Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  The one thing she could get out of this is some money. And that seems fine. Evidently enough happened between Ms. Jones and the President to inspire his willingness to make a settlement, and she ought to just take it. She shouldn’t give it to charity. She should go to Frederic Fekkai for a haircut and ask him to do something to her hair, so long as it’s not what he did to Hillary. She should get a facial at Mario Badescu, and buy herself some custom-mixed face powder at Prescriptives. She should do whatever a girl can do with “mad money.” She should do anything she wants, but for God sakes, don’t be ashamed of getting some money. This is America, where capitalism is a virtue so long as nobody says so. Every day in everything we do we are all in it for the money or we are truly stupid. It doesn’t mean that love of our work isn’t a primary concern or that many people earn less than they could because they choose, instead, to do something they like. It just means that this is no time to get sentimental about Marx; under the Clinton administration, we have dismantled welfare as we know it (kind of like God as we understand him) and as we don’t know it; anyone who hurries can still catch the last days of Fidel, but let’s face it, we like the measure of man and everything he needs and wants to be expressed in numbers, and every time somebody gets handed a large sum of money and says they’d do it for free, I wish they’d prove it. But no one does that—donations to charity don’t count, because that is still your choice—because money offers comfortable demarcations of what we are worth and who we are: mere praise or simple blame are not as effective ways to convey an assessment as, say, giving $36 million to Evander Holyfield or extracting $35 million from O.J. Simpson. The reason totalitarianism tends to be part of communist regimes is that in the absence of hierarchy established by degrees of wealth, only complete state control of the populace can impose order. Somehow men tend to be much more comfortable with their capitalist pursuits and desire to make money than women are. They feel more entitled and perhaps they’ve been made to feel so.

  The fabulous illustration that Paula Jones offers of why all women should be forced to do meaningful work outside the home—lest they become the daydream daytime hookers born of bored housewifedom like Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, or lest they turn an afternoon’s affront into a political football by being Paula and proud—is perhaps worth the price of this whiny public crusade. Because most of her plaint basically comes down to wanting to be unbranded, to lose her reputation as the town whore—and a lack of global perspective has allowed her to mistake this whole country for a gossipy little Peyton Place.

  Anyone aware of the rules of the game knows that any political blow is parried with counterattacks and sheepish dismissals. You don’t even need to be inside the Beltway to know that: just getting into the sandbox teaches you that if one kid calls you a loser, you must retort by calling him an asshole. But Paula, who started all this by going public, seems outraged that White House spin doctors are not saying that yeah, the President did pull it out and say kiss it, he likes to treat all his girls to the goods. She is actually alarmed that no one is eager to embrace her need for emotional justice. While willingly entering the arena by announcing—frankly—her existence to a world that already knows that many, many more of her kind haunt the Clinton presidency, Jones was then dismayed to discover that her sound and fury signified nothing—and only produced a lot of unpleasant noise in response. In her suit, Jones’ attorneys complained that, “The outrageous nature of Clinton’s branding of Jones a liar is aggravated in that a greater stigma and reputation loss is suffered by Jones by the statements of the President of the United States in whom the general public reposes trust and confidence in the integrity of the holder of that office.” Though I defy anyone to diagram that sentence, I think the gist is that if he says she’s making stuff up, it’s really damaging.

  Now, of course, no one puts much stock in the word of any politician, least of all Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton, who has made being full of shit not just a mere peccadillo, but in fact the greater part of his personality. How can she seriously make this claim? More to the point, how can she fail to see that she started this slugfest, and after accusing him of outrageous exposure, aren’t all bets pretty much off? Why should he be kind and considerate in response, even if what she claims is true. In fact, the horrible thing about Paula Jones’ case is that it might even be true, but every aspect of her legal and public presentation make it such that it is hard to take seriously. She has allied herself with conservatives like Pat Robertson and antiabortion activist Randall Terry of Operation Rescue, which necessarily excluded feminist groups from rallying to her side: as NOW president Patricia Ireland said in a 1994 statement, “We find the involvement of right-wing leaders in her case disingenuous … They are not known for supporting women’s rights but rather for opposing them.” Ms. Ireland sees the religious right’s interest in Jones’ cause as no more than an attempt “to impeach President Clinton and to portray harassment suits as something women file to bring down powerful men.” In fact, the feminist agenda is so alien to Jones’ backers that it is hard to see her lawsuit as anything other than some sort of conservative dessert tray carting around various right-wing delicacies for her supporters to delectably select from. In general, on the liberal side of things, when legal moves like this are used—and misused—the one thing that can at least be said is that there is a direct relationship between the red herring (a sexual harassment claim) and its true goal (women’s rights). In this case, impeaching Clinton and beating the liberals at their own game is the true motive (no point even finding a pretense of alteriority).

  With all this freighting down Paula Jones’ claim against the President, she still somehow wants him to apologize and to say that she is a “good person.” Why? What would it mean if he is doing that under duress of legal action? And who is he, with all his foibles and faults, to declare her good or bad? What is this all about? And does it really belong in court?

  I find Jones’ goal of admission and apology particularly disturbing on what are perhaps the highest feminist grounds I know of: honesty and self-respect. In this country, the way the courts are set up, you can sue for money—not for goodwill or sweet talk or a half-assed apology from an angry adversary. I believe that the system was established in this way because, as they say in the best legal circles, money talks and bullshit walks. This nation was founded on many principles of liberty, but the most important one is surely free speech, which ensures that you cannot be compelled to say anything you don’t want to ever (except in criminal proceedings, when you can be held in contempt of court—but unless it’s a high-profile, politically charged case, witnesses can usually take the Fifth). No one can make you tell someone you like them and want to be their friend if you’d sooner cement their feet together and dump them into a slow, noxious death at the bottom of the East River. No one can make you recant an editorial you wrote when you were a sophomore at Dartmouth and infatuated with certain strains of German romanticism that somehow led you to say that other than genocide, Hitler had some pretty good ideas about government. No one can force you to admit you majored in sociology or dated Carl Bernstein. The only thing that the civil courts do when they want to mete out punishment is penalize you where it hurts—in your wallet. These are the rules here in our democracy: in the Soviet Union, they made people renounce creature comforts and pledge allegiance to Stalin’s Five-Year Plans; in Red China, intellectuals had to labor in the fields and claim a fealty to Mao’s Little Red Book. But here, we just make you pay traffic tickets and other more taxing fines. And if women want to engage in the legal system to forward freedoms or just because we’re stark, raving, plumb-crazy mad and we’re fed up and we want revenge, we’ve got to learn to collect the cash and laugh all the way to the bank or Barneys or the beach island paradise of our Rousseauvian escapist dreams.

  We women need to learn to exact a pound of flesh by good, capitalist means.

  It seems clear that Paula Jones has made a mistake in staking out C
linton by wishing to be comforted and liked, even though nothing she’s done merits either response from the public or the President himself. This is a little-girl impulse, it is the same needy, wanty sense of worthless begging for approbation and affirmation from those who have no intention of bestowing any such thing upon you that gets women into compromising sexual—and other—positions in the first place. I don’t mean to blame the victim—just because it is so damn easy to manipulate many women into sexual servitude does not make it moral or lawful and does not allow us to let men who break our boundaries in bad ways get away with it—but it does mean that we women must behave firmly from the get-go. It means that we know, with no exceptions, that it’s a bad idea to go up to the executive hotel suite for a rendezvous of any sort with any man who was previously unknown—and that if you do somehow get cornered by a drawer-dropping higher-up who demands that you pay oral homage to his private parts, you take swift action, you don’t wait until conservative interest groups and fringe publications pull you into a brouhaha that is no longer even part of your happily married life and the two kids that you are raising in Long Beach, California. You don’t wait until the statute of limitations on filing a sexual harassment suit has expired and you must therefore concoct a claim of civil rights violations to even get the case into a courtroom. And you demand lots of money, refuse to apologize for your really wretched hair, don’t demean your integrity with wishes for confirmation, consolation or any words like I’m sorry—and you ask for more money than you want or deserve or would even satisfy Marie Antoinette. And you simply smile with no concern when you are disliked or despised: you do what you have to do because you must, because it is right, and fighting fair—like the many female employees of Mitsubishi, The New York Times, Goldman Sachs, AT&T and other companies who sued for sex discrimination and got justice in the form of cash—will be found to have its own compensations, including, occasionally, a respect that can become genuine goodwill. But if you want sympathy, cry to Mommy.

  I wonder what it will take for people to learn this lesson: you can’t make people like you, and all the efforts to do so (such as filing suit that would appear feminist when it is actually just nihilist) will usually have the opposite effect. Willy Loman wanted to be well liked, and he died with the certainty that his insurance was worth more than his life.

  In Jones’ case, her attorneys are asking the President to say things we will all know he doesn’t mean, although the gesture—along with a sizable payment—will satisfy them. Obviously, the only thing Bill Clinton can possibly be sorry about at this point is that whatever he did to this woman has caused him so much trouble. But he can’t truly be sorry for how she might feel: this woman has filed a lawsuit against him, she’s consumed his energies, she’s spoken of distinguishing characteristics that one can only blush over. If there ever were a point where he felt sorry about hurting her in some way, that’s long gone. Now he just wishes she’d disappear. And yet, she wishes he would say patently untrue words.

  Look, at the moment we live in mea culpa hell. People are so sorry so often and so quickly—within forty-eight hours of the ear bite, Tyson was apologizing. Of course, he had to do it, the way people always say “Fine” when asked how they are. Very rarely are people honestly sorry—if they were, they would not have done it in the first place. Except for in small chance mishaps, “sorry” is an obnoxious trivial word. There was briefly some talk of President Clinton making a formal apology for slavery, as he had recently apologized for the Tuskegee incident, and this idea was patently idiotic. There were some obvious problems—the events took place too long ago for the current American population of immigrants to feel for slavery as a crime, the hundreds of years that the practice went on made it more a lifestyle than a behavior per se, all of which is to say that the enormity of the crime is beyond the scope of anyone accepting its onus—but the main reason we ought never apologize for such a thing is that it’s just too easy. It is so facile, so self-satisfying, so meaningless. With Tuskegee, we can calculate the cost of the error some, we can pay reparations, we can localize the evil and do our best to undo it, but to apologize for slavery would be to say we’re sorry for racism, hate, exploitation, the dark side of human nature, that first fall from grace, the day Satan entered Eden as a slivery snake and opened man’s eyes and taught him to hate what he could see rather than loving what he could feel. Ever since then it has been a world of men behaving badly, of women sometimes behaving even worse, and everyone just covering their tracks, saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Saying, basically: I’m sorry I ruined your life.

  But there is real dignity in the occasional moment when some public figure says I’m not sorry. I mean, any idiot can say I’m sorry, but it takes a real mensch to say I’m not sorry, or better still, to just shut up. Quiet—or quiet resignation—and a reluctant, pained acceptance of one’s responsibility for how he has hurt and harmed and maimed and destroyed others is the only real way to do penitence. After a long and thoughtful time of living with the burden of whatever wrong it might be, then maybe there might be an appropriate moment to ask the wronged party for forgiveness. But remorse is not a rhetorical device.

  I found it extremely amusing when both Sol Wachtler and Dick Morris had their respective memoir/public policy books come out at the same time, and both had to do the talk show circuit and discuss the various wrongs they’d committed against their wives and mistresses. Both would sit there and say, “Larry, I did something wrong and it was inexcusable.” “Oprah, no one involved in this deserves any blame except for me. I am sick. I am compulsive. I have an addictive personality. I have hurt wonderful people whom I love very much, and I deserve every terrible thing that ever happened or happens to me.” My favorite was all the times Morris would talk about wanting his wife back. And I sat there, thinking to myself, these poor, benighted middle-aged men, thrown into the recovery movement fairly late in life, pelted with touchy-feely terminology; forced to “claim responsibility”—a phrase first used to explain how the PLO admitted to having blown up a building—for all sorts of acts that they thought they wouldn’t have to answer for before St. Peter at the pearly gates, at which point they could just offer what I call the Portnoy Defense (“I’m a nice Jewish boy! Even when I was bad—the worst—I was still a nice Jewish boy!”), and here they are, unable to continue their professional lives unless they find a way to discuss their behavior that will be palatable to the public. So they think that by saying that it’s all their fault, they are—paradoxically—getting themselves off the hook. They are plea-bargaining with the world, offering up their candor—which is not the same as honesty—for a sentence that is no more than humiliation, unemployment and prison time already suffered. They adopt this strategy not just because it’s preemptive but because it creates the appearance of penitence. And because it is all they can do: here are two men who are accustomed to doing and deciding, faxing this one, phoning that one, forcing, forcing, forcing.

  But redemption is about reflecting and lying low, it’s about conceding and surrendering. It is not about results-oriented speech, but about slow change, about waiting for that weightless state of grace that is the opposite of demand and want and need. Redemption is big and godly and generous and good. But these men can’t sit around all day waiting for the real thing, so instead they try to manipulate and force and cajole it, as if it were a policy decision, an unruly aide, an intractable bloc of senators, something they can announce in a press release. Dick Morris seems to think by telling every interviewer that he is desperate to win his wife back, he will do so, that a grand gesture is a meaningful one. He seems not to understand that he owes none of us any explanation for why he behaved as he did, and if he wants to give his marriage the dignity it deserves—and prove that he really has changed—he’ll just shut up.

  How about trying no regrets. How about saying that these things, these apparent humiliations, were all part of the process of becoming. No one needs to restore my good name, no one
needs to make me into a good girl, to give me lady status after a lifetime of tramp, because I am who I am and what I am and not what others define me as. I don’t need someone else to legitimize my claims. Both Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers made the mistake of seeking absolution in the wrong places. Both want to be understood and accepted and vindicated for their bad experiences, but in truth, their personal pain is between them and their Maker. Court is meant to establish legal claims and award damages—if Clinton did what Paula Jones said, he is pretty scummy. There is a brute, juvenile crudeness to a man pulling out his dick and saying suck it, even if the woman seems dirty and maybe even is dirty. But she needs to make peace with her misery herself. Gennifer Flowers too. Both women have relationships with other men that are stable, both are okay, and the courts really should be used for real cases of illicit behavior, loss of employment and ruined lives.

  Look, it is hard to be a girl, a person, these days. We are single for so long, we are hurt in a million different ways, and we wish we could just have restitution, a little recognition of our heartaches. But we can’t. This is just the price of freedom, and I doubt bondage is preferable. People go running to court like they ran to the teacher to tell on the playground bully. Autumn Jackson seems to be taking out her sorrow of not having a family on Bill Cosby. Dorothy Hutelmyer, the North Carolina woman who sued her ex-husband’s new wife for adultery and was granted one million dollars in damages, and Kelly Fisher Dodi al-Fayed’s former fiancée who, prior to his death, was basically suing him for falling for Princess Diana, also seem to be misusing the courts to help assuage their private heartbreak. Nina Sharavan, an emotionally disturbed topless dancer, accused Eric Williams and Michael Irvin of the Dallas Cowboys of raping her to satisfy some need for attention, or to cry out for help (even Irvin and Williams said that they didn’t want her punished as much as they wanted her to seek psychological help, because they could see she was traumatized). We are begging for the law to give us not only what is missing in our lives but that which we keep losing over and over again with every new little loss. It is like emotional hemophilia—every time we are cut, the wound threatens to never heal. Early-life damage, instead of making us tough, turns us into delicate creatures seeking repair in ill-advised places. And then we want to drag the law into it—we want the lousy things people do to each other to be illegal, even though more often than not they are not even immoral. They are mostly just business as usual.