PENIS POLITICS

A woman describes a career of navigating predatory men in this debut political memoir.

Hinton knows politics. After covering it as a newspaper reporter, she served as a press secretary in Washington, D.C., and New York City for the likes of Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio. The author is all too familiar with what she terms “penis politics,” the tendency of men in authority to use their gender as a means of dominating the women around them. “In politics,” she writes, “there’s a toxic brew of ego, entitlement, power, testosterone, and a ‘bro culture’ that is especially difficult for women to navigate.” Hinton recounts that she got her first taste of such behavior before she ever left her hometown of Soso, Mississippi, where one of her high school's basketball coaches assaulted one of her teammates. The author and her friends said nothing, a decision that would resound throughout her life whenever other men, from novelist William Styron to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, attempted to use their stature to intimidate Hinton. This memoir is a reckoning of such moments, from the author’s teenage years racing passing trains to get faster for basketball to her college years studying journalism and political science at Ole Miss. After a brief career as a journalist, she got to Washington, D.C., by working for the first Black congressman elected from Mississippi since Reconstruction, Mike Espy. Her time as press secretary for Cuomo, when he was assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was a heady mix of work she believed in—such as trying to help Black churches rebuild following arsons in her home state—and her boss’s lewd jokes and bullying behavior. What’s more, while working for de Blasio during his tenure as New York City mayor, Hinton found herself in the middle of an awkward feud between her old boss—now the governor of New York—and her new one.

Hinton’s prose is sharp and incisive. She is adept at setting a scene and bringing people to life on the page. She captures the aggressive culture of American politics, as here, in one incident from the Cuomo–de Blasio feud: “Either Andrew or someone on the Cuomo team offered grudging respect for the approach in a Politico article: ‘There’s a clear belief that Karen helped de Blasio grow a pair,’ said one source. I could play penis politics, too, from time to time.” The book will perhaps be of greatest interest for the author’s experiences with Cuomo, which generally fit with the portrait of him that has emerged over the past year. According to Hinton, when she began the process of adopting her daughter, Cuomo sidelined her career at HUD. The author’s experiences working for Black candidates in Mississippi—particularly in helping them improve their images with White voters—are also captivating windows into a still-relevant area of American politics. Throughout the memoir, Hinton returns to the story of her friend who was assaulted by a coach and the shape that girl’s life took afterward, using it as a way to discuss the long-lasting consequences that predatory men with power can have on the lives of the women around them.

A timely, engaging political account about the consequences of saying nothing and speaking up.