Lengthy musings about Clinton, feminism, erotic justice

Bill Clinton is the only American president whose hand I have shaken. (That opportunity came in Pauley Pavilion at UCLA in 1994; I also shook his hand elsewhere on the campus in June 1992, when he was still a mere candidate). I voted for him in 1992, and for the last dozen years or so, have been utterly fascinated by him. With his autobiography due out this week, I’ve been thinking about him quite a bit.

Let me first say that my own attitude towards our 42nd president has shifted, and shifted again, over the years. My fondness for Clinton began when, during the 1992 campaign, I listened to his speeches and admired his oratory. He has never been a consistently good speaker. Some of his speeches were dry, meandering, and clearly disorganized, as if he hadn’t devoted sufficient time to preparing them. But when he was “on” — my goodness, no president in my memory could touch him! (That includes Ronald Reagan — the late 40th president always seemed to communicate well, and he had a gift for the one-liner, but Clinton could send shivers down my spine in a way that Reagan, even at his best, never could).

But I have to confess that what I have always loved most about Clinton is the hatred he aroused in conservatives. It’s often been said that “you can judge a man by the caliber of his enemies”. If that is true (and I am not sure that it always is), then from a liberal perspective, Clinton must be regarded as one of our greatest statesmen. Indeed, it was the venom of his enemies that kept me loyal to him through most of the 1990s! If he inspired such intense dislike amongst folks like Kenneth Starr and the editors of the National Review, he had to have considerable virtues! Indeed, even when I was deeply disappointed in his actions (like his signing of Welfare Reform and the Defense of Marriage Act), I comforted myself with the reassurance that if conservatives hated him so much, there had to be some wonderfully decent quality about his policies that I was missing! Had Clinton not been so hated by Republicans, I don’t think he would have been able to move the Democratic Party so far towards the right! He used his enemies to rally the left around him, even when we were deeply upset with his actions. It was brilliant politics, and in my case, it worked.

But I’ll let other folks talk about his policies and his politics. Clinton has also been a watershed figure in the history of the evolution of American masculinity. I remember in 1992, on election night, he and running mate Al Gore got up on a stage in Little Rock and hugged. Not a side hug, but a big, jubilant bear hug. They even bounced up and down while doing it. I was thrilled — because it was the first time I had seen an American president (or president-elect) demonstrate such strong physical affection for another man. I saw it as a triumph for the generation that came of age in the 1960s, the first generation of men in which public displays of affection between men could at least (sometimes) be acceptable. (Though I’ve got plenty of Scotch-Irish Calvinists in my gene pool, I’ve never regarded reticence as much of a virtue.)

Clinton not only could embrace men, he seemed to treat women as equals. To the centrist left in the early 1990s, Hillary was as much of a hero (if not more so) than her husband. (In some quarters, of course, she remains every bit as much a hero as she was a dozen years ago). I was delighted to see the first couple embody a new paradigm for marriage. It was clear to me that Clinton was a man unintimidated by women who had minds of their own. His marriage, his appointments of the likes of Janet Reno, Madeline Albright, and Ruth Ginsburg; these made clear that Bill Clinton was in a very real sense our first “feminist president”. But as the decade wore on, other names began to appear besides those of Hillary, Reno, Albright, and Ginsburg. Slowly, names like Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and ultimately, Monica Lewinsky became unavoidable parts of the news. As a liberal, I tried very hard to be outraged at the right for their attacks on the president’s character. The impeachment proceedings seemed to me to be outrageously partisan. But as angry as I was at Clinton’s critics, I slowly (agonizingly, actually) came to see that Bill Clinton was the architect of his own adversity. Time and time again, his lack of self-control had handed the right-wing an opportunity to derail any hopes of implementing a progressive agenda. (I admit, by the time the Lewinsky scandal broke, I had little hope of seeing Bill implement anything resembling a progressive agenda — but loyalty dies hard sometimes.)

I came to the conclusion that Bill Clinton was, in many ways, like a lot of modern American men: he was only capable of treating women with respect when he was not sexually attracted to them. I’m obviously psychologizing here, but I am fairly certain Bill did not lust for Reno, Albright, or Ginsburg! In the absence of sexual attraction, he could see these women as people — and thus cheerfully appoint them to high office and rely upon their counsel. Intellectually, he was very much a feminist. But if you’ll forgive the purple prose, like so many men, Clinton’s feminist principles foundered upon the rocks of his libido. He not only objectified Monica Lewinsky, he treated her shabbily; his behavior with Paula Jones was similarly puerile and offensive. (I am aware that there are other issues at play here like education, age, and class — but let’s leave those aside.)

What I’ve come to see as so important — from a gender studies perspective — about the Clinton story is what it reveals to us about the problem of compartmentalization. To be a feminist man must be about more than mentally assenting to the idea of women’s economic, political, and social equality. It has to be about more even than working to secure that equality for women. Male feminism has to be embodied in every compartment of one’s relationship with women. It must exist in the bedroom as well as the boardroom, if you will. Most men struggle with objectifying women sexually. Some of that struggle is rooted in biology, some in culture. But though my socialist and progressive friends may disagree with me, I have come to see the struggle to live a life of sexual integrity as a more important aspect of male feminism than anything else. Of course, giving women equal pay matters. Giving women access to political and economic power matters. But what good is it for a man to join the fight for women’s equality unless he has first devoted his energies to reconciling his sexuality to his sense of justice? Indeed, given how gargantuan and destructive the global sex trade has become, one could argue that transforming male sexuality is unquestionably the central task for male feminists.

I still like and admire Bill Clinton. His virtues are almost as obvious as his flaws, his talent as massive as his appetites. But though a decade ago, I saw his as a role model, today I see him as a splendid object lesson. My goal as a feminist man is not merely to treat women as my political, economic and social equals, nor even to help other men treat women in that same way. With the help of many mentors and friends of both sexes, my goal for myself is to live a life of what progressive theologian Marvin Ellison calls “Erotic Justice”. Erotic justice means refusing to reduce another human being to the status of an object which exists for one’s own pleasure. For so many men, discipling the libido is one of the hardest struggles of their lives. A commitment to erotic justice is a commitment to engage in that disciplining, even when it is immensely difficult. Erotic justice is not, however, just exercising self-control. It is the conscious effort to transform one’s sexuality so that it loses its capacity to wound, to alienate, to objectify. It does not mean the end of erotic excitement — it is just the insistence that the truly erotic is incompatible with injustice. To put it mildly, it’s a long journey.

Bill Clinton used the language of gender justice, and on one level, he practiced it. On another level, he fell massively short. In those successes and those failiures, he was like many of us. But for me, his failures have become a source of inspiration and a challenge, not just for my personal life but also in my academic and avocational work with teens. For that aspect of his legacy, as well as for that wonderful and historic hug he gave Al Gore on that sweet November night in 1992, I am grateful.