Bill and Paula

...Despite my then-imprecise understanding of that term, I comprehended enough that I burst into tears and ran blindly away...

...The legal definition of adultery can’t discriminate between Hepburn and Tracy and Hart and Rice, but we can-and we should...

...When was the last time a Washington hostess closed her parlor to a Congressman who flagrantly mistreated his ex-wife...

...If she’s lying, then shame on her, shame on the unscrupulous partisans who are promoting her, shame on the talk-show hosts who will try to exploit her inevitable public confession for ratings gains, and shame on the magazine editors who will feverishly bid for the exclusive PaulaJones: Why I Lied book excerpt...

...What Paula Jones is describing isn’t sexual harassment...

...President, just say you’re sorry...

...Jones looks and dresses...

...If a woman heartlessly plays fast and loose with her fiance, trading him in for a richer, better-looking model but hanging on to his grandmother’s heirloom engagement ring as a keepsake, most of their social circle will studiously try to avoid “taking sides...

...I burbled excitedly...

...But if it’s true, as his biographer claims, that Clinton’s former gubernatorial chief of staff Betsey Wright sat down with the young governor in 1988 to discuss damage control of possible “bimbo eruptions”public statements by his bevy of former sexual partners-then I am appalled, by both of them...

...When this gambit proved ineffectual, she says, he pulled down his pants, exposed his penis, and asked her to kiss it...

...When I was 20, I was in college and working parttime at a little daily newspaper...

...Jones was not raped...

...Mascara and Elitism By confusing social and legal crimes, we’ve lost the ability to think or speak intelligently about situations like the one Paula Jones describes...

...So if Paula Jones was dressed to thrill that afternoon in the hotel, she wasn’t, God forbid, asking to be raped...

...Intuitively, we know there’s a difference between a presidential candidate who poses for a snapshot with a blonde on his lap and a high-ranking soldier who conducts a discreet affair during a marital separation, but our legalistic view of social behavior makes it hard to explain just where that distinction lies...

...Having spent much of my childhood in my mother’s tiny southern hometown, I am here to tell you that there’s no mistaking a working-class Baptist church lady for a honky-tonk honey, even at a distance of 100 yards...

...Carville would use very different terms to describe the Paula Jones incident if it had involved Mary Matalin...

...We don’t need to embrace 19thcentury standards of female chastity and public homophobia to appreciate the effectiveness with which Victorian society could punish social misbehavior-and the way it could also temper its social judgments with mercy...

...Pity the poor victim of a social felony...

...And that’s not a function of socioeconomic class...

...Much of the blame for this must lie with those feminists who define every unpleasant male-female interaction as a species of rape...

...it could have been your wife...

...But if your clothes are writing checks your personality can’t cash, you’re suffering from what we of the feminist elite call “cognitive dissonance.’’ That’s why it’s not elitist to look at Anita Hill and Paula Jones differently...

...This may seem like Victorian nostalgia-and to a certain extent, it is...

...Jones says she thought getting to know the governor might help her career, so up she went...

...You want to give me a blow job...

...After a few weeks, he gave up and left me alone...

...Sir, that was no bimbo...

...And that’s pretty much where it ended...

...Unfortunately, American society has lost the distinction between social and legal crimes...

...If her allegations are all lies, then we need to exact a social price as well as a legal one...

...He continually interrupted my work, asked me out on dates, and repeatedly called me at home...

...It’s considered inappropriate, and quite rightly, to ask what a rape victim was wearing when she was attacked...

...Those lines have been made blurrier by our growing national desire to define everything that upsets us or hurts our feelings as cause for legal action...

...Oh yeah...

...If your husband goes on a business trip and leaves his wedding ring at home, honey, he is malung a fashion statement...

...It means we’ll have to stop returning the phone calls of that amusing and professionally useful young woman who brags about exploiting a sprained ankle to get a “handicapped” parlung sticker...

...He’s not even a harasser...

...She claims she later felt self-conscious around her boss and worried that the governor might try to retaliate, but there’s no evidence that happened...

...Her visual presentation doesn’t excuse his offensive behavior...

...Oh, I’m one of your biggest fans...

...Shame on them all for insulting every woman who’s ever truly been harassed at work, for misleading every voter who tries to balance private conduct with public views, for coldheartedly trying to disrupt the political process of a great democracy...

...If she’s telling the truth, Mrs...

...We all use our clothes to send messages about who we are and what we want...

...It’s disrespectful to women who have been the targets of violent attack to consider Paula Jones a rape victim on any level...

...Didn’t anyone take the trouble to pin his ears back, to point out the incongruity betw-een publicly espousing feminist causes and privately rolling around indiscriminately in the bed of a pickup truck...

...The problem is, sexy clothes broadcast your message to the masses, even if you’re only interested in reaching the C-Span audience...

...He then placed his hand on her knee and tried to kiss her neck...

...But since the notion of outraged womanhood has fallen out of fashion, we lack any other explanation for the visceral revulsion we feel when Jones tells her tawdry little story...

...Clinton’s opponents would like to put the Paula Jones affair on the same level as Watergate and Teapot Dome, and that’s just plain wrong...

...Jones’s virtue...

...Again, there’s that cognitive dissonance thing...

...Her book Perfect Ladies: Women, Power, and Etiquette in the 20th Century will be published by Houghton next spring...

...I suspect Mr...

...Often, we use our fashion choices to send sexual signals...

...he said wearily, twitching his mustache toward me...

...Horrified, she says, she told the governor she was “not that kind of girl...

...Welcome to the Excelsior Hotel The relationships between men and women aren’t always simple, and the lines between insult, harassment, and courtship can be hard to draw...

...The culture of niceness and non-judgmentalism has made it socially unacceptable for us to spurn and shun men (and women) who behave abominably...

...legal crime conundrum...

...Which just goes to show that sexual harassment is a lot more complicated than Paula Jones thinks it is...

...No way...

...Carville the Cad As we’ve lost the ability to discuss nonverbal social signals without cries of “Stop blaming the victim,” so have we forfeited the vocabulary to describe the Clinton camp’s attacks on Mrs...

...Absolutely...

...And since social life relies on the interplay of subtle messages, verbal and non-verbal, it’s not improper to point out that Paula Jones is an obvious mascara abuser...

...I responded with frosty monosyllables and withering glances...

...But Clinton’s supporters need to be reminded that just because it was legal doesn’t make it right...

...Jones’s supporters hold that if a sexual encounter was unpleasant, it must therefore be legally actionable...

...Even if the incident happened just as she says it did, it sounds like it was private, legal (albeit disgusting) behavior...

...Perhaps what we need in the coming century is a neo-Victorianism, a shared willingness to define social rights and wrongs, and a shared responsibility to enforce those standards in our own lives...

...We can start by taking a new look at the Paula Jones lawsuit and the issues it raises...

...Hill, it’s clear from the way she presents herself publicly that she’s not sending sexually inviting messages to the male world at large...

...Is bright red lipstick an invitation to violent sexual assault...

...Apparently realizing his mistake, the governor hastily reassured her that he wasn’t trying to force himself on her, and awkwardly offered to square things with Paula’s boss if she got in trouble for leaving her post...

...Jones is telling the truth about her unpleasant encounter with then-Governor Clinton, and I have no reason to believe she isn’t, then she had a brief but humiliating experience in a Little Rock hotel room back in 1991...

...Yet if we frame the Excelsior Hotel incident in social terms, we can talk sensibly about the issues it raises...

...If Mrs...

...It’s a horrible-although not atypical-incident of mortifying sexual insult...

...Is it an invitation to a possibly unwelcome compliment about your luscious lips...

...Of course, that will require more than another slew of pompous pro-monogamy think pieces...

...Here we have the flip side of the social vs...

...By her account, she was a low-level state employee working the reception desk at a conference on quality management...

...But if she’s telling the truth, then shame on Bill Clinton, and on everyone who failed to remind him that the rules apply to him too...

...This time, I took decisive legal action: I married him...

...As she left, she says, the governor asked her to keep the incident to herself...

...If all the rumors about President Clinton’s womanizing are false, then I apologize...

...If we’re serious about clearing the courts of unnecessary litigation, we’ll all have to take back some responsibility for social law enforcement...

...If he doesn’t get over it quickly, he’ll find himself sitting home alone on Friday nights while his ex-flame joins the old gang for happy hour...

...Jones was the victim of a social crime, and social crimes demand social punishments...

...We don’t ask whether a robbery victim was wearing an Armani suit, nor do we question whether he had a past history of philanthropy...

...Mrs...

...She was subjected to an appalling display of male sexual piggishness, and she deserves, not a jury verdict or a cash settlement, but a sincere public apology...

...To pretend that how we look and what we wear is unrelated to social and sexual behavior is absurd...

...They’ll indulge in a little psychobabble, noting that it takes both members of a dyad to create a dysfunctional arena (or, in Oldspeak, it takes two to tango...

...she was the target of an incomplete pass...

...Even those of us who believe that Clinton’s reputed zipper problems don’t automatically make him unfit for public office are repulsed by comments such as James Carville’s sneer, “Drag $100 through a trailer camp and there’s no telling what you’ll find...

...Personally, I’ve got a black beaded number that came with a written money-back guarantee to inspire impure thoughts...

...that’s why all the policy-wonk wannabes you see on the Metro dress exactly alike...

...Next time, Mr...

...Obviously, getting an unrequested look at a man’s private parts (distinctive or not) is way more disgusting than listening to your boss make smirking remarks about porno flicks...

...Later that afternoon, a state trooper handed her a note from the governor, asking her to meet him in his hotel suite...

...Rapists, by definition, are not dissuaded by a woman’s protest that she’s “not that kind of girl...

...Governor Clinton, who was giving a speech at the conference, walked in and made chitchat with the eye-catching 24-year-old Paula...

...If she’s telling the truth, he’s not a rapist...

...In fact, she later got several raises...

...But when we look at Ms...

...Once in the room, Clinton took her hand and trotted out a few stale compliments about her hair and her figure...

...Tort vs.Tart Our confusion of social and legal crime has made it impossible to talk sensibly about any issue involving men and women...

...Let’s take the question of the way Mrs...

...PaulaJones may have lots of hair and a down-market accent, but that shouldn’t subject her to private viewings by state officials...

...That means we’ll have to be chilly toward that charming guy who’s refusing to pay his brilliant son’s college tuition, on the grounds that his new young wife’s kids take all his money...

...Clinton’s backers seem to take the view that misogyny is perfectly acceptable if its target uses lots of hair spray...

...If the jilted young man complains about his friends’ lack of moral outrage, they’ll recommend a good therapist and counsel him to seek speedy emotional closure...

...Bill and Paula The distinction between social misbehavior and actionable misconduct BY ELIZABETH AUSTIN WHEN I WAS 16 YEARS OLD, I WAS hanging out at a local coffee house when I suddenly realized the man standing next to me was a regionally famous folksinger...

...What’s a poor, brokenhearted young man to do-except haul the hussy into court to get the ring back, plus court costs, legal fees, and a small lump sum to ease his hurt feelings and injured pride...

...The editor of the opinions section started commenting on my appearance and sprinkling his conversation with ,suggestive remarks...

...That’s a mistake, on several counts...

...It means we’ll have to take on some of the messy, unpleasant interpersonal stuff we’ve so gladly turfed over to the courts...

...And if Paula Jones is telling the truth, and all of this embarrassment, humiliation, and national distress are what it takes to wring an apology out of him, then Bill Clinton is getting what he richly deserves...

...He’s just a man who didn’t quite comprehend that some of us still take sexual insults rather seriously...

...But she may have been sending social signals that were misunderstood by at least one observer, whose response was more enthusiastic than chivalrous, and who interpreted her presence in his hotel room as implied consent...

...But Mrs...

...ELIZABETH AUSTIN is a Chicago writer...

...When I was 19, I got a summer job at my hometown newspaper...

...Resurrecting social crime and punishment would give us the means to acknowledge the subtle gradations of human behavior that the court system was not set up to recognize...

...Does anyone consider dropping a rising young speechwriter from the A-list just because she snagged someone else’s husband...

...One of the editors there, an old guy in his thirties or forties, hoisted a few half-hearted passes in my direction...

...Governor Clinton didn’t press his suit further, nor did he order her fired...

...Did no one in Clinton’s inner circle consider his private behavior towards women important, apart from its possible effect on his political career...