"Our Monica, Ourselves"

Willis' is a Monday morning quarterback argument. It's perfectly true that the public's support for Bill Clinton probably had something to do with their own experience that marriage and sex are complicated things. But no one was able to predict that support in advance -- not liberals, and certainly not conservatives who had made such political capital out of family values and banked on the idea that the details of the affair would disgust the public. I still maintain that Clinton was right to lie initially about the affair, not just from a personal standpoint (it was nobody's business) but from a political standpoint. At the risk of sounding condescending, adults often lie to children about things they are not equipped to handle, and before Clinton the American public had simply never given any indication that it was mature enough to accept a public figure's adultery without resorting to simplistic, moralistic condemnation.

With the Clinton affair the gap is between what Americans are willing to accept and what they will acknowledge they are willing to accept. Thus Clinton's high approval ratings were accompanied by almost equally high disapproval numbers. (A meaningless statistic. What did they disapprove of, the sex or the lying? And if the latter, lying to whom, his wife or the nation?) A few months ago Frank Rich published an extraordinary article in the New York Times Magazine on the porn industry. In it he said what no other mainstream publication or program had been able to bring itself to acknowledge: that with annual revenues exceeding that of most major professional sports, porn is mainstream. And yet how many people do you know who admit to looking at porn? And reporters and broadcasters, when dealing with the subject, still pretend the need to inform their audience who Jenna Jameson is.

There is no doubt that, on one level, Willis is right. Despite what we thought about an adult's (even a president's) right to sexual privacy, the Clinton affair gave the media a great opportunity to reinforce traditional sexual and moral standards in the guise of maintaining public decency (and thus gave up any claim to objectivity in their reporting). Sasha Torres contributes a hilarious and infuriating -- because it's so right -- essay called "Sex of a Kind" that takes apart the squeamishness of the media in reporting the details of the Starr referral. In her funniest passage, Torres writes about "poor Bob Schieffer [of CBS], who found himself in the unenviable position of translating the juicy bits of the report for the American public and his bombastic boss [Dan Rather]." The transcript of Schieffer's report is pure Terry Southern: "While the president was on the telephone, according to her, he -- let me just read this to make sure we don't -- he unzipped his pants and exposed himself and -- and they had sex of a kind. Again, he stopped her before, I would say, he was completed, I guess would be the way to put that ... Certainly this is living up to every expectation that it was going to be lurid, tawdry, and laid out in explicit detail."

But tawdry and lurid only in the context of television, the way that mild everyday profanities like "hell" and "damn" seemed shocking when they started showing up on prime-time shows. Who but the very sheltered and conventional would find the idea of oral sex tawdry? Certainly not people, even married people, who practice it in their own sex lives. And surely there are enough people who use dildoes or vibrators or other sex toys to be more admiring of Monica's ingenuity with that cigar than shocked by it?

But the media had to stick to their script of pretending to be shocked by all this (and judging by the constipated indignation of Cokie Roberts or George Will, two of them, at least, weren't pretending) or else admit that their whole notion of propriety was hopelessly outdated. And of course that shock allowed them to exploit the case for all its juicy details without pretending they had become gossip columnists. They had to cast the blame for "cheapening" the national dialogue on Bill Clinton as a way of not acknowledging that the material they now had to address was the logical outcome of the media's decision to make Gary Hart's affair with Donna Rice a news story. (I was in a newsroom the day that story broke, and I'll never forget a veteran news editor saying to me that he was ashamed of his profession.)

So the media coverage leaves those of us who supported Clinton in a quandary. As certain as we were that this was none of Ken Starr's business, none of the media's business and none of our business, it's also clear that the media's fearfulness in talking about sex contributed to an atmosphere in which normal and understandable sexual behavior (a blow job, for Christ's sake) was presented as if it were an unimaginable perversion. The media insisted that we should be offended by Clinton's behavior when what was truly offensive was their insistence that we be offended.

But because this case takes place at the nexus of what Americans know about sex and what they willingly admit to knowing, it's also probable that at least some people were comforted by the media's maiden-auntie routine. Just as that survey question "Do you approve of the president's behavior?" gave people a vague, easy out that the more forthright "Do you think the president's extramarital affair has anything to do with his ability to carry out the duties of his office?" would not have.

Nothing is harder to reinstate than a taboo that has been broken. Despite the fact that the impeachment was a political disaster for Republicans, it's not unimaginable that a politician's sexual life will once more be considered a threat to our national interest -- though we can hope that, post-Sept. 11, it's more likely that what a politician does in bed will finally be considered bupkis. The taboos broken by the public discussion of Bill and Monica's affair are the ones about what does and doesn't happen in even strong marriages, and what people do behind locked, or in this case ajar, doors. After Bill and Monica, Americans may, like Linus holding onto his blanket, still be clinging to traditional ideas of proper sexual relations. But somewhere gnawing at them is the notion that it might just be time to put childish things aside.

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