Bill Clinton, Jack Rabbit
(Irreverent Opinion)
by Susan Brownmiller
Nothing sickens me more than the specter of famous-name feminists jumping to the defense of President Clinton whenever a new story emerges about his sexual habits. I voted for the lyin', cheatin, cutie pie twice, in line with the "lesser evil" theory of electoral politics, and I'm not sorry I did, but you won't catch me apologizing for him in public. On the other hand, I haven't been screaming for his resignation, either. Let's face it: the amiable rake with the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am compulsions has shadow-boxed feminists into a corner. It's time for my sisters who sold their souls to the Democratic Party to fall on their swords and admit they've been mightily bamboozled, rather than pooh-pooh each fresh accusation.
The cost of defending our prez has become entirely too high. It's turned into a repudiation of everything we've said for years about rape and sexual harassment. It's placed us in the disgusting, anti-feminist position of blaming the victim. It's ceded the moral high ground to cynical right-wingers who gleefully employ our rhetoric for their own nefarious ends. And it's prevented us from reminding the public that the charismatic liar with the crooked finger and lopsided grin has failed us on the important issues over and over.
Let's get real. So what if he had a long, secret affair with Gennifer Flowers? What's evil is that he lied about it to save his political skin. So what if he let California bunny Monica Lewinsky snap her thongs and go down on him in the Oval Office? Not for a minute did I consider this tawdry, catch-as-catch-can diddling a case of sexual harassment, but I was flabbergasted that he tried to get away with another Big Lie. I am one of the few feminists I know who believed Paula Jones from the git-go. I believed Kathleen Willey and I believe Juanita Brodderick. Each of these women strikes me as a credible witness. Taken as a whole, we see a jack rabbit who grabs any nearby woman for a moment of relaxation.
I do see fine distinctions between the Jones, Willey, and Brodderick stories. I've always suspected that he got his signals crossed with Jones; the scenario that makes the most sense is that he stupidly mistook her for a professional prostitute. And evidently he mistook the distraught Willey for a willing and eager Monica type. But Brodderick's story cannot be explained away. Yet you should hear some of my feminist sisters saying lame things like "She shouldn't have let him into her hotel room."
She shouldn't have? Well, in retrospect I guess she shouldn't have, but remember, the venue was his suggestion. Brodderick thought the meeting was arranged to discuss nursing home regulations. Men take meetings in their hotel rooms all the time. Why should Brodderick have suspected that the earnest young pol was going to jump her the minute the door was closed? Okay, we have to concede that women still can't claim the privileges that men take for granted, like take a meeting in a hotel room without worrying whether it looks like an open invitation to rape or seduction, but feminists should not be blaming Brodderick for Bill Clinton's egregious misreading of her intentions. Rapists always say, "Gee, I thought that's what she wanted."
It's endlessly fascinating to speculate about the Clintons' loveless, sexless marriage, and to ponder the terms of the unholy bargain that brought them to the top of the heap, but the real mystery is how the charmer managed to convince vast numbers of people he's the living embodiment of all the serious concerns articulated by women and blacks without doing damn much of anything at all. So he plays golf with Vernon Jordan and chose Betty Currie as his personal secretary-- we're supposed to consider this a sign of progress? In truth, he blithely used these loyal intimates to carry out his procurements, and then, when things started to blow, he used them again in a pathetic attempt to cover his tracks.
Yes, Clinton has appointed more women to big jobs than any other president in history and that's nothing to snivel at, but rather than view a handful of high-profile women as some sort of blessed gift from on high, I see the appointments as one small result of thirty years of feminist agitation. Yes, he's held the line on abortion, but any Democratic president would have done the same thing. Now let's look at a few examples of how Clinton let us down so swiftly we could only gasp: signing the oppressive welfare bill, dropping Lani Guinier like a hot potato, firing the remarkable Jocelyn Elders for daring to mention masturbation (how's that for hypocrisy?), endorsing the Don't Ask/Don't Tell policy for the military, letting Janet Reno get away with the inferno at Waco, vetoing the needle-exchange legislation, ordering air strikes on two small, troubled countries to show he's the Free World's great macho leader.
On balance, his record is atrocious.
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- "Evolutionary Psychology" has recently been vigorously promoted in a controversial book called A Natural History of Rape. According to this view, the growing incidence of rape (both female and male) in our society--like all other sinful sexual practices (sinful, that is, in the Biblical sense)--is understandable in terms of the widespread acceptance of evolutionism. After all, if as noted above, it is a natural evolutionary drive for males to "produce as many offspring as possible" with "as many females as possible," then when this instinct is thwarted by a reluctant female, or a disapproving society, men must resort to rape. Even homosexual rape is supposed to have an evolutionary rationale in terms of struggle and dominance.
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Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer. A Natural History of Rape (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999).
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Thornhill and Palmer are professors at the University of New Mexico and the University of Colorado, respectively. See also an interview with Thornhill by David Concar in New Scientist 164 (February 19, 2000): 45-46.
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Biologists suggest President Clinton has followed the genetic program handed down by human evolution: have as much sex with as many females as possible in the Darwinian quest for hereditary survival.
Michael Ruse (probably Canada's leading Darwinian philosopher) and Richard Dawkins (certainly England's most articulate evolutionist, as promotes this concept. "What Darwin says is that the most dominant male gets the first crack at the women," said Michael Ruse, . . . Darwinism has argued that survival is the main goal of organisms, and part of that quest is to produce as many offspring as possible.
This evolution-driven impulse is working against the current concern of liberalism about the supposed population explosion and also over the AIDS epidemic generated by such sexual promiscuity.
Nevertheless, these evolution-based lusts are quite natural, they say. The Times article then quotes from an article by Richard Dawkins in the London Observer, as follows:
We lust because our ancestors' lust just helped pass their lustful genes on to us--What else does a man become a great chieftain for?
Since such behavior is part of our evolutionary genetics, they argue that we must not legislate against it, even though it is producing too much population. The remedy, they say, is not to return to Biblical morality, but to promote "safe sex" and abortion (perhaps also infanticide and euthanasia), and even homosexuality. These practices are said to be common in the animal world, so are part of acceptable evolutionary philosophy.
Washington Times, March 1999, p. 5. |
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On April 25, 1978, in the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock, Ark., a nursing-home supervisor named Juanita Broaddrick was, she says, bitten and raped by the attorney general of Arkansas. As Joe Eszterhas describes it in ''American Rhapsody'':
''Finished, he got off the bed and put his pants back on. She was in shock, sobbing. He went to the door. He put his sunglasses on. He turned back and he looked at her. 'You better put some ice on that,' he said, and was gone.''
The alleged perp is now the president of these United States, and it's pretty clear that Joe Eszterhas thinks the story is true. (He says Broaddrick was ''as believable as anyone I'd ever seen on television,'' which is high praise in his idiom.) But, as he adds:
''It didn't matter. We were a tired people, tired of pornographic imagery on the evening news, tired of feeling we were mired in filth. This was the worst . . . and we didn't want to hear it.''
It all depends, here, on what the meaning of ''we'' is. For a start, who is Joe Eszterhas and how come he's our moral tutor in this fear-and-loathing tour of the Clinton sex scandals? If you've ever left a movie theater muttering to yourself, ''How'd that sucker ever get made?'' then you are probably familiar with Eszterhas's work. (I speak of ''Sliver,'' ''Showgirls,'' ''Jade'' and other insults.) Then again, if you've ever left a movie theater having had a slightly better time than you expected (''Music Box,'' ''F.I.S.T.''), then you have this hard-driving screenwriter to thank. Admit it, though, you probably know him from ''Basic Instinct.'' But since Hollywood's studio leadership has always been a reliable part of the pro-Clinton phalanx, you won't be seeing much of the Starr report on the silver screen. So when Eszterhas found himself consumed by the need to make sense of it all, his only recourse was a fact-based, ranting, rocking-and-rolling screed with none of the full-frontal scissored out.
The ''we,'' it turns out, is the Who -- at least in the sense of ''My Generation.'' Eszterhas feels betrayed by Clinton, precisely because he once believed in him. Believed in him, that is, as the dope-smoking, draft-dodging adulterer of Mary Matalin's encapsulation. The boy-prince of the Rolling Stone set. ''One of us,'' in Jann Wenner's own unashamed words. So this is a long yell of protest from a professional hedonist who, faced with the ugliness of professionalized hedonism in the White House, doesn't care for the refraction of the mirror ...
There are two or three chapters that rise above this, however, and that illustrate Eszterhas's hit-or-miss talent. He has acquired a real feel for the vulnerable, endearing, needy, hopeless character of Monica Lewinsky; the fat girl who was used and abused and who was only a fleck of evidence away from being denounced as a stalker and a mythomane. He fashions a near-brilliant evocation of the qualities of Vernon Jordan, the stoic and phlegmatic ally who knew exactly what he was doing, and who did it for a friend whose moral character was infinitely inferior to his own. And he is extremely funny about the shrink defenses that the first lady and other amateurs have proposed:
''A modern president, Bill Clinton was allegedly the victim of incest, pedophilia, child abuse, erotomania, sexual addiction, gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, rage addiction, wife beating, husband beating, grandfather beating, low self-esteem, jealousy and poverty. . . . There he was on television, this victim in chief, asking to be forgiven for something he wouldn't admit to having done.''
Finally -- and I curse myself for not noticing this at the time -- Eszterhas grabs the ironic coincidence of Richard Nixon's Monica. That's Monica Crowley, the trusting young intern and amanuensis who shared so much private time with the sage of Saddle River, N.J., and won his lonely, self-pitying and self-aggrandizing confidences only to make a book out of them. But at least Tricky Dick never told her that she might also share his life after Pat was gone...
The book begins with a puzzle: How did the flower children fall for such a self-evident thug and opportunist? And it offers a possible hypothetical answer, which is that ''the Night Creature'' -- Nixon -- and his heirs and assigns could not ever possibly be allowed to be right about anything. When Eszterhas writes about Nixon, and his admirers like Lucianne Goldberg, he hits an overdrive button and summons the bat cave of purest evil. He hasn't read as much recent history as he thinks he has, or he would know that his forebears were mesmerized in precisely the same way to believe that Alger Hiss was framed. Thus does Nixon inherit an undeserved and posthumous victory. If by chance we ever elect a bent and unscrupulous Republican president, he or she will have a whole new thesaurus of excuses, public and ''private,'' with which to fend off impeachment. These ''bipartisan'' excuses will have been partly furnished by the ''nonjudgmental'' love generation. If Eszterhas had had the guts to face this fact, he could have written a book more like ''F.I.S.T.'' instead of ''Sliver.'' Meanwhile, and almost but not quite unbelievably, we await the president's comment on Juanita Broaddrick's allegation.
Christopher Hitchens (on American Rhapsody), Basic Instinct
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