Slow Burn and Idle Maunderings

[lydy]

I've been listening to the podcast "Slow Burn." The first season chronicled the Watergate scandal, and how it led to Nixon's resignation There's a lot of stuff there I didn't know, and some stuff they left out that they shouldn't have, but it's a good, interesting listen. I had no idea about Martha Mitchell. The second season is about Clinton's impeachment, and before I listen to it, I want to try to remember what it was like at the time, without reference to notes and histories. I want to set down my vague memories before I get a lot of facts. Conservatives have been beating their chests about how we failed to hold Clinton to account, which is painfully and obviously disingenuous, but I am curious about my opinions now, and want to contrast them to what I think and feel after I have a better look with more detail.

I was in my mid-thirties when this all went down. One thing I never really focused on was how young Monica Lewinsky was. I think I was thinking of her as roughly my age. (I did look this up: she was 11 years my junior.) A young, pretty woman wants to sleep with the most powerful man on the planet? Seemed like a no-brainer, to me. Moreover, Bill Clinton had tons of charisma. When I considered the question, "Would I sleep with this man?" the answer was an absolute and resounding "In a hot minute." And the answer would have been the same if I was Lewinsky's age. My early twenties were full of unwise sexual liaisons, some of which were enormously rewarding, others...less so. I would also say that I did not focus on the power imbalance. She was an adult, he was an adult, and well, ya know. I kind of assumed, or maybe hoped, that Bill and Hillary had a secretly open marriage. Certainly, there were a lot of stories about how Bill liked to tom-cat about, and I assumed that the two of them had somehow come to terms with that.

I had certainly heard of the Genifer Flowers story, but I didn't pay it much attention. I just don't care about adultery, to be honest. Either he and his wife will work it out, or not. Do not care, and do not want to know. Also, there had been (or were still happening? not sure of timing) a whole series of increasingly entertaining peccadilloes from tv evangelists, which warmed the cockles of my heart. The Jimmy Swaggart downfall was just downright funny. But if the most prominent members of Reagan's Moral Majority were being hung out to dry for moral failings, it didn't seem to me that anybody should be throwing asparagus at Bill Clinton.

When I first heard of the story of Monica Lewinsky, my first thought was, "No relationship can stand this kind of public scrutiny. What ever they were to each other, this will destroy them." Near as I could tell from the grotesque coverage at the time, the two of them were genuinely fond of each other. I was less clear on how honest Bill was with her, and unclear on what she thought about the harm she might be doing Hillary, but it seemed gross and unconscionable that this was being dragged into the public sphere. It was unique. Lots of presidents had mistresses. GHWB was rumored to have one, JFK was known to have several, and so back in time. (If Reagan had any sexual peccadilloes, I really didn't want to know, because euwww.)

I hate Newt Gingrich with a passion. The Clinton white house had its problems, but most of the scandals seemed, from the vantage of Minneapolis to a person who was not an avid news consumer, to be concocted and blown out of proportion by a person who was obviously dealing in bad faith. He was an evil little prick, and if you want to talk about polarizing politics, well, he's not patient zero, but man is he close. I did not see the White House as scandal-ridden so much as Gingriched.

The Paula Jones story seemed like trumped up nothing. At that time, I thought that you could really only claim sexual harassment if someone refused you advancement because you wouldn't sleep with them, or non-consensually groped you. At the time, I used to say that sexual harassment sensitivity training should really be simplified to "The first grope is free." I...do not hold those views, anymore. At the time, none of the things that Jones said sounded that bad to me, but I was not playing close attention, either. Carville said, "Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, it's amazing what you'll get." It was an appallingly misogynistic and classist slur, and I am ashamed now that I laughed. The one bit of misogyny that did really irk me were all the people going on and on and on about Lewinsky's weight. There were numerous pundits who appeared to be offended, not that Clinton was banging an intern, but that he was banging an intern that wasn't hot enough. It was intensely gross.

The spectacle of the House Investigation, with Henry Hyde, who had a long-term mistress, Newt Gingrich whose sexual misconduct included banging his secretary and then divorcing his wife while she was in the hospital with cancer, and various other Republicans whose own sexual histories were nothing to write home about was vile. Hypocritical and vile. The various slings that they took at Hillary, at Lewinsky, and their sheer self-righteous posturing made me vow that I would never vote for another Republican, not even for dog-catcher. This is a vow I have kept, although gods know the Republicans make it easier every year.

There was also an allegation of two ... Arkansas cops? ... who allegedly, I'm not sure, took Clinton and his paramour to anonymous no-tell motels on the Arkansas dime, maybe? It seemed deeply far-fetched and not credible. I haven't revisited that set of allegations, but what I've seen of politicians' behavior since then makes it less incredible.

Do I think we failed to hold Clinton to account, upon reflection? I ... think we failed Monica Lewinsky. I think that we let the government and the press victimize her, and I think we should all be ashamed of that. I am less clear about Clinton. I don't think that, at the time, we had anything like the understanding we have now about power imbalances and consent. And if we were going to hold Clinton to account, he wasn't really the best place to start. There were so many other things that were more common-place and worse. If it happened now, things would be different (I hope), but those stepping stones had not yet been put in place. I think that he did misuse his position, but I do not know how coercive he was. I actually care a lot about coercion.

So, I guess we did fail to hold Clinton to account, but it wasn't because he was the president, or Bill Clinton, so much as it was that we weren't holding _anybody_ to account in that way. And the naked partisanship on display had exactly nothing to do with advancing the cause of feminism. It was entirely about playing moral gotcha at the president. The talking points were all about monogamy and marriage, and I don't give a wet slap about that. No one should think that the Republicans were, in any way, champions of women's rights.

So, that's what I've got. I'll revise this after I've listened to this season of Slow Burn.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

I was reading a year or so ago some of the things that Lewinski has written about all this. They're pretty interesting -- and one of the things she notes is the way that a lot of the coverage made assumptions about her side of the story because she was refusing to tell juicy gossip. I specifically remember her writing about watching a talk show where someone was going on about how Clinton hadn't pleasured her in return and this was part of how imbalanced this was and so on, and she was like, "You have no idea what he did or didn't do for me. Because that is private."

She also considers the was the media treated her during the scandal to be a direct precursor to the way women are being treated and doxxed in things like Gamergate.

[brooksmoses]

As update, here's the Vanidy Fair op-ed she wrote.

I had forgotten that it wasn't just the media per se; the scandal was in 1998, and so this was also arguably the first major case of mass internet-supported harassment.

[brooksmoses]

Also came across this article she wrote more recently, which also seems worth reading.

[lydy]

That is a stunning article. Thanks for the pointer.

[sonia]

I remember being disgusted at the political get-him-however-we-can aspect, and unhappy about the power imbalance. It had not occurred to me that they were fond of each other.

I still believe that people with more power, especially men, should absolutely hold platonic boundaries with people subordinate to them. And sadly that's not the society we live in.

[naomikritzer]

Monica Lewinsky is almost exactly my age -- three months younger, to the day. So I was looking at her as a peer, accurately.

[julian]

...wow, she was born in July of 1973. I assumed she was a year or two older than me. My brain hurts.

[julian]

Arkansas State Troopers, yes. I believe they wrote a book?

Anyway, David Brock later recanted it, iirc, which I probably don't.

(Ah, he said it was bad journalism and he shouldn't have done it.)

[lcohen]

i think i felt similarly to the way you felt. the republicans were so focused on the moral failing of adultery and that had no traction with me (and none of them had a leg to stand on). since she was said to have initiated it, the power imbalance didn't hit me the way it would today.

[mrissa]

Anita Hill was when I was in junior high, so I had already learned the lesson they wanted me to learn, which is that the good outcome of reporting harassment is that no one cares about you and the bad outcome is much, much worse. That the assaults I was dealing with in school would be the same later, but maybe more so. That I would never be the one getting the excuses, I would be the one getting called a whore. My school experience and this lesson from the news fit as neatly together as if someone had written a lesson plan.

So when Monica Lewinsky's story came out when I was in college, it...confirmed the worldview, that you couldn't expect anyone to give a damn, ever, that we were not important, that we never got to be the important ones, that if you tried to stick up for yourself you would be a sad, bad joke and anyway think of all the good he's done. I watched the people who had stuck up for Clarence Thomas scorning Bill Clinton and vice versa, and I learned not to trust either set.

And now every single week that I get on Twitter, there are people angry because people like me did not want a Senator with multiple harassment allegations. Because the stories that gave me flashbacks and made me want to throw up about my Senator could not possibly be important, because they happened to unimportant categories of people, people like me, people who are there in photo ops to have someone's hand on our asses, regardless of our accomplishments.

I hear things about mellowing with age sometimes but I don't really see it on the horizon for me any time soon. The rest of the world should not plan for that. No.

[lydy]

I sometimes think that the biggest difference between you and me is that you were raised to believe you were important, and I was not. (I also was not assaulted, so I have the advantage of you, there.) I felt pity for Lewinsky, but it never occurred to me that she was important.

Over and over, the hypocrisy of the conservative shocks me. The way they dump on Kirstin Gillibrand for calling for Franken's resignation and then defend Gen. Kelly. And the way people nominally ON MY SIDE fall for this crap when it comes to people like Franken. Over and over again, they make it clear that people who they believe have my particular set of genitals are only counters in a game, and not players on the field.

[mrissa]

I think that's it: that I was simultaneously being taught by my dad that I mattered intensely, that I would always be an important person to him if to no one else in the world...and being taught by the rest of the world that I was a counter in the game not a player on the field.

The former has given me enough agency to tilt at the latter, but I think also to see it differently.