Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

6. Sex of a Kind: On Graphic Language and the Modesty of Television News

6 Sex of a Kind On Graphic Language and the Modesty of Television News Sasha Torres Indulge me in a fantasy, if you will. What if queer sex advisers like Susie Bright, Dan Savage, and Pat Califia had been engaged by the major networks and 24-hour cable news channels as in-house experts on the Clinton sex scandal?1 What if, when we tuned in to ABC, say, we encountered Sam Donaldson updating us on the latest White House press conference, George Stephanopolous ventriloquizing the president’s advisers, and Bright discussing the considerable overlap between the definition of sexual relations at issue in the Jones deposition and the notions of topping and bottoming that circulate within the s/m and b/d communities? One can almost hear the exchange between Susie and ABC news anchor Peter Jennings now: Peter: We go live now to Susie Bright, in New York’s Greenwich Village . Susie? Susie: Hello, Peter. I’m standing in front of the East Village gay bar “The Cock” and talking to patrons here about the Jones lawyers’ definition of sexual relations. You, sir, wanted to say what? Patron (clad only in jock strap and feather boa): Well, I just wanted to say that, basically, when the president claimed that he didn’t have 102 sex with Monica, what he meant was that she topped him, and that under the definition that doesn’t count as sex. It only counts as sex, according to Judge Wright, if you’re the top. Susie: And do you think that President Clinton is believable as a bottom? Patron: Absolutely. And I don’t think he should be impeached for it, either. Susie: Well, Peter, there you have it. The consensus here at the Cock is that bottoming is not—should not be—an impeachable offense. Flipping the channels to CNN, we might find sex-advice columnist Dan Savage speculating, in an interview with Judy Woodruff, about the possibility that Clinton might have been telling the truth when he testified that he had no intent to arouse or gratify Lewinsky: “Let’s face the facts, Judy,” he might say, “Like many men, Bill Clinton may have neither the skills nor the inclination to arouse or gratify women. He may not be a liar. He may just be a pig.” Later, on MSNBC, we might encounter Pat Califia opining that the discrepancy between Clinton’s grand jury testimony and Lewinsky’s might stem from Lewinsky’s need to ease the tension between thinking of herself as an ambitious, powerful woman and getting turned on by “servicing” the president. Imagine Califia painstakingly explaining to, say, right-wing MSNBC talk-show host and blonde bombshell Laura Ingraham, the distinction between being servile and having servile fantasies. In indulging this little flight of fancy, I’m suggesting that the response to the Lewinsky revelations depended absolutely on the work of heteronormativity, by which I mean here a simultaneous fascination with and aversion to explicit public descriptions of sex, particularly sex other than married heterosexual intercourse . I’m suggesting as well the difference certain kinds of “perverse” sexual expertise might have made to our collective understanding of the legal and constitutional matters at stake in this affair. Additionally, I’m pointing to something about how televisual norms worked to limit the possibilities for political knowledge during this moment. Television’s conventions for talking and not talking about sex impeded news organizations from analyzing a crucial element of the case: the specific content of the definition of sexual relations in use during the Jones deposition. This definition was a key element in Starr’s case against Clinton, the element at stake in Starr’s claims that Clinton had perjured himself both in that deposition and in his grand jury testimony. Given the centrality of the court’s definition of sex to the question of impeachment, television’s incompetent SEX OF A KIND 103 engagement with it is striking, to say the least. Though its aversion certainly had the effect of enabling and prolonging the case against Clinton, I locate it not in any vast right-wing conspiracy, but rather in certain historical elements of the televisual apparatus. I shall argue that television news’ stunning ineloquence about sex stems from two deeply embedded elements of television’s “informational ” discourse; these are, first, the particular inability of the...