Six years ago, when Bill Clinton’s presidential bid was rocked by the first “bimbo eruption,” the Gennifer Flowers allegations, it was Hillary Rodham Clinton who responded first, saving his campaign with her passionate defense of their marriage. “That’s an issue [faithfulness] that we are very comfortable with in our marriage,” she said on the eve of the 1992 New Hampshire primary. “We love each other. We support each other … We’ve stood by each other through thick and thin.”
Wednesday, while the president awkwardly struggled to make his denial of the latest bimbo explosion, the Monica Lewinsky affair, stronger and more convincing as the day wore on, Hillary Clinton again stood by her husband, saying emphatically that she believed the latest allegations were false and politically motivated. But this latest controversy, involving a woman not much older than the first couple’s daughter who worked in their home, may be the ultimate test of the Clintons’ relationship.
Can this marriage be saved? Even if Kenneth Starr fails to dig up proof of adultery and perjury in the Oval Office, will the strain of battling through one more public scandal be enough to destroy the first marriage? Salon canvassed a range of Clinton intimates, observers and psychologists for their views of whether the Clintons will survive the latest barrage of media scrutiny and allegations.
The sheer number of stories about President Clinton’s alleged womanizing over the years has led some to wonder whether the Clintons might have an “open” marriage.
“No, I don’t really think so, and if they do, it’s not formalized,” said longtime Clinton observer
Meredith Oakley, a political columnist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and
author of “On the Make: The Rise of Bill Clinton” (Regency). “I think
periodically (Bill and Hillary) butt heads. I think periodically she says, ‘Enough,
fellow, we’ve got to correct this situation.’ She is not a silent partner
in this marriage.”
Another source familiar with the Clintons since their days in Arkansas politics, who spoke with Salon on
the condition of anonymity, agreed that the couple does not have an open
arrangement. “I don’t think she’s given him permission to stray, no,” the
source told Salon. “I think [Hillary Clinton] is generally a conventional,
middle-class woman. I think she’s tolerated a lot and forgiven a lot, but I
think she’s concluded that comes with the package — that Bill Clinton is
such an extraordinary person that she has to forgive him some things.”
Some observers say Clinton’s philandering is such a reckless and chronic part of his life that it must be characterized as pathological. David Brock, author of “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham” (Free Press), has asserted that Clinton “is a sex addict.”
Salon’s source in Arkansas said the long history of allegations about Clinton have raised similar questions in his mind. “Rumors about the president’s affairs have been circulating for so long,
and have been so persistent, that most people would say that Bill Clinton has, in the past, been indiscreet. People here felt that [his
philandering] was a flaw, but not a fatal flaw.” Now, in the wake of the latest scandal, added the source, “the Clintons are going to have to sit down and talk to Chelsea like a grown-up. If he did this, then he’s a sex addict and they have to tell her that daddy is a sick man. If he is a sex addict, then it’s like he’s an alcoholic. His promises aren’t worth a shit. He’ll whip it out even if it brings the world down.”
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But experts such as prominent San Francisco psychologist Lillian Rubin insist that Clinton’s dalliances should not be considered a sexual pathology. “This is very speculative, of course, but I believe that with men like Clinton, it has more to do with power than with sex — not so much power over women as affirming the power of his existence, making him feel whole, manly. And in that context, it is more readily accomplished with women who are his inferiors.”
Feminist author bell hooks feels that the Clintons enjoy a solid, progressive marriage — but one in which sex is beside the point. “Nobody understands that women can feel relieved sometimes when their husband is fucking someone else. It’s hard to satisfy men with big egos. But there’s no way that Hillary could come out and say, ‘I don’t care that Bill is fucking someone else. Sex is not the way we prove our commitment.’
“In terms of their relationship, they are the most progressive couple we’ve ever had in the White House. People want to make them pay for that. It would be the most positive thing for our culture if we respected the love between Hillary and her man. We need a love ethic at the seat of power. And these two people do seem to deeply care about one another. So in that way they are better role models than any previous couple in the White House. Their relationship is based on respect and love. Not necessarily on sex. People hate that.”
The anonymous Arkansas source agreed that the Clintons’ marriage was for real. “Everyone I know who is close to the Clintons describe them as passionate about
each other. I think they have been in it for the long haul together. They are very unusual people. They are brilliant. They are interested in a lot of the same things. And they are passionately committed to each other.”
In a conversation last year with Salon, David Brock recalled that everyone he interviewed for his book who knew the young Clintons when they were students at Yale Law School in the 1970s believed Hillary was very much in love with Bill. As their marriage progressed, he added, “There seem to be these periods in ’81 and ’82, and again in ’88 and ’89, when there is consideration by one or both of them of divorce, and then (Hillary) reenters the marriage.” Still, Brock conceded, “You talk to people even today who say, if you look at her, if you look at the way she looks at him … she’s still in love with him.”
Columnist Meredith Oakley adds, “He needs her, he needs the strength that she offers, he needs the focus that she offers. Because he can go off on tangents. And when he goes too far astray, when he gets his mind or attention off the gold, she pulls him back in line. He relies on her very much to keep him on the track, on the path that they’re following. I think she is, in some respects, a source of inner strength, because he knows regardless she’s going to be there.
“Whatever you think of them, you have to admire the fact that they both seem to hang in there. Theirs has lasted longer than many, many marriages — in fact, longer than most marriages that I’m aware of.”
Oakley believes that Hillary Clinton may have overlooked her husband’s sexual peccadilloes because he brought her closer to power. “He has brought her things that she could not have accomplished on her own. He had the power that she wanted but could not get, because the times were not right for her. She was not going to be president. In fact, Hillary is not even cut out for elective politics because she doesn’t like having to be accountable to people. She would make a good dictator, but she’d be lousy if you elected her to an office. She wouldn’t abide the news media and things like that.
“So there were places Bill could take her that she couldn’t go herself, and that was the White House. He could put her in a position to accomplish the things she wanted to, like the children’s issues, health-care reform and so on. He could put her in a position to have influence and she couldn’t get that on her own. It’s a man’s world and she had finally accepted that he might be president but she would not.”
In psychologist Rubin’s estimation, Hillary Clinton has “made a deal with the devil. It’s something like women who put up with violence. She is a person who wanted to be president and knew she couldn’t be. He’s charming enough and bright enough that she’s hung in with him.”
But, adds Rubin, who is the author of “The Transcendent Child,” Clinton’s reckless behavior has now brought the Clintons’ successful political merger to the brink of disaster. “He obviously has some kind of compulsion to self-destruct, or at least to push the edge of the envelope. It’s something he’s done his whole life. He’s gotten away with so much in terms of the character issue, he lives on the edge the whole time.
“If I were to diagnose him, I would say he has a quintessential narcissistic personality disorder — he swings from the grandiose to a little boy incapable of protecting his mother and himself. He also shows many of the worst qualities of the child of an alcoholic. In clinical practice, you see that male children of alcoholic families seem unable to fully commit to any woman, they are often very ambivalent about their relationships with women.”
As the Monica Lewinsky controversy continues to rage, the question on many Clinton observers’ minds is whether the marriage will survive the firestorm.
“They’ve made it through crises in the past and I know they have
extraordinary love for each other,” said Gene Lyons, a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “But love is based on respect, and if he did this, then she’s got to lose respect for him. But I don’t think she believes it right now.”
“I think Hillary will accommodate,” predicted Oakley. “What’s she going to do, pack up her bags and move back in with Mama at the condo?”
But others aren’t so sure that the president’s alleged affair with Lewinsky won’t be the beginning of the end of their marriage.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they divorce after he leaves office,” said Rubin.
Salon asked five intelligent observers to give us their thoughts on the latest unholy mess in the White House.
Gene Lyons Gene Lyons is a political columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and the author of “Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater” (Franklin Square).
Even people here who have been on Clinton’s side through all the so-called scandals are pretty shaken up by this. If he did do this, he’s got to resign and I’ll be bitter at him for a long time, because he will have betrayed his country, and his party and his family.
But at this moment, I’m still agnostic. I have tapes in my office — which I got while researching right-wing “dirty tricks” against Clinton — of women talking about having sex with Clinton and it’s all demonstrable fantasy. What we may have here is a David Letterman situation, where you have a young woman who gets infatuated with the president, keeps following him around and fantasizes that she’s having a relationship with him.
Or maybe it’s a case of political intrigue. The timing is interesting. The Paula Jones case is going into the toilet, and everyone knows it, except the media. Kenneth Starr has nothing on Whitewater. It’s possible that this has been cooked up by Clinton’s enemies as a desperation move. What we may have is some sort of coup attempt, and right now the rebels have the radio station and the television station. The question is: Which way is the Army going to go? Clearly, like most coup attempts, this won’t come out as draw. Somebody’s going down over this — Bill Clinton or Kenneth Starr.
How will it come out? If this woman (Monica Lewinsky) takes the Fifth and refuses to testify, that could stop Starr dead in his tracks. Maybe it will turn out that Clinton’s relationship with her was purely avuncular; he’s had relationships of that kind in the past, although they inevitably draw suspicion. And if I was in the White House, I would be asking how Starr got the tapes in the first place. Was the original taping legal? And how did Starr, on his own authority, decide to put a wire on Linda Tripp — which makes her an agent of Ken Starr.
Maybe this will turn out to be another Clinton conundrum which we’ll never get to the bottom of. My guess right now is that Clinton will survive, crippled. Again.
David Horowitz David Horowitz is a Salon columnist and author of “Radical Son” (Free Press)
Do I believe it? Sure. The chickens are finally coming home to roost! It’s a pattern. Character is destiny. We know Clinton. Once you’ve been through Gennifer Flowers and all the early bimbo eruptions, nobody’s really surprised. The pattern is fairly clear to anyone who’s read the allegations by the Arkansas state troopers. This is Clinton. And I may say, since I’ve been engaged in controversy in Salon over this, this really validates Matt Drudge. Drudge is part of the press corps that is driving this story. It makes sense for them to try to destroy him or try to discredit him.
Why would Clinton do something like this? As a male who has a somewhat checkered past I have never been able to understand either Kennedy or any of these guys. Isn’t power enough of an aphrodisiac? Don’t you think Clinton could say, “Hey I’ve only got four more years, then I can do anything I want?” Isn’t it enough to be trying to establish peace in the Middle East, or to deal with Saddam Hussein? I can understand the temptation. I cannot understand, as a father, I can’t understand taking advantage of a 21-year-old who has a summer job, who is an intern in the White House. It would turn me off to see somebody so vulnerable.
There’s something wrong here, and it’s the same thing with Kennedy. I think they get high off the risk. In order to feel real, you take these risks. The Kennedys are exemplary at it. They take insane risks with people standing around with their jaws dropped at the stupidity of it. It’s really some kind of authenticity test. It’s no different from those people who dive out of planes on surfboards and spin around. Sad to say this is Clinton’s Everest.
But the story here is no longer Clinton’s satyriasis. The issue now is obstruction of justice. Exactly what brought down Nixon. Everywhere that Kenneth Starr has probed, what has created the crises of the Clinton administration in the first place, has been coverup. Whether it’s been Foster or “Travelgate” or the FBI files, whenever the crises of the Clinton administration have erupted, always the issue has been coverup and obstruction of justice. This has seriously injured the Clinton White House and for the first time, raised the serious prospect — if it can be shown that Clinton did suborn this witness — of impeachment.
Martin Anderson Martin Anderson was a special assistant to President Richard Nixon and an assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
If the allegations are not true, it won’t even be a footnote in the history books. It it’s true, they should have said, “Gee, I’m sorry, it happened.” Admit it and say it won’t happen again. The American people are very forgiving, it’s amazing how much the public will forgive. But they don’t like to be lied to.
The real serious charge is not whether or not he had an affair with this woman who is over 21. The serious charge is whether or not the president of the United States suborned perjury. If that’s true, then there will have to be preliminary impeachment hearings. That’s a clear obstruction of justice. It’s the sort of thing that got Richard Nixon impeached.
Wendy Kaminer Wendy Kaminer is a lawyer and public policy fellow at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass. She is the author of “True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism” and “It’s All The Rage: Crime and Culture” (both Addison Wesley).
All of this makes me nostalgic for the days when a president was investigated for legitimate crimes. If the American people want someone moral in office they should elect the pope.
I don’t think these allegations are serious. It epitomizes the trivialization of the news. This story is a lot of fun for people. It’s gossip. I don’t think the behavior is relevant to his ability to govern. I’m not a fan of President Clinton, but I don’t think we are focusing on the right thing. This is no more outrageous than the welfare bill or the immigration bill. President Clinton has done a lot of things that have outraged me more.
If the allegations are true? Then technically he will be guilty of suborning perjury and yes, technically, that is a violation of the law. But so is running a stop sign. Does it say something about his judgment? Sure, it’s extremely reckless and arrogant. If I were Hillary or Chelsea I would take this very seriously. It is a private, not a public issue. If there is anything unforgivable about this it is lying to his daughter.
Dr. Mark Levy Mark Levy is a forensic psychiatrist, chairman of the San Francisco Foundation for Psychoanalysis and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California-San Francisco
I don’t believe it. It would not be first time that a woman — or a man — has described a wish or a fantasy instead of an event. It’s not hard to imagine that a young woman working with the president might have a crush and out of sheer innocence and a girlish prank might go along with someone, like Linda Tripp, who is clearly seeking dirt.
He’s back! The last time we heard from Jerry Springer, you may recall, he was retreating, tail between his legs, from a short-lived second job as news commentator on a Chicago station, an embarrassing episode that left him, at least for a few days, the most hated man in the Windy City. But he survived this temporary setback — and he’s returned stronger than ever.
Springer’s show, after punching up its already-sleazy guest list (and inspiring its already-sleazy guests to punch up each other) is now getting its best ratings ever. “While other gab shows talk about cleaning up their respective acts, Springer’s … program — notorious for an endless parade of brawling, big-chested strippers, naughty nudists and brazen adulterers — has actually become more outrageous than ever this season,” noted Josef Adalian in the New York Post. “The result: … a stunning ratings surge.” Springer’s new, even tawdrier show closed in fast on Oprah Winfrey during the October sweeps, and actually beat Oprah for the week ending Nov. 30, leaving the Jerrmeister standing briefly atop the talk-show ratings world.
We are thrilled with Jerry’s comeback, but we think he can do even better! Indeed, with all due respect to Oprah, we think he can grind the Queen of Daytime Talk into ratings powder.
Publicly, Jerry shows Oprah nothing but the utmost respect. (“Oprah’s the best there is,” he recently told a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.) But we know in his heart of hearts he’d love to vanquish her once and for all.
And we know how he can do it. What does Oprah have that Jerry doesn’t have? Only one thing: a book club.
Why can’t Jerry get one of his own?
We know what you’re thinking: “But Jerry’s guests can’t read.” Actually, that’s not true at all. Studies show that cross-dressers, for example, are extremely avid book-purchasers. And while white supremacists are, for the most part, illiterate, the majority of pregnant lesbian strippers have at least some college education — and a startling 35.2 percent have advanced degrees!
So we say: Jerry — You Go Girl!
Think of the possible topics for the show: “Cold Mountain, Hot Lesbian Strippers!”; “Angela’s Asses”; “The God of Small Penises”; “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Crouching Down in the Bushes, Naked, with Binoculars.”
And imagine the edifying exchanges that could result once Jerry’s Kids throw themselves into the serious study of literature.
JERRY PROMOTES THE GREAT AMERICAN DIALOGUE ON RACE
Jerry: So what did you think of “The Turner Diaries,” Bruno?
Bruno: I thought they rocked! A kick-ass defense of our glorious Aryan heritage. And I loved all the race war stuff, just loved it. After reading it, I felt like blowing up a Federal Building. A big “Heil Hitler” for this book, Jerry!
Jerry: And how about you, Rabbi?
JERRY’S BOOK CLUB DOES TONI MORRISON
Lonya: Toni Morrison is one nasty-assed bitch.
Jerry: But, Lonya, you didn’t even read the book! Why do you say that?
Lonya: Well, why she call herself Tony, like she some sort of Italian dude? That’s nasty.
Jerry: You’re Lonya’s mother — what do you think, Mrs. Johnston?
Mrs. Johnston: Guido, Jerry. Call me Guido.
JERRY’S BOOK CLUB TALKS ABOUT THE CHILDREN
Jerry: So, Tom, what do you think of the book?
Judy: Don’t ask him. He didn’t even read the book — he was doin’ the nasty with the baby sitter!
Jerry: Is that true, Tom?
Tom: Nah. I was readin the book with her.
Judy: Naked?
Tom: I’m not ashamed of my body.
Jerry: That’s great. But why do you even have a baby sitter? Your baby isn’t even born yet.
Tom: She’s not a baby sitter, Jerry. She’s an adult baby sitter.
Jerry: She baby sits adults?
Tom: No no — she’s an adult baby. Um, and she sits around.
Judy: Sleeps around, more like.
JERRY’S BOOK CLUB DOES FAMILY VALUES
Jerry: This week on the book club we’re doing a modern-day classic: Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss.” And to discuss it we have two guests: Eddie Rex and his friend Jocasta. Now, Jocasta, it’s fair to say that you and Eddie are boyfriend and girlfriend?
Jocasta: Oh, yes, Jerry. I’m carrying his baby. We’re gonna get married next month.
Jerry: But you’re also his mother.
Jocasta: Well, yeah.
Chorus of audience members: Slut!
Jocasta: Well, listen here, [beep]heads, it got awful lonely after his poppa, the late Mr. Rex, God bless his soul, got killed by them highwaymen. [To the Chorus] You’da done it too, you dirty [beep]ers!
Chorus: You’re the [beep]ing whore, bitch!
Jerry: Eddie, before we get to the book, you’ve got something you want to tell your mom about that night, don’t you?
Eddie: Well, yeah. Me and pops was drinkin, and we had a little bit of a disagreement and … well, let’s just say that one stroke of my good staff flung him clean out of the trailer home and laid him prone, right where them three roads meet. I whomped him but good!
Chorus: Ooooooooh!
Jocasta: You wretch, in birth, in wedlock cursed! I’ll poke your damn eyes out, you [beep beep beep]er!
[Jocasta jumps on him, gouging out both of his eyes before being wrestled to the ground by Jerry's security guards.]
Eddie: Dark, dark! The horror of darkness, like a shroud, wraps me and bears me on through mist and cloud! Damn, mom! I can’t [beep]ing see [beep]!
Chorus: “Jer-ry! Jer-ry!”
like most women in America, I have never attended a Promise Keepers gathering — I’ve only seen them on TV. Actually, an ex of mine has a few cousins who I remember spending a holiday dinner with in the early ’90s, and they were big fans of the new ideal in masculine Christianity.
Their faces at our supper table were hot pink from spending the afternoon in a football stadium — praying, singing and crying with their spiritual brothers. They were high on God, boy-power-blissful, redeemed to a spit polish. And believe me, these were no choir types: They were naughty boys who had been called everything from bullies to bastards to better-off-dead, with case histories to back it up. It seemed like the worse their records, the more vigorously they rejoiced in their conversion. They’d rocketed, in one born-again blast, from selfish and ignorant louts to God’s enlightened servants.
When I watched the Keepers march on Washington last month and kneel in one massive group at the Capitol Mall, I thought of Dennis, Renny, Johnny and Coco, in their pre-P.K. personas, prideful in their machismo, wired for conquest. If anyone was going to wind up on their knees, I would have expected it to be the women they’d left behind, sobbing their eyes over going to bed with such hopeless cads. Instead, the womanizers themselves were scraping pavement with their knees, asking for Christ’s forgiveness, and I was left with one great unexplained question in my mind: What’s up with these guys’ sex lives?
In my ignorance, I always presumed that the evangelical churches denied and repressed every kind of sexual expression. I imagined that the reason these stadium rallies seemed like giant homoerotic gatherings of masochistic breast-beaters was because no one had the nerve to talk frankly about sex in their church community, and yet all that trussed-up lust has to come out somehow.
But I was wrong. There is a sophisticated discussion on the Christian way to conduct one’s sex life, and its most articulate form can be found in the pages of some very popular Christian sex manuals.
Such books as “A Celebration of Sex” by Dr. Douglas Rosenau (with a forward by Bill McCartney, founder of the Promise Keepers),
“The Gift of Sex” by Clifford and Joyce Penner (over 250,000 copies sold!) and Ed and Gaye Wheat’s “Intended for Pleasure” will all give you an explicit and compassionate guide to going absolutely hog-wild in your sacred marriage bed.
The Penners, who are pioneers in this field, are a couple who were raised in rural Mennonite communities. They loved the family-centered church they grew up in, but were aggrieved to witness the “absence of positive sexual teaching, combined with rigid rules about sexual expression, that led us both to believe that sex between a man and woman was seen by our church as evil, even though we did not feel that way about it ourselves.”
Clifford and Joyce met each other at a Baptist college, where they first encountered the notion that sexual pleasure was a gift from their God, and that marriage was God’s way of bringing two people together, not only to make babies, but to enjoy the passion of each other’s bodies. For the first time, they heard a member of their faith say that erotic feelings were natural and even substantiated in the Bible. Believe me, all three of these books cannot resist quoting the exquisite Song of Solomon at length.
All of the Christian authors I’ve read went on to further their medical training, particularly in psychology and sex research, which they found immeasurably helpful in spreading a simultaneously pro-sexual and pro-Christian message. They find nothing standing in the way, biblically speaking, of advocating joy in the body, orgasms galore and experimentation with different positions and foreplay. They are downright feminist in their insistence that in order for a man to respect his wife, he must respect her sexual needs and become more “Christ-like” in his approach to her pleasure. In other words, slow down, Mr. Premature Ejaculation. I guess Jesus would have taken his time!
Dr. Rosenau and the Penners all went to the Masters and Johnson Institute to learn more about sex, and they repeat, almost verbatim, the classic lessons on how arousal and orgasm take place — the primacy of the clitoris in women’s orgasms and so on. Rosenau recommends self-esteem exercises like “Stand nude in front of a full-length mirror. Observe yourself and describe every one of your body parts with no negative judgments.”
Stare at yourself nude in the mirror and say nice things about your body! Surely the authors must know that even this tiny suggestion is incongruous with a lot of the Christian world’s dogma. But these books demonstrate that there is a tremendous wish in the Protestant church to develop an approach to sexuality that relates to modern life. Although the authors did not write these books as political tracts, it is clear they believe that the church must support healthy marriages in order to survive as a powerful community, and that neglecting the sexual component in marriage is a half-baked approach to marital success.
For men, the authors recommend recognizing and enhancing your wife’s capacity for pleasure. For women, the strongest tip is to be open to your husband’s advances whether you’re horny at the moment or not — rely on your love and spiritual reverence for your husband to get the fires started … and if that doesn’t work, there’s always a good lubricant!
No, I’m lying — these authors aren’t hip enough to suggest a good massage oil as Plan B (although I’m sure Mary Magdalene would have had something helpful to say on the subject). But it tickled me that they did identify the chief challenge in marital sex as solving the differences in the frequency and timing of female and male desire. Sexperts of any philosophical persuasion would agree with them — it’s the heterosexual erotic conundrum.
Christian sex educators have found their greatest freedom in the areas that the Good Book blessedly overlooks. There’s this whole rap on how, since the Bible doesn’t come right out and say what the deal is with oral sex, then it’s wide open for your own personal interpretation. Or, as Rosenau puts it, “God promises us in Philippians 3:15, 16 that if we act on the truth we do understand, He will help each of us mature and come to an understanding of His will and way.”
So if the truth of the matter is that I also would like to try anal sex, is God down with that too? Well, actually, some things are just beyond God’s pale. Rosenau has a special chapter for men in his book in which he warns, “Many Christian men have allowed this [anal sex] to become an obsession detracting from the rest of their lovemaking. They obsess about this behavior as a symbol of variety or adventure. The vaginal tissue was designed by God for intercourse and the anus was not.” Hey, I’d like to see a biblical page and number on that! If anything, the vaginal muscles are designed to facilitate childbirth, not intercourse per se. Anyway, Dr. Doug is so gentle about this subject that it makes me suspect he’s had to struggle with it himself. He ends tenderly by saying: “This may be an area of your fantasies that you need to let go of. “
In my agnostic cluelessness, I could never anticipate what was going to turn out to be OK in the Christian sex scene and what was not. Unzipping yourself in a car: OK! Strip-teasing for your husband: Why not? But something as simple as masturbation: Tricky, tricky, tricky. The act of touching your genitals and stimulating yourself to orgasm is sanctioned. The dangerous part is what you might be thinking about while jilling off.
Herein lies the great terror of the Christian sex manual: the wandering erotic mind. Thinking about sex can so easily lead to thinking about doing it with people other than your spouse, which is out and out sinful. There are also a million other taboos that might enter your erotic daydreams — from homosexuality to rhumba panties. On this subject all the Christian sex experts agree: The only proper thing to be occupying your mind when you are making love is your spouse — his or her body, character and love for you. God forbid you start wanking off to thoughts of something or somebody else.
What I appreciate about this Christian logic is that they don’t futz around connecting the dots. They say that unchecked fantasy is kissing cousins to pornography, and I agree with them: Pornography is simply the artistic depiction of the show that’s playing daily in the theater of men’s minds.
Not only do the Christian sexologists take a grim view of the kinds of frolicking depicted in most porn, they object to pornography’s very principle, that you are enjoying an image of something or someone who you are not actually connected to in an intimate, marriage-type way. This is where the Christian use of the word “objectification” comes into play, and why so many Christian intellectuals were deeply moved by early feminist analyses of pornography. Both camps feel that it’s wrong to lust over an idea you create in your own mind or surmise from a picture or story — that you are damaging yourself and your faith (be it Baptist or Gloria Steinem) by “making another human being into a depersonalized object for one’s sexual gratification” (my emphasis).
Feminists may have given Christians the notion of “objectification,” but the anti-porn feminists really owe their sense of outrage over the wiles of the human imagination to their American Christian heritage. They’re really not that different from the Christian sects that don’t allow “imaginary playmates” or fairy tales in their home. Those flights of fancy are also fuel for the act of turning another human being in one’s mind “into an object for gratification.”
Yet, if I fantasize about the incredibly gorgeous checkout clerk at my local Safeway (and imagine having anal sex with her, for instance) I have not actually done anything to her. She knows nothing of my thoughts and she never will, unless by some wonderful act of God she throws herself at me while I’m swiping my ATM card. My lusty imagination is not a danger to myself or society — a fertile erotic mind is not the same as unchecked impulses or a pathological disregard for other people’s feelings.
If I should furtively hide my most compelling fantasies from my spouse, I absolutely agree that my secret is going to put a shadow on my honest relationship with my partner. What the Christian sex manuals do not consider is that I could share my fantasies with my spouse without inciting a jealousy-whipped riot of bad feeling. It’s inconceivable to them that sharing fantasies without apologies, as well as supporting each other’s erotic imagination, could actually be a gift to a good marriage rather than a poison.
I’m afraid that the well-intentioned Christian sex guide is leading its readers into a trap. If you follow the instructions: make time for making love, stand nude before the mirror, enjoy blow jobs in the car and stripteases at noon and lots of kissing and canoodling at all hours, and even go so far as to “not buy a TV in the first year of your marriage” (my favorite suggestion!) so you can really get to know each other — well, the two of you will be feeling so foxy and well-connected that the inevitable result will be a flourishing fantasy life.
Sure, when you’re first infatuated with your beloved, you can spend hours just dreaming about his or her little toe. But fantasy will also take on the memories and mysteries and color of every lover’s life as naturally as the natural physical sex these experts describe. There is, shall we say, no fucking way you can turn off those daydreams unless you’re planning on getting a lobotomy. To repress them, ironically, leads us to obsess about them, whereas to share one’s fantasies with a trusted companion is to have a sense of balance, humor and empathy about our erotic spirits.
Next column: “How to Affair-Proof Your Marriage in 10 Easy Steps!”
Well, maybe it’s not so easy, but when it comes to Christian sex manuals, the experts take no prisoners in the war against the sin of adultery. They believe successful monogamy requires a virtual military strategy. Is their advice the hard truth of the matter that secular advisors don’t have the stomach to recommend?
