It's hard not to be furious with Bill
Clinton. Not because he fucked—or sucked, or got sucked by, or spurted
all over—Monica, or because he cheated on Hillary, or because he lied to
the country. The First Adulterer's real crime is that he didn't take
advantage of his wrecked presidential image by also blowing American
sexual hypocrisy to smithereens.
Read his lips: "Yes, I had sex, I enjoyed it,
I did exactly what I wanted to do, and you all should be so lucky. You
guys wanna impeach me for getting a blowjob? Go right ahead." If Clinton
had dared to say something so nakedly honest, maybe we wouldn't have had
to ask if he was merely asserting his masculinity when he decided to
bomb Afghanistan and Sudan. Lies and half-truths can get ugly,
especially if you have to send friends, colleagues, and an entire
government out to cover up on your behalf.
Integrity, alas, has always been far too
revolutionary a concept for politics. Some pols even like to argue that
it's detrimental to effective leadership. Many of Clinton's signature
compromises were built on sexual hypocrisy (just ask Joycelyn Elders or
gays in the military). Even after admitting to Gennifer Flowers and
dodging Paula Jones, he's still making a public show of going to church,
Hillary in one hand and a Bible in the other.
Clinton bows his head about apparently
consensual sex at the same time that a whorehouse is busted in New
Jersey and half the businessmen in town are on the premises. When New
York cops are getting caught using a brothel. And as ever, politicians
are keeping mistresses on the side, or they're ditching their dying
wives, or they're really gay, but so what? The joy of being a guy is
getting to do what a guy gets to do. What's the point of being Horatio
Alger if you can't reap the rewards?
For men in America, the reward is clearly
unbridled sex. Wilt Chamberlain beds 20,000 women. Teddy Kennedy
reportedly has intercourse on a table in the secluded room of a posh
Washington restaurant. Rock stars gorge on an unending feast of
groupies. (Superstar women, by contrast, earn the privilege of bearing
children out of wedlock.) The entire capitalist apparatus is set up to
sell women as reward: what's the come-on in the bottom of all those
liquor-ad ice cubes? Why do you need some sultry babe to sell a car? Why
wouldn't you want to be like John Kennedy, anyway? Who wouldn't want to
fuck Marilyn Monroe?
Not surprisingly, the media has decided that
the drama in the Clinton scandal revolves around women: Hillary's
heartbreak, Monica's welcoming lips, Tripp's betrayal, Goldberg's dirt,
Currie on the cross. Indeed, the only time male sex gets called into
question is when it somehow fucks up a career. On those rare occasions
when the luck of the double standard runs out, the rest of the male
establishment snaps to attention. If a guy needs nookie so bad it's
about to cost him his job, something freakish must be going on: it's for
moments like this that terms like sex addict and compulsion
were invented. But Clinton's no sex addict: he's just another guy who
thinks success gives him an inalienable right to whatever he desires.
There is a compulsion that links Clinton to
other pols at the center of sexual scandal—not the lascivious behavior,
but the childish, self-destructive acting out that starts up when it
seems they might really be held responsible for their actions. Back when
men were men, it was understood that they could preach monogamy unto
death in public and keep a harem in private. Progressive politicians,
with their prowoman agenda, pay lip service to a world in which there
must be a little more accountability than that. Which is why the guys
who behave most bizarrely when they get caught in flagrante delicto tend
to be liberals.
First, of course, was candidate Gary
Hart, who opened the door on every politician's bedroom by taunting
the media with cries of "Come and get me." And then there was
Senator Bob Packwood, defending the feminist agenda by day and
pinning women to his desk by night. Amazingly, Packwood also pulled
a Hart. Congress demanded his diaries, and he complied, but kept on
writing them, admitting his own lies and cover-up. And, if a recent
Drudge Report is to be believed, Clinton fits the same mold: he goes
on TV and says he made a mistake, but he allegedly wears Monica's
tie while doing it. As one Drudge source said, that could be
construed as Clinton's "finger to the world."
But it's no surprise he's enraged. In his
set, vows are something that can be winked at—unless the little
woman is cheating on you. Being suddenly held to the sexual rhetoric
that tells Clinton he can only have sex with one woman for the rest
of his life must make him want to slit his throat. Hell hath no
greater fury than a person whose privileges are suddenly denied.
What if you're a hot young stockbroker and they give you a lousy
seat at Le Cirque 2000? What if you're trying to hail a taxi and
they treat you like a black person and won't pick you up? What if
you're a man who thought that the whole point of power is to get
laid and then it turns out you can't do it anymore? Clinton's
fury was the only authentic emotion in his speech. He's as angry as
every single other Angry White Male we've seen over the years.
The president is pissed. Where does Starr
get off telling him what to do? How come the most powerful man in
the free world can't get the sexual privilege god gave a jock? Marv
Albert's going back on the air, for god's sake! Athletes can still
get away with raping women! And the president can't get a
blowjob? (Probably the only comparable case of denied privilege in
sports is O. J. Simpson's—like Packwood, he seems to flirt with the
idea of confession, and like Clinton, he's utterly mystified that
anything could tarnish his golden glow. But even in this society,
murder is going too far. For that, you've got to sell the mansion.)
If only Clinton had called a blowjob a
blowjob, he might have started an adult conversation about sex,
relationships, power, and privilege. He might have helped remake
America as a nation that could have real scandals, like Italy or
Japan. He could have disrupted the narrative of Hillary as victim
and sparked a more intelligent discourse about the possibility of a
union in which the bonds may not be primarily sexual. It would be
fascinating to hear Hillary discuss such a marriage, except that she
too is wedded to fake story lines. She may have replaced the
previous months' incessant hand-holding with an equally suspect
distance, but that's most likely just Bill's scripted punishment.
When she permits his redemption, will the whole country follow suit?
Clinton could have contributed something
really useful to the public exchange in that speech of his. But no.
And so the same old tired songs play nauseatingly on.
