The misanthrope's corner

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by Florence King

It's deadline time and I'm winging it. Usually it takes me four days to do a column: two days to write it, one day to revise it, and one day to polish it. But there's no time for that now because I waited too long.

I should have started this column a week ago but I have been glued to the TV watching the Come Again Kid deny non-adultery in the wrong verb tense. My deadline is the same day as the State of the Union speech; there's no telling what will have happened (future perfect) by the time you read this, but I have to write something so I'll ask you to forego my usual carefully prepared food for thought and take (ink)potluck: a free-associative melange of some of me things that went through my mind as I watched fate close in on Deep Croak.... It is 1952. Now 16, I have lost my baby fat and gone from duckling to swan, and my mother, who normally pays no attention to anything except baseball and her hero, Sen. Joe McCarthy, is being uncharacteristically maternal. We are washing dishes when suddenly, out of the blue, she says:

"If a man ever asks you to do something funny to him, you tell him to go to hell, you hear?"

"What do you mean, `something funny'?"

"Never mind, just promise me."

Mystified, I promised. The mystery deepened as she swung off on one of her patriotic tangents.

"That's why the French can't win a war without our help! It saps their strength! They're so busy doing something funny to each other that the Germans just walk right in!"

I got A's in history but I couldn't sort that one out. I tried my grandmother.

"What does it mean when a man asks a woman to do something funny to him?"

"Your grandfather was a perfect gentleman." I might have known. It was her standard reply to all sex questions. Next I consulted my best girlfriend, who drew a blank.

"Maybe we could look it up in the dictionary?" she suggested hopefully.

"Oh, sure. If it isn't under `something funny' we can try `funny comma something.'"

She had an older married sister who had come through with several tidbits we couldn't pry out of our mothers, so we dropped by her place for an intelligence briefing, but this time she balked.

"You two don't need to know about such things. Just remember that men have a terrible name they call women who do something funny." "What?" we chorused. "I wouldn't repeat it."

... It is 1956. Now twenty, I finally figure out what Something Funny means from, of all things, a supplementary text my history professor put on reserve in the library.

Felix Faure, president of France 1895-1899, died during a visit from his mistress. Hearing her terrified screams, his aides broke down the door and found him seated on a sofa with the mistress kneeling in front of him, her long black hair clutched in his death-locked fingers. After freeing the hysterical woman, the aides put the fallen leader in bed with his hands folded over a crucifix, a scene immortalized by a newspaper drawing of the time that was reproduced in the reserve book under the title, "Death of Faure (Official Version)." My mother was right.

What strikes me about today's oral-sex psychodrama is where the kooky thinking is coming from. My generation of women had our rationalizations, but they were ours, not men's. The erotic contortionism we called "Everything But" made us the Keystone Kops of heavy petting, stripping gears and kicking holes in dashboards with high heels, but our dates not only put up with it, they respected us for being virgins because we had them convinced that nice girls never got in the back seat.

That kind of female power vanishes when men do the kooky thinking. The emerging theory that fellatio does not "count" as adultery or even constitute a sexual relationship proves that letting men get hold of rationalizations is like letting Wrong Way Corrigan get hold of aviation.

Whether or not Monica Lewinsky brings down the Clinton Presidency, she has certainly succeeded in weakening the "womyn" wall of political correctness. One commentator after another referred to her as a "young lady," a "girl," a "kid," and even, once or twice, a "child." Each time these diminutives emerged, Clinton seemed to get older and older.

Another point of linguistic interest was Lewinsky's taped statement, "I've lied all my life." Male commentators took it literally, but most media women made less of it. I daresay they were thinking, as I was, of the hyperbole of girltalk. You have to add mental italics--"I've lied all my life!"--to hear the giggle and the long disjointed story about nothing in particular that usually accompany statements of this sort.

Whether Clinton goes in disgrace or stays under a cloud will make little difference to serious lovers of language because either way we are in for it. Face it: no matter how many women have done something funny to Clinton, not one of them will ever be called a fellatrix, and it's a dead cert that "sexual addiction" counselors will do their tone-deaf best to give satyriasis a bad name.

I must admit that the tumult is expertly plotted. The best-loved novels always contain two very different women who play off each other: Scarlett and Melanie, Becky and Amelia, Anna and Kitty, the angel and the hussy, the blonde and the brunette, good sister/bad sister. Now we have Paula Jones with her signature line, "Ah jes' wanna git mah good name back," and Monica Lewinsky with "Schmucko"--Daisy May meets Marjorie Morningstar.