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Loyalty cocktail | page 1, 2
But even if the experiment works below the belt, how would Clinton survive the
loss of all that sex for power's sake? How would the urge to stick an expensive cigar into a subordinate be rechanneled? Giving $10,000 speeches and stocking
his library ain't gonna scratch that itch. Working, say, in some high-risk, high-stakes business, where he can crush
rivals in front of pretty secretaries, might stand in for his most swinish
sex. But the "love me" Clinton, the one Gennifer Flowers says eats pussy
like a champ, would need a place to play too. Assuming Hillary's still
angry, he could devote himself for a while to winning her back. Given
his love for his mama and the intellectual gulf between his Missus and his
mistresses, Clinton probably suffers a virgin-whore complex like that of John
Leguizamo in "Summer of Sam" -- the kind that precludes anything kinky with
the wife. The Clintons would just have to get over that. As his term winds down and
her campaign heats up, the two could play sexually with the shift from prez
and first lady to senator and first man. For Hillary
to fuck him with a dildo would not only pass the baton of power but would
claim him in a post-prairie vole way, cross-strengthening the gene
therapy's bond. If Hillary's diagnosis in Talk is correct and he needs to
repeat the trauma of pleasing two women, perhaps she could get a dark wig
and other accouterments for an alter ego. In short, he'd have to do what most married people do: figure out ways to
keep sex with one person interesting. Even the estimated 60 percent of
Americans who cheat on their spouses generally don't cheat as continually as Clinton, and they achieve some workable system of monogamy. The president, the last two speakers of the House and most of the Kennedys hold a distorted mirror up to the rest of the country. They show us a nation of rutting rodents, men constitutionally unable to remain
faithful. Virginia Vitzthum Virginia Vitzthum's column appears every other Tuesday in the Urge edition of Health & Body + Archives
Would there be a market for a monogamy drug outside the Extremely Powerful club? Priapic cartoons like Clinton, Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger don't resemble men I know -- any more than the passive mommy voles look like my female friends and colleagues. Granted, whenever I read that 87 percent of Americans believe that Adam and Eve are their great-grandparents and that homosexuals are going to hell, I remind myself that my educated little circle in my Eastern city isn't any more representative of the United States than, say, Salon's readership is. Maybe I'm naive, maybe it's not just a power thing, maybe all the Joe Sixpacks in Kansas do have babes on the side. Since I don't know any of them (or Clinton or Beatty or Jagger, for that matter), I couldn't include them in my monogamy gene survey. About 20 men responded to my e-mail question, "Would you take a drug that would make you content with your mate and never want to fool around with anyone else?" Most wanted the absurd premise clarified; they particularly wanted to know if the drug would keep you bonded to someone you no longer love. My favorite follow-up question came from a single straight man: "Are all males so required to self-medicate, or would there be a class of roving [polygamous] CEO dudes picking off the mates of contented drones?" Such responses suggest that my friends spray the bushes just like Clinton, Gingrich and most rodents, but with a self-awareness that breeds restraint. Most of the gay men surveyed said they would take the drug if their partner did too. Several respondents suggested that the loss of desire would ripple far beyond the romantic dyad. One divorcee said a monogamy pill could knock out "FTD, Dr. Ruth, Oprah, Springer, sports, Playboy, music, painting and poetry." A straight serial monogamist toed the Camille Paglia line, declaring "the way one conquers [women] is through information, inspiration, imagination and ambition." Both these men maintained that insecurity and competition animates romance as well as other achievement, but neither advocated open marriage to foster this. The married men in my survey -- the target market -- uniformly condemned a monogamy drug as "castration" and "lobotomy." (One said, however, if he did have "the Clinton disease," he would take the drug so as not to lose his wife and son.) "The conflict between lust and monogamy helps me understand the responsibility I've undertaken by being married, a responsibility that goes well beyond fidelity," one relative newlywed reported. Another friend who's been married 12 years and has two kids wrote, "Surplus longing is good for sharpening existential dread. Happiness is 'always already' relative, even for the naturally sanguine. Thus we endure our contentment as well as our pangs of lack." Fantasy, trust and the struggle to stay faithful make a bracing cocktail that these husbands would not want to dilute. I'm skeptical about the monogamous paradigm -- I've seen it turn honest
people into liars and happy people into the cast of Sartre's "No Exit." But
my married friends' e-mails cheered me up considerably. These guys suggest
that sexual denial can be rich and conscious and paradox-embracing, not
just Puritanical repression or blind submission to a social more. Their
reflections give the lie to biological determinism as well: Human maleness
is not a disease to be cured, and monogamy can be something better than the
path of least resistance.
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