Big man

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by Midge Decter

The story of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is a story whose general outline is perfectly familiar to anyone who has ever attended an ordinary American high school. She is clearly the girl that the kids--ever cruel--used to call the "school slut." Lively, exhibitionistic, full of longing and anxiety about herself, she hangs around the locker of the school's number-one male--say, the captain of the football team or the boy voted most popular in his class (or, as we now learn of Monica Lewinsky herself, a teacher)--and offers herself to him. For her this serves both a longing to be important and a long-practiced expectation of humiliation. For him, a girl is after all a girl. Her offer is taken whenever he has nothing else to do, in a dark corner of the school or the back seat of a car. Though he is going steady with the prom queen, and hence will never be seen with her in public, she takes solace from the idea that there is a sense in which by being ever available to him she has the greater power. Ultimately, of course, he rejects and humiliates her, perhaps by insulting her in the presence of others, or perhaps by handing her over to a needy friend. And she thinks to rescue a few shards of self-respect by telling all about their relations to someone who will make her story known.

Of course, now that so many high-school kids are what they call sexually active, this basic story has acquired a certain number of twists and subtleties. It nowadays might be not her mere availability but the variety of the sexual hungers she is willing to sate that accounts for her status as school slut. Nevertheless, the transactions of status and power between her and the school's number-one male as well as the certainty of her humiliation cannot have changed much. For as the same text in which there cannot be found any special exception for oral sex tells us, "Male and female created He them." In other words, each after his and her own kind, even in late-twentieth-century America.

In the story of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton as we have it, things are not quite so youthfully gauche. He bought her an occasional gift, for example, and may now and then have engaged her in friendly conversation. And when the moment came to get rid of her, first out of the White House and finally out of Washington, she was handed over to a friend who set out to do something genuinely helpful for her. In the end, of course, he did not succeed.

But a number-one male never succeeds in keeping the girl he humiliates quiet, and Bill Clinton, who is after all a high-school boy with clearly a lot of experience in the ways of high-school girls, should have known that. For what would have been the point of her offering to service him in the manner the whole country now knows he prefers if she were never under any circumstance to tell people about it?

But the problem connected with her telling people about their relations came to be involved with such grown-up unpleasantnesses as perjury and/or the suborning thereof, attended by the possibility of indictment, conviction, and even impeachment. That was not how the scenario was supposed to have played out, and the poor kid was undoubtedly terrified. She even had to engage her parents in her predicament.

Such emotionally lopsided affairs are always also a little dangerous to the comfort and reputation of the beloved, whoever he may be, but this time what was at stake was nothing less than the Presidency of the United States. She wanted to do the right thing by him, poor Monica, including commit perjury. And she is so young and so wide-eyed, she might have contented herself with sharing her secret with just a few friends. But then the extra humiliations began--and she has probably just begun to experience what the Clinton White House can inflict in the way of scabrous gossip and outright lies, such as Clinton's so predictably saying he never had anything, nothing, nada, zero, less than zero, to do with "that woman."

Meanwhile, of course, the feminists are cowering somewhere in a corner, exposed for the political groupies they are, with not a word to say for the plight of a little 21-year-old girl, on her knees before the chief power in the land, who is also her boss. (Had that boss been anyone else, they would undoubtedly be determined to demonstrate that such an episode of sexual harassment should cost him many millions of dollars.)

We hear from the message-bearers of the sexual revolution that young girls no longer think of oral sex as the kind of big deal it was in olden times. Maybe that is so, but, on the strength of the sad story of Monica Lewinsky, girls are still girls, their tears are still tears, and high school is still high school. Even when the captain of the football team happens to be the President of the United States.

Midge Decter, editor and freelance writer, is the author of The Liberated Woman and Other Americans.