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346 When Marx amended Hegel to specify that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, he could have been talking about the history of American sexual politics from Anita Hill to Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. From the beginning conservatives used Jones’s case not only to attack Bill Clinton but to accuse feminists of a hypocritical double standard. “Paula Stunned by Feminists’ Silence,” a headline in the right-wing New York Post observed, while in the New York Times Maureen Dowd offered such tidbits as that redoubtable neanderthal, Representative Bob Dornan, suddenly converted to the cause of fighting sexual harassment, sporting an “I believe Paula” button. While these complaints, however disingenuous, pointed to an uncomfortable truth—most publicly visible feminists had reacted to Jones’s charges with re- flexive avoidance, and some with inexcusable class snobbery—they had little impact, since Paula was perceived by most people to the left of Dornan as a tool of the sectarian right. But with the breaking of the Lewinsky story, conservative demands that, as Post columnist Steve Dunleavy put it, feminists “ravage Clinton the same way they ravaged Clarence Thomas” went into high gear. Undeterred that Lewinsky had been over twenty-one during the (then still alleged) affair and had not complained of harassment or indeed complained at all, right-wing champions pronounced her a victim of at best exploitation, at worst child-molesting. Where they would ordinarily have been inclined to see Monica as a nutty/slutty temptress and condemnation of her male partner as a case of totalitarian sexual correctness, they had now evidently adopted the view of the correctniks that sex between a woman and her boss, or between a young woman and a powerful older man, is inherently abusive. Kathleen Willey’s claim that she was groped in the White House, with its echoes of Bob Packwood, was Villains and Victims Villains and Victims 347 a more plausible subject of indignation, but since Lewinsky was the focus of Kenneth Starr’s inquiry and the public’s attention, conservatives showed little interest in distinguishing her case from Willey’s or even Jones’s: the three were simply lumped together as “Clinton’s women.” In their zeal to portray the president as the worst serial abuser of women since Bluebeard, some even tossed Gennifer Flowers into the mix of victims, despite her publicly voiced admiration for Bill’s talents as a lover (on a scale of 1 to 10, she rated him a 9). Feminists, they insisted, were duty-bound to support Starr’s investigation: if they really believed that the personal is political, their partisan loyalties to Clinton and the Democrats would not deter them from defending their sisters. Their own hypocrisy aside, the conservatives’ logic was faulty. To assert that “the personal is political” is to claim that politics is not synonymous with government but extends to those sexual and domestic relations in which men exercise institutionalized power over women. It doesn’t necessarily follow that “personal politics” should be feminists’ chief criterion for judging a public official—that who he is as a sexual actor should outweigh who he is as an agent of the state. This is not to say that a male politician’s personal relations with women are inherently irrelevant to his office (as many of Clinton’s defenders have argued), but rather that except in cases clearly involving violence or abuse, there is no inconsistency in arguing that other issues—the politician’s public stance and policies on women’s rights, the motivation and political agenda of his enemies—are more important. Such trade-offs are, after all, the essence of electoral politics, which normally is not about purity of principle but about compromise and lesser-evilism. The last time this question came up for feminists was in 1980, when Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter in the Democratic presidential primary: the womanizer with a staunch pro-woman record in the Senate versus the apparently faithful spouse who had distanced his administration from the women’s movement and opposed federal funding for abortion. My position then was “Marry Carter; vote for Kennedy.” Clinton’s situation doesn’t lend itself to one-liners. His reputation as a profeminist president is, on the level of policy, mostly myth. Though he has appointed women to high-level positions and defended abortion, he has also pandered shamelessly to the family-values sentiments of cultural conservatives —especially their campaign against “illegitimacy...

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