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T A B L E+T A L K Have we learned anything at all? Discuss the lessons of Impeachment '99 in the Politics area of Table Talk
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SEX AND THE SINGLE INTERN | PAGE 1, 2
The counterculture's most enduring achievement was to usher in a sexual morality that emphasized feeling over propriety. These values have now become not just ingrained but conflated with our convictions about social justice, so that intimacy is supposed to be a model of equity. There's only one problem: Desire remains stubbornly behind the times, and when it comes to desire, the imbalance of power is still a turn-on, especially (but not exclusively) for men. Intergenerational sex is a vivid reminder of all the ways straight relationships -- even between peers -- depend on the artful application of female submission and male dominance. (Gay relationships have their own power issues, of course, but that is another story, since there was never a John Doe in among the Jane Does alleged to have dallied with the president.) To condemn the president is a handy way out of this bind. It allows conservatives to make the repression of desire seem egalitarian. Which is why feminists and other progressives, who are hip to this strategy, have refused to join in the pummeling. No one is harder to forsake than a bad man whose enemies are worse. Yet something about the dispensation our side has granted Clinton resembles the familiar Jewish exemption of Chinese food from the kosher laws. Pork is pork, especially when attached to a pig. And for all his good vibes, Clinton is more like the lubricious '60s throwback Austin Powers than the liberated man the Beatles imagined when they sang, "The love you take is equal to the love you make." What's more, when it comes to that hallmark of the new morality -- taking responsibility for one's desires -- let's face it: For Clinton, that depends on what id is. But loyalty to a treacherous icon is not the only reason we won't bash Bill. There's also the reminder -- in every revelation about the president's props and practices -- that sex ought to be private because it's so damned complicated. Take the question of why Clinton slipped and slid with such a sophomore. It may not be liberated, but it sure is Southern, and it ought to strike us as ironic that the president's most ardent pursuers hail from states where, until recently, the age of consent was so low it defied national norms. Even today, the widespread popularity of child pageants in the South affirms an ongoing interest in young girls, as does the punch line to the good-old-boy jape Dorothy Allison cites in "Bastard Out of Carolina."
So is the whole Monica megillah just an anxiety attack about the return of this repressed tradition? We'll never know -- not from the Southern gents who tried to evict the Trailer Trash president, nor from the man who turned the Oval Office into God's Little Acre. It's possible that not even Clinton understands why he diddled dangerously. When it comes to a desire just below the surface of permissibility, we are all Monicas, full of illusion and incomprehension. If that seems perplexing, consider the made-for-Oprah enigma: Did Bill love her, or was it just "a servicing arrangement," as Linda Tripp maintains? Like so much else about this scandal, both these explanations are incomplete. The servicing of middle-aged men by lush young women is certainly about power, but it is also about longing for incestuous union and lost youth. To address these hidden dimensions of the Lewinsky affair is loaded for all sides in the impeachment debate. For conservatives, it means exposing the underbelly of ordinary, middle-aged male behavior. For liberals, it means confronting the dark side of sexual freedom. Maybe the problem was imbedded in the new morality all along. After all, the phrase "sexual liberation" lent itself to an uncanny assortment of beliefs. Women who used it were usually talking about unleashing female desire, clearly a revolutionary act. But for most men, it meant shuffling off the coil of commitment for some more customized arrangement. This contradiction has come back to haunt us as we consider the unintended consequence that is Clinton's sex life. As if the intergenerational issue weren't thorny enough for those who subscribe to the ethic of equity, what about the fact that Lewinsky was an intern whose fortunes depended on her boss? Assuming that the president is not a rapist (despite the nasty Republican whispers), this is clearly his mortal sin against feminism, which has struggled for a workplace in which power is not used to promote a sexual agenda. No one is out to ban dating on the job (though the fact that this has happened in a number of businesses is another example of how Puritans twist feminism to serve their ends). It's the boss, stupid, who should keep his hands off the help. But for many bosses, this new rule is the world turned upside down. Executive rage may be the real reason so many elite males had a cow over Clinton's carousing. Their fury when the president got away with what they no longer can is explanation enough for the impeachment frenzy, not to mention the apoplectic tone of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. But what about the possibility that some unequal workplace liaisons are emotionally complex, even liberating? If feeling trumps propriety, how can practitioners of the new morality object when the boss and an assistant fall in love? Questions like this give lockjaw to the usually loquacious left, because they suggest that the personal is not always political -- or at least not simply political. Maybe that's why the president's sex life became a scandal in the first place. Perhaps this was the right's attempt to deal with the new morality by throwing its complications in our face. As we learned back when the '60s was a miniseries of the mind, freedom favors contradiction. Let that be our side's response to both Clinton and his enemies. They can all stand to be reminded that the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Richard Goldstein is executive editor of the Village Voice.
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