"Our Monica, Ourselves"

More plausibly, Clinton is cast as, if not quite the first female president, then as one who didn't adhere to the reserved phallic strength that is a primary symbol of presidentialism (Oh, God! Make it stop!) Jane Gallop, one of the smartest contributors, acknowledges the link between male sexuality and power but notes that it breaks down "at that moment of what they call 'spending' and losing control and all of that." When Laura Berlant adds, "What seemed disgusting was that he had a body," Gallop says, "If the right-wing in this country is still really moralistic about sex, the left is moralistic about food. That's where the new style of moralism about control is. Well-educated liberal people are supposed to be in control of the amount of body fat they have. The people who are disgusted by Clinton's fat and by Monica's aren't the right wing, they're the ones who want a yuppie president with the right amount of body fat at the helm."

Elsewhere in the book, Clinton doesn't receive nearly that much sympathy. Many of the essays are mired in the naive absolutist idealism of the left, and thus announce their insulation from the reality of politics that necessarily entails deal making and compromise. In other places, there is a sense of justice that has barely evolved from the elementary school playground. Janet R. Jakobsen contributes a woolly-headed essay that could stand as the definitive answer to those older women who puzzle over why so many younger women refuse to identify themselves as feminists. The title, "He Has Wronged America and Women" (cue Carry Nation) comes from a letter sent to the New York Times.

Jakobsen's conclusion is that she can't get upset about the treatment accorded Bill Clinton because he represents "the long-standing tradition of heterosexual monogamous marriage as duplicitious (at least for powerful men)." Also, according to Jakobsen, after approving the Defense of Marriage Act and welfare reform, Clinton was fair game. Or, to put it more succinctly: nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah.

"It was, after all, a conflict between white men over the sign and symbol of 'woman,'" Jakobsen writes of the impeachment. Tell that to Monica, who was neither sign nor symbol but a real woman whose sex life was declared fair game by the government, who was denied access to counsel in a scenario that was pure Orwell, and whose life and public utterances were controlled by Ken Starr, who held the threat of prison over her head. This was one of the purest examples of institutionalized sexism ever, but Jakobsen can't see beyond her prejudices. She does, however, have a suggestion for bringing women into the power fold, and approvingly tells the story of a woman who wrote in Tina Turner for president in the 1996 election because, as the woman explained, "if she were president there would be a battered women's shelter on every corner." (Either that or a good wig shop.)

"Our Monica, Ourselves" does suggest that, for many on the left, the hardest thing to reconcile is their disgust over Ken Starr's moralistic vendetta and their belief that the affair was Monica and Bill's business with the hallowed (and sometimes merited) feminist insistence that the personal is political. The book is best when it delves into the thorniness of that conflict. Jane Gallop argues that sexual harassment law has been a boon for the right, allowing them a chance to restore the image of women as nonsexual beings who need to be protected from any sexual behavior, and an opportunity to legislate what is and isn't acceptable sexual behavior.

Gallop isn't denying the need for sexual harassment law but, if I read her right, she's saying it's impossible to separate sexual harassment from sex because it is impossible to strip sex of its power dynamic. That dynamic was often misread in Clinton's case. A newspaper editor who was railing against Clinton's "abuse" of Monica was stopped short when my wife asked him, "When a woman is giving a man a blow job, who's in the position of power?" (That's what sex activist and writer Pat Califia meant when she referred to "the particular sound of pleasure and fear that men make when their manhood is taken behind someone else's teeth.")

Ellen Willis contributes an essay, "'Tis Pity He's a Whore," that, thankfully, doesn't beam in from Zontar in the manner of her recent writing (to wit: "More and more I am coming to the conviction that Roe vs. Wade, in the guise of a great victory, has been in some respects a disaster for feminism." Uh-huh). Willis tries to get at how the desire for sexual privacy, basically the belief that consenting adults should be able to lead sex lives free of government supervision, contributes to sexual secrecy, which in turn mystifies sex and keeps desire from "compromising the enforced 'innocence' (that is, ignorance) of respectable women and children." (Though she doesn't admit that nothing reinforces sexual norms more insidiously than people presuming that they know what goes on in any marriage, especially marriages between public figures.)

Willis' notion is that in seeking exoneration Clinton succumbed to the same conventional forces that were trying to destroy him. The problem with her argument is that it's only tangentially connected to the sexual reality of American life. Willis writes that Reagan broke the taboo of a divorced president but that an openly homosexual president, or a heterosexual one living with a partner outside of marriage, is still beyond the pale. Why then does she think it would have been possible for Hillary Clinton, during the "60 Minutes" Gennifer Flowers interview to say, "Not every marriage is monogamous. Relationships are complicated, and ours is no exception"? Even after Clinton, there is still no way in American political life to present a nonmonogamous marriage as anything but a mistake that must be atoned for.

Next Page: Good reasons to treat the public like children

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