I'm having trouble reading Ana Marie Cox's "Dear Senate women: grow up and don't pass Hillary Clinton 'secret notes.'"

I don't know. Maybe it's because she's writing in The Guardian now. This could be some British way of writing that just can't make it into my American mind. Anyway, Cox — going on about a letter 17 female Senators wrote to Hillary Clinton urging her to run for President — is working with the premise that "male representatives are boys and women are the grown-ups." That premise is not the part I'm having trouble with. I understand it. I understand it as: Feminism-as-sexism is funny; come on, give us a little room to get in some harmless girly slaps after all the millennia of suffering.

But let's move on. Cox writes:

No one in the media has seen the letter, so I guess it's possible that it contains some kind of burn-book-level intel: Jeff Session (Alabama Republican senator) is a grotsy little byotch, Lindsay Graham (South Carolina Republican senator) made out with a hot dog, Ted Cruz (Tea Party Texan) is almost too conservative to be anything but a robot. 

"Grotsy" isn't even in Urban Dictionary, but I understand it. It's like "grotty," which was understandable as a variation of grotesque when the British comedian George Harrison said it in "Hard Day's Night." Grotsy is as understandable as ugsly.

(Maybe the "s" absconded from "Sessions," which she has as "Session.") [ADDED: Commenters say it should be "grotsky," and the phrase "grotsky little byotch" is from "Mean Girls."]

I understand the rest of those insults and why it's funny to just make up insults about Republicans to pad out a column and why — when you're talking about Republicans — it's okay to apply the mustard of homophobia. That's all well within the rules of American political humor.

Cox concedes that it's completely boring that a bunch of female Democrats support a Hillary candidacy. So what's to talk about? The fact that it was secret. A letter with nothing interesting to say was nevertheless written and revealed to have been written but we still can't see the text even though the text is presumably uninteresting. Well, there's your reason right there for not revealing the text. It's thuddingly dull. Cox says:

There's not much reason to make your support for something political private....

Which is why the existence of the letter and its gist was revealed. Cox concedes this as well: The secrecy label was "less about keeping the support in the note secret than making the support note-worthy." I won't get tripped up by that hyphen. That must be how they write "noteworthy" in the U.K.

So the letter functioned, dully, to give a teensy bounce to the Hillary for President beachball that no one feels like playing with right now. So what's to say? Here's where we get to the part of Cox's column that I found so hard to read:

Hillary... knows a thing or two about "inevitability", and what she knows is not likely to make her more excited to suffer through a fourth presidential campaign (I think we can safely say what she went through during Bill's campaigns counts as suffering). 

What? Hillary doesn't want to run? Excited to suffer? The meaning of suffering? There's just enough of a frisson of masochism in that to make me notice the absence of sex, which sets me off for this:

One of the maddening things about covering the Clintons is Bill's love of the dramatic reveal, the tension-filled lead-up...

Now you've got me thinking about the time "Bill Clinton Finally Just Show[ed] America His Penis."

Excuse the expression: back to Cox:

Bill Clinton is called the "The Big Dog", but he's really a tomcat (in more ways than one) – he likes to toy with his victims. He likes to play hard-to-get, though in the ends, he's almost always gotten. 

In the ends.... More Brit-talk? Does that mean the same as "in the end." The ends? Is that like the way there's an "s" on "buttocks"? (Is it the "s" that absconded from "Sessions"?)

I don't know what I'm supposed to think about here. Bill Clinton likes to play hard to get? That's not how Juanita Broaddrick describes it.

Based on that, journalists have determinedly disregarded any indication that Hillary's ambivalence is genuine. 

But Hillary is not Bill. Games are for boys; I don't think this is a game for her.

All right. I've settled down. I guess there was no call to think about sex. No sex, please, we're British. Cox was just trying to say that Bill Clinton is good at toying with us politically, so if he were to act ambivalent, it would be theater. Is Cox saying that because Hillary isn't good at that kind of theater, somehow she might actually be sincere in her ambivalence? Most of us are just ignoring the lady's coyness. We already know what she wants. If she can't do coyness as prettily as Bill, that's a reason not to look at the insipid show.

Maybe Cox is just saying the thing that is too boring to write about: We already know that Hillary is running for President. And: Just say it! Cox gets back to her feminism-as-sexism with that last line, which is trying so hard to be a zinger: "Games are for boys; I don't think this is a game for her." Games — plural — are for boys, and this particular game — the teasing roll-out of a candidacy — is not for her. If games are for boys and Hillary is not a boy, then no games are for her. To specify that one game is not for her is to imply that she is a boy. I'm just talking about logic here, not saying that's where Cox meant to go.

Cox apparently meant to end where she began: The premise that female politicians are the adults. But the evidence is that the females have acted like children, so what are you going to do? Cox tells them to stop acting like men, because men are childish. But they're all childish! They're all acting like politicians! Cox should only be able to say wouldn't it be nice if only the males behaved like children, and then you could say the males are children and the females are grown-ups?

Really, all you can say is that they're all politicians, acting like politicians, and some are better at playing politics than others, and — clearly! — Bill is better than Hillary. Therefore: Hillary should keep it simple. Noted. In my note-book of things that are just barely note-worthy.

"I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

It means something that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "pig" instead of "pork." I think about how George Harrison sang about piggies, the bigger piggies, "in their starched white shirts... stirring up the dirt" as well as "the little piggies... crawling in the dirt." (He stirred up Charles Manson to deliver "a damned good whacking.")

Life was "getting worse" for the little piggies, while, by contrast, the bigger piggies "always had clean shirts." Now, I'm not going to veer off into the topic of The Great — big pig — Gatsby's shirts. You know if you've read "The Great Gatsby" or seen the movie that a huge to-do is made at one point about how many beautiful shirts Gatsby had.

But here in this Gatsby project, we look at one sentence in isolation. That way, everyone's on the same footing. You don't have the little readers and the bigger readers. Life isn't getting worse for some of us and just fine for others. We gather here, in the daily post, to consume one sentence, so let's lunch.

Let's know each other by first names. Here we are equals. We have all read the sentence, and we can all very well speak out about it. Here, we actively exclude extrinsic evidence. About the book, I mean. We're free to drag in anything else, such as The Beatles, as betamax3000 did so well in yesterday's Gatsby thread, the one about warm human magic.

So pig, then. Pig, not pork. Which makes us think that the clerks and bond-salesmen are little piggies. The men eating humble food — all the humbler for saying pig, not pork — in a dark, crowded place. A pigsty? Our narrator is crammed in close quarters with them as he chows down. He's on familiar terms with them: He calls them by their first names. He's a member of the herd of little piggies.

Did you notice the words are right there one after the other: little pig? As a competent and tolerant reader, you can tell it's the sausages and not the pigs that are supposed to be little, and as a picky reader, you might say it's bad writing to permit that ambiguity to survive the final draft. But maybe the writer wanted you to see little pig. And the bigger question is why insert the pig at all? We'd presume that sausages were pork. Obviously, Fitzgerald wants us to think about pigs and think about the men as pigs. He wasn't as blunt as Mr. Harrison, but he was calling these guys pigs.

Another reason to throw pig in there, permitting the ambiguity, is to call the sausages little without being too aggressively Freudian about saying little sausages and making us think too quickly — before we'd noticed all these other things — of pricks.

ADDED: Meade, helping me proofread, questioned "herd" as the proper collective term for pigs. I know there are some other options, but I like it because it evokes Jesus:

Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.” He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. Those tending the pigs ran off, went into the town and reported all this, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region.