Amazing Gracen

Last February the Star printed a story called "Bill and His Women." The tabloid reprinted the cover shot from our May 1992 issue to illustrate an article on indiscretion. Here she is, folks, Miss America 1982, Elizabeth Ward Gracen--a fresh look at some previously unpublished photos of the woman who made such an impression on President Clinton. When we ran our original pictorial, tabloids such as the Star were claiming that Clinton spent state funds on an affair with the former beauty queen. Gracen's response was a lesson to all who pry: "Basically, what the tabloids are asking me is, Have I slept with this person? I don't believe that's anyone's business. I have certain boundaries about what I choose to reveal about myself, and I respect other people's boundaries as well."

Elizabeth was a class act then, and she's a class act now. She is everything we would want in a lover--for more than the obvious reasons.

We were working on that pictorial long before the tabloids tried to link Gracen to Clinton. The former Miss America wanted to send a wake-up call to Hollywood. And it worked. (She has appeared in films and on television.) Nudged by the tabloid reference, we went back to our files. What we found were shots of a remarkably attractive woman whose name is in the news. Do we need further justification? Gracen is a without doubt the most beautiful woman in this story. What would you have done in Bill's place?

Having said that, let's take this opportunity to reflect on the media circus that has surrounded Monica Lewinsky. With little evidence, the media fabricated details--the semen-stained dress, the Secret Service voyeur, the hours of telephone sex--right out of a fire-and-brimstone sermon. Commentators resurrected scripts that were as modern as any soap opera and as old as Cotton Mather. At the same time, the common man looked at Clinton and asked, "Who cares?" We knew about it in 1992 and still voted him in. Nothing has changed.

At the heart of most of the pontification is the notion that male lust needs to be curbed, that anything more than one woman for one man for all (text continued on page 164)Elizabeth Gracen (continued from page 134) time is proof of exploitation or sexual predation. But we believe that all men and women have the right to explore--through as many partners as they wish--their sexual potential. If you accept the testimony of one of Clinton's alleged former sex partners, he is a "profound and imaginative lover." Gennifer Flowers--someone who unfortunately does not share Elizabeth Ward Gracen's sense of discretion--came to his defense when the Paula Jones brouhaha surfaced, saying the alleged incident was not Bill's style. How good are your sexual references?

That most in the media still think in the old scripts of predator and promiscuous slut is evident in how Monica Lewinsky has been described in the press. Old friends have come out to say she is manipulative, oversexed, a woman with an agenda, someone who went to Washington with a set of knee pads and her eyes on the president. Oversexed is the modern term for nymphomaniac--what Kinsey once described as "someone who has more sex than the person using the term." Name a 21-year-old woman who is not oversexed. If a woman is assertive or exploratory, do we need a high school teacher to label her manipulative?

Clinton's sex life is his own. We should not expect men to make sexual choices with the same grim consequence with which they handle the Cuban Missile Crisis or Saddam Hussein. Lighten up. That Clinton can perform with his job pressure is a miracle. That sex can be a relief valve, or a rejuvenation, isn't worth 10,000 editorials or a life on the couch. It is one of the many faces of sex. We don't need the president to make that point. Look at these pictures again. Feel recharged? The controversy gave airtime to the self-appointed experts on something called sexual addiction. These dour souls feel that anyone who likes sex enough to repeat it is caught in a web of temptation. They toss about phrases such as obsessive-compulsive behavior and self-destructive risk.

Gennifer Flowers chimed in, describing Clinton as a high-wire act, a man who wanted to have sex at a party in the governor's mansion while his wife was close by.

What do we think of sexual risk? It is pure moment. It is improvisational. It charges the act when hours of languid foreplay are out of the question. It is hot. It is saying, "This can't wait."

One might say that it's hit-and-run sex, or male oriented--that we somehow rob the woman of her right to hours of adulation, dinner and a movie--the old price of courtship. But we no longer believe women have the sexual inertia of a nun or of Queen Victoria. Sparks fly. If the quickie is the only form of sex that doesn't come with a mortgage, so be it.

Are we immature, or what? The scandal quickly became a national discussion on the meaning of oral sex.

The oral-sex debate took at least three forms. Most had fun with the lust loophole, the notion that Clinton believes the Bible says oral sex is not adultery. Did he find that in the King James version? More likely, in the Rick James version.

We learned that Black's Law Dictionary does not technically consider oral sex to be adultery, but we've never turned to law books for sex advice. ABC News produced a lawyer who muttered that there is case law to the contrary. Our own expert says adultery is defined by the spouse's reaction. If your spouse were to discover you in the act, would you want him or her to be carrying a shotgun?

Most articles couched oral sex as a politician's obsession. Congressmen have been getting blow jobs from pages and secretaries for aeons.

When Playboy polled college students in 1996 we found that about half did not consider oral sex to be real sex, and that three quarters did not include oral-sex partners in their sexual histories. This may or may not be, as one social psychologist argued, a "moral fireebie."

An entire generation has carved out a sexual space that does not involve intercourse. In the Fifties, we called Vassar coeds who did everything but the real thing "technical virgins." Oral sex is a way of being sexual without risking pregnancy. It is recreational sex. It's the most fun you can have without taking off your clothes or mussing your hair.

Then there was the "protect the children" masquerade. We were amused by all the conservatives who whined about having to discuss oral sex at the breakfast table with their fifth-graders.

Look at what passes for sex education these days. Those same children go to grade school to learn about reproductive organs, the role of hormones and AIDS. A curriculum that doesn't mention ecstasy--only grim consequence. (There are nations in the world--Sweden, Holland--where alternatives to intercourse are part of the curriculum.) In this void, Generation Xers have discovered oral sex and made it their own. More power to them. Now oral sex has the presidential seal of approval.

This may be Clinton's greatest legacy. Especially in the workplace. At least one editorial commented that Zippergate had made it OK to discuss sex around the watercooler without fear of being brought up on sexual harassment charges. Clinton embarrassed himself so that we could all be adults again.

The child factor cropped up everywhere. On one NPR show, a famous feminist kept saying that Clinton had exploited an intern who was barely out of high school. A fellow panelist had to correct her. Monica Lewinsky was 21, an adult, fresh out of college, not high school.

The feminist quandary: When does a woman become an adult, i.e., when is she responsible for her own actions, up to and including seducing the president and telling tales out of school? The thrust of sexual harassment laws and date rape lectures is that women are passive victims, that they need protection throughout their lives. Victorians felt that way and arrived at a simple solution: Keep all women at home. Should women be kept out of government and the workplace until they pass a maturity test? Should women be licensed?

The famous feminist claimed that the Lewinsky affair was clearly an abuse of power, as exploitative and offensive as the Paula Jones affair. As governor, Clinton could not, by law, have sex with any employee of the state of Arkansas. As president, he cannot have sex with any employee of the federal government or, for that matter, any citizen of the U.S. without violating someone's notion of sexual harassment law.

Perhaps the most hypocritical attitude was that adopted by commentators who took it upon themselves to criticize the president's response to questions about affairs.

How would they respond to the Starr chamber? How would you? There are only three possible responses to a charge of adultery:

• Discretion: My private life is none of your concern.

• Denial: Who, me? No way.

• Defiance: Yeah, I fucked her. So what? Let ye who are without sin cast the first stone.

Clinton is caught between options one and two, but regardless of the truth, he will always be viewed as weak. Hillary did a better job, saying to the press, "We've been married for 22 years. We know everything there is to know about each other and we understand and accept and love each other." She was as powerful as Xena, and in that moment, just as sexy. And should anyone persist, choose your second and meet at dawn.

Clinton could have said: "We are human. We have a marriage that is a partnership. It is not defined by something as absurd as sexual exclusivity. We are faithful to the partnership, not to some sense of each other as property."

The right to privacy should extend to the president as well as to the man in the street. Then again, perhaps we should revert to those ancient rituals in which court advisors gathered in the royal bedroom to watch the king and queen have sex.

did the president have sex with miss america? given the chance, who wouldn't?

Sexual risk is pure moment. It is improvisational. It is hot. It is saying, "This can't wait."