The Monica Lewinsky crisis throws a new light on that enigmatic photo of Bill and Hillary, their generous flesh covered only in bathing suits, mock-waltzing together on the beach in St. Thomas. Despite the first couple’s coy complaints about the supposed invasion of their vacation privacy, almost everyone assumed the shot had been cleverly posed by someone employed by the President’s anti-Paula Jones publicity campaign. After all, in real life, what amorously inclined, privacy-deprived couple— finding themselves in a gorgeously lonely spot— would leap to their feet, whistling Strauss?
But now that we know that the President, insufficiently chastened by Paula Jones’s charges of sexual harassment, has, in all likelihood, been carrying on with every female within grabbing distance—who is to say that he was not simultaneously romancing Hillary, too? A man of such gargantuan appetites might easily, in the odd moment of need, mistake his own wife for a bimbo.
Technically speaking, it is not yet a crime in the United States for a man, even a married one, to have sex with a consenting twenty-one-year-old. The legal snare lies in the accusation that Clinton urged Lewinsky to lie about their affair under oath, should Jones’s lawyers subpoena her in order to help establish the President’s alleged runaway priapism. But if Clinton is impeached, the real issue will not be the mere suborning of a witness, but our entire culture war over sex, sexuality, and various other pathways to pleasure.
For years now, the right has been inching ahead in our civil war over culture and morality, leaving America in the grip of a pitilessly Puritanical backlash. The tragedy is that Clinton might once have been able to turn this backlash around—if only, as in so many other issue areas, he had been brave as well as cute and smart.
Clinton, like the rest of the boomers, grew up in a society that was far more indulgent of male philandering. In John F. Kennedy’s time, as has often been noted, men of power actually gained points by guzzling and grabbing. Certainly it did not seem to hurt JFK that dozens of his aides and Secret Service officers witnessed his trysts with whole pools full of babes at a time, or so Seymour Hirsch reports in The Dark Side of Camelot. In the culture of the early 1960s, executive men in gray flannel routinely lapped up their martini lunches, leered at the hat-check gal, and staggered back to the office to pinch their secretaries’ butts. All this was considered fine, manly behavior and evidence of unobstructed testosterone flow. In an era when gay men were portrayed as limp-wristed fairies, it may even have helped to be known as an energetic pursuer of women.
The influx of women into the workforce, beginning in the sixties, was bound to challenge the male conception of the office as playpen, even if that office was the Oval one. It is not that women or their feminist spokespersons like sex any less than men, or that all women are at all times disgusted by the leering attentions of males. In some settings, in fact, we welcome and even encourage them. But the workplace is different. We go there to get a job done, and unless that job is lap-dancing, it’s an insult to be judged by one’s body parts and willingness to share them.
Feminists outlawed sexual harassment to clear the way for women’s economic advancement, which is, among other things, an essential ingredient for women’s liberation in the sexual realm as well. Sure, some charges of sexual harassment occasionally seem, even to this hard-line feminist, a little on the oversensitive side. But even men don't appreciate unsolicited intimacies in public settings—which is why, if you want to insult a German or French man who is not a close friend or family member, you start by addressing him as du or tu.
It wasn’t feminism, though, that undid Bill Clinton. He seems genuinely comfortable around women, even those of the non-babe variety. He appoints them to high positions; he has stood his ground on abortion rights despite what must be powerful daily temptations to defect. As a result, organized feminism has remained by his side through every “bimbo eruption” so far, adopting a Hillary-like stance as the ever upbeat and oblivious spouse.
When Paula Jones surfaced with her accusation of crude sexual harassment in 1993, the National Organization for Women muttered darkly about right-wing conspiracies and tactfully averted its gaze. A few feminists (myself included) were distressed by NOW ’s stand-by-your-man forbearance: If sexual harassment is a crime, it’s a crime even when nice-guy Democrats do it to right-leaning women.
Still, you could argue that there was always something good-natured about Bill’s derelictions. No one has produced credible evidence that, for example, Jones failed, as charged, to get a promotion because she rejected his advances. And it is not true, as Lewinsky’s lawyer William Ginsburg weirdly opined, that if Clinton did indeed have sex with his client, he must be a “misogynist.” If anything, he likes women far too much for his own fragile powers of self-control. The brain says no, but again and again, the groin says go.
But Clinton’s problem is not just that he is a man, a married man, or even a married man who happens to be the President of the United States. In the cultural iconography of 1990s America, he has had to work overtime as the representative of an entire generation and its favorite decade— the 1960s. Liberals loved him, back in 1992 (and before he betrayed them in so many ways), for dodging the draft and for admitting he'd been around pot-smokers without stalking out in a snit or summoning the narcs. O ne popular political button, issued just after his first election, shows a smiling, long-haired, very young Bill over the loving caption, “My President.”
‘A President who snatches alms from poor moms, while consigning their libidos to cold showers and prayer meetings, arguably deserves whatever torments the Puritan right can devise as punishment.’
For the same reasons, the right has despised him from the start as Dionysus, god of orgies, incarnate. At the Republican National Convention in 1992, Marilyn Quayle, wife of then-Vice President Dan Quayle, fired one of the opening salvos in the culture war when she excoriated demonstrators, drug-takers, draft-dodgers, and, for good measure, working mothers. Nor was her rhetoric particularly inflammatory for the right. When, for example, rocker Jerry Garcia died in 1995 (a passing that the White House noted with appropriate sorrow), the Moonie-owned Washington Times seized the occasion to denounce the 1960s as a “toxic decade ,” marked by “nihilism” and “infantile hedonism.”
From the start, Clinton bungled his role as 1960s icon. Asked about the draft-dodging, he mumbled and waffled, thereby blowing the priceless opportunity to say, “Yes, and I not only dodged the draft, I also protested proudly against that hideous imperialist war, as so many other citizens of conscience did.” On the pot question, he reached a nadir of ambivalence— admitting simultaneously that he’d smoked it, that he hadn’t inhaled it, and that he wished he’d ingested a toke or two after all. Why not say, “Yeah, I tried it. Didn’t we all? And what’s the fuss? One of the wonderful legacies of the 1960s counterculture is that we now understand that marijuana is a harm less high, with none of the nasty side-effects of booze”?
Better yet, he could have challenged the 1960s-bashing head on. That poor demonized decade was hardly the ten-year-long sex-and-drugs orgy of prurient rightwing imaginings. It was, for those of you too young to have been there, the last time when great masses of Americans took their polity seriously enough to try to participate in it—by organizing, protesting, and generally doing the kinds of things that wide-awake citizens normally do. (Not that there’s anything wrong with a little partying, too.)
What is more germane to his present difficulties, he could, years ago, have scored a few preemptive points on the subject of sex and its role in public affairs. An adulterous politician may owe an apology to his wife, but unless the adulterous activities were carried on during Cabinet meetings or with the heads of foreign states, he does not owe one to his constituents. When Gennifer Flowers revealed her affair with then-candidate Clinton, he and Hillary went on TV to offer some sappy twitterings about the vicissitudes of love and marriage. Better to have stated firmly right then: “Sorry folks, but this is none of your business. Even while leaving a thick trail of semen all over the state of Arkansas, I got my job done.”
Not only did he fail to challenge the Puritanism of the religious right, he gradually acceded to it, even wrapping himself, increasingly, in its tawdry banner. The worst case, because it potentially dam ages so many lives outside of Clinton’s immediate family, was welfare “reform.”
To the right, welfare reform was not so much a budget-cutting measure as a moral crusade waged against those mythically promiscuous ghetto women who rep ro duce solely to gain a few additional dollars in welfare payments. This is not the place to rebut that curiously sex-soaked stereotype, or to go into the actual statistics on the reproductive habits of the poor. Clinton could have done that at any time, armed with extensive data from his own Health and Human Services Department. Instead, his Administration joined the campaign against “illegitimate”—or, as we used to say before the right altered the relevant vocabulary, out-of-wedlock—births, having his HHS director declare them “just wrong.”
No one, of course, could have expected a sitting President to endorse non-marital sex; the mistake lay in not asserting, firmly and calmly, that sex happens, that it happens even among people who are not married to each other, and that the products of such unions are fully legitimate human beings, deserving of social supports. In stead, to his eternal dishonor, in 1996 Clinton signed a welfare bill that ends the federal responsibility to children in poverty and, as an added insult, provides funds to enroll their mothers in what the right styles as “chastity training.”
Now a President who snatches alms from poor moms, while consigning their libidos to cold showers and prayer meetings, arguably deserves whatever torments the Puritan right can devise as punishment for his own sexual wanderings. My own preference would be to see him impeached for some weightier misdeed than bedding down a White House intern and urging her to lie about it, and his record provides a surfeit of these.
On issue after issue, Clinton would articulate a principle—such as human rights for gays in the military— only to fold at the first snarl of opposition from the right. He promised an “activist government,” then gave us a government that is more concerned with what our children wear to school (uniforms or mufti) than with whether they have a meal in their stomachs when they leave the house in the morning. He raised taxes for the rich, then whipped around and apologized to them for doing so. The list could be extended indefinitely, but the point is this: With the exception of abortion rights, there is nothing Clinton has consistently stood up for, least of all the old 1960s notion that sex outside of marriage is not innately and in all cases a sin.
By dodging the draft, Clinton may have saved his life. But by slinking away from the culture war, he left the way clear for the political faction that believes sex is evil while usury, exploitation, and pollution are just sound management principles.
If the right-wing Puritans have him cornered now—well, no one can say he ever exerted himself, in the slightest way, to prevent this sordid outcome. As for Hillary: One can only hope that those photos purporting to document marital love were, in fact, carefully posed .