The Week Feminists Got Laryngitis

It was the week that Gloria Steinem got laryngitis. Other feminists, however, will have a harder time explaining their stammering and mostly inaudible performance during Week I of Presidential Sex Crisis III. Patricia Schroeder and Bella Abzug came up with tortured, self-canceling meditations on sexual harassment vs. good, wholesome, consensual sexual relationships. The National Organization for Women issued a touching call for public officials to pledge they would reject "the aphrodisiac of power" and forswear sexual contact with their office help. Apparently no one had explained to the team at NOW that the very essence of adultery is the breaking of pledges once made in good faith to nice, trusting women like themselves.

The sorriest performance, though, was that of Hillary Clinton. Widely regarded as our First Feminist, she spent last week singing Tammy Wynette's tune on all the morning soft-news shows, hoping to convince us that the only problem Bill has is the right-wing conspiracy to destroy him. Someone needs to tell this woman that the first time a wife stands up for an allegedly adulterous husband, everyone thinks she's a saint. The second or third time, though, she begins to look disturbingly complicit.

Well, the time may have come, sisters, to cut Bill Clinton loose. It could still turn out, of course, that the whole thing was completely innocent, and that Bill was using those late-night visits to tutor Monica Lewinsky on the intricacies of Social Security financing and line-item budgeting. And it may well be, as Kathleen Parker observed in USA Today, that the alleged objects of the President's affections are not exactly feminist role models but "our worst stereotypes incarnate: emotional, back-stabbing, duplicitous, manipulative."

But even if no harassment was involved in the most recent case or if Monica was a kind of harasser herself--inflating her bond to the President in order to have something to boast about to her Pentagon pals--feminists have plenty of reasons to be incensed about the gender dynamics of the Clinton White House. We're talking about a workplace where any young woman with a sufficiently tartlike demeanor could reportedly enjoy the President's precious attentions, along with the career-counseling services of his closest friends. Meanwhile, who pays attention to all the other, harder-working and no doubt more productive interns whose hair is short and necklines are high? The feminist idea, as I understood it, was that we go to work to get a job done, and unless that job is lap dancing, it's an insult to be judged by one's body parts and willingness to share them with others.

All right, it would hurt to toss the most steadfastly pro-choice President we've ever had--the fellow who appointed Madeleine Albright and Ruth Bader Ginsburg--just because he might have a little problem keeping his fly zipped up. However, Bob Packwood was also pro-choice and, on some lofty level, no doubt pro-woman. And the point still came when you had to say yuck.