ORAL IN THE OVAL
The newsworthiness of Clinton’s sex drive quickly became a referendum on oral sex. The 90s sex education vacuum fed curiosity and misconceptions about fellatio, so a public debate on the sex act seemed most welcome. The theory that emerged was that men deserved and should be rewarded with oral sex, and women should be pleased to oblige.
Independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s 1998 report of Clinton and Lewinsky’s affair reads less like a political or legal document than it does like a bodice ripper. Starr cites instances of “oral-anal contact,” and attempts to poeticize a scene of Lewinsky fellating the president by describing a ray of sun landing on her face.
On the heels of the maniacally detailed Starr report, Lewinsky’s name practically became shorthand for “blow job.” In the 2002 HBO documentary Monica in Black and White, a man asks her, “How does it feel to be America’s premier blow job queen?”
“I don’t actually know why this whole story became about oral sex,” she answers. “It was a mutual relationship.”
One theory is that America hadn’t collectively confronted heterosexual oral sex until it became presidential. Oral sex, particularly the kind received by men, became a barometer for sexual proclivities and appetites. Even though it was consecrated in pornography, whether or not the act qualified as sex became hotly debated. The president didn’t think it was, and he was the leader of the free world, so maybe it wasn’t.
Thanks in part to abstinence-only sex education, teens and preteens experimenting with oral sex also believed that it wasn’t actually sex. In 2000, the New York Times published a hand-wringing report blaming the uptick in sexual activity, like oral sex, among younger kids on divorce rates and absent parents. One interviewee added rap music and MTV to the list of culprits. A psychologist interviewed said her preteen clients called themselves virgins saving themselves for marriage, but “they’ve had oral sex 50 or 60 times. It’s like a goodnight kiss to them, how they say goodbye after a date.” Abstinence-only education had convinced kids that oral sex was a work-around—they could avoid unwanted pregnancy and disease (though the latter wasn’t true) and still have fun. Among middle and high school cohorts, including my own, it was a way to skirt virginity loss, or a carrot for someone you weren’t ready to sleep with.
The 1994 study about sex in America found that only three sexual practices were “appealing to more than a small fraction of people”: vaginal intercourse, watching a partner undress, and oral sex. They found the last was most likely to be enjoyed by men, not women. While few women over fifty had performed oral sex, three-quarters of women under thirty-five had.
Teen media reinforced male primacy in sex and female victimization. Researcher Laura Carpenter looked at two decades’ worth of Seventeen magazines to determine which sexual scripts it normalized for teen girls. She published her findings in 1998, the year of the Clinton sex scandal, and found that the magazine’s first mentions of oral sex were two articles disparaging fellatio in 1994. Cunnilingus wasn’t mentioned at all, obliterating its possibility. Magazine editors “presented boys who wanted casual sex as dangerous but deviant and depicted girls who were abandoned after sex as unlucky individuals who chose the ‘wrong’ boys.”
This idea of the primacy of male sexuality expanded to kids and teens who, in the 90s and early 2000s, were learning about sex through unprecedented access to pornography online. Pornography has promoted a restricted view of sex that persists today, said Cindy Gallop, a sex educator and the founder of the real-sex website Make Love Not Porn. “Because the vast majority of mainstream porn is made by men for men, the entire raison d’être of every single porn scene is to get the man off,” she told me. “As a result, we now have an entire generation of guys and girls growing up learning that the entire raison d’être of sex is to get the man off.”
Certainly, pornography’s blow job fixation led scores of young men to believe they were entitled to the act, that they needn’t reciprocate, and that all women loved to perform it. These misconceptions only spread as pornography exploded with the growth of the internet. And mainstream pornography, then and now, still prioritizes male orgasm and acts that achieve it. So it was no wonder that by 1998, when America learned of an affair in the Oval Office, the takeaway became the performance of blow jobs, derision for the giver, and backslaps for the recipient. It was the quintessential act that extolled male sexuality.
ENTITLEMENT AND FEAR
Reports of date rape and coercive sex, body shame, and blame for disease complicated sex for girls and women in the 90s and forced them to play defense and internalize consequence. This conflicted with what boys and men absorbed. Sex for them was there for the taking. Entitlement to sex influenced media depictions of famous men and sex acts and underpinned the spread of pornography online. It was theirs forever now that Viagra was in the picture. There was no better symbol for this than the gray-haired occupant of the Oval Office, whose sexual proclivities became legendary. Faulting girls for sex while lauding boys and men shaped how a generation came of age and discovered relationships and pleasure.
Thus, old, stale messages that women should fear the sex that men were entitled to persisted in the 90s, despite the decade’s lip service to modern ideals about free sexuality and gender equality. The binary of entitlement and fear also filtered into media portrayals of each gender. It saturated how the press covered famous and infamous women, particularly when they were associated with sex or victimized. This dichotomy would shape the decade’s two biggest sex scandals.
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The Goldilocks Conundrum
It was in this climate of abysmal sex education, coercion, violence, shame, and blame that sex scandals replaced baseball as the national pastime. And the two scandals that bookended the decade—starring Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky—illustrate how 90s culture forced women into a Goldilocks conundrum of female sexuality: there was only too hot or too cold, and no such thing as just right.
Ultimately, it wasn’t what Monica Lewinsky did in the White House’s inner sanctum that led to her bitchification. It was how she behaved afterward, and how that was translated by the press. She was unapologetic, sexual, and playful. She kept a semen-stained dress, sent love letters, filled her apartment with red roses, and giggled with Barbara Walters. She was blamed for not guarding herself against sex and for liking it. She was hated for not being attractive or thin enough to nearly torpedo a presidency, and for striving and taking too much. She was too hot.
In contrast, because she reported sexual harassment, Anita Hill was portrayed as stiff, frigid, and sexually unavailable. Her critics called her a scorned woman out for revenge. Saturday Night Live depicted sexual harassment as failed flirting and blamed the accused Clarence Thomas for failing to bed the frosty, snobbish employee. Hill was too cold.
Both were classic victims, blamed for powerful men’s bad (and unlawful) behavior. The bitchification narrative muddied our view of them, however, preventing us from seeing them this way.
“A LITTLE BIT NUTTY AND A LITTLE BIT SLUTTY”
From today’s vantage point, what happened to Anita Hill reads like a gallows humor satire of 90s bitchification. But there’s nothing fictional about it. The plot is straightforward, if not entirely familiar to most: A former civil servant, who in the 1980s worked at the government agency charged with prosecuting sexual harassment cases, says that she was sexually harassed by her boss. A decade later, that boss is nominated to serve on the Supreme Court. The former civil servant testifies before the United States Senate about her former boss sexually harassing her, arguing that this makes him unfit for a job on the nation’s highest court. But the senators humiliate and mock her. The media echo chamber amplifies the senatorial scolding. She is castigated as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” Her life is more than a little bit destroyed, as a result.
Anita F. Hill grew up the youngest of thirteen children on a farm in Lone Tree, Oklahoma. Her chores included harvesting peanuts and digg
ing crawdads from mud bogs. Hill first met Clarence Thomas, a Pin Point, Georgia, native who worked in government, at a Washington party in 1981. A mutual friend introduced them, both Yale Law School graduates, and they connected over a shared commitment to improving civil rights. “He struck me as sincere, if a little brusque and unpolished,” Hill said in her memoir, Speaking Truth to Power.
Not long after, forty-three-year-old Thomas became assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education. He offered the twenty-four-year-old Hill a job as his personal assistant. Though their politics differed—Thomas was a conservative, Hill a liberal—she had been looking to leave the big law firm where she worked and transition to a career in public service. “Perhaps this would be the dream job I had hoped for,” she recalled thinking.
Coming from the private sector, Hill faced a steep learning curve. The familiar feeling of not belonging—a theme she’d come to know throughout her early life—reemerged. “Because I was a young, single black woman, the rumor mill speculated that I had been hired for both my race and my sex,” she wrote.
Despite Hill’s objections, her duties as Thomas’s assistant included being an ear for his personal problems. He began asking her out, and pressuring her when she refused. Hill called Thomas “arrogant” and said he thought “his position entitled him to personal as well as professional access to his staff.” She recalled that the more she rebuffed him, the more “vulgar” Thomas became.
Soon, he was spouting off NSFW sex talk and recounting acts he’d watched in pornographic films, like orgies and women having sex with animals. Thomas told her about a film star called Long Dong Silver and asked her, “Who placed a pubic hair on my Coke?” Reflecting on it in her memoir, Hill was certain that this behavior was a tactic to minimize her: “I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all, particularly in such a graphic way, and I told him repeatedly that I didn’t want to talk about these kinds of things. I would also try to change the subject. I sensed that my discomfort with his discussions only urged him on, as though my reaction of feeling ill at ease and vulnerable was exactly what he wanted.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT
Sexual harassment has a long and tangled history in the United States. What’s always been true is that women are overwhelmingly the victims, male bosses are chiefly the perpetrators, and sexual harassment is meant to disempower women in the workplace. This tactic dates back to slavery and was also rampant in the early American factories where young women worked. Victims of sexual harassment and rape were often punished or outcast, feeding the belief that women were to blame for tarnishing the male realm of the workplace with their sexuality.
“It was immoral for young girls to be working alongside men and subjecting themselves to the ‘natural licentiousness’ of the workplace,” explained Alice Kessler-Harris, a women’s labor historian, paraphrasing the widely held social view of the 1800s. A 1914 report found that a glass factory charged with widespread sexual harassment attempted to solve the problem by replacing all the young, sexually attractive women with older ones.
Like countless women before her, Hill wanted only for the behavior to stop. It was interfering with her ability to do her job, which she now regretted taking. “My stomach began to tie in knots at the thought of going to work each day,” she said. Distraught, Hill confided in a friend, who suggested she change her perfume, as if that would somehow dissuade Thomas. The friend had meant to help, but her advice suggests how rudimentary the understanding of the problem was at the time. Back then, there was no tool kit. No one recommended Hill file a formal complaint. Hill was like many Washington newbies: the most powerful person she knew was her boss.
Sexual harassment didn’t have a name, in fact, until 1974, when Cornell lecturer Lin Farley coined it. She used the term in a consciousness-raising group organized to protest the sexual harassment of Cornell University lab employee Carmita Wood, who quit her job to flee her tormentor. Farley testified before the New York City Human Rights Commission, using the term “sexual harassment” for the first time. Still, there was no legal recourse for victims. While in law school, the feminist lawyer and thinker Catharine MacKinnon devised a legal framework for prosecuting sexual harassment claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) acknowledged the problem of sexual harassment in 1980. MacKinnon’s template was used and later codified in June 1986, when the Supreme Court heard its first sexual harassment case. Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson was a particularly egregious example—a boss forced his employee to have sex with him repeatedly, insisting it was required of her—and the court ruled that sexual harassment, or discrimination on the basis of sex, was indeed a civil rights violation. MacKinnon warned that the court’s decision wouldn’t end sexual harassment, which was less about sex than an entrenched and successful means of workplace control. “It doesn’t mean that women are always believed when they say they were harassed or that harassment won’t happen anymore. But it does as much as the law can do,” she said.
There was backlash, of course, even from feminists. When Helen Gurley Brown, the Cosmopolitan editor and indefatigable defender of carefree sex, was asked if any of her staffers had been sexually harassed at work, she answered, “I certainly hope so.” She also recalled games of “scuttle” at the radio station where she had worked, in which men chased attractive women around the office until they caught them and tore off their panties. In preparation, girls wore their best panties to work.
COMING FORWARD
The EEOC is the federal agency that collects and investigates workplace sexual harassment claims. It defines sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.” In 1982, Ronald Reagan tapped Thomas to run the EEOC. The irony was not lost on Hill. However, she chose to continue working for Thomas, a move she describes as a matter of job security: Thomas guaranteed the new job, but he couldn’t protect the old one. Also, by then, the harassment had abated, and she felt safe enough to believe that it was over. And besides, Hill was ambitious. Why should a twisted boss stand in the way of her career path?
But after their move to the EEOC, Thomas’s tormenting picked up again and became even more personal. He remarked on Hill’s body, hair, and whether or not her outfit made her sexy. His behavior as Hill describes it was the very definition of workplace sexual harassment according to the EEOC—Thomas was inhibiting Hill’s job performance and creating a hostile work environment. Filing a formal complaint was useless, as Hill now worked for the head of the enforcement agency charged with protecting employees from sexual harassment.
“I felt as though I had been dipped in a vat of scalding water,” she said.
The irony deepened when Hill was assigned to review and make recommendations for the agency’s sexual harassment policy. Thomas and Hill’s colleagues wanted the policy amended to lessen employers’ responsibilities in sexual harassment cases. Hill concluded the opposite, that employers should be liable when sexual harassment occurs under their roofs, an opinion she relayed to Thomas. She remembers that he “grumbled and muttered to himself” before begrudgingly accepting her recommendations. Hill wouldn’t last in the department long enough to see them implemented.
It is well known that most women who experience sexual harassment at work don’t report it. Instead, they’re apt to do what Hill herself did: pray that it stops. When it doesn’t, plenty of women flee their jobs, their financial security, and sometimes their careers to evade their tormentors. That’s what Anita Hill was forced to do in 1983, when she quit working for Clarence Thomas.
It took a medical emergency to propel Hill to seek new work. After a trip to the emergency room, she was diagnosed with stress-related stomach pains. Desperate to get away from Thomas, Hill took the first job offered to her at a small law school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose accreditation was hanging by a string. When Thomas badgered Hill to join him for a
farewell dinner before she left the EEOC, he warned her that if she ever “told anyone of his behavior that it would ruin his career.”
Having been drawn to the pulse and power of Washington, DC, Hill had never imagined her life taking this path. “I decided to escape the harassment,” Hill recalled. “I was settling.” She lived off of savings and withdrew retirement money so that she could leave Thomas’s office in 1983, and cried the whole plane ride to Tulsa.
Eight years later, in 1991, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement, and President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace him. The NAACP, women’s groups, and a consortium of labor interests opposed Thomas’s nomination, citing his inexperience and ultraconservatism. He had served as an appeals court judge for just over a year, and they feared he might roll back gains in civil and reproductive rights. Still, Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings consisted mostly of softball questions and evasive answers. He even concealed his views about Roe v. Wade, the court decision legalizing abortion, a politically radioactive issue that a high court nominee could never hide from today. His supporters touted his strong character as his preeminent qualification.
Meanwhile, Hill had remade her life teaching law in Oklahoma. After three years at Oral Roberts University, she was hired by the University of Oklahoma. She was still teaching there in July of 1991 when a New York Times reporter called to interview Hill for his story about the newest Supreme Court nominee, since she had worked for him. She didn’t tell the reporter about the abuse she had suffered, but the traumatic history came flooding back. As she writes in her memoir, she had “for years spent considerable time and effort convincing myself that what happened to me no longer mattered. For the first time I was forced to consider that it did—that the behavior was not only an offense to me but unfitting for someone who would sit on the Supreme Court.”
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