Feminist responses to the sex scandal

...If there's anything to be gained for feminists here, it must be some further insight about the political significance of personal behavior...

...The man who signed this legislation was not exactly an unblemished feminist hero before we found out about his affair with Lewinsky or heard Willey's accusations...

...Why shouldn't it instead be treated like every other politically significant act...

...For every person who considers the Clinton-Lewinsky affair categorically private because it was sexual, there's someone else who thinks it's absurd to talk about protecting the privacy of public employees' conduct in a government office...

...JESSIE ALLEN is a lawyer and doctoral candidate at Columbia University Law School...

...But he is president and she was an intern...

...The question for feminists is whether President Clinton's personal conduct demands a public political response...

...When people say they understand why the president lied under oath about his sex life, I wonder what they would say about a woman on welfare who lied about sex to preserve benefits for her family...

...Personal behavior in public places is often treated as private...

...The personal is part of the political...

...Senator Packwood's may have been just such a case...

...But an act's political importance can no more be determined by saying the conduct was illegal than by saying it was private...

...How can you excuse that behavior while insisting that sexual harassment laws be broadly enforced...

...It's a mixed record...

...To punish the president's behavior as categorically coercive, though, we would have to ignore or contradict Lewinsky's testimony that she was a willing participant in the relationship—a denial of her own willing agency that itself gets uncomfortably close to coercion...

...Many Americans would no doubt see this legally permissible conduct as the president's private business, but it would surely trouble feminists...

...Popular concern for the privacy rights of the highest federal employee strikes me as a bit more solicitous than the prevailing attitude about how much privacy is due some other recipients of federal benefits...

...There are some ways public officials might behave in their personal lives that would seem to preclude feminist support...

...People who find that approach hypocritical must think that personal conduct always takes precedence...

...Suppose the president had physically forced Lewinsky to perform oral sex or threatened to fire her if she refused his advances...

...He has defended abortion rights in a number of tough situations...

...That's the law that prohibits using Medicaid funds to provide abortions...

...By all accounts, she welcomed their sexual contact...

...In a less Olympian realm, it may have been unwise to treat Senator Robert Packwood's public record of support for women's interests as irrelevant once he was discovered to be a chronic sexual harasser...

...We understand public acts as formal, costumed, shaped to create an impression if not deliberately to deceive...

...Still, Clinton's downfall would hardly be a feminist victory...

...In fact, whether or not you think law can or should be apolitical, ruling out those sorts of factors is what is supposed to distinguish legal judgments from political policy choices...

...But if she is to be believed, isn't it clear the president was trying to coerce her into having sex by implicitly offering her a quid pro quo—service me and I'll make you ambassador...

...The main advocates for public punishment of the president's personal behavior have been anything but progressive on women's rights...

...Putting the moves on someone who has come to you for a job is unquestionably an abuse of power...

...It's hard DISSENT / Winter 1999 21 to picture the president of the United States receiving oral sex from a White House intern without seeing something exploitative about the situation...

...For many feminists, the political significance of the president's sexual conduct is overshadowed by his endorsement of the welfare reform bill of 1996...

...Hold on, though...

...Sure, Willey says that when she told him to stop he did...

...The truth is that if the independent counsel's report focused on the sort of conduct Kathleen Willey alleged, supporting Bill Clinton would have been much more difficult for feminists...

...Still, how someone acts when he thinks no one's looking can unmask aspects of his private life...

...If people are politically accountable for their personal lives, why put up with a politician who does the "lip limbo," as Don Imus put it, with an intern...

...Having smudged the lines between personal and political, private and public, we need to consider the meaning of perDISSENT / Winter 1999 23 sonal behavior in its full context, without de , Hying either the complexity of the political work Dr our political principles...

...Lewinsky actively sought sexual contact with the president...

...Of course he is also the man who championed family and medical work leave...

...Treating the two situations alike is consistent only if one is simply opposed to sex...

...As a feminist, I flinch every time someone explains that because sex is personal, and therefore private, the president should not have to answer publicly for his sexual conduct...

...That simplistic view is equally unconvincing...

...Conversations in public phone booths are protected from government surveillance...

...In fact, they are so far to the political right they manage to make Henry J. Hyde, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, look moderate...

...In the first case he'd be subject to criminal prosecution and in the other to a slam-dunk sexual-harassment suit, provided Lewinsky alleged it was the reason for her sexual compliance...

...Yet it seems necessary to consider the surrounding context, including the president's public record, whether the ultimate source of a feminist program is moral or political, when deciding how a continued Clinton presidency advances or hampers a feminist program...

...WHY DO I say "difficult" and not "precluded...

...Suppose we learned that President Clinton had agreed to pay for his daughter's college education only on the condition that she give up her interest in science for the more appropriately "feminine" study of home economics...

...The point is that it makes sense to look at the whole picture— to weigh the political importance of the particular personal conduct against the value of the person's public political acts and to see how the person's whole record looks in light of the political alternatives...

...Of course the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky was personal...

...Even so, if blacks continued to support a Lincoln presidency after learning of some racist personal conduct on his part, I doubt many of the rest of us would call them hypocrites...

...One reason we have hesitated to contextualize our political assessment of Clinton's personal conduct might be that we confused that judgment with a decision under sexual-harassment law...

...It's clear that viewing the personal as political makes it impossible for us to dismiss politically troubling personal behavior just by labeling it "private...

...But the effect of that affair, and of Kathleen Willey's allegations, on our image of the president as someone who stands up for women's rights is more problematic...

...But people are not always more "themselves" in their personal relations...

...Isn't it hypocritical to attack a conservative Supreme Court nominee for talking dirty to his staff but excuse a liberal president who actually had sex with his...

...Though Hill's accusations did not involve physical contact, she testified that she felt trapped by her boss's repeated insistence that she stay and listen to his pornographic soliloquies even after she had clearly communicated her discomfort...

...I've been puzzling over how to express it: The personal isn't only political...

...It is not so clear that conflicting personal behavior always renders that sort of public stance inauthentic...

...But that view does not force us to jettison any political representative whose personal conduct transgresses feminist principles, no matter what the public cost...

...For feminists, as for legislators deciding what constitutes an impeachable offense, the problem is more complicated...

...If it is true, Willey's story is much more problematic for feminists than the president's affair with Lewinsky...

...If what you want ultimately from a political leader is public representation, it may not make a lot of sense to use his personal conduct as the litmus test for his political principles...

...Why isn't it fair to find President Clinton's personal behavior politically offensive and still conclude that it is outweighed by his willingness to publicly promote women's political agenda...

...We play roles in private settings, too...

...Stopping sexual harassment and domestic violence, for instance, depends on the notion that personal behavior sometimes warrants public intervention...

...To me, it makes perfect sense to study the whole record before deciding how to respond to his politically offensive sexual conduct...

...It's ironic to face the same tired mischaracterization for failing to complain about noncoercive sex...

...Not only is there a tremendous disparity in their public power, he was her supervisor...

...Then again, we often assume that, regardless of public appearances, someone's personal behavior reveals his or her true self...

...Sexual-harassment law regulates only unwelcome sexual conduct in the workplace...

...That Act, which begins, "Marriage is the foundation of a successful society," denies women the right to public support for their children's and their own survival...

...what we are trying to figure out is whether this personal conduct should be treated as entirely private or if it requires a public response...

...That doesn't mean those aren't valid political considerations...

...She claims that when she asked the president for a job he mashed her...

...So where does that leave us...

...I see nothing to be gained here by a public response that denies a woman's autonomy in order to save it...

...But why should seeing the political importance of personal conduct mean that public acts no longer count...

...In some sense it would be poetically just if the president were vanquished by the same moralizing conservatives he was pandering to when he signed the welfare bill...

...In those circumstances, power can be abused without overt coercion...

...But what about Kathleen Willey...

...Lincoln's behavior toward African Americans in his personal life is surely politically significant...

...For that matter, his personal behavior might be less important than his public betrayals of women...

...But remember the Hyde Amendment...

...Focusing on coercion easily distinguishes the Clinton-Lewinsky liaison from Anita Hill's allegations about now-Justice Clarence Thomas...

...A legal determination of liability for harassment does not turn on whether the defendant has been generally sensitive to women's interests...

...For some reason, both feminists and their critics have often treated sexual misconduct as a kind of automatic disqualifier from public life...

...Is the feminist conundrum here just a matter of poli22 DISSENT / Winter 1999 tics...

...I don't mean to suggest that politically obnoxious personal behavior can never render someone unfit to publicly represent women's political interests...

...We sometimes shy away from calling feminist goals political, in order to anchor feminism in a moral-rights claim that transcends politics...

...Standing up for rights is a fundamentally public activity...

...Because, if politically objectionable sexual conduct preeludes feminist support for a public official, then not only is the personal political, it trumps all other political conduct...

...Coercion is the central feminist concern in sexual relations between women and men, and Monica Lewinsky describes her affair with President Clinton as noncoercive...

...Parents discipline children on playgrounds and lovers quarrel in restaurants, yet there is no public obligation—or prerogative—to get involved in these personal relationships unless the nature of the behavior itself warrants public intervention...

...The personal is always political, but not necessarily public...

...Nor does it matter that holding him liable will benefit other employers whose policies are far worse for women...

...I can't agree with Gloria Steinem that the behavior Willey describes is basically noncoercive...

...Feminists are used to being called the antisex brigade when we complain about sexual coercion...

...If we say that personal conduct has political implications, we can't also argue that all personal conduct should be shielded from public comment...

...It seems strange to have to protest that regular old public-style political acts still count too...

...That would be the end of the matter in an affair between autonomous equals...

...The president's public presentation of himself as a faithful husband was pretty well shattered by the revelation of his affair with Monica Lewinsky...

...The common feature of these bad-behavior hypotheticals is coercion—a clear, coercive use of power that denies a woman's independent will...