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They may never walk on the Oval Office carpet, but Hillary Clinton is getting a pair of pumps named in her honor.

Pop star Katy Perrys forthcoming foray into footwear will honor, among others, the former secretary of state, People magazinereported Wednesday.

Launching on Feb. 16, Katy Perry Collections will also include a sparkly multicolored sneaker designed in honor of the Girls creator and actress Lena Dunham.

The Hillary, a $139 shoe that appears to be rose gold in color, features a clear heel that contains stars adding a a pep in her step the singer says.

Ive been courting this idea for several years, Ms. Perry, who campaigned for Mrs. Clinton and performed at the Democratic convention in 2016, told People magazine. For half my career, people have been asking me when Im getting into fashion. Its always been simmering under the surface, but I wanted to do it the right way and be the real creative contributor. This is something that Ive created from the bottom up.

Ms. Perry dedicated the $129 Lena sneaker to Ms. Dunham, the coolest tomboy she knows who embraces everything and she isnt afraid to be who she is, People reported.

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Hillary Clinton to be honored by pop star Katy Perry with high-heel shoe design - Washington Times

Hillary Rodham Clinton has had an odd career for a feminist icon.

Her main occupation has consisted of being the long-suffering wife of a powerful man, infamous for treating subordinate women as disposable conveniences, who abused her ruthlessly and humiliated her publicly. In exchange for standing by her man, she was given an orphaned Senate seat in New York, where she did not live, and two shots at the presidency, which she lost to an unknown back-bencher from Chicago in 2008 and to a reality-television host in 2016.

Margaret Thatcher she isnt.

She is back to her habitual form of paid work: Making speeches that are so vague as to be nearly content-free, her famous face and bland, almost affectless mode of speech serving as a kind of blank screen onto which those gathered can project their fantasies about having been present for Something Very Important.

Whatever that might be.

This weeks speech was for the MAKERS conference, a project of AOL, which still exists. MAKERS is a collection of web videos about famous women, featuring exactly the sort of women youd imagine appealing to mid-level executives of AOL, which still exists: Lena Dunham, Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Lilly Singh. The women of the world were, one assumes, simply crying out for well-lighted videos of humorless American (Miss Singh is Canadian, i.e., American Lite) multimillionaires repeating the most tedious banalities imaginable. And so they now have them, courtesy of AOL, which still exists.

Mrs. Clintons remarks were remarkable for one line:

The future is female.

That line caught the attention of Le Figaro, which breathlessly headlined a report: Hillary Clinton: Oui, lavenir est fminin! It is likely that the editors at Le Figaro are better-read than Mrs. Clinton is and recognized the sentiment from the contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq, who used the line in his dystopian novel The Elementary Particles. Houellebecq, an aging hedonistic intellectual who writes very sad novels about aging hedonistic intellectuals, imagined a future in which sexual rivalry and unhappiness between the sexes both have been abolished with a single master-stroke: the abolition of the human race and its replacement by an engineered successor species that reproduces asexually and is entirely female.

Perhaps that is not what Mrs. Clinton has in mind.

Houellebecq was probably having some fun with the declaration of the poet Louis Aragon that la femme est lavenir de lhomme, woman is the future of man. Aragons expression has made several other appearances: Jean Ferrat sang it, and Hong Sang-soo used it as a film title. Houellebecqs version was rendered The Future Is Feminine in the English translation rather than the splashier and much more commercial-sounding The Future Is Female (an error in judgment, I think; it is intended to be a commercial-sounding slogan), but the idea is the same. In a more recent novel, Submission, Houellebecq solves the same problem in a different way: a near-future France knuckles under to Islam, and aging hedonistic intellectuals, exploiting the fact that professors in France enjoy a much, much higher social status than they do in the United States, go in enthusiastically for polygamy and arranged marriage.

RELATED: No, the Future Is Not Female

In the English-speaking world, The Future Is Female has had a different sort of career, having been taken up as the motto of lesbian separatists in the 1970s and then reborn as a popular T-shirt in recent years which, Americans being Americans, has given rise to litigation about who owns that daft phrase.

My bet is that Mrs. Clinton took the line from the T-shirt, or rather that one of her minions did. (Speechwriter for Mrs. Clinton must currently be the saddest job in all politics.) A T-shirt is about as deep as she goes. Like Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton likes to talk about the importance of art (or the arts, as such people habitually put it) and culture and the like but does not seem to have read very many serious books in the past 40 years or so, or to have thought very seriously about anything she has read. Progressives enjoy the life of the mind a great deal...in theory. Michael Tracey of The Young Turks, one of those predictable lefty types who like to go on about how much they love science and how deeply they care about the environment, took to Twitter earlier this week to ask for help in identifying an exotic bird he encountered in Texas City. It was a pelican.

Darwin, yes; Audubon, not so much.

I suppose it is just barely possible that Mrs. Clinton used The Future Is Female in tribute to radical feminists in the Age of Nixon, when she was first getting her real start in politics, and goodness knows that all those years of enduring marriage to Bill Clinton must fill one with a certain aspirational longing vis--vis the whole touchy subject of lesbian separatism. That she has been thinking about the works of Michel Houellebecq and the funny professional problem of how one would go about marketing human extinction is even more unlikely. (Though if ever there was a really convincing ad campaign for human extinction, it was Mrs. Clintons 2016 presidential effort.)

There are great works of literature that have some bearing upon the public career of Hillary Rodham Clinton (you would not believe how many performances of Macbeth I have seen in recent years), but she isnt reading contemporary French novels in her spare time, even in translation. (Like President Trump and President Obama, but unlike the current Mrs. Trump and either of the Presidents Bush, Mrs. Clinton, purportedly the most intellectually accomplished woman of her generation, does not know a foreign language. Melania Trump speaks five languages.) Mrs. Clinton is in fact a familiar political type, whose intense and lifelong focus on the pursuit and maintenance of that pettiest and most ephemeral of things political power has left her intellectually stunted, which is obvious to anyone who ever has heard her speak. No doubt she already is planning her 2020 campaign, without anyone around who cares enough to explain to her why this is absurd. She is, in truth, a tragic figure.

Bereft of anything like an original thought, she tends to repeat dopey slogans like The Future Is Female, without giving much thought to what they mean.

Which, in this case, is nothing.

Kevin D. Williamson is National Reviews roving correspondent.

Original post:
Mrs. Clinton Is Not the Future - National Review

Feb. 7, 2017, 2:16 p.m.

Monday night's MAKERSwomen's empowerment conference in Rancho Palos Verdeskicked off with a surprise video statement by Hillary Clinton that elicited a huge roar from the crowd.

"Despite all the challenges we face, I remain convinced that yes, the future is female,"Clinton said in her first recorded statement since the inauguration of Donald Trump and women's marches the next day.

The conference, which continues through Wednesday and is being live-streamed online , is bringingtogether powerful women at the height of their powers.ActressOctavia Spencer and activist Gloria Steinemkicked off the conference with a keynote conversation about Spencer's movie "Hidden Figures," and diversity in storytelling on Monday night. (And Steinem spoke exclusively to The Times about the election and the challenges ahead.)

But while Spencer and Steinem garnered a standing ovation and resounding applause, Clinton's recorded statement prompted theloudest cheers of the night.

"Remember, you are the heroes and history makers, the glass ceiling breakers of the future," Clinton said in the video. "As I've said before, I'll say again: Never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world."

Check out the full clip below.

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Today in Entertainment: Daft Punk to open pop-up shop in LA; Lady Gaga to duet with Metallica at Grammys - Los Angeles Times

February 7, 2017 If you've been wondering what Hillary Clinton is up to these days she is not far and she is still cheering for women.

Mrs. Clinton, the 2016 Democratic Partys presidential nominee, on Monday made her first appearance since the inauguration of President Trump in a video statement released on the first day of the 2017 Makers Conference.

Despite all the challenges we face, I remain convinced that yes, the future is female, the former secretary of State said in the video. Just look at the amazing energy we saw last month as women organized a march that galvanized millions of people all over our country and across the world.

The three-day conference, which organizers bill as 36-hour action plans on women in the workforce, features other high-profile speakers from politics, Hollywood, and business, including organizer Gloria Steinem and actress Octavia Spencer.

Organized as the second annual conference by Makers a storytelling platform dedicated to the discussions of womens issues the conference invites hundreds of leaders this year, hoping to raise awareness and seek solutions on issues ranging from violence against women and inclusion of men.

This years conference is themed #BEBOLD, following Clintons special announcement, and the organizers have dubbed the event the meeting after the march, referring to the Womens March that happened one day after Mr. Trumps inauguration and drew, according to some estimates, more than half a million people to Washington D.C.

"What passed as bold in 2016, is not going to get us through 2017, said Makers founder Dyllan McGee and Vice President Samantha Leibovitz DeChiaro in their opening remarks.

The statement comes at a time when a surge of young women are flooding to local Democratic organizations, planning to give politics a first try as the first-time politician Trump settles into office. The Christian Science Monitors Story Hinckley reported last week:

Since President Trumps election, young progressive women are flooding political training programs. They are energized by a fear of what a Trump presidency might bring on issues from reproductive rights and climate change to immigration policy and education funding. Ironically, some are also inspired by Trump, a first-time candidate who won the presidency despite a lack of political experience.

While it is still too early to tell if the wave of females enthusiastic about politics is comparable to the burst of interest in 1992 when law professor Anita Hill accused US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in his confirmation hearing this outpouring, according to the Monitor, is happening just at a time when local Democratic representation has declined drastically.

And as the first woman in history to win the party's presidential nomination, Clinton may be giving these young women the encouragement they need.

And remember, you are the heroes and history makers, the glass ceiling breakers of the future, she said. As Ive said before, Ill say again, never doubt you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and every opportunity in the world.

Read more here:
Hillary Clinton speaks by video: 'The future is female' - Christian Science Monitor

I was beginning to miss Hillary Clinton now that Steve and Betsy, and the rest of the Republicans, have taken over the world.

Until yesterday, when she released a video her first post-inauguration appearance to promote this years MAKERS conference. MAKERS, if you havent heard of it (I hadnt), sounds a bit like the World Economic Forum, in that it involves lots of posh people talking about how hard life is. Only these posh people are women.

But back to the video. During it, Clinton stares lovingly into the camera, her cheekbones illuminated by heavenly lighting, and delivers a feminist message. Remember, you are the heroes and history makers, she says to the girls of tomorrow. The glass-ceiling breakers of the future.

The general purpose of the video is to inspire women to stand up for themselves, and to big, bad men. I suspect it will be hailed as an amazing rejection of Donald Trump and all things sexist. Even though its just a big fat clich and exactly the sort of thing that got him into power.

The fact is that huge swathes of the public are sick of hearing this phoney, simpering type of third wave feminism. I know I am. In particular, Ive had enough of glass ceilings. Where the hell are they all? Im ready to break one just to get a new metaphor.

Thats beside the point, though, because its gender politics that grate on me, and Clintons insistence on using them, even though she got into power without deploying the F word.

What she and many political pundits forget is that for every woman inspired by her go get em message, others feel really patronised. Clintons pep talk suggests that we are all sitting on our hands, in desperate need of reassurance. Perhaps without her strong words we might be crying into our dinners at night our biggest achievement!

But most of women dont think of themselves as victims, nor in need of mobilisation by Clinton. They have enough willpower and competitiveness to get things done themselves. Yet increasingly they are being asked to club together with the sisterhood, or whatever its called next. Far from empowering women, this reduces them into a category that changes how others interpret them. Thats what gender politics does; it fragments and divides people into minimal entities.

Hillary Clinton receives standing ovation on attending Broadway show

Indeed, over the last few months I have lost count of the numbers of gym classes, tech gatherings or worse I have been invited to in the promise that theyll be all female, as if this is a fantastic selling point. But I dont want to be some sort of millennial Amazonian. Are men so terrifying, that we now must have separate activities to them? No.

Gender politics is certainly not the antidote to Donald Trump, nor sexist sentiment generally. The Breitbart types find it pathetic when women have to be told by Clinton to stand up for ourselves. It emboldens their stereotype of us as weak.

What I found worst about Clintons video was its suggestion that girls are worried about what the future holds. I suspect this is far from the truth, as children are so clearly oblivious political events and sentiment.

But they are not immune to neuroses, which many adults are giving off at the moment. The worst thing we can do is suggest to girls that sexism will come to get them, as Clintons video covertly hints. Its not even the case! They must expect to be winners.

If you look at some of the most successful people, let alone in politics, many of them forgot that they were women. Not literally everyone has to go to the toilet but they wanted to climb out of the box, rather than put themselves into it. Now theres a better metaphor for you than this glass ceiling lark.

In truth, I am tired of Clinton and anyone else preaching naff, clichd words to women, in the name of feminism. A lot of it is loserism. Even the This Girl Can campaigns do my head in when Im out and about. I dont need an advert for validation. Of course this girl can! And will!

But this girl cannot stand being patronised, which is exactly what Clintons inspirational message did. She of all people should know that women dont need such blathering nonsense.

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Hillary Clinton's video is unbelievably patronising. The best thing women can do is ditch gender politics - The Independent