It's the Sex, Stupid
By Andrew Ferguson
(TIME, February 2) -- So there we are, my seven-year-old son and I, sitting on the
couch last week, watching the evening news. I flatter myself
that it's a scene from the civics textbooks: Dad introducing
Junior to the wide world of public affairs. My son knows
something is up with President Clinton, but he's not sure what,
precisely, and I'm not sure I want to explain it to him.
Suddenly the words Oval Office pop out from the newsreader, and
then President, then oral sex, and my son's brow furrows. He
looks up at me, thoroughly puzzled. I reach for the mute button
and kill the sound from the TV. This is not what the civics
books had in mind.
I mention my homey vignette because already among the pundit
class a consensus has emerged about the role of sex in the
latest Clinton scandal: it is not, at the deepest level, about
sex; the truly damning allegations are about possible perjury,
and about the subornation of perjury, and about the obstruction
of justice, and about other matters of law.
No. This thing is about sex.
On its face that statement may sound so banal as to be
meaningless. Everyone knows sex is involved. My point is
different. Sex is the whole ball of wax. If the scandal mortally
wounds Clinton, it will be because the public understands the
relationship he is alleged to have forged with Monica Lewinsky.
It will be because they had sex and because of the kind of sex
they had.
In the knowing, irony-drenched world of baby-boomer culture, no
one wants to be thought a prig. So let's stipulate that simple
adultery would not have endangered the President politically or
created the lurid spectacle before us. He's been accused of that
before and survived. People seemed not to believe his denials in
1992 about Gennifer Flowers -- in fact, according to leaks from
his recent deposition, the President seems not to have believed
them himself -- but the public apparently forgave him. An implicit
bargain was struck, and it's hard to imagine a national
convulsion erupting from disclosures that, say, he had stashed
away somewhere in the Old Executive Office Building a cabaret
singer roughly his own age.
The tapes of Monica Lewinsky, though, tell a story that is,
shall we say, more complicated. If the tapes are correct -- and
Bill Clinton, of course, says they are not -- the President of the
United States is a sexual predator. The story line is
boy-meets-girl, with a twist. The boy is 50 years old, married,
and the most powerful and famous man in the world; the girl is
by many definitions still a girl, a few years older than his
daughter: 21, fresh from college, away from home, working for
him without pay at her first real job. He is her boss; she is
starstruck. He travels in motorcades; she works as a clerk. She
is flirtatious and pretty and willing, and he takes her.
Much has already been made about the manner of sex described on
the tapes. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is strictly
one-way, designed for the maximum pleasure of the recipient. The
pleasure of the giver is incidental. The act itself summarizes
the relationship, as the tapes reveal it: someone is the
supplicant, and it's not the President. Those of us unlucky
enough to remember the late 1960s and early 1970s -- before Monica
Lewinsky was born -- recall the radical-feminist critique of sex
as purely a matter of power and exploitation. Under some
circumstances the critique seems not so radical. It explains
why, for example, professors are enjoined from dating their
students. Immaturity and infatuation make you vulnerable, even
if you yourself aren't aware of it, and decent people in
positions of power do not exploit the vulnerable for kicks. Here
the logic of common morality is inexorable, and the conclusion
is harsh: If the President had sex with her, he is not a decent
man; he will be understood as such; and his public life will be
over.
Why? Maybe no one wants to be thought a moralist these days, but
most people are moralists at heart; their standards might be
flexible and forgiving, but they're not infinitely elastic. It
is possible, and in the view of some people likely, that the
tapes will be exposed as the quite elaborate fantasies, 20
hours' worth, of an unstable young woman. But if the tapes are
true, that wobbly moralism will reassert itself, for many of
those irony-drenched boomers are now parents of their own Monica
Lewinskys. One of two things will follow. The public will demand
that Clinton go; or, tired of watching the news with their
fingers on the mute button, they will turn away not only from
the President but also from the very idea of public
responsibility. And that, needless to say, isn't what the civics
textbooks had in mind either.
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