In the wake of the dueling bombshells that hit Donald Trump almost simultaneously Tuesday, one piece of shrapnel cut a little more sharply than the rest. Paul Manafort’s conviction on eight charges, mostly related to tax fraud, didn’t have any connection to possible collusion between Russia and Trump. And Michael Cohen’s guilty pleas had been expected for some time. What did draw blood was Cohen’s damning claim this payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, both alleged Trump paramours, were made “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.”
One of the more interesting reactions I saw on Twitter and elsewhere was from disappointed Trump supporters, who went into “Welp, Just Saying!” mode, lamenting that this whole problem could have been avoided if the president were just a little bit more like his vice president.
According to what’s become known as the “Pence Rule,” the vice president famously refuses to dine alone with women or “attend functions without his wife if alcohol is being served.” People who find this to be a normal arrangement between spouses justify it by saying that it keeps a public figure like Pence from being caught in a compromising position. But that makes no sense. Why just meals and functions with the devil’s juice? (Never forget that Trump doesn’t drink, so it’s not like staying off the sauce keeps you faithful.) But the truth is that for someone who wants to cheat on their spouse, the opportunities are infinite: an innocent brush on the arm could happen at a meeting, or walking down the street, or literally anywhere. Remember that the Lewinsky affair began with Monica flashing her thong at the president during a brief interaction in the chief of staff’s office.
Let’s leave aside that Donald Trump is as far from Mike Pence on the propriety spectrum as one can be. Or wait, let’s not. Because the fact is that Trump’s (alleged) insistence on sleeping with women who are not his wife and Pence’s refusal to be with in the same room with them are two extreme responses to the same idea: That men and women are vessels of nothing but sexual energy and that no adults possess self-control. (And that’s the generous interpretation. The extreme left and right would say that men can’t help preying on virtuous women, or that men are easily led astray by ravenous vixens.)
These are all stupid, of course, but also degrading and infantilizing to both sexes. Men make up 53 percent and women 47 percent of the workforce. Societal changes have made it more acceptable for men to be stay-at-home parents. All of this leaves limitless opportunities for men and women to interact in one-on-one situations. That can mean carpooling to the office, or working lunches to hash out the new contract with the widget supplier, or sharing a bench while watching toddlers at the playground. It might even mean going out for a drink after work! I don’t know if there has been peer-reviewed research into the matter, but I’d hazard a guess that at least 99 percent of the time that Donald Trump is not at one of his hotels, zero illicit sex results from such encounters.
In truth, the only thing the Pence Rule is good for is guarding a choir boy (like Mike Pence) from malicious litigation. That’s not nothing, but let’s not pretend that it’s acting as the buffer that keeps otherwise devoted spouses from straying. It has zero effect—none—on men such as Donald Trump or Bill Clinton, whose appetites could not possibly be held in check by some silly self-imposed practice.
Buckets of ink have been spilled detailing that workplace rules along these lines are detrimental to the advancement of women, and how impractical it would be for women in leadership roles to adopt such practices for themselves.
And so it’s a problem that is pragmatic, but also philosophical. The idea that married people need to have “rules” about interactions with the opposite sex is not only alarmingly outdated in 2018 but represents a troubling way of thinking. Not everything is about sex. But putting limits on spending even minutes with another man or women implies that it is. And that’s its own form of prurience.
