Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
Camille Paglia comments on the "Animal House" atmosphere of the Clinton White House
Jan 22, 1998 | People are alleging that the president is a sex addict -- is this true?
First of all, I want to get on the record that I am a Clinton supporter in political terms. But I was probably the only leading feminist to have believed Paula Jones right from the start -- from the very moment she emerged in 1994. I felt that the charges that Anita Hill made were far less grave than the ones Paula Jones made against Clinton.
I'm in no way shocked by the latest allegations, but it's pretty clear to me as a theorist of sex that Clinton has more of a mother problem than a woman problem. I feel it's not a conventional sex addiction per se. But from his youth in the matriarchal domestic womb of his very powerful mother figure, Clinton has apparently had problems separating his own identity from that of women. So he has this split -- it's very close to a Madonna-whore split -- between the intelligent woman, the woman who is an equal of his brain and of his political instinct, and the objects of his carnality, which he seems unable to direct except toward slutty types or toward those in some vulnerable, dependent position.
What we're seeing here is an odd continuation of the Michael Kennedy case with the baby sitter. I think the baby sitter became more attractive to Michael Kennedy because she was part of the domestic unit. She was just another egg in the maternal nest! It's almost an incestuous pattern. Similarly here: I just don't understand it when you have a man who is the leader of the free world, who has access to so many women -- they're in the tens of thousands out there! -- who'd be delighted to have an affair with him, why he'd have to create a situation where there's a potential charge of sexual harassment. Why couldn't Clinton adopt the European standard of sophistication -- as with Prince Charles and the French prime ministers -- where you have discreet liaisons with women who know how to keep their mouths shut? And Clinton is someone who has always been on the right side in feminist issues. The point is this girl was available, she was there, she was an adjunct to the domestic nest! The Oval Office, after all, is one big egg, isn't it?
Here's the thing: Clinton's a workaholic. He does deserve credit for the fact that he's nothing but business and has performed indefatigably day after day, month after month. This is the excuse he was trying to make yesterday -- "I have to get back to the mission for which the American people elected me." He's trying to use this as a kind of shield. His workaholism really became a problem for his sex life. He rarely takes a vacation. He hardly visits Camp David. He never gets out of the White House in Washington, even to go to parties on the Georgetown scene -- we all know the Clintons' shunning of that scene, to Sally Quinn's ire! There was never opportunity for the kind of spontaneous, fun liaison that can occur in an upstairs bedroom on top of a pile of mink coats on a bed in the middle of a party -- where you're not bringing sexual pressure to bear in your own hierarchical office environment. It's really Clinton's workaholism that has led to this lapse in judgment.
Look at the Kennedys, for heaven's sake! We've got Ted Kennedy allegedly able to have liaisons with women in cigarette boats off the coast of Monte Carlo, on the floor of Washington restaurants, any place, any time! You get a Kennedy near a warm body, and it's a sexual opportunity! But while Clinton has always been desperately trying to model himself on JFK, he lacked JFK's savoir faire and worldliness. Basically Clinton's a homeboy. He wants to make everything into Little Rock again where there's one big clan of good ol' boys hanging around, shooting the breeze.
Clinton seems to favor a certain type of woman.
It's pretty clear that Gennifer Flowers was a sensualized version of Hillary. Or perhaps we should put it in reverse: Hillary slowly remodeled herself on the blond archetype of Gennifer Flowers. If you look at pictures of the early dowdy Hillary, when she first arrived in Little Rock, she sure didn't look at all like Gennifer Flowers! So Hillary's really transformed herself.
I've gotten in a lot of trouble in my career talking about Hillary Clinton's frigidity as a personality and how our generation of career women (she and I are the exact same age) have had trouble reconciling our ambitious side with our sexual side. I think that she's a kind of refrigerator at home, and that for warm, tender, accepting embraces Clinton has really had to go outside his marriage. In no way is Hillary an all-forgiving mother figure. She's really his severest critic, and he's needed her every step of the way in his career. She provides the discipline.
One reason I believed the Paula Jones story right from the start was because of the allegation that he demanded oral sex from her. Based on my long study of pornographic pictures and videos, I can easily see why Paula Jones would instantly produce a fantasy of oral sex. People kept saying, very ignorantly, "Oh, she's not very attractive -- what would he have seen in her?" Well, I can see very clearly she has this big wide mouth, and a lot of teeth, and there's a sort of slackness about her jaw -- which is what women porn stars develop when they learn how to relax their jaw muscles to perform great oral sex. I think that Paula Jones was at every stage a walking, talking advertisement for oral sex! So I was stunned when I first saw the pictures of Monica Lewinsky on every TV program -- the big wide smile, the nicely relaxed lips with all those teeth -- and I thought, Oh my God, here we go again! We heard years ago that Clinton seemed to believe that he was never unfaithful to his wife as long as he just having oral sex. I think that's what he wanted from Paula Jones and that's what was going on here. In his own mind, he really believes, "I'm not doing anything wrong. All we were doing was having a little fun." He was being sexually serviced during his busy day.
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