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THE SCANDAL I: Sexual Addiction Who is really "obsessed by sex"?
National Review, Nov 23, 1998 by Jonah Goldberg
WHEN you melt away the practiced iconoclasm, the predictable liberalism, and the pure arrogance of President Clinton's defenders in the culture industry-almost all of which has now weighed in on the scandal-you are left with an irreducible core. When Clinton defenders say it's "all just about sex," they are almost right. It is all about sex, but not "just."
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Something remarkable has happened to the cultural Left in the 1990s. Sex is everything. Sexuality has become the linchpin of human identity, replacing race as the chief source of activism and passion in discussions of civil rights, politics, and public morality. In a calculated maneuver, the Left has decided to brand Clinton's sexual behavior with Monica Lewinsky private-despite all of the evidence that Clinton dragooned the country into the most public illicit affair in modern history and then compounded his misdeed with other crimes. Yes, the affair was metaphysically tacky and bordered on the deviant, but the more unconventional the expression of sexuality, the more comfortable the Left is in defending it.
Obviously, this represents a tectonic shift in feminist dogma. It is a shift that was occurring well before the Lewinsky scandal. Today, the most provocative academic feminist isn't a sex hater. She is Jane Gallop, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin. When asked about her sexual preference-at a conference entitled "Flaunting It"-she responded, "Graduate students." On talk shows and on the op-ed pages, the sex-is-rape school is in full retreat while the sex-is-a-passport-to-a-cushy-job school is attracting adherents in droves. Katie Roiphe in the New York Times says of Lewinsky, "There is nothing inherently wrong . . . with her attempt to translate her personal relationship with the President into professional advancement."
Clinton has become the sex-and-identity-politics poster boy, the beleaguered President whose troubles stand for so much more than questions of legality or partisan politics. Consider Andrew Sullivan's interpretation. The former editor of The New Republic (who now devotes much of his energy to making gay life mainstream), Sullivan recently launched a broadside against the "new" conservatism in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. The quixotic conservative has argued powerfully for Clinton's resignation elsewhere, but not in the Times, where he creates an army of straw men called the New Conservatives-"the scolds"-who are little more than a band of church ladies concerned only with squelching sexual rights and everybody's fun.
Sullivan's piece shows how seriously even the most thoughtful sexual liberationists are about making Clinton a sex-rights Rosa Parks. "For the new conservatives," writes Sullivan, "the counterattack on homosexual legitimacy is of a piece with the battle against presidential adultery." Indeed, the article bundles divergent issues more craftily than Microsoft does its browsers. Not only is the argument against Clinton an argument against gay rights, says Sullivan, it is an assault on abortion (here and abroad). The "Lewinsky obsession," Sullivan writes, and the "anti-gay crusade" are bound together by the "anchor" of abortion.
Sullivan is hardly alone in his belief that Bill Clinton is a martyr in the battle against the sex cops. The refrain has been repeated relentlessly in elite magazines and newspapers. Clinton "has been mortified, subjected to an Orwellian intrusion by the gumshoes of the state," writes Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. Starr's prosecutors "sound like a crowd at an auto-da-f?, a burning at the stake in the Inquisition," says Anthony Lewis in the New York Times. Frank Rich, also in the Times, writes that the American people would rather support Clinton than "lend any vindication to the crusade of a zealous prig out of The Crucible." And just in case anyone missed the reference to the Salem witch trials, the Times trotted out the author of The Crucible himself, Arthur Miller, to make the tortured analogy, in an op-ed piece entitled "Salem Revisited."
The Crucible, of course, was a thinly veiled indictment of the crimes, real and imagined, of McCarthyism. Now it seems like something else. In The Crucible, a decent man cheats on his wife with a manipulative young woman. The affair then unleashes a flood of Puritan rage, along with a zealous and exacting judge, who is invited to determine the facts. What more powerful morality play could there be for this scandal? Of course, in the story, the Puritans believe the sex exposes a conspiracy of witches. Ken Starr believes it exposes a conspiracy to obstruct justice, suborn perjury, and abuse power.
As it happens Miller rewrote the play for the screen in 1996, even as the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship was sputtering toward its conclusion. In a New Yorker article about The Crucible, Miller says he realized that, without the Cold War, the only believable political theme and personal motivation remaining for his work was . . . sex. The Crucible was conceived, according to Miller, as a political play, but in the 1990s a remake could run only on sex. This wasn't always so. When Jean-Paul Sartre authored the first screenplay of The Crucible in 1957-The Witches of Salem-he envisioned the story as a brutal war between the proletariat and the ruling classes. Now the prevailing dogma is no longer dialectical materialism but sexual expression.
