If there’s anything more repulsive than the Presidential sex investigation, it’s the protestations of the media folks who feed on it. The consensus among the punditocracy—Will, Rosenthal, Friedman, even Dowd—is that the scandal has done irreparable damage to the “dignity of the office of President,” possibly to our military readiness, and certainly to the dignity of the press. Keith Olbermann, the owlish young fellow who hosts a cable show devoted entirely to the smutty subject of the “White House in Crisis,” has publicly confided, “There are days now when my line of work makes me ashamed, makes me depressed, makes me cry.”
The easy explanation for all this weeping and gnashing of teeth would be that Americans—media types included—have a problem with sex. Surf around for a few minutes, and you will find numerous channels named XXX-otic or XXX-tasy, while, only a few clicks of the remote away, televangelists rail piteously against the demon lust. A couple of weeks ago, on the all Christian Trinity Broadcasting Network, a Pastor Lester worked himself into a lather describing the Jezebels who seek to tempt even men of the cloth: “And they CLEAN their bodies. And they per-FUME their flesh. . . Then, lapsing into tongues, he delivered what may be the ultimate American statement on matters of an erotic nature: “Bubba wubba nikkitanny fulloosa tay!”
Or perhaps it is the kind of sex the President is alleged to have indulged in that so offends the men and women of the press. Those who imagine that America is a sexually advanced society should note that twenty-one states still have laws proscribing “sodomy”—which includes oral sex (and, in some places, affectionate encounters with livestock). And in fifteen of these states, the proscription extends to sodomous enterprises undertaken by consenting heterosexual adults. It would be nice to report that the President has campaigned tirelessly for the repeal of these bizarre laws, and for a more tolerant outlook in general, but that would have conflicted with his “family values” image. As a result, his adventures are far less palatable than if he had merely begotten a few out-of-wedlock children to brighten up the White House now that Chelsea has gone. Instead, he chose to spill his seed—on Monica’s cocktail dress and who knows what other nearby fabrics and items of Oval Office furniture. For law-abiding and God-fearing Americans, such activities pose much more than a dry-cleaning problem.
But sexual Puritanism cannot be the only explanation for the media elite’s professed dismay. The same news-people who are now beating their chests over the necessity of discussing the alleged sordid events in the Oval Office never shrank from reporting on the rape-murder of a seven-year-old beauty queen or the erotic adventures of O.J.’s dead ex-wife. We are not talking, in other words, about the kind of people who readily blush. If they are as offended as they pretend to be, then some primal taboo has been breached—something even more deep-rooted and disquieting than sex.
What could that be?
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the answer is clear: The prolonged Clinton sex crisis forces everyone to acknowledge that the President has a penis. And this is something that, in the interests of national security and patriotic self-esteem, the public is better off not knowing, or at least not dwelling upon.
There have been other times when a President has revealed too much of his physical being. LBJ had his gall bladder operation scar, which he delighted in showing off to photographers. Ronald Reagan had his rectal polyps, which—at least in diagram form—were solemnly displayed in the newspapers.
Nor is this the first time the subject of the penis itself has arisen in mainstream media discourse. The word debuted on the evening news four years ago, to describe Lorena Bobbitt’s amateur surgery on her husband. More covert references have abounded throughout the 1990s: We recall Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas’s attempts to interest Anita Hill in a literary character named “Long Dong Silver.” We note the ubiquity of the coy cliché that “size matters.” Then came Viagra, with celebrities like Hugh Hefner and Elizabeth Dole publicly gushing about its miraculous effect on the target organ.
So we knew that Presidents have bodies, and we knew that some bodies have penises, but no one really put these facts together until 1993, when Paula Jones showed up to allege that she had actually seen the Presidential member in the flesh. Her further claim, that it bears “distinguishing marks,” served to plant that organ firmly in the national consciousness: What kind of marks—Satanic ones, or perhaps tattoos? And would photographs be displayed in court? Next, after Monica Lewinsky confessed to having intimate contact with the same and preserving some of its emissions on her garments, whole new lines of speculation opened up: Will a Presidential semen sample be required for comparison, and, if so, which starlet or supermodel will be enlisted to extract it?
There is a deep reason why the terms “President” and “penis” rest so uneasily together in the mind, and it is only tangentially related to sex. The penis—to put a feminist twist on Freud—is just another phallic symbol, with “the phallus,” in psychoanalytic jargon, standing in for power. Now the President of the United States is, of course, the most powerful individual on earth—commander of nuclear missiles and submarines, bom ber of the Sudan and Afghanistan, destroyer of nations. He is the ultimate phallic symbol, perhaps the very phallus itself. So what does it mean when we are constantly distracted from his imperial majesty—that is, his role as a phallus—to his literal penis?
Here, perhaps, the enigmatic French theorist Jacques Lacan, so beloved of the postmodernist academics, can be of some help. In one of his few sentences that can be rendered into intelligible English, he has stated that the phallus “can play its role only when veiled.” Lacan does not explain exactly what happens when you strip away the veil and reveal the phallus’s connection to the physical penis, but we can guess: All its mystical potency is lost. You are left with a prick, a ding-a-ling, a weenie.
It could be argued that Clinton has undermined the dignity of the office of President in far more important ways— for example, by using that office solely as a base for his unending fundraising efforts. It could be further argued that the real way he has demeaned the nation is by leaving it without national health insurance or a livable minimum wage.
But the absence of a Presidential program—or mission, or vision—has never bothered our pundits in the least. What torments them is fear that, as the Lewinsky business rolls on, someone, somewhere—perhaps a ten-year-old child in some long-forgotten Third World country—will cry out, “Look, the Emperor’s got no trousers!” Then the tittering will begin, growing into a hearty roar, as billions of fingers point toward Washington, D.C., and billions of voices raise the question, “Is that all?