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

13. 'Tis Pity He's a Whore

13 ’Tis Pity He’s a Whore Ellen Willis As Bill Clinton looked me straight in the eye, tightened his jaw, and denied having sexual relations with That Woman, I had a fantasy: suppose, on that historic 60 Minutes episode in 1992, he had said, “Yes, I had an affair with Gennifer Flowers .” And suppose Hillary had added, “Not every marriage is monogamous. Relationships are complicated, and ours is no exception.” Why is such candor unthinkable? After all, most of the voters who elected Clinton didn’t believe his denial that he’d slept with Flowers, any more than they would believe his denial about Monica Lewinsky, five and a half years and a second victorious campaign later. There’s a good chance that Americans would have supported the Clintons’ right to set the terms of their marriage—even identified with it, considering the complications of their own lives. Yet declining to tell the lies that pay homage to virtue would indeed have been a daring political gamble and a shocking, radical act. It would instantly have shifted the debate from whether personal lapses from conservative sexual and familial values should disqualify a candidate for public office to a more basic issue: should public officials be required to conform to those values in the first place? Bill Clinton, who is neither a radical nor much of a political gambler, was not about to stake his candidacy on the outcome of such a debate. But by lying, he acceded to his opponents’ 237 moral framework. Had he challenged it and won anyway, he would have done himself and the entire country a favor by showing that politicians, even presidents , need no longer submit to the sexual blackmail of the right. Instead, he supplied the rope that effectively strangled his presidency. My enthusiasm for radical candor won’t sit well with those who argue that the worst feature of the presidential scandal was its contribution to a horrifying breakdown of the distinction between public and private life. Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato—responding in Dissent to the article where I first made the foregoing suggestion—contend that the proper public response to intrusive sexual questions is simply that they are “out of line and nobody’s business.” Of course, Clinton shouldn’t have to discuss his sex life with the media. Nor should he have been questioned about a consensual affair as part of the discovery process in a sexual harassment lawsuit, any more than a woman who complains of sexual harassment should have to submit to being deposed about her sexual relationships with other men in the office. Nor should Kenneth Starr have been allowed to investigate Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky on the pretext that his attempt to cover up an affair he shouldn’t have been asked about in the first place was relevant to the Whitewater inquiry. Nor should Starr have forced Lewinsky to testify by threatening to prosecute her and her mother on the basis of illegal tapes, or asked her questions about the minute details of her encounters with the president, ostensibly to nail down Clinton’s perjury but actually to strip him naked before the world. Nor should the House have voted to release this material to the public, with utter disregard for what is supposed to be the confidentiality of grand jury proceedings (granted that Starr’s leaks to the press had long since made it a joke). Clearly, what we have witnessed is the frightening spectacle of right-wing zealots abusing the power of the state to invade Clinton’s—and Lewinsky’s—privacy. But public discussion of what to make of this invasion has displayed a persistent confusion—shared by queasy liberal commentators and ambivalent “ordinary Americans” alike—between sexual privacy and sexual secrecy. The two are in fact very different in their meaning and purpose. Genuine sexual privacy rests on the belief that consensual sexual behavior is an individual matter that need not and ought not be policed. Privacy will be consistently respected only in a sexually libertarian culture, for repression inevitably gives rise to a prurient preoccupation with other people’s sex lives. And when privacy is respected, secrecy is unnecessary : as the actor and libertarian Orson Bean once observed, if people were brought up in a culture where eating was considered a shameful act, they might ELLEN WILLIS 238 rebel against that social taboo...