Many men have reacted to the perceived personal characteristics of Bill Clinton, especially concerning his relationship to his wife. 

A lot of us, perhaps even without realizing it, expect a President to play a pretty major role in our iconography and cosmology.  As the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, and hence the proverbial "most powerful man in the world," the American President occupies a heavily freighted spot as the nation’s symbolic "alpha male." 

But Bill Clinton has Hillary, and she’s not quite traditionally wifely and submissive.  That leads to the conclusion that she must be a shrew, which makes him by implication a henpecked wimp, and what kind of icon is that for anybody to be expected to venerate?  Instead of being a kind of testosterone proxy, like a good professional football team—a way for ordinary men to vicariously experience the kinds of good, powerful manly feelings that are in all too short supply in today’s world—here's this guy symbolizing the exact kinds of gender trials and tribulations that the rest of us have to put up with in our own day-to-day lives.

Of course, this view is not entirely untainted by partisan interests.   This becomes clearer if we compare Clinton with other recent Presidents—say, George Bush. 

Why didn’t Bush get any guff about his wife?  The official depiction of her as a kindly grandmother notwithstanding, at least one account that I’ve read indicates that Barbara Bush was actually quite mean, not to mention bossy—i.e., the stereotypical "old battle-axe."  Apparently, the image doctors were able to handle this satisfactorily by never giving her a chance to say much of anything substantive. 

But how did we manage to overlook the basic visual imagery?  I mean, standing beside Barbara, George often looked like he was out with his mother.  He was so much younger-looking than her, in that reedy sort of way of his, that he might as well have been holding a sign emblazoned with the word "twerp."