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

18. Sexual Risk Management in the Clinton White House

18 Sexual Risk Management in the Clinton White House Anna Marie Smith As Clinton leaves office, his aides mention time and time again that he is concerned about his historical legacy. Feminist historians will look back at the Clinton administration and give it a mixed review. On the one hand, Clinton will be remembered for a few key initiatives on late-term abortion, family leave, and the earned income tax credit. His partnership with Hillary Rodham Clinton will be compared to that between the Roosevelts. Women and minorities also won a substantial number of the appointments to the Clinton administration. On the other hand, Clinton abandoned many of his best nominees, presided over a dramatic increase in the gap between the rich and the poor, and supported a draconian welfare law that virtually eliminated the statutory entitlement to poverty assistance. Above all, feminists will remember the Clinton-Lewinsky affair as a moment in which sexual harassment policy was turned inside out. Many of us have struggled for years to pass policies in our workplaces and to enact laws in our legislatures that reflect a feminist position on sexual harassment. We have had to confront some of our most recalcitrant male colleagues in meeting after meeting to make our point clear. No, we are not against sex, sexual expression, or freedom of speech. We insist that a person’s right to equal opportunity in the workplace is violated wherever she/he is faced with unwanted sexual conduct. If a woman has 315 been subjected to unwanted sexual behavior that is so severe that she could not do her job or that she could not pursue her studies properly, or if she has been effectively coerced into accepting sexual conduct as part of a quid pro quo exchange , then she has been denied one of her basic rights. From a feminist perspective , the key question is this: Is the adult1 worker consenting to the sexual conduct in question, and is that consent freely given, or is her/his consent produced by the coercive dimensions of her/his workplace status? The feminist perspective is absolutely agnostic on the moralistic questions that may arise. We do not care—and we should not care—whether or not the adults involved are male, female, transsexual, married, single, divorced, straight, or gay; whether the worker complainant holds a “decent” job or works on the street; whether the sexual practice is “tasteful” and “normal” or “tacky” and “perverse,” or whether sexual relations took place in an “appropriate” private venue or in a “pristine” public place. In the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, as in the Thomas-Hill hearings, feminists lost control of the public discourse on sexual harassment. To take but one example, the taboo on adultery looms large in the Clinton-Lewinsky records. Starr and the Republicans seem to have assumed that the public would be outraged by their allegation that the president had abused his power specifically to conceal an adulterous sexual liaison. The fact that every single sexual moment between Clinton and Lewinsky was fully consensual for both parties was hardly given any emphasis at all. In the end, the pro-impeachment camp was bewildered by the fact that the American people were not really fazed by something as banal as extramarital sex. The ghosts of Chappaquidick and Gary Hart’s Monkey Business cruise did not rise again. For all the apparent failures of Starr and the Republicans to mobilize popular opinion against Clinton in defense of “moral decency,” however, feminists will look back at the Clinton years as a turning point in official discourse on marriage and the family. In his trademark “triangulation” style, Clinton picked a theme right out of the Republicans’ repertoire—family values—and made it his own. At the same time, however, the neoconservative policies that he approved made it more difficult than ever for working-class and poor families to stay together. In the following essay, I want to explore the ironic logic of two juxtapositions . First, Clinton constructed himself as a pro-family and pro-marriage leader, even as his policies had severe anti-family effects, and even as he continued to pursue his sexual fetishistic interest, namely extramarital casual sex. Second, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair began at a particularly intense political moment for the White House, namely during the government shut-down of 1995, and continued ANNA MARIE SMITH 316 in an...