplace in the living room. I’ll call and see if he knows if anyone has rented it.”
“Can you wait until the weekend to call? Or at least until after seven tonight?” This was when the rates were cheaper.
“Is that a confirmation that we get to live in sin?”
I fastened the bra then walked over to him, leaned down, and kissed his lips. “I guess it is.”
He slipped his hand underneath the bra’s left cup and squeezed my nipple. He said, “It’s such a shame to cover these up.”
And here we have Bill asking if he can finger Hillary in the car as he drives:
We were on the highway, not close to other cars or trucks, and I reached up to my hips, hooked my thumbs into the waistband of my underwear, and pulled them to my ankles, above my sandals, without taking them off.
“Please don’t get pulled over,” I said, and after that I really couldn’t speak. I was writhing against his fingers. I lasted about two minutes, and then I was saying as quietly as I could, “Oh, baby. Bill. Bill. Baby, I love you so much.” He stopped moving his fingers and just cupped me, and I whimpered incoherently.
He was alternating between watching the road and turning his head to watch me, smiling, and he said, “I love you so much. I really do. And also—” He lifted his hand off me and gestured toward his own lap, where he clearly had an erection.
“I don’t think I should do anything while you’re driving,” I said. “But when we’re home, I really, really want to make you feel as good as you make me feel. Is that okay?”
“That’s fantastic,” he said.
I have to wonder, is this more or less of a hazard than road head?
This is the entirety of my familiarity with Rodham. I don’t think I’ll be reading the rest of it anytime soon.