First, a warning. This article reports on the public statements that certain women have made about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Many of these statements are crude, vulgar, and sexually explicit. As a result, parts of this article may be offensive to children, men, and others not yet accustomed to the urbane feminine discourse that prevails in certain quarters.
Late last month, the New York Observer brought together 10 mostly middle-aged Manhattan women at Le Bernardin restaurant on West 51st Street to talk about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. It was a distinguished group of well-educated professional women, moderately famous in their fields, and without exception they were wildly enthusiastic about Bill Clinton. “I for some strange reason like Clinton even more because of this,” admitted former Saturday Night Live writer Patricia Marx. “He is the most incredibly charming man,” gushed fashion designer Nicole Miller. “This virile president is suddenly fulfilling this forbidden fantasy of this old-fashioned taboo aggressive male. I think women are finding that appealing,” said author Katie Roiphe.
Several of the women noted that their husbands were shocked by Clinton’s alleged behavior. But the women were mostly tickled by it: “It’s like every girl’s dream. You can be the president, but you can f — the president too,” declared writer Elizabeth Benedict. “All of my women friends and I would be happy to have sex with Clinton and not talk about it,” declared Marx. Novelist Erica Jong recalled the time she performed oral sex on a young acquaintance because he possessed a first edition of John Keats’s Endymion. But she seemed more excited at the prospect of doing what Ms. Lewinsky is alleged to have done, and she described it graphically. Writer Nancy Friday theorized that Mr. Clinton’s sex life will only improve because there will be added danger: “His next b — is going to be the most exciting one he’s ever had.”
The women were not totally sanguine about the allegations. Susan Shellogg, who is identified as a writer and former dominatrix, injected a tinge of moralism: “I think the president is reckless for not practicing safe sex. If she has stains on her dress, she was not using a condom. That’s a big story.” The participants were otherwise ambivalent about Lewinsky. Roiphe thought she was merely average looking, while others suggested she is less than intelligent. Nancy Friday did say that men will be more attracted to Lewinsky from now on because they will want to do what the president did: “She can rent out her mouth.”
At the same time the panel was disgusted by independent counsel Kenneth Starr — a “fascist pig,” as Erica Jong termed him. Friday and Marx suggested that he had never experienced sex. “Maureen Dowd called him a creep. Which was wonderful,” interjected the Observer‘s reporter, Francine Prose. And the entire panel agreed that taping a friend’s phone call is far worse than anything Clinton or Lewinsky might have done.
Many people who read the Observer piece concluded that these are the worst women to ever walk the face of the earth and that, instead of putting a tape recorder on the table, somebody should have set off a roach bomb. But that misses the historic significance of the conversation. We have arrived at the epochal moment when certain advanced women are making a serious effort to be even more repulsive than men.
We used to think that men were raunchier than women. But you’d have a great deal of trouble rounding up 10 successful Manhattan males to talk as crudely – – for attribution — as those 10 New York Observer women did. Moreover, the women didn’t even come up with their own form of raunchiness. They simply aped the old male style. The Observer women praised the male adulterer for his virility, just as the lockerroom pigs used to. They measured whether the adultery was worth it on the basis of the mistress’s looks, just as the chauvinists did. They used vulgarity to prove their sophistication, just as men — or at least junior-high boys — used to do. They adopted a hard-bitten pose of sexual cynicism, just as male teenagers did. And they imply that they’ve done it all before and would do it again, just like the Hustler magazine set.
Men used to brag about their conquests, but now it is sophisticated women who do all the boasting. The rule of thumb for prominent feminists seems to be: One affair equals two book contracts. Read the books and articles by women like Erica Jong, and some of the prominent writers who are a prestige level up from the members of the Observer panel, such as Daphne Merkin, Naomi Wolf, and Candace Bushnell, and you are likely to be confronted with the lurid details of their most intimate experiences. Shere Hite and Nancy Friday have become fabulously successful by repackaging the graphic memoirs of women who did it and then talked.
Even at their worst, men rarely published their promiscuity, but if you skim through the current media, you run into a torrent of female bragging. Lisa Zeidner boasts in GQ about bedding a married professor while a student. Salon magazine responded to the Lewinsky affair with an article by its young staffer Jenn Shreve, who wants us all to know how loose she and her friends are. “Among my contemporaries,” writes Shreve, “it isn’t all that shocking to sleep with three different partners in a weekend, not all of the opposite sex. . . . Sleeping with an older man, even a married one, is regarded as a triumphant rite of passage.” A few clicks over, Salon’s Susie Bright responds with an outpouring of sympathy for the commander in chief: “Face it, our president could use about a dozen b — right now, in rapid succession, from a series of adoring fresh faces.”
Liberated women always wanted to be equal to men. Who would have guessed that the particular man some of them wanted to be equal to was the publisher of Screw, Al Goldstein?
A quarter century after Erica Jong introduced us to the concept of ziplessness in Fear of Flying, we have arrived at a weird double standard. Sex talk by men is pushed out of public view, while sex talk by women is pushed into it. Male novelists like John Updike — who lavishly praised Fear of Flying in the New Yorker when it came out in 1973 — have toned down the sex in their books. But women memoirists have radically increased the sexual content in theirs. Men who write about how much they like to be spanked have to post their stuff on the farthest reaches of the Internet. Women who write about how much they like to be spanked publish in the New Yorker. Men who talk endlessly about their sexually transgressive behavior are creeps. Women who do so are given tenure and invited to appear on conference panels. Start with the sexual revolution of the early seventies. The male line of descent leads to some scuzzy video store. The female line of descent leads to Camille Paglia and the New York Observer 10.
The Observer panelists are beneficiaries of three social phenomena. First, they picked up on cause marketing. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is linked to the rain forest. Benetton sweaters are linked to multiculturalism. The feminist exhibitionists linked their sex lives to high-minded social concern. They persuaded a lot of women that one of the ways to combat sexism is to show off and write about your private parts. Suddenly the use of the F-word became a great blow against the patriarchy.
Second, self-conscious vulgarati are beneficiaries of the awesome generational self-consciousness of the baby boomers. Old boomers like Erica Jong and young ones like Naomi Wolf interpret their own sexual experiences as if they have important implications for their entire age cohort. Sex is no longer just sex, it’s sociology, so it’s description and practice becomes something akin to academic research.
Finally, and most important, the New York Observer women know intuitively that they can get away with bad-girl conversation because it is relatively harmless. Men unrestrained can be truly savage. But the past few years have demonstrated that society can withstand a lot of Madonna-style exhibitionism. Recent studies suggest that sexual activity has declined slightly over the past several years, even among teenagers. In all probability, the women at that Manhattan restaurant are merely inverse hypocrites. They pretend to be worse than they are. And they are aware of one old truth that no sexual revolution will ever erase. Women who talk dirty always get plenty of attention.
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
