COMMENTARY: Getting real about Clinton

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Carter Heyward, an Episcopal priest, is a professor of theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., and the author of numerous books and articles.) UNDATED _ Somewhere in the air between Boston and Chicago recently, as I watched a young mother somehow manage to juggle the desires of […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Carter Heyward, an Episcopal priest, is a professor of theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., and the author of numerous books and articles.)

UNDATED _ Somewhere in the air between Boston and Chicago recently, as I watched a young mother somehow manage to juggle the desires of three squirming toddlers, it hit me: I understand why most of the public, even strong women, continue to support Bill Clinton regardless of how we look upon the sex he may or may not have had and the lies he may or may not have told about it.


It isn’t primarily our voyeurism, nor media manipulation. It isn’t really a tasteless or superficial thing, this sense that we _ even lesbian feminists like myself _ will stand by our man. It’s not even simply our happiness with an economy which seems good for the predominantly white groups of people who are not homeless, in prison, or otherwise socially expendable.

No, it is that in Bill Clinton, many of us are drawn to what so many were attracted to in the late Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales _ the transparency of their humanness.

Think about it. Maybe this is exactly why soap opera and fairytales”work”for so many women and girls. The characters _ Bill in the White House, Diana in the palace _ reach out to us.

Silently or verbally, they speak to us and smile at us. They wink at us and nod our way.

Through many ideals and much mischief, through some real goodness and lots of stupidity, through many lies and secrets, the lives of the real Bill Clinton and Diana Spencer invite us to identify with, and fight for, their humanness in the midst of a social order which, like the paparazzi or Kenneth Starr, threatens to gobble them up.

For sure, we sense our humanness is under fire. We are immersed in a complex global system of wealth production, monopoly, and management rendering such a quaint notion as”private enterprise”as obsolete as the old Victrola.

And we are being confounded, even as we are defined, by systems in which we can hardly tell the real from the”virtual.” We can hardly draw distinctions between what may be possible _ advanced technologies in reproduction and weaponry, for example _ and what may be good.


In this cyber-postcapitalist situation, which weighs against our most deeply human hungers and vulnerabilities, a psycho-spiritual numbness becomes for many our best defense against being overwhelmed by a dominant cultural ethos telling us we are, in fact, powerless.

But enter a princess with bulimia, a failed marriage, a lover, an attitude toward royalty, and a desire to help suffering people. Enter a president of the world’s most powerful nation with lots of ideals, lots of political enemies determined to get him _ and lots of sex. We feel connected with their humanness.

I suppose most of us like Bill Clinton, regardless of how we view the specifics of his presidency or his use of sexual power, because we see he is alive and hungry, just like the rest of us. Through his sex play _ some of it boorish, none of it coercive as far as we know (and we seem to know a lot) _ we sense some stirrings of our own most deeply human, passionate, and even sexy places of desire for connection.

This president is waking us up, like JFK did (some of us will remember), and like FDR did (my mom reminds me). Is it simply a coincidence all these men have been sexy dudes? Or might their sexual energies reflect a shared passion, however misguided in public policies as well as sexual behavior, for life and love and all things most deeply human and creaturely?

It is time for women _ feminists and others _ to reject the nonsense that sex is abusive simply because it happens between adults with”unequal institutional power.”On this silly criterion, which implies that power relations are inherently wrong if they become sexual, nobody can have sex with most of the people they are likely to know the best _ folks they work with, study with, experience life with.

It’s a criterion which unfortunately is providing the basis for lots of codes of professional ethics these days _ codes we will live to regret.


We need to get clear that not all sex at work is harassment and not all harassment of women, gay men and lesbians in the workplace is about sex.

The Clinton saga is about sex, not about harassment. Hence, it’s a story about human beings mucking along, not about sexual violence.

Through the humanness we glimpse in Clinton’s sexiness and stupidities, many folks are becoming a little less numb, a little more alive, than we were before. This is why lots of us are still standing with the president, however disappointed we may be in much of what he has stood for (and refused to stand for) since taking office in 1993.

DEA END HEYWARD

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