Don't conflate Strauss-Kahn's assault with Schwarzenegger's affair
Juliet Williams is an associate professor of women's studies at UCLA. Her op-ed originally appeared in the Washington Post on May 20, 2011.One was accused of a crime, and one pleaded guilty to being a cad, but those quick minds in the infotainment business soon got Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger into the same story line:
Sex and politicians!
In which we commingle a true sex scandal (cheating pol fathers love child; keeps secret from wife, children, voters; wins office twice) with a seven-count indictment for criminal sexual assault (world finance leader seen as future French president busted in alleged rape attempt on housekeeper who came to clean his swank hotel suite).
CNN showcased Time magazine’s upcoming cover: “What Makes Powerful Men Act Like Pigs.” Columnists blamed “manly urges” and “men behaving badly,” and MSNBC added both men to its already robust rogues’ gallery (which includes John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Chris Lee).
Uh, no. One of these things is not like the other.
When a term such as “sex scandal” is used to describe behaviors running the gamut from politically irrelevant to legally actionable, I’d say we’ve got a problem. And the weird accident of timing here reveals how badly we still confuse consensual if illicit sex with violence against women.
Until recently, we didn’t have to worry so much about how to talk about the sexual misbehavior of prominent men. That’s because until recently, we didn’t talk much about it at all. But that certainly changed in the late 1990s, when Kenneth Starr broke the sexual sound barrier and catapulted talk of thongs and stubborn dress stains into the evening news.
Who else but the deceptively prudish special prosecutor could have induced grannies and schoolchildren alike to gather around the family dinner table to contemplate such eternal questions as whether it counts as an extramarital affair if your intern “performed oral sex” on you in your office (as the Starr Report put it) but you didn’t technically go “all the way” with her?
Looking back, Starr’s investigation proved pivotal. It paved the way for what has become an unprecedented era of sexual disclosure. If once we found it difficult to talk about scandalous sex acts, now we can’t seem to stop ourselves. And as the list of politicians whose legacies will be forever asterisked grows, it’s hard not to feel that all of this scandal-mongering has sullied not just those who have been caught with their pants down, but all of us who have made these spectacles into ceaseless cable fodder by obsessively watching them unfold.
There’s good in our increased willingness to bare topics once taboo. We now talk more frankly than ever about matters long shrouded in silence, secrecy and shame. Recall that two years after the Clinton scandal drew to a close, news about the widespread sexual abuse of children by clergy in the Catholic Church began to surface in the national and international press. The frankness with which these abuses have been discussed all around the world has been essential in moving the process of redress forward. I can’t help but wonder, would these conversations have been possible in an era before the phrase “oral sex” entered the standard news vernacular?
