Come on. Baby, Stir My Spam

...An intelligent commentator from Mars might have predicted that with Americans and their media taking such pride in being erotically on the cutting edge, charging anybody with having the wrong kind of sex would be a political y awner—that such acts would be one of those things regular guys (and now gals) actually boast about, like being a bad speller...

...The crucial fact that military folk are pretty much like everybody else, but serve under circumstances that mandate drastically different notions of discipline, gets too little emphasis...

...The media will go on looking for a few more bad men as long as stories about them continue to sell soap...

...With a few exceptions, members of Congress and the press minimized the dissimilarities between the Flinn and Ralston cases, wrongly seeing them as examples of a double standard...

...Probably the main reason the press has come down so hard on the Armed Forces is the assumption that military men are nearly all conservatives, basically clubwielding Neanderthals when it comes to women and most other aspects of life...

...First, a whole bunch of sergeants and other lower-level Army types are courtmartialed and sent to the slammer for having sexual relations with female soldiers who were under their command...

...Europeans, particularly the French, have a big laugh every time some American public figure gets in trouble over sex...

...Look at the National Organization for Women's different approaches to Anita Hill and Paula Jones...

...confused, contradictory social expectations arising in a long period of peace...

...Many in the news business would say this is because conservatives espouse family values, and the press has an obligation to expose hypocrisy—as it also did in the case of Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart in 1988...

...One result is that public figures are now subjected to the same kinds of coverage that entertainers have long taken for granted...

...Look at what they—and the press—had to say about Lieutenant Kelly Flinn and General Joseph Ralston...

...A few weeks ago the Washington Post headlined a news story ridiculing an interracial male organization oriented toward family responsibilities: With Prayer and Singing, Promise Keepers Assemble...

...The rules are changing all the time, but they never get any less rigid...

...Meanwhile the Commander in Chief continues to be sued for sexual harassment, a case the press decided long ago was not a feminist cause, not worthy of saturation coverage, not an example whose potential effect on the soldiers, sailors and airpersons under his command need be noticed...

...For the next hundred years, "Victorian" would be a term of ridicule and abuse, one of the ultimate insults in a century that has prided itself from beginning to end on being more sexually liberated than any of its predecessors...

...It never occurs to the people who toss them around so casually that these stereotypes argue powerfully for keeping women out of the services altogether...

...But as anyone knows who has heard of Clarence Thomas, Robert Packwood, or the military cases that so exercise the same television networks that bring you Ricki Lake and Montel Williams, the Martian would be dead wrong...

...Some people were already tired of her and everything she represented...

...When should adultery or other sexual misbehavior become a public issue...

...It is now an unquestioned truism that President Kennedy slept with more women than the average man meets in a lifetime...

...The news of the last few months leads instead to the conclusion that Americans are terminally schizophrenic about sex...

...Only "possibly" because in practice the same overt criteria come into play, especially the not unreasonable question of whether someone (generally a man) has taken advantage of someone else (generally a woman) who has less power...

...Soon after, an Air Force general is forced to withdraw as a candidate for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because many years ago he committed adultery with a civilian...

...Four years later it lambasted Senator Packwood in juicy detail, and it ballyhooedthe military scandals of 1996-97 week after week...

...When it comes to political figures' sex lives, the other part of the dilemma, there ought to be some way for the press and public to avoid the extremes of so-called Victorianism and the French tolerance for whatever power does...

...At the same time there are covert ideological criteria that largely determine whether the case becomes a cause célèbre in the media...

...Especially Thomas Jefferson, who as everybody knows has hundreds of descendants by a slave mistress named Sally Flemings...

...There are, possibly, two separable issues here: the sex lives of politicians and those of members of the armed forces...

...Franklin D. Roosevelt, although paralyzed from the waist down, had it off with a gaudy variety of domestic and foreign lovelies while Eleanor discovered the pleasures of lesbianism...

...Group's Leader Deplores 'Sexual Immorality.' You can see where the Post stands on sex...

...François Mitterrand, the late French President, had children by both a wife and a mistress, and commentators made a point of how a really civilized society accepts such "human" frailties as a matter of course...

...Of course, some French commentators could never understand the fuss over Watergate either, or over the fact (revealed late in his presidency) that Mitterrand was a loyal official of the Vichy government until the Allies began to win World War II...

...The only recent exception to all this rectitude was, again, Paula Jones' sexual harassment charges against President Clinton, on which the old gentlemen's agreement seems to have made a comeback...

...At a certain point, media coverage or public obsession itself reduces an official's ability to do his job, as in the case of Senator Packwood...

...You wouldn't know it this summer...

...a widening gulf between people in uniform and their watchdogs in the press and government, fewer and fewer of whom ever did military service...

...In this instance the mainstream press, hostile to what it calls military "culture" but getting badly confused by now as to which of these cases constitutes a feminist cause to rally behind, splits, though the general loses on points...

...Even boring old Ike had Kay Summersby to take his mind off World War II...

...Since the most common ingredients in highly rated programs are sex and violence, it's surprising that television took so long to discover what a gold mine the armed forces could be...

...But the media often take their lead here from feminist organizations, and the suspicion is hard to resist that a public figure's support or opposition toward such issues as abortion and affirmative action sometimes has more impact on whether an accusation becomes a big deal than either the hypocrisy of the malefactor or the plight of the woman involved...

...The idea that anything as juicy as a potential sex scandal involving a major institution could remain private in the era of 500 channels is visionary...

...These cases are the proverbial tip of a psychological iceberg, which has been building up under water for decades and is now ready to tear a hole in whatever ship sails by...

...In the past five years the distinctions between pornography and news, between the supermarket tabloids and the "respectable" press, have largely broken down...

...Queen Victoria, who seems to have had a high old time as long as her husband lived, would wonder how in the world the late 20th century got so sexually mixed up...

...Yet in 1991 the same newspaper, like the New York Times, USA Today, and the four major television news organizations, put its front page at the disposal of Anita Hill's supporters...

...After being discredited for nearly two centuries, the same charge has come back again in books by Conor Cruise O'Brien, Annette Gordon-Reed and the novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, not to mention a recent Merchant-Ivory movie, for exactly the same reason—to discredit Jefferson politically, this time from the Left...

...Over the last 20 years or so, the past has been reconstructed to lead up to just this kind of sex-drenched present in high places, civil as well as military...

...The trouble is, virtually all issues are routinely reduced today to personality, "lifestyle," emotions that the least-informed TV-watcher can relate to...

...Accusations against conservative Republicans are much more likely to be taken up than those against liberal Democrats...

...Anyone in uniform who aspires to multiple stars—or any civilian who plans on running for office—had better figure out by the age of puberty what the public is going to find acceptable 30 or 40 years down the line...

...In this case not only the press but Congress excoriates the Pentagon for being Victorian, although the case is complicated by the fact that the officer lied under oath and disobeyed orders...

...If you think everything in life—everything—is relative, then the French approach will commend itself to you...

...Next, a female officer in the Air Force is charged with adultery (shacking up with the husband of an enlisted woman, as it happens...

...It gives them a chance to look down on us for our puritanism and lack of maturity...

...The only thing is, the press in those days had a "gentlemen's agreement" (remember gentlemen...

...Nothing is easier than saying that so long as politicians' sex lives don't lessen their effectiveness in office or exploit anyone, they should be none of the public's business...

...He was one of the original, or founding, hypocrites and died when Queen Victoria was only seven...

...not to report erotic doings in high places...

...The Armed Forces have more than their share of problems today—declining budgets coupled with increased missions...

...Anything can become an issue—or a nonissue—depending on the mood of the moment...

...To many viewers, the family and sex lives of politicians are the only interesting thing about them...

...In actuality, the use of sexual-misbehavior charges as a form of political attack had its earliest high point, or low point if you prefer, in American history when James Callendar, a journalist in the pay of the opposition Federalists, claimed that Jefferson, then President, was the father of several little Hemingses...

...The press gives the matter saturation coverage and supports draconian punishments, as it did in the Navy's Tailhook scandal...

...Few Americans are that casual, but many like to think they are, and the result is a set of highly contradictory attitudes about sex and public life...

...That's because everybody was a hypocrite until at least 1976, maybe later...

...Lack of sympathy for the Armed Forces as a whole, and for a supposedly monolithic military mentality, translates itself easily into a belief that any hapless women who blunder into view need to be continually protected from the thugs who run the barracks...

...And you thought the Victorians were conflicted...