America had barely recovered from the flap over Tinky Winky, the purse-carrying purple teletubby the Rev. Jerry Falwell outed as gay, when along came another doll controversy. You know the story: An Atlanta mother complained that her 11-year-old son was verbally deflowered by an Austin Powers action doll.
Young Marvin had already seen “The Spy Who Shagged Me” — whisked past the PG police by his father — and now he was drawn to the bushy-chested doll in Union Jack underwear who asks the saucy question “Would you fancy a shag?” But it was the query on the packaging — “Do I make you horny, baby?” — that pricked the boy’s curiosity. When he asked his mom what “horny” meant, she was ready with an explanation: “It’s sort of like goose bumps that make your hair stand up,” said Tamatha Brannon, rather creatively. But she didn’t stop there. She did what any good American parent faced with such a situation would do: She sued Toys ‘R Us, which admitted it accidentally stocked a PG-rated version of the doll instead of the fully clothed, G-rated figure it had intended.
But the flap over the Austin Powers doll is only the best-known summer outbreak of panic over a new social concern: rampant doll sexuality. Earlier this season the nation had to deal with a similar shock-horror over the new Tarzan toy. Seems this denizen of the Disney jungle can be made to raise his right hand, which normally rests against his loincloth. All well and good. But if you rapidly push a certain button, his fisted mitt will rapidly move up and down, adding piquancy to the ape man’s cry: “Aiiiyaiiiyaaah!”
What’s a parent to do? Those who worship at “The 700 Club” already know that there’s a vast conspiracy to violate the innocence of tykes and toddlers. Leading this crusade is Disney, the agent of Satan that permits gay days at its theme parks and hides sexual innuendo in its cartoons. (Since this company is now run by a male Jew, it is the official home of the antichrist.) No wonder Mattel promptly recalled Tarzan, and did what generations of priests and counselors told parents to do when faced with such hand-jive: They tied the doll’s arm down. “What we’re doing is securing the arm so it doesn’t get …” a spokesperson for Mattel haltingly explained. “So it isn’t in a position … so it doesn’t have … how can I say this gracefully? So he’s not in a pose with his hand.”
Why are these kiddie icons raising so much adult heat? It’s the latest round in a time-honored American ritual: obsessing over the sexuality of the young. Tinky Winky-phobia was only a start. Clearly, this plush purple plaything has no sexuality — unless it’s polyester perverse — but that didn’t stop Falwell from accusing PBS of foisting a gay icon on 3-year-olds. After all, Tinky Winky is lavender, sports a triangular headdress and carries a purse. Guys have been killed for less in God’s country.
The Teletubby freakout was no surprise to me. I remember turning on the TV when I was 7 or so and happening upon a fierce debate about farm animals running around in the nude. This was in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, so I was used to such panicked crusades. The creator of this one eventually admitted that it was a hoax, but not before his supporters posed the problem in stark and shocking terms. Children were seeing donkey dongs and cow udders brazenly displayed. Shouldn’t these beasts wear clothes?
Such a wacky rap could only pass for real in an age when parents pondered the hidden sexual meanings in comic books. Thanks to a lurid survey called “The Seduction of the Innocents,” parents in the 1950s were able to detect vaginas in the armpits of cartoon characters (something I, as a kid, had never noticed until the controversy). It didn’t end until a comics code prevented any conceivable innuendo, so that Archie, Veronica and their pals had bodies as flat and featureless as, well, Teletubbies.
Young people have always been the scrim on which their parents’ nightmares are projected, of course. In the ’50s, it was savage, sexy teens hopped up on jungle music. No doubt the deeper anxiety was that kids were emerging as a class with its own morality and plenty of spending cash. Now these once-beleaguered boomers are in a similar panic about their own offspring.
In the wake of Littleton, a new panic is being sown in the fertile soil of fears about the young. Just as “juvenile delinquents” were a national obsession in the ’50s, the specter of killer kids is now haunting America. And just as perverts were once thought to stalk the nation’s schoolyards preying on the young, the culture is now imagined as a stalker of our children’s souls. Meet Austin Powers, the new enemy within.
Never mind that adolescents are making wiser decisions about sex than their parents ever did, as demonstrated by the declining teen pregnancy rate. Never mind that violence is a far greater threat to kids today than sex could ever be. Puritans will always see opportunity in the primal parental fear of losing control over their children. But this time, there’s a modern edge to the panic. Because it’s not just precocious sexuality that’s being beamed through the TV, the movies and the toy store. These devil dolls are also sissyfying our sons.
Clerical pundits like Dennis Prager have taken full advantage of this anxiety, loosing op-ed jeremiads about a feminist-led “war on boys’ natures” in a recent issue of the Weekly Standard. The underlying fear is that kids are learning to identify with a persona that breaks the macho mold. Of course, what’s really happening has less to do with feminizing boys than with liberating all children from the tyranny of gender roles. But traditional parents may well worry at the sight of their daughter waving a light saber around the house, while their son contemplates carrying a purse like Tinky Winky.
But it’s not just Tinky Winky; consider the buzz about Jar Jar Binks, the alien sidekick in the new “Star Wars” movie. Of course, Jar Jar is most frequently maligned for alleged racial stereotyping in the creation of his faux-Rasta character. But now, more than a dozen newspapers and magazines, from the National Enquirer to USA Today, have weighed in on whether Jar Jar is gay. From the fury in cyberspace, you’d think George Lucas had set a drag queen loose in the Sistine Chapel. Clearly, this oversized amphibian has never sung in the choir, but he does utter words no real man would ever tell a Jedi warrior: “I wuv you.” No wonder it’s been necessary for the actor who plays him, Ahmet Best, to assure the world that Jar Jar is “swinging straight.”
Notice that for all the tumult over whether the Internet, video games and violent movies might whet a kid’s appetite for mayhem, no one is panicking over action figures from the wrestling realm or the ever more pumped-up G.I. Joe. These toys remain acceptable because they affirm traditional ideas about masculinity. But Tinky Winky and Jar Jar are signs that the culture is evolving before our eyes, teaching little boys that manhood isn’t measured by power and dominance, but by the ability to nurture and love.
And so, in the modern version, Tarzan is no longer king of the jungle, but a deeply troubled boy torn between doubts about his ape identity and foreboding about his human nature. The conflict is resolved by his emergence as the caretaker of an inter-species family. Here is the brave new world writ small. We can’t let him model self-love, too.
And as for Austin Powers: He may be shagadelic, but he sure isn’t butch. Indeed, the great jape in this movie is that the randy nerd in the flouncy outfits — who is indeed polymorphously perverse — will always beat out his demonic double, the tight-assed Dr. Evil, especially when it comes to getting women. (And note to Jerry Falwell: Austin began to look like a switch-hitter in the final scene of “The Spy Who Shagged Me”, when he got into bed with his look-alike clone and the lovely Felicity Shagwell.)
Now it looks like cracking down on the PG Powers doll won’t be enough. Even though few kids who haven’t been to Britain know the meaning of the word “shag,” a movement has started to remove it from the title of “Austin Powers 2.” Such is life in the land of promiscuous puritans, where wild shifts between freedom and repression are the norm. Children will always be caught on the horns of that dilemma — and they will always find ways to escape.
Perplexed and not a little pissed off by the president’s historically high ratings — in the wake of an impeachment spurned by all but the rabid, the rotund, and the bedridden — pundits and prophets of the right have taken to castigating the people. “The Founders were right to have a certain distrust of democracy,” conservative commentator William Kristol recently asserted, echoing the James Dobson’s more apocalyptic admonition: “Our people no longer recognize the nature of evil.” This impulse to save the nation from itself brings to mind Bertolt Brecht’s advice to East German Communists grousing about the lack of popular enthusiasm for socialism. If the people have betrayed the government, Brecht quipped, perhaps the government should “abolish the people and elect a new one.”
Not even Bob Barr has broached such a solution. But the Republican “Superior Dance” would do the Church Lady proud. This rigid strut clearly reflects a painful recognition by the children of the Reagan revolution that they are out of step. For all their success at winning office, something more potent and less tangible than politics blocks the right when it comes to producing fundamental changes in American life. That baffling “something” is the culture, and in this retail realm, the dominant sensibility is every bit as resistant to salvation as it is to socialism.
Clinton owes his survival to the uniquely American conflict called the Culture War. What began in the 1950s with the brush fire rebellion of the Beats and exploded in the ’60s in a full-blown countercultural revolt has by now become a jihad fought at every mall and microphone in America. So sweeping is this cold civil war (complete with the specter of an enemy within) that it has become a permanent part of politics, lingering just below the surface of issues as seemingly distinct as abortion, affirmative action and free speech on the Internet. Indeed, it’s possible to argue that the entire impeachment spectacle is an attempt by the right to shift the terrain of this conflict to an arena where they have the numerical advantage. As it turns out, however, they’ve seriously miscalculated the odds.
The daily dose of scandal has been greeted by the public as another opportunity to be entertained, and Clinton has emerged from the mire with something he didn’t have before: a mystique. Greeted by adoring crowds as the Elvis he always pretended to be, the president now represents an American type that has always lurked behind our sanctimony: part victim, part perp, all trickster. He is far more adept than his enemies at slippin’ and slidin’, a silver fox in the wolf run. Instead of a bully pulpit, he projects a laissez-funk aura that fits the culture like a love glove. And no one has given this president a bigger boost than the Republicans who decided to saturate the media with Monicana. Instead of the revulsion and outrage they hoped to create, they have made Clinton a guilty pleasure, the political equivalent of death by chocolate.
But calling Clinton “a poster child for the ’60s,” as Pat Robertson has, doesn’t begin to explain his popularity. In fact, the reason the culture war is so resonant is that it represents a conflict that has raged for more than a century in American life. One can find all the elements of the current scandal in Hawthorne, who was acutely tuned to the central bifurcation in our culture between what might be called the structure of authority and the spirit of love and liberation. In “The Scarlet Letter,” this clash takes root in an adulterous love affair, in which shame and stigma work their cruel magic. But Hawthorne also wrote about a band of rebellious Puritans who lead the young into the forest, where they let their hair grow, dress like the animals and dance around the maypole of desire. In this cautionary tale, the rebels are pursued and captured by the colonists, who kill the adults and cut the hair of the young — much like what transpired as the counterculture collapsed. You see the dichotomy between authority and liberation again in Mark Twain, between the upwardly mobile Tom Sawyer and the renegade Huck Finn, whose journey down the Mississippi with Jim is a matrix of the ’60s observation that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Walt Whitman, an unambivalent champion of political and personal liberation, wrote a century before the counterculture, and his exhortations about a democracy in which “the body electric” is the bond between citizens continue to haunt American politics.
Seen in this light, the triumph of Clinton is not about a collapse of moral sense in the American people, but an inevitable sign of the return of the repressed.
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What is new about the current incarnation of this long struggle is the way it has become enmeshed with the changing demographics of America. Perhaps the only real achievement of the counterculture, when it comes to enlarging the transcendentalist vision, was its empowering of groups that had always been on the margins of the body politic — not just racial minorities, but gay people and, most profoundly, women. By now, it is fair to say, an alliance of these formerly subordinated groups is the dominant element in our political life. Certainly, when women and minorities team up they can make or break a president, and in 1992, they did. Clinton is that beneficiary, and in this sense, he is truly a creature of the ’60s. His affiliation with women — which goes far beyond his dalliances and persists despite them — as well as his affinity for minorities (in the apt words of Toni Morrison, he’s the first “honorary black president”), is the central reason Clinton has prevailed. It is also the unspoken reason why he enrages pundits, Puritans and patriarchs alike.
“Foolish Love” is how the Economist explains the president’s popularity. “They stand and cheer, their ecstatic smiles as wide and lingering as his.” They, presumably, are that 70 percent of the people who tell pollsters they like the way Clinton is doing his job. But the cover image the British weekly uses to make its point tells the real story: These aren’t just any Americans, but rapturous women grasping pictures of Bill and beaming like bobby soxers. Indeed, Clinton’s ratings have remained six to eight points higher among women than among men throughout the scandals. Add the staunch support Clinton enjoys among minorities and it’s clear why he inspires such fury in certain segments of the population that nothing short of his expulsion from office — followed by imprisonment — can quell their rage.
The gentlemen journalists of the Economist may see this constituency as a pack of gullible girls, but in fact, Clinton’s rapport with women is no mere romance. His administration — beginning with the first lady — is the most feminized in American history, as well as the most diverse. So are his legal team — two of four are women, one of them a black woman — and even the list of witnesses the Senate is about to depose (one black man and two Jews). The House prosecutors, on the other hand, are, to a person, white (and mostly Southern) males. Only in the media is this distinction not apparent. But then, so much about this president’s appeal is a mystery to the punditocracy. Political commentary, like political power in this country, is still largely reserved for white males. They are no less subject to fear of a black and female planet than are their more plebeian cousins, the Angry White Males. But like all elites, they are slow to acknowledge their anxieties and quick to conflate their interests with the rule of law. Meanwhile, the president eludes his enemies because he is a creature of the very culture they cannot comprehend.
You’d think all these guys would relish the fantasy of getting head in the Oval Office — from a luscious Jewess, no less — but their response to the Lewinsky scandal has been more like the good old boys in a Tennessee Williams play, whose reaction to the appearance of a loner in a snakeskin jacket is to drag him off and castrate him. Why didn’t John F. Kennedy’s far riskier liaisons produce a similar response in the good old boys? Because he was one of them — the loyal son of a bigoted patriarch who did nothing in his career to upend the structure of male power. Clinton, on the other hand, provokes the primal terror of women’s power because he plays to it, and now that this power can make or break a president (especially when women team up with minorities), it’s inevitable that male panic will express itself in a political castration rite.
Of course, unlike the doomed hero of “Orpheus Descending,” Clinton knows how to dodge the knife. He understands how the attack on his sexuality will play to his public — how blacks feel about being called an animal, how gays feel about being labeled a pervert, how women feel when their passions are regarded as a sign of weakness and voraciousness. He understands the inextricable link between the fortunes of these groups and his own ability to govern. And he has an instinct for the new morality that has emerged along with the breakdown of patriarchal authority. A mother-centered child of an alcoholic who did battle with brutal stepfathers, he is a natural embodiment of the TV talk-show ethic, in which the moral meaning of sex lies in its emotional content, not its correspondence to convention. This is the politics of Jenny Jones, and Clinton is its master, but that gift would not have taken him so far unless it were a reflection of some deeper impulse in the American psyche: the vision of a sexually charged democracy that Whitman imagined when he wrote, “The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers.”
Of course, Whitman would probably blush, if not rail, at what Clinton has made of the transcendental canon. The body electric is one thing, but stand-up blowjobs followed by easy betrayals — the president’s defense against perjury rests on his promise that he didn’t try to “gratify” or “arouse” Monica Lewinsky — are quite another. Clinton has always been the premodern man with a postmodern pitch — that’s why people adore what he represents but don’t trust what he is. Yet, even in his guileful ambivalence, he is an authentic American type. To understand Clinton’s mystique, we must leave Whitman and Hawthorne behind, and look to Uncle Remus, who had a far savvier sense of the American terrain. It was a farmyard whose greatest perils were the tar pit and the briar patch, and whose most successful resident was the infinitely wily Bre’er Rabbit. Through charm and trickery, he eludes his enemies and maintains his advantage. Here is the Man From Hope writ small.
Yet who better to lead us than someone who knows the tar and briar first hand? Whatever Congress may decide, the people’s choice is a lover, not a fighter; a manipulator, not a moralist; a trickster president in an increasingly slippery world.
Now that the slings and arrows of impeachment have been stilled, the discussion has shifted to a question — “What’s next for America?” — calculated to keep the media in clover until the next scandal blooms. A thousand think pieces ponder the post-impeachment future, and panel after pundit-ridden panel is assembled to assure that we will never see the promised land of closure until we have wandered for 40 sweeps months in the desert of TV talk.
There is something apt about this lingering rumination. After all, the charges against President Clinton were never a proper catchment for his sins, which were, though not impeachable, fascinating and perplexing. Perjury and obstruction of justice are awfully hard to prove in a culture where lying is the leaven of life, and making a political crisis out of a sex scandal, in the age of Jerry Springer, strikes most people as beside the point, at best. If adultery is a private matter (though one we are eager to read about in graphic detail), then its moral significance can only be decided in the court of the culture. Jeff Greenfield is a better host of these proceedings than a judge in gold stripes, and the denizens of talk shows a more appropriate jury than any stentorian senator.
But because most Republicans regard the culture as a sinkhole of depravity (except for such hallowed events as halftime at the Super Bowl), they can’t take it seriously, let alone make sense of it. As a result, they persisted in the face of growing evidence that most folks were rooting for Clinton to beat the rap. As befits a nation of promiscuous Puritans, Americans will condemn the sinner but punch the air in private whenever a sly sensualist prevails. We can thank the Republicans for conferring victim status on the world’s most powerful person, thereby transforming him into the pariah we love to hate.
No one is more forgiving of this president’s transgressions than the boomer masses. Something about him makes every former hippie with a hedge fund feel the old sap rising. Never mind that Clinton is to the counterculture what Barry Manilow was to acid rock; he embodies that Grateful Dead lyric: “I will survive.”
Yet anyone who takes the ’60s seriously ought to find Clinton’s behavior troubling, though not for the reasons the Republicans have trumpeted. I’m not talking about lying, or urging one’s lover to lie low. If these were high crimes, the jails would be full of errant presidents. I’m talking here about the heart of Clinton’s darkness: the fact that his lover was, to use the moralist’s phrase, “a woman half his age” — and an intern to boot. Why is it so hard for our side to admit that these are problematic acts? The answer lies not just in the vagaries of “special interest” politics, as the right likes to think, but in the contradictions produced by the ’60s colliding against the present.
The counterculture’s most enduring achievement was to usher in a sexual morality that emphasized feeling over propriety. These values have now become not just ingrained but conflated with our convictions about social justice, so that intimacy is supposed to be a model of equity. There’s only one problem: Desire remains stubbornly behind the times, and when it comes to desire, the imbalance of power is still a turn-on, especially (but not exclusively) for men. Intergenerational sex is a vivid reminder of all the ways straight relationships — even between peers — depend on the artful application of female submission and male dominance. (Gay relationships have their own power issues, of course, but that is another story, since there was never a John Doe in among the Jane Does alleged to have dallied with the president.)
To condemn the president is a handy way out of this bind. It allows conservatives to make the repression of desire seem egalitarian. Which is why feminists and other progressives, who are hip to this strategy, have refused to join in the pummeling. No one is harder to forsake than a bad man whose enemies are worse.
Yet something about the dispensation our side has granted Clinton resembles the familiar Jewish exemption of Chinese food from the kosher laws. Pork is pork, especially when attached to a pig. And for all his good vibes, Clinton is more like the lubricious ’60s throwback Austin Powers than the liberated man the Beatles imagined when they sang, “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” What’s more, when it comes to that hallmark of the new morality — taking responsibility for one’s desires — let’s face it: For Clinton, that depends on what id is.
But loyalty to a treacherous icon is not the only reason we won’t bash Bill. There’s also the reminder — in every revelation about the president’s props and practices — that sex ought to be private because it’s so damned complicated.
Take the question of why Clinton slipped and slid with such a sophomore. It may not be liberated, but it sure is Southern, and it ought to strike us as ironic that the president’s most ardent pursuers hail from states where, until recently, the age of consent was so low it defied national norms. Even today, the widespread popularity of child pageants in the South affirms an ongoing interest in young girls, as does the punch line to the good-old-boy jape Dorothy Allison cites in “Bastard Out of Carolina.”
“What’s a virgin?”
“That’s a 10-year-old can run fast.”
So is the whole Monica megillah just an anxiety attack about the return of this repressed tradition? We’ll never know — not from the Southern gents who tried to evict the Trailer Trash president, nor from the man who turned the Oval Office into God’s Little Acre. It’s possible that not even Clinton understands why he diddled dangerously. When it comes to a desire just below the surface of permissibility, we are all Monicas, full of illusion and incomprehension.
If that seems perplexing, consider the made-for-Oprah enigma: Did Bill love her, or was it just “a servicing arrangement,” as Linda Tripp maintains? Like so much else about this scandal, both these explanations are incomplete. The servicing of middle-aged men by lush young women is certainly about power, but it is also about longing for incestuous union and lost youth. To address these hidden dimensions of the Lewinsky affair is loaded for all sides in the impeachment debate. For conservatives, it means exposing the underbelly of ordinary, middle-aged male behavior. For liberals, it means confronting the dark side of sexual freedom.
Maybe the problem was imbedded in the new morality all along. After all, the phrase “sexual liberation” lent itself to an uncanny assortment of beliefs. Women who used it were usually talking about unleashing female desire, clearly a revolutionary act. But for most men, it meant shuffling off the coil of commitment for some more customized arrangement. This contradiction has come back to haunt us as we consider the unintended consequence that is Clinton’s sex life. As if the intergenerational issue weren’t thorny enough for those who subscribe to the ethic of equity, what about the fact that Lewinsky was an intern whose fortunes depended on her boss?
Assuming that the president is not a rapist (despite the nasty Republican whispers), this is clearly his mortal sin against feminism, which has struggled for a workplace in which power is not used to promote a sexual agenda. No one is out to ban dating on the job (though the fact that this has happened in a number of businesses is another example of how Puritans twist feminism to serve their ends). It’s the boss, stupid, who should keep his hands off the help. But for many bosses, this new rule is the world turned upside down. Executive rage may be the real reason so many elite males had a cow over Clinton’s carousing. Their fury when the president got away with what they no longer can is explanation enough for the impeachment frenzy, not to mention the apoplectic tone of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.
But what about the possibility that some unequal workplace liaisons are emotionally complex, even liberating? If feeling trumps propriety, how can practitioners of the new morality object when the boss and an assistant fall in love? Questions like this give lockjaw to the usually loquacious left, because they suggest that the personal is not always political — or at least not simply political. Maybe that’s why the president’s sex life became a scandal in the first place. Perhaps this was the right’s attempt to deal with the new morality by throwing its complications in our face.
As we learned back when the ’60s was a miniseries of the mind, freedom favors contradiction. Let that be our side’s response to both Clinton and his enemies. They can all stand to be reminded that the love you take is equal to the love you make.
