Our subject today is the five building blocks of any good column: seduction, thongs, sexism, politics and hypocrisy. And thongs. Or did I already mention thongs?
It began a few weeks ago when I was reading a story summing up the trial of John Edwards, the former Democratic senator, presidential candidate and vice presidential nominee.
Edwards was charged in 2011 with six felony counts of violating campaign finance laws in order to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter. The charges were stupid, and the trial was a waste of millions of tax dollars. Edwards was found not guilty on one count and the jury deadlocked on the rest, resulting in a mistrial on the remaining charges.
There’s no doubt that Edwards behaved despicably to his late wife, Elizabeth, and his family and acted like a thorough rat, which he admitted after the trial.
“There is no one else responsible for my sins,” Edwards said. “It’s me and me alone.”
But not quite. The story I was reading contained the officially accepted version of how the Edwards-Hunter affair began. Hunter went up to Edwards one night as he was walking back to his hotel and said to him, “You are so hot.”
And that’s all it took, we are to believe, for Edwards to plunge into the depths of sin. Just one of the lamest pickup lines ever.
The exchange fed a familiar theme, however, in the accounts of many high-powered affairs: The woman is a nobody, the man is famous and powerful, yet the woman comes on to the man, seduces him and therefore is actually to blame.
Wasn’t it Monica who seduced Bill? I looked it up in the Starr Report, a government document so sexually grisly that I’ll deal just briefly with what took place on Nov. 15, 1995, the first of seven “sexual encounters” between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton as reported by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr:
It began a few weeks ago when I was reading a story summing up the trial of John Edwards, the former Democratic senator, presidential candidate and vice presidential nominee.
Edwards was charged in 2011 with six felony counts of violating campaign finance laws in order to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter. The charges were stupid, and the trial was a waste of millions of tax dollars. Edwards was found not guilty on one count and the jury deadlocked on the rest, resulting in a mistrial on the remaining charges.
There’s no doubt that Edwards behaved despicably to his late wife, Elizabeth, and his family and acted like a thorough rat, which he admitted after the trial.
“There is no one else responsible for my sins,” Edwards said. “It’s me and me alone.”
But not quite. The story I was reading contained the officially accepted version of how the Edwards-Hunter affair began. Hunter went up to Edwards one night as he was walking back to his hotel and said to him, “You are so hot.”
And that’s all it took, we are to believe, for Edwards to plunge into the depths of sin. Just one of the lamest pickup lines ever.
The exchange fed a familiar theme, however, in the accounts of many high-powered affairs: The woman is a nobody, the man is famous and powerful, yet the woman comes on to the man, seduces him and therefore is actually to blame.
Wasn’t it Monica who seduced Bill? I looked it up in the Starr Report, a government document so sexually grisly that I’ll deal just briefly with what took place on Nov. 15, 1995, the first of seven “sexual encounters” between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton as reported by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr:
MCA,MIC GERAKAN ARE VERY COMFORTABLE WITH TWENTY MUSLIM MAJORITY SEATS THIS IS HOW THEY ATTACK ISLAM NOT A SINGLE VOTE FOR THEM THIS TIME LET WE MUSLIM FINISH THEM OFF WASALAM Bukit Bintang is a traditionally Chinese prostitute area and has always been so since Merdeka. It is the bastion of Chinese political might in Malaysia. …Read more
“According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the president made eye contact when he came to the West Wing to see Mr. [Leon] Panetta. … At one point, Ms. Lewinsky and the president talked alone in the chief of staff’s office. In the course of flirting with him, she raised her jacket in the back and showed him the straps of her thong underwear, which extended above her pants. En route to the restroom at about 8 p.m., she passed George Stephanopoulos’s office. The president was inside alone, and he beckoned her to enter. She told him that she had a crush on him. He laughed, then asked if she would like to see his private office.”
I will draw the curtain here. But again we see the theme: A 22-year-old intern shows her underwear to the 49-year-old president of the United States, and he’s seduced.
My research assistant (Wikipedia) came up with this historical analysis of that moment: “According to feminist commentator Carrie Lukas, Lewinsky ‘with her thong-snapping seduction, forever changed the image of the D.C. junior staffer from aspiring policy wonk to sexual temptress.’”So who is really to blame? The man who would create 16 million jobs and stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or a “thong-snapping” seductress and “sexual temptress”?
Let’s go to the present day: Gina Chon was until recently a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. In 2008, she was covering the Iraq War and exchanged some naughty emails with a source who was in Baghdad with her, Brett McGurk, a top national security adviser to then-President According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, “McGurk and Chon apparently were married to others at the time that they struck up a relationship; they obtained divorces and recently married.”
McGurk is now President Obama’s nominee to become ambassador to Iraq. But the emails were leaked last week and on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal pressured Chon to resign even though, according to one published account, the Journal “found no evidence that [the affair] affected her reporting.”
I can understand this. In journalism, the rule has always been: “If you want to cover the circus, you can’t sleep with the elephants.”
But getting rid of Chon may have been a little harsh considering her reporting was not affected. She could have been suspended for a time, instead. Though I can see why the owner of The Wall Street Journal would insist on extreme dignity, absolute propriety and utter decorum. He’s Rupert Murdoch, after all.
Brett McGurk also may be in some trouble. The Senate must vote on his nomination, and there are rumblings that some Republicans are upset with his affair. (Republicans never have affairs. Except when they do.)
But there is a double standard here: The woman gets caught, and her career gets destroyed. The man gets caught, and he may get to avoid one of the worst jobs on earth: U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
I will end with an excerpt from Larry King’s extraordinary interview with Monica Lewinsky on Feb. 28, 2002. Let it be a lesson to temptresses everywhere.
KING: Are you dating?
LEWINSKY: Yes.
KING: Seeing nice people?
LEWINSKY: Yes.
KING: Anybody serious?
LEWINSKY: No.
KING: Nobody married?
LEWINSKY: No. Oh, gosh, no.
KING: That’s done.
LEWINSKY: Never again.
“According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the president made eye contact when he came to the West Wing to see Mr. [Leon] Panetta. … At one point, Ms. Lewinsky and the president talked alone in the chief of staff’s office. In the course of flirting with him, she raised her jacket in the back and showed him the straps of her thong underwear, which extended above her pants. En route to the restroom at about 8 p.m., she passed George Stephanopoulos’s office. The president was inside alone, and he beckoned her to enter. She told him that she had a crush on him. He laughed, then asked if she would like to see his private office.”
I will draw the curtain here. But again we see the theme: A 22-year-old intern shows her underwear to the 49-year-old president of the United States, and he’s seduced.
My research assistant (Wikipedia) came up with this historical analysis of that moment: “According to feminist commentator Carrie Lukas, Lewinsky ‘with her thong-snapping seduction, forever changed the image of the D.C. junior staffer from aspiring policy wonk to sexual temptress.’”So who is really to blame? The man who would create 16 million jobs and stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or a “thong-snapping” seductress and “sexual temptress”?
Let’s go to the present day: Gina Chon was until recently a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. In 2008, she was covering the Iraq War and exchanged some naughty emails with a source who was in Baghdad with her, Brett McGurk, a top national security adviser to then-President According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, “McGurk and Chon apparently were married to others at the time that they struck up a relationship; they obtained divorces and recently married.”
McGurk is now President Obama’s nominee to become ambassador to Iraq. But the emails were leaked last week and on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal pressured Chon to resign even though, according to one published account, the Journal “found no evidence that [the affair] affected her reporting.”
I can understand this. In journalism, the rule has always been: “If you want to cover the circus, you can’t sleep with the elephants.”
But getting rid of Chon may have been a little harsh considering her reporting was not affected. She could have been suspended for a time, instead. Though I can see why the owner of The Wall Street Journal would insist on extreme dignity, absolute propriety and utter decorum. He’s Rupert Murdoch, after all.
Brett McGurk also may be in some trouble. The Senate must vote on his nomination, and there are rumblings that some Republicans are upset with his affair. (Republicans never have affairs. Except when they do.)
But there is a double standard here: The woman gets caught, and her career gets destroyed. The man gets caught, and he may get to avoid one of the worst jobs on earth: U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
I will end with an excerpt from Larry King’s extraordinary interview with Monica Lewinsky on Feb. 28, 2002. Let it be a lesson to temptresses everywhere.
KING: Are you dating?
LEWINSKY: Yes.
KING: Seeing nice people?
LEWINSKY: Yes.
KING: Anybody serious?
LEWINSKY: No.
KING: Nobody married?
LEWINSKY: No. Oh, gosh, no.
KING: That’s done.
LEWINSKY: Never again.
When the topic of infidelity spills into our daily dose of media, we may say we saw it coming, or we may react with shock. Either way, we don’t exactly look away. Without even meaning to, we learn details, names, sources and suspicions. Most of us would admit that there is little point in speculating about the ins and outs, agreements and lies, secrets and circumstances of a stranger’s affair, but our fascination with the indiscretions of others should tell us something about ourselves and the world around us.
It’s hard to deny that, as a society, there’s a lot to be examined about the ethics of our own relationships. In the United States, 45 to 55 percent of married women and 50 to 60 percent of married men engage in extramarital sex at some time during their relationship, according to a 2002 study published in Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy. Still, other studies reveal that 90 percent of Americans believe adultery is morally wrong. Infidelity is inarguably prevalent, yet it is extensively frowned upon. Given this discrepancy, it is important for every couple to address how they are going to approach the subject of fidelity and to examine the level of honesty and openness in their relationship.
Earlier this week I got a call from a well-known women’s magazine and was asked to explain when it is okay for a woman to lie to her partner. I declined answering the question, for one simple reason: it’s not! Since when did lying become okay? Lying to someone, especially someone close to us, is one of the most basic violations of a person’s human rights. Whatever one’s stance is on open versus closed relationships, the most painful aspect of infidelity is often the fact that someone is hiding something so significant from their partner. Two adults can agree to whatever terms of a relationship they like, but the hidden violation of the agreement is what makes an act a betrayal and an affair unethical. Thus, the real villain behind infidelity isn’t necessarily the affair itself, but the many secrets and deceptions built around the affair.
In the book “Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships,” I cited extensive research on the subject of infidelity and posed the following:
Deception may be the most damaging aspect of infidelity. Deception and lies shatter the reality of others, eroding their belief in the veracity of their perceptions and subjective experience. The betrayal of trust brought about by a partner’s secret involvement with another person leads to a shocking and painful realization on the part of the deceived party that the person he or she has been involved with has a secret life and that there is an aspect of his or her partner that he or she had no knowledge of.
Damaging another person’s sense of reality is immoral. While keeping a relatively insignificant secret from someone you’re close to diminishes that person’s reality, going to great lengths to deceive someone can actually make them question their sanity. It’s true that feeling an attraction or falling in love may be experiences that are out of our control, but we do have control over whether we act on those emotions, and being honest about taking those actions is key to having a relationship based on real substance.
As kids, we are taught that it is wrong to lie; yet as we get older, the lines tend to become increasingly blurred. This is especially the case when we are faced with the challenging conditions that come with intimate relationships. Too often, when we get close to someone, our innermost defenses come into play, and we unintentionally alter ourselves to “make it work.” The baggage we carry from our past weighs heavily on us, and we have trouble breaking free from old destructive habits and harmful modes of relating that distort both ourselves and our partners. When this happens, jealousy, possessiveness insecurity and distrust can cause us to warp and misuse our relationships.
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