The President and the Porn Star
In
1998, the professional moral scold William Bennett published a book
titled “The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American
Ideals.” In it, Bennett described blasé attitudes toward presidential
adultery as corrosive. Clinton’s promiscuity, he argued, implicated his
fitness for governing: “Chronic indiscipline, compulsion, exploitation,
the easy betrayal of vows, all suggest something wrong at a deep level —
something habitual and beyond control,” he wrote.
I
was reminded of Bennett’s words by David Friend’s fascinating recent
book, “The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido,” about
the sexual scandals and cultural upheavals of that decade. In
retrospect, the dynamics of the Clinton-era culture wars seem blissfully
simple, pitting a sexually libertarian left against an aggressively
prudish right. It is a cosmic irony that, 20 years later, it is
conservatives who’ve finally killed off the last remaining unspoken
rules about presidential sexual ethics.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that,
a month before the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen
arranged a $130,000 payout to the porn star Stephanie Clifford, known by
the stage name Stormy Daniels, to stop her from discussing a 2006
dalliance with Trump. The New York Times added new details. The Daily Beast then reported that another porn actress,
Jessica Drake, who had accused Trump of offering her $10,000 for sex,
signed a nondisclosure agreement barring her from talking about the
president.
In
any other administration, evidence that the president paid hush money
to the star of “Good Will Humping” during the election would be a
scandal. In this one it has, so far, elicited a collective shrug.
Liberals,
in general, can’t work up much outrage, because the encounter between
Trump and Daniels was by all accounts consensual. And few social
conservatives are interested in criticizing the president, since they’ve
talked themselves into a posture of hardheaded moral realism in order
to justify their support for him. In 2016, for example, Bennett himself
condemned “Never Trump” conservatives for their “terrible case of moral superiority.”
If
there’s a significant scandal, it will lie in the origins of the
$130,000, or in other encounters Trump has covered up. There’s a
sentence in Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” that hasn’t gotten the
attention it deserves. It comes toward the end, when Steve Bannon is
praising Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz: “Kasowitz on the campaign — what
did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them.”
If
it turns out there were payoffs to hide non-consensual behavior, there
may be an uproar. But sleeping with a porn star while your wife has a
new baby, then paying the porn star to be quiet? That’s what everyone
expects of this president.
I
don’t think it’s a coincidence that the right’s tacit embrace of a
laissez faire approach to sexuality — at least male, heterosexual
sexuality — coincides with attempts on the left to erect new ethical
guardrails around sex.
In
the 1990s, many feminists defended untrammeled eros because they feared
a conservative sexual inquisition. Elements of that inquisition remain;
attacks on reproductive rights have grown only more intense. Still,
Trump has reconciled reactionary politics with male sexual license. In
doing so, he’s made such license easier for feminists to criticize.
This weekend, the sex scandal that captivated people I know involved not Trump but the comedian Aziz Ansari. On Saturday, an online publication called Babe published allegations from a young photographer, pseudonymously called Grace, about a date with Ansari gone wrong.
Speaking
to the writer Katie Way, Grace describes halfhearted — at least on her
part — oral sex and Ansari’s insistent push for intercourse. Grace
seemed to be disappointed that Ansari didn’t live up to his nice-guy
feminist persona. “You ignored clear non-verbal cues; you kept going
with advances,” she texted him.
Among
feminists, reaction to the piece broke down roughly generationally.
Grace interpreted her experience as sexual assault, but several older
writers saw it as a story about caddishness and bad sex, neither of
which justified the invasion of Ansari’s privacy. In The Atlantic,
Caitlin Flanagan described it as “3,000 words of revenge porn” inspired by romantic disappointment.
I
agree with Flanagan that the bad behavior Grace described doesn’t rise
to the level of assault or harassment, and I don’t think Babe should
have published the story. Still, I can sympathize with the younger
feminists who are pushing the limits of the #MeToo movement. They are,
it seems to me, trying to impose new norms of consideration on a brutal
sexual culture, without appealing to religious sanction or patriarchal
chivalry.
“A lot of men will read that post about Aziz Ansari and see an everyday, reasonable sexual interaction,” tweeted the feminist writer Jessica Valenti.
“But part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture
considers ‘normal’ sexual encounters are not working for us, and
oftentimes harmful.”
Maybe
feminists feel free to express their fury about the path sexual
liberation has taken because they no longer need to defend sexual
liberation itself from conservatives. In the 1990s, porn culture seemed
subversive and chic. Now it’s become repulsively presidential.
If the story about Trump is true then the Democrats can welcome him to the Clinton Club, Gloria Steinem can pen another op-ed about how it's really the woman's fault...
ReplyDelete"The Face of The Generation is Like The Face of a Dog" --- Mishna Sota 9:15 , Sanhedrin 97a Talmud Bavli
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