What Has Sex Got to do With It?

Michigan nixes tree lover’s
vanity license plate, pinus,
as too close to Penis.

Bubblehead: I believe a Chief of Staff who could have joint Israeli citizenship and who has actively participated in the defense of Israel is not a good choice for a President who claims to want to broker peace between Palestinians and Israelis. I certainly do not believe that Jews are ineligible to be President of the U.S. Indeed, I think that is ridiculous (just as I think Rand Paul is pretty ridiculous). Say what you will about the Palestinians, they are just as human as Israelis but certainly have not been treated as such by the latter who, for the past forty years, have proven themselves to be greedy, imperialistic, racist criminals that defy International Law and even human decency. I should specify the Israeli government, as even many Israeli citizens don’t approve of what they have been doing.

What does sex have to do with it? I am inspired to write about this because of the plight of Nikki Haley, running for governor of South Carolina. Two different men have now claimed to have had extramarital affairs with her; she denies everything and says she would resign if either of them could be proven. So far it just seems to be a case of she said/he said. I have no idea if these claims are true or false, but for the sake of the argument, what if they are true? What does her sex life have to do with whether or not she would be a decent governor?

Similarly, what does anyone’s sex life have to do with how well or poorly they may be able to do their jobs? There have been in the past few years, ever since the end of the Clinton administration, all kinds of sex scandals involving politicians, religious leaders, and others. These have occurred among both Democrats and Republicans, Straits and Gays, although it does seem Republicans have had quite a few more than Democrats. Perhaps this is a form of justice because it was Republicans that started this orgy of looking into people’s private sexual behavior when they tried to impeach Bill Clinton. Interestingly enough they didn’t try to impeach him specifically for sexual behavior, but, rather, for lying about it. In any case, prior to the Clinton tragedy, engineered by Republicans for purely political reasons, the sexual behavior of politicians and most others was not regarded as anyone’s business, reporters did not report on it, and it was a true situation of don’t ask, don’t tell. Everyone knew, for example, that John Kennedy was a notorious womanizer, but this never became an issue while he was President, largely because the Press did not investigate or reveal this sort of thing about public figures.

But since the Republicans opened this can of worms there have been more sex scandals than one can keep track of. Mark Souder of Indiana recently resigned because of having an affair with a staffer. But don’t forget David (Diapers) Vitter, or Eliot (leaves his socks on) Spitzer. Remember that earlier Bob Livingston withdrew from his attempt to become Speaker because his womanizing was about to be revealed, Bob Packwood was forced to resign over allegations about his womanizing, and more recently we have had the cases of Mark Sanford, John Ensign, Jim Bakker, and many, many more. If you look up sex scandals on the internet you can quickly find almost more than you can easily count. And these are only scandals involving heterosexuals.

Among Gays don’t forget Mark (measure it with a ruler for me) Foley, Bob Allen, Glenn Murphy Jr., Jim West, and Ted Haggard, to say nothing of Larry Craig. It seems that now everyone’s sex life is regarded as important with respect to their job performance, although it is not clear why there should be any connection in most cases. Even Tiger Wood’s excesses did not seem to affect his golf game, and who could even venture a guess as to how many women John Kennedy had affairs with? Even Clinton’s “affair” with Monica Lewinsky would almost certainly not have affected his Presidency had the Republicans not used it to try to remove him from office (and thus causing him to have to spend so much time trying to defend himself instead of running the country). As W. Somerset Maugham once said, anyone’s sex life would probably be regarded as shocking were it to be made public. You don’t have to either condone or condemn any of these incidents to know that forty or fifty years ago we would most probably never have become aware of them. And if you think Bill Clinton was the only politician in Washington, D.C. having illicit and perhaps even kinky sex I believe you must be incredibly naïve. These things happen, not only in the nation’s capital but all over the country, and no amount of moralizing or proscribing them is going to make much difference. What I wonder about is why is it that such things suddenly seem to be so more important now than they used to be. Is it merely because we were not formerly made aware of them?

How did we in the U.S. became so fascinated by the sexual behavior of others in recent years, when for many more years before we were not? Is this merely a result of the Republican vendetta against Clinton (whom they couldn’t beat politically), or does it have a much more profound cultural explanation? Europeans for the most part don’t share this fascination, they fully expect their politicians and leaders to have affairs and mistresses and so on, and don’t usually connect their sex lives with their positions of power and influence. Nor are Europeans so weird about nudity, where nude beaches or semi-nude beaches, and even naked hiking takes place without a great deal of fuss. Do Americans really wonder if under those tiny string bikinis and bras some women are really significantly different from others, or do they just not know what is under there, the sight of which would presumably bring down the social order? We are now literally bombarded on a daily basis with sex in one form or another, in advertising, the movies, television, magazines, and newspapers. Erectile dysfunction seems to be virtually ubiquitious, a national epidemic, and female orgasm has become a topic of genuine concern. We have certainly come a long way from when it was considered improper to even comment on a woman’s ankles and they wore body length bathing costumes. Maybe it is also related to the increasing loss of privacy in our lives.

There are, of course, some sexual acts that are not only unusually egregious but might, in fact, affect someone’s ability to perform their job. I should think hitting on underage Pages would come under this category, and perhaps more persistent advances make people so offended they do not care to put up with it any longer, and so on. But most cases, involving extra-marital affairs, one night stands, opportune moments, acts between consenting adults, probably make little difference to anyone other than spouses and while not considered proper are not enough to ruin careers or seriously handicap the participants. This has become a kind of sexual McCarthyism, a game of gotcha, and needs to be toned down a bit.

LKBIQ:
It would be madness to let the purposes or the methods of private enterprise set the habits of the age of atomic energy.
Harold Laski

TILT:
The last purebred male Columbia Basin Pygmy Rabbit died in March of 2006.