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

12. The President's Penis: Entertaining Sex and Power

12 The President’s Penis Entertaining Sex and Power Catharine Lumby In an elegant essay titled “My Father’s Penis,” feminist author Nancy Miller recalls watching her father pottering around the kitchen when she was a child, his drawstring pajamas slightly agape. She writes: This almost gap never failed to catch my eye. It seemed to me as I watched him cheerfully rescue the burning toast and pass from room to room in a slow motion of characteristic aimlessness . . . that behind the flap lay something important: dark, maybe verging on purple, probably soft and floppy.1 Forty years after the scene of these memories, Miller finds herself once again confronted by her father’s penis. Her father, now stricken with Parkinson’s disease, requires her help to bathe and urinate, a situation which leads her to reflect on the relationship between the phallus and the organ it represents. At first, she concludes that touching her father’s penis has destroyed its mystique, writing that, while the phallus symbolizes male power (“the way my father could terrify me when I was growing up”), the penis is simply a biological accident. Months later, as her father lays dying, Miller is no longer sure it’s so easy to separate symbolic power from its human form: 225 Had my father still been able to read, I would never have written about “the penis.” By going public with the details of domestic arrangements on Riverside Drive, I was flying in the face of the parental injunction not to “tell” that had haunted my adolescence and continued well into my adult years.2 Miller’s essay points to the complicated relationship between power and the way individuals embody it. Her father’s penis is many things to her: a source of mystery, difference, sexuality, awe, physical illness, and frustration. There is, she suggests, an undeniable connection between male power and the penis, but it’s not straightforward. It’s a relationship that causes men, as well as women, confusion and even despair. In the closing years of the twentieth century, U.S. citizens have been getting uncomfortably close to their president’s penis. Of course, everyone knows the president has a penis—it’s an essential criterion for the job, after all—but no one wants to think about it. The presidency is a highly symbolic office. The incumbent is expected to display superhuman levels of self-control, reliability, and good judgment , none of them traits normally associated with the male organ. The United States likes its presidents to have balls, but a penis is different. A penis can only get in the way of the national interest. In traditional feminist terms, the phallus is the classic metaphor for male power. But it’s important to remember that it’s just that—a symbol. In human terms, the mantle of power comes with built-in anxieties—it isn’t ready-to-wear and there’s always someone claiming they fit the mantle better. If the phallus is a symbol, then the penis is its real life corollary. And penises are notoriously unreliable . They shrink in cold water, droop after too much alcohol and, sometimes, just want a night or two to themselves. They’re also unpredictable, unreasonable, and faithless—though how their owners respond to these incitements and frustrations varies widely. Clinton is not, of course, alone in his struggle to contain damage from the sex scandals that have dogged his career. Around the Western world, voters are demanding increasingly high ethical standards from politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and other high-ranking public servants. Royal commissions, Senate and congressional inquiries, and independent bodies set up to investigate corruption have all helped to highlight impropriety and raise public expectations about the conduct of elected and appointed public figures. The growth of news programs and products has also played a key role in encouraging the appetite for information about those in public office. CATHARINE LUMBY 226 The voting public has come a long way since the United States, and the rest of the Western world, watched open-mouthed as the Watergate affair unraveled, taking a president with it. In 1972, it still seemed inconceivable to many voters that someone trusted with the highest office in the United States would cynically lie to his people. Today, we expect our politicians to lie. Ironically, at a time when it’s harder than ever for...