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P Introduction: The Sexual Evolution toward Female Control I want to be the girl with the most cake. —Courtney Love and Hole, “Doll Parts,” from Live through This, 1994 And I made up my mind to find my own destiny. And deep in my heart the answer it was in me. —Lauryn Hill, title song, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” 1998 President William Jefferson Clinton will not be remembered as being naive about the ways of women. Yet he met more than his match in the 21-yearold White House intern Monica Lewinsky, whose ambition and audacity he disastrously underestimated. A few months before their relationship became public, a puzzled Clinton admitted to her, “If I had known what kind of a person you really were, I wouldn’t have gotten involved with you” (Starr Report 1998, B6). What Clinton did not realize was that Lewinsky’s behavior was that of a new generation of women. To explain Monica Lewinsky, you have to explain Monica Lewinsky’s generation , which plays by rules entirely different from those of its predecessor. Lewinsky is one of the women born during and shaped by the sexual revolution , the women’s movement, resulting in new education and work opportunities for women, new religious freedoms, and the information age. Sharing more of men’s power, sense of entitlement, and social clout, Lewinsky’s peers generally feel more comfortable than did earlier generations in aggressively and unapologetically pursuing their own interests in sexual relationships , that is, doing it “her way.” This highly individualistic generation is unpredictable and idiosyncratic in their behavior, not conforming to one neat and rigid mold, as women (and men) did in the past. Using their own taste as their barometer, they have a broad menu of choices at their fingertips (for 1 instance, sleazy, cold-blooded, noble, or romantic) and thus can end up with a distinctive sexual configuration on their plates. Lewinsky, whose sexuality was powerful and puzzling enough to cause a constitutional crisis, embodies all these changes. In reality, her sexual pro- file—having many past sex partners, making the first move, indulging in diverse forms of play (oral sex in person and aural sex over the phone)—fits into the sexual mainstream of her generation (even though the Eisenhower administration–era white male journalists still dominating the nation’s editorial pages constantly declared that she was an aberrant tramp) (Shreve 1998). One of the most surprising discoveries of the 1998 Starr Report was that Lewinsky was not a victimized schoolgirl, as had been previously reported . Rather, she was brazen, relentless, and self-centered in her quest for sex and power; in other words, she acted like a man. Instead of being innocent prey, the report revealed that she even initiated her affair with the president , as well as many of their “sexual encounters.” As Barbara Walters pointed out in her March 3, 1999, TV interview on ABC, this affair wasn’t a “one-way street.” When Walters asked whether Lewinsky also “was gratified,” Lewinsky said yes. Walters continued this line of inquiry: “And there were things that were done that made you as a woman happy and content?” Again her answer was affirmative, punctuated with a little laugh. Furthermore, when Clinton tried to break off their relationship , she did not leave quietly. The upwardly nubile intern instead demanded that the leader of the free world secure her a job, a powerful and lucrative one, “not [as] someone’s administrative/executive assistant” and with a salary that “can provide me a comfortable living in NY” (Starr Report 1998, B6). In addition, as men have always done, Lewinsky indulged in “locker-room talk” and bragged about her conquest to at least ten friends. At the same time, however, Lewinsky was a bundle of contradictions, not following a particular pattern of behavior. Indeed, some of her behavior was traditionally female. After all, she was the one servicing him sexually most of the time, as well as falling in love with him and entertaining fantasies of future wedded bliss. Overall, Lewinsky, raised in the 1980s, acted entirely differently than the typical 21-year-old woman raised in the 1950s and 1960s would have done. Young women today feel entitled to conduct their sex lives on their own terms. Conversely, without access to quality information on female sexual desire, sexual health, and abortion, baby boomers in their early years were sexually ignorant. Even in the late 1960s, boomer women, lacking men’s...

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