OPINION:
The debate over the #MeToo movement continues. The ladies keep coming out of the confessional with “J’accuse,” but some of the players are missing. They’re the women who slept their way to starring roles in the movies and powerful positions in politics and the media and didn’t talk. We don’t know who they are, nor are we likely to learn the details of success on the road to the top, because they played by the old rules of Hollywood and Washington, keeping their dalliances to themselves.
They’re a little like Mae West, the famous comedienne of yesteryear. A woman Mae met looked at the not-so-little rocks on her fingers and exclaimed, “Goodness! What lovely diamonds.” Mae replied: “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”
Such women regard sexual relations as Henry Kissinger practiced international statecraft, where everything is dependent on “context.”
But we’re clearly in a moment of great contextual change. You might call it “moral combat,” which R. Marie Griffith does in her new book, “Moral Combat,” describing how sex has divided American Christians and fractured American politics since the last century. She dissects the sweeping cultural change that tweaked religious as well as secular morality in America, changing the vocabulary of public conversation. Many issues and circumstances contributed as the vocabulary even altered media perceptions of what is permissible to print.
Sex and politics are clearly at the root of our divided culture. Nina Burleigh, a White House reporter, described two decades ago how President Clinton leered at her “bike-wrecked, naked legs” aboard Air Force One, and she understood why women swooned over him. “I would be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal,” she said in an interview in The Washington Post. “I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on, to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
The political divide meshed with a sexual divide. Conservative and liberal values were seen through the prism of politics and policy. But what’s liberal and conservative in politics and sex is not always as clear-cut as we sometimes think. The straightforward alignment sometimes zigs and sometimes zags, just as it has over sexual harassment.
The liberal support for Bill Clinton, reflected in his views on abortion, for example, hasn’t protected him since he retired. His sexual harassment accusers have been largely vindicated. Nearly everyone thought the “Access Hollywood” tape would destroy Donald Trump, but he mitigated the damage by seating the Clinton accusers on the front row at the third presidential debate. Their very presence rebuked Bill’s behavior and Hillary’s enabling of that behavior.
Hillary, bearing the feminist standard, speaks proudly of her Methodist heritage (that many Methodists regard as little more than mockery of what she was taught in Sunday school), trapped herself by declining to fire her “faith adviser” when he was accused of harassment. She now concedes that “if I had to do it again” she would sack him. But life does not offer mulligans, and feminists are not pleased, either.
The popular “Saturday Night Live” skewers sexual offenders in the White House, left and right. Natalie Portman, as Jackie Kennedy, consoles Melania Trump, humiliated by tales of her husband’s rutting with a porn star, by recalling how she similarly suffered over rumors of Jack’s affair with Marilyn Monroe. Melania observes, unhappily, that “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” wasn’t x-rated.
Sex in the pages of Marie Griffith’s “Moral Combat” finds the moral polarities in our history as an equal-opportunity vulnerability, humanized by both traditionalists and secularists. The sins expose unexpected shifts in attitudes, depending on context in social history and the changing times. There’s enough arrogance to go around. Both liberals and conservatives claim the more virtuous attitude, saving the vitriol for the “other,” sinner and saint, chauvinist and feminist.
“Moral Combat” went to press before the most recent controversies swamped the attention of everybody. Critic Katie Roiphe was tarred and feathered for daring to raise certain questions about #MeToo excesses in an article in Harper’s magazine online. She makes it clear that she shares some #MeToo goals, but thousands of Twitteroids called her “a garbage person,” “a ghoul,” and “human scum,” all based on what they thought might be in the article they never read. Her crime, she tells CBS News, was “departing slightly from the officially accepted feminist position.” She likens her critics to George Orwell’s “thought police” in his novel “1984.”
“If we want a true reckoning,” she says, “it means listening to authentically conflicting points of view, from both women and men.” She’s right, of course, but it’s not going to happen until something profound changes in our politics. Ranting, raving, bashing and bloviating is just too much fun.
• Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.
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