Our Scarlet Letter Complex

...A tabloid story, once broken, will now be carried by the mainstream press as a news item and thus legitimized...

...The rise in the president's popularity after he was accused of having an affair with Monica Lewinsky is no accident...

...Beyond rap, the pop-culture obscenity diminishes, but the picture of what men want from sex doesn't improve...

...Your life is over, Guccione was in essence saying to Lewinsky...

...Lawrence described in his 1929 essay "Pornography and Obscenity," in which he argued that pornogDISSENT / Fall 1998 n 89 OUR SCARLET LETTER COMPLEX raphy is the very opposite of art that provides us with the "sunshine" of sexual arousal...

...But the sexual McCarthyism that has brought us to the point where fellatio in the White House between the president and a female intern is treated as if it were an impeachable offense reprsents the kind of cultural shift that the religious and political right could never have engineered on their own...

...These days we don't want to take the steam out of sex, but in our best moments we know that it requires what we don't now have: a context in which how we think and feel about each other gives our passion depth...

...It is a horrifying description consistent with MacKinnon's assertion in Feminism Unmodified that "to be about to be raped is to be gender female in the process of going about life as usual"--but instead of making MacKinnon seem beyond the pale in her view 90 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 of what sex has become for women, it has helped give her mainstream respectability...

...Instead, she was treated as a feminist heroine who had struck a blow for abused women everywhere...

...In this post-Watergate period, when cynicism about everyone in public life reigns, what has made possible this change is abandonment of the rules that in the past made reporters unwilling to explore the rumors of an affair between a Dwight Eisenhower and a Kay Summersby or a John Kennedy and a Marilyn Monroe...

...COPING WITH a culture in which sex has been made ugly in this fashion has not been easy for us as a nation, and with increasing frequency we have come to resent those who have made us feel dirty...

...The numbers, which in an early Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed the president with a 79 percent approval rating and Kenneth Starr with just 22 percent, reflect our sense that we are being fed bedroom tales that are none of our business and benefit nobody...

...DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 91 OUR SCARLET LETTER COMPLEX In 1993 Antioch College made headlines when the media found out about its "Sexual Offense Policy," which required students engaging in sex not only to get explicit verbal permission from each other when they began but before each new act of intimacy...

...At her trial Bobbitt's supporters weren't content to claim that she was a victim who had been pushed into a terrible act of vengeance because she didn't know what else to do...

...Our absorption of sex story after sex story hasn't led to our making sex a major part of our lives so much as contributed to an environment in which the opposite is the case...

...To make matters worse, all too often our answer to the kind of exploitative sex our culture presents as the norm has been revenge on an even grander scale...

...The prominence of the sex scandal in contemporary American life represents an important cultural victory for the political right, comparable to the political success it has had in transforming the way welfare rights and affirmative action are now seen...

...But that is as far as we go...

...In the July Vanity Fair it was even possible to see a Herb Ritts photo shoot of Monica Lewinsky in which she was billed as "the face that launched a thousand subpoenas...

...Pornography, Lawrence wrote, is the attempt "to insult sex, to do dirt on it," by making it seem trivial and nasty...

...Even Woody Allen, once the master of light comedy, has, as Deconstructing Harry shows, ended up creating a nineties movie persona whose obsession with scoring makes us wince rather than laugh at his bedroom antics...

...Even our notions of courtship have taken an ugly twist...

...As reflected in Ellen Fein and Sherry Schneir's backlash how-to-getahusband book, The Rules, courtship has nothing to do with love and everything to do with sexual frustration...

...Senator Jesse Helms and Ronald Reagan's secretary of education William Bennett, along with Moral Majority founder Reverend Jerry Falwell can take credit for the enormous influence they have had in bringing about an era of sexual suspicion...

...More difficult to assess, apart from the obvious political fallout, is how deep the damage goes from a culture that, on the one hand, asks us to be voyeurs, and, on the other hand, makes sex seem dirty...

...They also want to humiliate her by forcing her to reveal the name of her lover...

...Just how changed we are is epitomized by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione offering Monica Lewinsky two million dollars to tell her story and pose for his magazine...

...In the sexual climate of the 1990s, snitches and voyeurs can, it is clear, count on having our full attention and, within the media, enormous tolerance as well...

...Three decades after the sexual revolution, our own sex lives, if the most recent Survey of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago is to be believed, are nothing to brag about, if frequency matters at all...

...In the race to get the Clinton-Lewinsky story, what has paid off is getting the story first...

...Salinger—and in the process make use of twenty-five letters Salinger sent her—the criticism she drew in no way threatened her project...

...And smaller wonder still that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, after getting OUR SCARLET LETTER COMPLEX Tripp's tapes, did not feel there was anything smarmy about asking Lewinsky to wear a hidden microphone into the White House so she might get the president to talk about their sex life...

...But to see our contemporary scarlet letter complex as only the handiwork of the right is to underestimate the much deeper assault on sex that has peaked in the 1990s...

...Although they make Hester stand alone on a scaffold in the town square, there is on their part "none of the heartlessness of another social state which would only find a theme for jest" in her predicament...

...But at the core of the nineties sexual scandal and the rise of mainstream tabloidism is an even deeper change: a cynicism that treats sex —and, by extension, sexual privacy—as unworthy of protection...

...Most papers simply reported the Gifford story as daily news, as they did when an anonymous tipster cost Air Force General Joseph Ralston his chance to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by disclosing an affair he had thirteen years earlier while separated from his wife...

...But in the 1990s an altogether different ethic has come to prevail about prying into private lives...

...In the film Kids, it is teenage boys—who don't care about spreading AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases— who are the villains...

...Businesses from IBM to Staples now have formal policies for regulating office romances, and these days at the college level, it is faculty who are the focus of policies banning relationships between students and teachers...

...Michaels and the McMartin defendants were ultimately acquitted, but what their Salem-like trials and the willingness of prosecutors to believe the charges against them foretold was an environment in which sexual suspicion would rule the day...

...One of the staunchest defenders of Anita Hill, MacKinnon has become a television talk-show regular and is constantly called on to testify before Congress when questions of censorship and pornography arise...

...The mutilation of her husband was turned into a joke, as those who rallied to her defense put on buttons proclaiming "Lorena Bobbitt for Surgeon General" and wore teeshirts declaring "Love Hurts...

...As they flee west, virtually every man they encounter turns out to be a pig of some sort, and until the police catch up with them, they have a fine time putting the men in their place, using their smarts and Louise's gun to good effect...

...Whether it is the Geto Boys in "Mind of a Lunatic" exclaiming, "Her body's beautiful so I'm thinkin' rape," or 2 Live Crew in "The Fuck Shop" promising a woman "I'm gonna slay you rough and painful," or the West Coast rapper Just-Ice declaring, "The only love I got is psychopathic homicide," the picture of sex is grim...

...The MSNBC News Web site recorded a nearly 300 percent increase in daily hits, and the National Enquirer, which made an unsuccessful offer of $750,000 for Linda Tripp's tapes of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky, saw the viewings of its Web sites more than triple...

...When writer Joyce Maynard recently announced that she intended to publish a memoir about her ten-month affair in 1972 with novelist J.D...

...We focus on the emotional disasters they parade before us...

...Both were taking their cues from our nineties war on sex...

...Viagra jokes are the best we can &when it comes to sexual humor...

...In the case of John F. Kennedy, the consequence has been a mini-industry based on digging up information on the affairs he had before and during his presidency...

...The only papers and television stations that have lost out as a result of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal are those that have failed to jump on the peep-show bandwagon...

...We long ago stopped being a society that punished out-of-wedlock sex or expected the young to wait until marriage before becoming intimate...

...In 1995 there was the Ismail Merchant, James Ivory, Ruth Prawer Jabhvala film Jefferson in Paris, in which the mature Jefferson was putty in Hemings's 92 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 hands...

...The offer, as William Ginsburg, Lewinsky's lawyer at the time, angrily observed, was insulting and vulgar, but what is hard to dismiss is the thinking behind it...

...These days, a remake of Father of the Bride notwithstanding, the tone of our movie marriages is all ironic...

...Getting the facts wrong—as the Dallas Morning News did when it reported a Secret Service agent had seen the president and Lewinsky in a "compromising situation," or as the Wall Street Journal did when it reported that a White House steward told investigators that he had seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone in the Oval Office—has carried no real penalty, save exposure in a magazine like Brill's Content...

...People who have been to graduate school average only fifty-two sexual acts a year, while those who have been to college average just sixty-one...

...As the authors explain early on, their advice to women is "to make Mr...

...In rap, misogyny runs deep...

...Codes like those at Yale and Virginia, which explicitly ban faculty-student relationships, even when consensual, are increasingly the rule...

...Mainstream and tabloid journalism are no longer clearly distinguishable...

...The more absorbed we become by it, the more turned off we seem to get...

...In In and Out the laughs come from Kevin Kline playing a bridegroom who disappoints his bride by announcing that he is gay on the day of his marriage...

...Lawrence's impassioned plea in "Pornography and Obscenity"— that we begin the process of change by adopting "a natural fresh openness about sex"— is not likely to win many converts in an era when overexposure rather than repression is the main problem...

...Beginning in 1994 with the reissue of Barbara Chase-Riboud's steamy novel Sally Hemings, in which the fifteen-year-old Hemings seduces the forty-four-year-old Jefferson while telling herself, "His presence for me was command enough," we have had a steady diet of JeffersonHemings tales...

...Furthermore, in the sexual atmosphere of the nineties, even longdead presidents are targets for having their romantic lives examined...

...IN HER 1993 book Only Words, feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon begins her opening chapter with the following description of what sex has become for women: "You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs...

...It is a cynicism that D.H...

...As journalist Candace Bushnell put it in Sex and the City, we have entered the Age of Un-Innocence...

...Once upon a time our movie marriages were joyous...

...No one has affairs to remember—instead we have breakfast at seven a.m...

...Our nostalgia for a past in which sex seemed both richer and subtler may be seen in the huge audiences that Titanic and the remakes of Jane Austen's courtship novels have drawn, as well as in the popularity of a retro film like Sleepless in Seattle, where the two lovers never meet until the final scene and in homage to the 1957 Cary Grant–Deborah Kerr romance, An Affair to Remember, arrange to have their meeting on the observation deck of the Empire State Building...

...NICOLAUS MILLS is currently at work on a new book, Bedroom Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution...

...From President Bill Clinton to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to Senator Bob Packwood to Air Force General Joseph Ralston to comedian Bill Cosby—the list of those accused of sexual wrongdoing includes some of the most prominent figures in American life...

...Even more telling, MacKinnon's grim views of sex, along with those of her radical feminist ally, Andrea Dworkin, who contends that intercourse is a "means of physiologically making a woman inferior" and that "violence is male...

...94 n DISSENT / Fall 1998...

...Right obsessed with having you as his by making yourself seem unattainable...

...For talk-show hosts and columnists, it was easy to get laughs by imagining two Antioch students on a date, but since the Antioch rules were first published, the suspicions on which they rested have, if anything, become more widely codified in American society...

...They are not simply content to make his heroine, Hester Prynne, wear a scarlet A because she had a child out of wedlock...

...Then, in 1996, in The Long Affair, the historian Conor Cruise O'Brien took up the Jefferson-Hemings liaison as a way of talking about Jefferson's politics, and in 1997, in her study Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, treating the alleged Jefferson-Hemings affair as if it were a legal case, argued that the evidence, particularly Hemings's patterns of conception, gave solid grounds for concluding that she was Jefferson's mistress...

...Only one person in twenty is sexually active three times a week...

...For the tabloids, as well as such celebrated investigative journalists as Seymour Hersh, the reporter who wrote the first account of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Kennedy's sexual past has provided a feeding frenzy...

...The pattern was established at the start of the decade in Ridley Scott's 1991 buddy film Thelma and Louise in which Louise (Susan Sarandon), enraged by an assault on her friend Thelma (Geena Davis) in a parking lot, shoots Thelma's wouldbe rapist, thereby creating a situation in which the two women become fugitives from the law...

...Nineties sexual scandal embodies the same pornographic feelings about sex, and predictably its main arena has been the trial or public hearing, where in the typical sex scandal the most intimate details of a person's life are exposed, then subjected to the analysis of strangers, and finally turned into entertainment...

...In the 1980s we got a preview of how far such distrust could be carried in a series of nursery school sex trials—notably the 1983 McMartin Preschool case in California and the 1985 Margaret Kelly Michaels case in New Jersey, in which preschool workers were charged with the most fantastic sex crimes (in Michaels's case licking peanut butter from the genitals of the children in her care and playing "Jingle Bells" on the piano while nude...

...Nor do matters get any better when we turn to pop culture...

...In real life the classic revenge scenario was played out in 1993 when Lorena Bobbitt, the battered wife of former marine John Bobbitt, cut off his penis after what she said was a night of brutal sex...

...By way of contrast we need only think back to the famous 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold in which Burt Reynolds, then at the height of his film career, posed nude, one hand covering his private parts, while he smiled as he stretched out on a lion's head rug...

...It is a dilemma, personal and cultural, from which there is no easy way out...

...I N THIS atmosphere, the result has been a new emphasis on sexual exposure, on bringing to light relationships that would not have been approved of had they been known...

...You have become a national joke...

...In a world in which the bedroom is such a battlefield, the one constant is that nobody— no matter how innocent-appearing—can be trusted sexually...

...ART HAS, unfortunately, kept pace with real life...

...the male is the penis," have over the course of the nineties become embodied in some of the most widely read writing of the decade...

...Simpson trial...

...Nor has much changed since the year began...

...We are a long way from Puritan New England, but as the 1990s draw to a close, it is clear that the sexual scandal has become the signature event of the decade...

...We can quarrel with the tactlessness of Guccione's proposition, but what it says about our current sexual culture is on target...

...It is information we can't ignore, but we go away feeling empty and act accordingly...

...It is enough to give sex in general and men in particular a bad name, and over the course of the nineties it has...

...Economically driving this rush to publication is the ability of lone operators, such as Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, who suffer few consequences if one of their scoops proves false, to beat out the major papers and networks by releasing a story over the Internet...

...In Michael Crichton's novel Disclosure, an angry woman finds that filing false sexual harassment charges against her ex-boyfriend is enough to all but ruin his career...

...Finally trapped, they commit suicide by driving their car into the Grand Canyon, but not before they have established the idea that dignity for women means humbling men as brutally as possible...

...The problem is that our resentment hasn't been enough to change our current sexual culture or lessen our fascination with the lurid stories we are getting about the president...

...WHERE THIS leaves us is at a point at which getting news from the sex front feels like getting news from the war front...

...In her 1993 novel Foxfire, Joyce Carol Oates took up the same theme with a story about a teenage-girl gang that finds the only way to deal with the abusive men in their world is to outdo them with violence, and as the decade has progressed, men have, albeit disapprovingly, latched on to the notion that revenge is the primary sexual nexus in contemporary society...

...The revenge film and the revenge novel have managed to set the sexual tone for the nineties...

...Women are portrayed as hos and bitches, and men are glorified for treating them as such...

...When you are older, you husband ties you to the bed and drips hot wax on your nipples and brings in other men to watch and makes you smile through it...

...He will, however, concede their moral seriousness...

...For living public figures, the interest in their past sex lives has been even more intense...

...It was a marvelous spoof on the silliness of the traditional skin-magazine cover, and at the same time, with a confident and handsome Reynolds in on the joke, it was also a reminder of the pleasure we take in imagining the physically perfect lover...

...In In the Company of Men, it is corporate executives who can't resist turning sex into a brutal game, and in the futuristic Strange Days, it is the men of OUR SCARLET LETTER COMPLEX the new century who are the bad guys, preferring virtual-reality snuff porn to actual sex...

...In the press the same tone was struck after her acquittal...

...Fifteen percent of the adult population accounts for 50 percent of all sexual activity, and those with the highest educations are the least sexually active...

...In 1975, when Larry Flynt brought Hustler national attention with a five-page pictorial of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing in the nude on the Greek island Skorpious, there was a protest over the sleaziness of his ethics and no effort by the mainstream press to exploit the photos...

...In Dorothy Allison's coming-of-age novel Bastard Out of Carolina, the monster is her narrator's stepfather, who forces himself on her while she is a teenager, and in Paula Vogel's off- Broadway hit play, How I Learned to Drive, the monster is her central character's uncle, who begins an affair with his niece while she is still a girl...

...A quarter of a century later, it is difficult to imagine a film or a magazine portraying sex with such a combination of humor and admiration...

...Even the usually skeptical culture critic Barbara Ehrenreich couldn't resist slyly noting in a Time magazine essay, "If a fellow insists on using his penis as a weapon, I say, one way or another, he ought to be swiftly disarmed...

...Since the decade began, Thomas Jefferson has gotten almost as much attention as John Kennedy on the premise that he had a thirty-eight-year relationship with his slave Sally Hemings...

...In Hawthorne's eyes, the Puritans' conduct is far worse than Hester's...

...and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible...

...Like the "Thelma and Louise Still Live" bumper stickers, it is a premise that has flourished in the film's wake...

...In David Mamet's play Oleanna, an angry student discovers that all she needs to do to prevent her professor from getting tenure is claim that he propositioned her in his office, and in Paul Verhoeven's filmnoir thriller Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone shows that as long as she can seduce the men she hates, she can get away with murdering them...

...By the media standards of the 1990s, the bedroom is no longer privileged territory...

...We have entered an era in which no public figure—from entertainer to politician—can expect that his or her sex life won't become news if anything unusual about it is discovered...

...We talk about the recklessness or impropriety our sex scandals reveal, and in the case of unmarried welfare mothers, we complain about paying taxes to support their children...

...Small wonder, then, that in dealing with her "friend" Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp felt she would encounter few objections if she taped their conversations and then made use of the juicy gossip they contained about the president...

...In contrast to the Puritans, we, however, attach few overt moral or theological judgments to the sex in our sexual scandals...

...A film like Father of the Bride, where a tearful Spencer Tracy nervously gave away Elizabeth Taylor, made us laugh at its domestic comedy, but we never lost sight of the romantic belief in the future father and daughter shared...

...Thus we have had the phenomenon of a somber Ted Koppel discussing oral sex on Nightline, People magazine running a cover story titled "All the President's Women," and novelist Erica Jong speculating in the New York Observer about whether the president used a dental dam in his encounters with Monica Lewinsky...

...Still more important, the mainstream press and the networks, in their desire to be first with a story, have become competitors with the Internet...

...You might as well get DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 93 OUR SCARLET LETTER COMPLEX some money to compensate for the indignities that you will be subjected to no matter what else you do...

...What is most revealing about our sex scandals is the disillusionment they reveal in us with the consequences of the sexual revolution of the 1960s...

...What we do have going for us, however, is a sense, if not a direct memory, of better sexual times...

...In My Best Friend's Wedding, the jokes depend on a scheming Julia Roberts doing everything she can to spoil the wedding of a man she once loved and now wants back...

...The all-news television channels saw their ratings rise by more than 50 percent in the second week of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal...

...In Kathryn Harrison's memoir, The Kiss, the monster is her divorced father, a minister with whom she began an incestuous affair while she was a college student...

...What guides them, as it did the papers engaged in the yellow journalism wars at the turn of the century, is a media ethic that puts the highest premium on the scoop...

...New information about the president and Lewinsky still gets immediate network coverage, and from Rivera Live to Hardball with Chris Matthews, a series of syndicated talk shows feed off the Lewinsky story as they once did the O.J...

...It doesn't matter if the sex in question was consensual, if nobody got hurt, if no national issues were involved...

...The same was true for the attacks on the supermarket tabloid Globe, when it did a sex expose on ABC sports announcer Frank Gifford by paying a flight attendant he knew (but had never been intimate with) $75,000 to lure him to a hotel room where there was a hidden camera...

...These days we don't have to search far to find MacKinnon's and Dworkin's central message—men are sexual monsters—at the core of the work of women writers who reach huge audiences...

...And when it comes to sexual irony, we're stuck with rock star and underwear model Mark Wahlberg exposing himself at the end of Boogie Nights and admiring his own penis...