On the horrid article itself (instead of just the jaw-dropping quote), which isn’t technically about the casual cruelty that men inflicted on women in the conservative-romanticized utopia of the 50s, well, Lance Mannion has the long takedown that this article deserves. It’s by Michael Wolff and he at least does the nation a favor and shows that yep, The Village is more worried about politician’s sex lives than about what the public cares about, which is policy and leadership.
Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.
Which I have to say is unmitigated bullshit. The illustration for the article is of Eliot Spitzer, and that entire scandal is totally about gender. There’s no term for a “call boy” (though a few do exist, servicing men predominantly) for a reason. Prostitution is about gender more than sex, especially in our modern culture that tolerates a lot more sexual freedom to change partners and men can’t reasonably say that they have to pay for it to get laid outside of marriage. (Especially, as I’ve noted before, a famous, wealthy, and not horribly ugly man like Eliot Spitzer.) The rest of the article proves my point—Wolf longs for a time when middle aged men were protected by a society of men to have affairs with younger women without getting caught. If it was about sex and not gender, he’d have nothing to moan over. Because his notion that cheating has been done to death by disapproving soccer moms enacting a matriarchy (his words—no, really) is not born out by the statistics. Men and women both cheat at robust levels. There’s more than enough adultery going on for Wolf to imagine to keep his dick hard for forever, if this is really about his love of cheating and not about gender.
But it’s about gender. Cheating is not the point. Men getting to sneak around behind their wives’ backs with younger women is the loss he bemoans, and of course, women don’t get equal cheating rights, but that’s because they’re all dried up anyway.
Indeed, it is awkwardly clear that the sampling of the sexual desires of middle-aged politicians might apply to all middle-aged men, most of whom, we might extrapolate from the sample of politicians, would prefer to have sex with dramatically younger women. If the younger-woman specter is a private issue in a majority of the middle-aged marriages in this country, then what is the effect when it suddenly becomes a public issue?
He then bitches that a cadre of disapproving wives doesn’t understand that he and his need to have sex with prostitutes or young mistresses, preferably ones that even let you half-drown them in the bathtub. I wonder what his reaction would be if his wife suggested that he allow her to fuck 18-year-old boys in her bed while abusing them with a riding crop until they bled on his sheets. Doubtfully the magnanimity that he expects as a birthright when aimed at his desire to have his cake of a young mistress and to eat it too, of the dinner served by a submissive middle-aged wife.
But women don’t need that kind of sexual freedom in their middle age, because we’re dried up. So that’s how to explain how the sexual-freedom-for-men-but-not-for-women attitude isn’t unfair. But he doesn’t address the other factor that pierced the wall of protection men built around their cruelties and adulteries in the past—the large scale female dependence on men that made fighting back or speaking up financially destructive. The culture he wants back wasn’t just randomly tolerant of men’s proclivities. Women didn’t like it then, but it took having a more equal footing to push back. And how much have we really accomplished, even then? Flip on your TV and witness the ads for “Girls Gone Wild”. Our culture still coddles the belief that humiliating and hurting women is “sex”, even if a few randy feminists demand that sex be defined as naked pleasure for all parties.
It’s about gender, not sex. Because his loathing for middle-aged women’s supposed asexual ways is why he dislikes Clinton, and assumes you do, too.
The Hillary story is—and how could it not be?—largely a sexual one. This is not so much a sexist view as a sexualist view: What’s up here? What’s the unsaid saying? What’s the vibe? Although it’s not discussed in reputable commentary, it’s discussed by everyone else: so what exactly is the thing with Hillary and sex, with the consensus being that she simply must not have it (at least not with her husband; there are, on the other hand, the various conspiracy scenarios of whom else she might have had it with). It’s partly around this consensus view of her not having sex that people support her or resist her. She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.
That’s the most sexist thing I’ve read since the crap about why we have to ban the birth control pill, so I’d say that’s about gender, not sex. And as Lance and Digby note, no, not “everyone else” is interested in the Clintons’ sex lives. Sex does have an ability to get a person to linger a little longer on the show, because sex is inherently and biologically interesting. But the idea that politicians are predominantly people of interest because of their sex lives is laughable. Unlike The Villagers, I can think of a million people whose sex lives seem more interesting than any politician. And even when it comes to sexual gossip that normal, non-Village people care about, as Lance notes, it’s really more about romance than sex.
For people who do want to speculate on the sex lives of strangers, that’s why we have movie stars and teenage pop idols, who are at least blessed with beautiful and photogenic naked backs and bare shoulders. But even among the most gossip-addicted readers of People and the National Enquirer, the real interest is in the romantic lives of their favorites. The sex is part and parcel. And the point is to live vicariously through the likes of Brad and Angelina.
Or just to gossip, which is both a satisfying urge and a way that humans communicate values to each other. But it’s true that their actual sex lives are a minor part of the gossip factory. Break-ups and make-ups get a lot more attention. Even when a political sex scandal gets moving, ordinary people tend to be more concerned about the relational aspects than who stuck what where. There was a lot more internet chatter about why the wives don’t leave than about the sex itself, or speculation about how much the married couple gets it on.
Even Wolff, for all that he likes to paint himself as a man of middle-aged randiness that you women with your utter lack of desire could never understand, is far more interested in sex as a tool to create relationships and power structures than in the sex itself. His belief in the halcyon days of old when people were free to have all sorts of crazy sex is nonsense—because of women’s, gay and general sexual liberation, the invention of reliable contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the ubiquity of condoms, people are getting it on more and with more people than they did in the past. What Wolff very clearly laments is not that people are having less sex—they aren’t—but that sex isn’t a tool of male domination. It’s not that Kennedy got laid so much, really, but that Jack did and Jackie didn’t, and that (plus who got her head shoved under water and who didn’t) showed who was boss.
37 Responses to “No, we never think about the candidates naked”
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I haven’t read the Wolff piece, but the intro above the article:
The private follies of middle-aged male politicians are treated as weakness, perversion, corruption—anything but the real issue: human desire. The author, currently writing a book on Rupert Murdoch, offers an immodest proposal.
suggests satire, a la Swift’s classic, “A Modest Proposal.” If it’s not satire, then yes, it’s abhorrent.
I can’t see that it is. That phrase has become enough of a cliche that it’s relationship to satire has been flattened out.
If it was satire, he would have gone for the jokes about the many adultery scandals that involve homosexual liasons. Why back in the good old days, men could suck some cock on the side without dragging their post-sexual wives into it. Seriously, how can you miss that?
Good Gawd!
I was actually just thinking this morning if there would be a new wave of Clintonista comments that it just isn’t fair that so many younger white women voted for Obama because of jungle fever fantasies.
After reading this different but similarly ridiculous tripe, I’m wondering if that is going to become a new meme.
Okay, this doesn’t change the fact that voting on the basis of who’s getting sex, or who you think is, is wrong, or this guy’s entire set of assumptions, but the thing that jumped out at me:
WHY DOES HE ASSUME HILLARY ISN’T GETTING ANY?
She’s a healthy, attractive woman in middle age with a *very* stressful thing going on in her life right now full of emotional ups and downs. Her husband is well known to be Randy McRandypants. He’s also, according to Monica Lewinsky, careful about making sure women enjoy themselves. These two have been together since college. *Why* does anyone assume they are not having sex? If there is any female senator that I would be absolutely certain is getting regular orgasms from her husband, it would be Hillary Clinton.
I mean, this whole “Hillary is post-sexual” bullshit just says that the *writer* can’t imagine that a middle-aged woman could want sex or be sexually interesting to a middle-aged husband, and that says as much about his total bullshit worldview as everything else he says. Why is Michelle Obama “oomphy” but Hillary Clinton is “post-sexual”? Because black women never “dry up?” There is *not* a huge age difference between the two, maybe ten years or something.
I did not vote for Hillary Clinton, much to my sorrow — she wasn’t the person or the politician I thought she was when she was First Lady, and there were things she has done that I couldn’t get past as long as there was a viable candidate who hadn’t done them. But come on, people. Hillary Clinton is totally getting some. Think she’s gonna deny herself just because her husband cheated on her? She would have *left* him if she didn’t want him anymore over that. Why would she stick with the guy — a choice that has caused her as much backlash as the choice to divorce him would have — if she didn’t love and want him? It’s not like he’s done her a fat lot of good in the elections lately.
I can’t understand how the rest of the world can look at the Clintons and *not* see a love story. I’m not going to *vote* for them for that, but it’s obvious to me that she loves him so much she managed to forgive him, and I think he loves her a great deal too, though not enough to quite get past his great love for Bill Clinton. Come on, high school sweethearts together through thick and thin. The nerdy girl got the hot smart guy and helped him to become the goddamn President of the United States. Why anyone who actually bothers to think about their sex life at *all* thinks Hillary is not having sex with Bill, says more about them than it does about Hillary.
Thanks. Alara. What you said.
The author is a sexist asshole who isn’t getting any and doesn’t understand why pretty little 18 y/os aren’t lined up to screw him and why a wife might not approve of her husband’s adultery outside of the fact she’s a dried up prune who doesn’t like sex at all.
He’s fucked up, and he put it out there for all to see. What a shame that he won’t be ostracized as he should be.
One reason I don’t speculate about middle-aged couples’ sex lives is that I assume they have one. The statistics demonstrate that this is true, as does the sales of Viagra. I can see that younger people might be somewhat curious what our elders are doing, because we want to know if we’ll still be going at their age, but we have stats to tell the story for us.
The Clintons clearly love each other. Anyone who wastes time speculating otherwise likely is just scandalized by an egalitarian couple.
There is one reason to speculate about the sex lives of people of a certain age - if you are in public health, that is.
Seems the retirement communities are gettin busy, and the people who don’t worry about pregnancy any more don’t know jack shit about how to prevent STDs or that they should worry at all!
If we are to be concerned about such things, it should be to make sure that our parents and grandparents have access to the kinds of sex education and STD prevention strategies that either were not available or were absolutely never talked about (particularly to women) in their day!
Then we should go mind our own business.
Oh my God yes. So. Very. True.
As for me, I never really give politicians’ sex much thought because I find them all pretty uniformly unattractive, as well as predominately heterosexual.
Scott Kleeb, however… woof!
http://scottkleeb.com
Oops, to clarify:
The man is definitely hetero, but devastatingly CUTE.
*Why* does anyone assume they are not having sex?
As far as I can tell, two reasons. It’s either:
(A) Hillary is Teh Icky, and if the writer wouldn’t want to hit that, no man ever in the history of the universe would want to. Like the guys who are convinced that if they don’t like giving oral sex to a woman, any guy who says he likes it is lying.
(B) Bill cheated on Hillary, and Everybody Knows that the only reason a spouse cheats is because s/he isn’t satisfied at home and their spouse is a cold, controlling, withholding bitch. (Okay, that last word takes it away from gender neutrality, but it’s not really a gender-neutral notion, is it?)
I dislike guys like Michael Wolff enough to wish upon them the realization of their dearest desires: that they end up married to a complaisant wife who obediently serves up dinner and who conscientiously spreads her legs without displaying the slightest particle of enthusiasm for either activity, and that they likewise end up involved with a string of winsome young things who tolerate their company (barely) as the price of a few nights on the town with a few pieces of cheap jewelry thrown in. As I’ve admitted before, I’m a cruel woman.
If Wolff yearns after that kind of life with such intensity, then let him live that kind of life, forever, and let him never escape it. Ever. Full stop. Amen.
To expand on Mnemosyne’s A and B, there’s…
(C) Because Hillary is, of course, a Big, Scary Lesbian who hates teh menz, and if she’s having sex it’s with that hawtie who works for her (which means she’s recruiting hawties to her side, which means she’s even Bigger and Scarier than we thought!).
Bekabot,
If The Twilight Zone ever goes back into production, make sure to develop that into a script!
Well, the original Twilight Zone was of the Mad Men era, so temporally it would all be in keeping, I suppose.
For a real brain-eff, we might have the Wolff-standin of the epp be a reader of science fiction and a Rod Serling fan. Now that would be cool.
Flip on your TV and witness the ads for “Girls Gone Wild”. Our culture still coddles the belief that humiliating and hurting women is “sex”, even if a few randy feminists demand that sex be defined as naked pleasure for all parties.
I know that this is just a minor remark, but I’m curious — does all the humiliation and hurting really come out in the ads? In the distant past, I used to see the ads, with their island music and 2-second clips, and think I was seeing all-in-good-fun happy spontaneous nakedness. Only later was I told that the actual videos involve young women being badgered into taking their clothes off. And then I learned that Joe Francis is a rapist who beat up the female LA Times reporter trying to write an article on him.
Now I watch those videos, and it’s like looking at a chocolate cake where you know the frosting is entirely dog shit. Knowing the facts makes it disgusting and not appealing. But that doesn’t change the fact that the ads portrayed it pretty successfully as a yummy chocolate cake, before I knew what was going on.
I’m bemused by the notion of a “post-sex” middle-aged woman. As a woman who recently entered her 40s, I’m here to tell you that I’m a hell of a lot sexier than I was at 30. Same goes for my friends. My sex drive has only increased as I’ve gotten older, and Wolff would be scandalized to know that I get hit on now more than I ever did as a wee young thing of 18. He’s a wanker.
bekabot: Pretty cold. I approve.
I always assumed that the Clintons totally had a sex life. I mean, they clearly wouldn’t still be together if they weren’t totally, gag-gag mad for each other. I can’t imagine them putting the effort to maintain that relationship if it wasn’t worth it to them in some major way.
Speaking to Neil’s post, I had that initial view of GGW from the ads, too. Happy fun nakedness is happy and fun. What GGW really is is pretty ugly and squicksome. And I wouldn’t cry if Joe Francis ‘accidentally’ fell into an industrial bread dough mixer.
And I wouldn’t cry if Joe Francis ‘accidentally’ fell into an industrial bread dough mixer.
i might weep for the bread, though…
Amanda, kudos on your dissection of this article and the creepy sexist thinking behind it. I tell you, I’m a fifty year old man, and Hilary Clinton, to put it in sexist terms, looks just *fine* to me, in comparison to many other women her age (no, I could never be “with” her, on account of revulsion at her politics).
But you have one thing wrong: in your post you note “There’s no term for a “call boy” (though a few do exist, servicing men predominantly)”. I designed clothing for bodybuilders for four years, and I was in and out of gyms constantly, and constantly talking to men and women about dressing well, looking good, why they did it, what attracted them, and so on. And, yes Virginia, there is a significant market in women purchasing sexual intimacy from men. Now, it’s not nearly the size of the female-prostitution industry, but it’s not some minor thing. And it is, pushed by well-off middle-aged women who aren’t getting what they want from their husbands or SO’s. As more women are earning more money, they are seduced by the fact that money allows one to “rent” human beings for intimate services, without the necessity and complications of real intimacy. And, yes, there’s a lot of power imbalance involved.
The men and women involved are more ashamed about it than are men and women in the “traditional” sex-for-hire business, and so it is quieter and more underground. But it’s there, it’s not insignificant, and it’s only going to grow larger as the cohort of women who are nearly-dominating post-secondary enrollment enter and move through the workforce.
I’ll tell you, it was a shock to me to find this out, purely as a byproduct of marketing and marketing research, but after years of running into it, I couldn’t deny its existence anymore.
Ah, rambled on a bit — just to say, I’m in agreement with you on most things, Amanda, and keep up the consciousness-raising good work!
I dunno—it’s clear a lot of men look at the ads and think, “Randy fun.” But do they buy the tapes? Not that I know of. The market for them seems to be more the ones that get that the stream of boobs is next to, or even secondary to, the pleasure of knowing these women are being pulled down a few notches for your entertainment. A lot of us optimists see it as completely consensual (if still unequal), but we might be projecting onto the ads.
I’ll be 50 this year. I’m not post-sexual. I’m assuming this bozo thinks menopause means no more sex…I’m not menopausal yet, but I can’t imagine being “post sexual” once the threat of unexpected pregnancy passes. Seems to me that might be a rather freeing time, sexually.
I honestly do not know anybody who is interested in the sex lives of politicians unless those politicians are trying to interfere with consensual sex between adults. I’m sure some people do wonder (and I would think those people would be over-represented among far right, sexually repressed conservatives) but most people with sexually healthy attitudes probably don’t much care. Therefore, I have never actually wondered whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama are having sex with their spouses. I don’t even care if they are cheating or “post-sexual” (WTF?). As long as they aren’t abusing their position to obtain sex or running an anti-sex campaign, it’s none of my business.
It tells you more about what Wolff is interested in than about what “people” are interested in. Yet another douche who generalizes from their own experience. I bet he even has used the line “but everybody’s doing it” to coerce a date to do something they didn’t want, like the guys who try and see if they can get women to do anal.
Meanwhile, Here We Go Again!.
You think he could have come up with a convincing lie when pulled over for drunk driving … like “I’m polling the electorate” or something?
but I can’t imagine being “post sexual” once the threat of unexpected pregnancy passes.
nonsense. you’re “post-sexual” when the man calling you such no longer wishes to have sex with you. The way you talk about it, it’s like women have sexual agency or desire or something. Haha!
Ms Kate, interesting in that the article does not mention even once the party to which the representative belongs. Hmmm…
No, no no! Your post sexual when Micheal Wolff no longer wants to have sex with you! Or when he can’t get hard thinking about you having sex! At least not without him calling you “bitch”, “whore” and “slut”
Broce:
Yes it does, in the second paragraph. He’s a Republican, and sad to say, he is my Rep. However, I didn’t vote for him!
I’ve actually been waiting for something to come out about Vito, though I really expected it to be mob money.
Sorry! /threadjack
(C) Because Hillary is, of course, a Big, Scary Lesbian who hates teh menz, and if she’s having sex it’s with that hawtie who works for her (which means she’s recruiting hawties to her side, which means she’s even Bigger and Scarier than we thought!).
Just last night, I was standing in the checkout line at Safeway thinking about how much more entertaining life would be if anything in the tabloids was real. You can’t tell me you don’t want to hang out in the universe where Bill Clinton is constantly wrought with fanfic-level angst over Hillary’s brazen lesbian affairs with hot young aides.
Also, every female celebrity in America is constantly pregnant with Brad Pitt’s baby.
Mrs Nice Guy here: I will be 70 in a couple of weeks. Post-sexual? What is that?
Can you imagine the putative “real Americans” talking like this? Imagine the media finding some middle-aged woman in Peoria saying “well, on one hand, my nephew got injured by an IED in Iraq, and he’s now paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life, and it does concern me that Hillary supported the war that hurt him so bad, and seems like she wants to go after Iran too. I still support her over Barack, though, because I’m post-sexual and I identify with her like that.”
I don’t comment often - and that is NOT because I am not usually drawn in and moved by your posts. But I do just want to pop in and give you a hat tip for this post, in particular. Sharp, sharp, sharp. Wonderful. Thank you. Truly.
You, and most of the other Obama supporters are missing the point. The key word here is WORKING CLASS, (or rather HARD WORKING).
The only reason that the word White is included is because Obama is getting the votes of one sub-set of the working class. Blacks. But non-blacks are running away from him in _increasing_ numbers as time goes by.
Think about that for a bit. If Obama’s failure to win non-black working class voters is because of race, then what does it mean that he went from pulling almost 40% of non-black (democrats) in the early states, to barely 30% now.
Have we gotten dramatically more racist in the last few months? Or is it because as we get to know him his lack of any positive message FOR WORKING CLASS VOTERS becomes more and more apparent?
This would be obvious if blacks were voting their class intererests, but since they seem to be mostly voting their racial pride the fact that Obama has a problem with the working class is easly spun as racism.
Shame on you for joining in with that dishonest and divisive smear.
There’s no term for a “call boy” (though a few do exist, servicing men predominantly) for a reason.
I’ve heard the term “rent boy” but it doesn’t seem to be common.
Ummm… “gigolo”?
My own theory is that the reason for the insane frenzy of wingnuts screeching about Hilary is: They all want to have sex with her, and they all know that she never, ever, will.
She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.
I’m pretty sure my dad’s 86-year-old girlfriend, the most ardent Clinton supporter I’ve met, isn’t “post-sexual.”
Mind, she’s also kind of racist, so that’s probably a component.