Social Dramas and Cultural Performances:
All the President’s Women

by Elizabeth Bell

ABSTRACT: Victor Turner’s social drama is exemplified in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, a two-year saga that captivated the American media, government, and public from 1998-2000. The social drama, with its stages of breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration, however, tells only half the story. Concurrent to the drama, a running metasocial commentary occurred on the Internet in the form of “Monica and Bill” websites, replete with thousands of jokes, graphics, and parodies. This essay analyzes these cultural performances for their perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity and rescue of heternormativity through the President’s women—Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The social drama and the cultural performances that mirrored it on the Internet serve phallocentric social and political orders.

Victor Turner defines the social drama as "a sequence of social interactions of a conflictive, competitive, or agonistic type" (33), and he delineates its stages as breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism. More simply put, the social drama begins when a member of a community breaks a rule; sides are taken for or against the rule breaker; repairs—formal or informal—are enacted; and if the repairs work, the group returns to normal, but if the repairs fail, the group breaks apart. Each time I have taught Turner’s social drama in my graduate Performance Theory class, I have been blessed and cursed with timely exemplars: the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and the September 11 attacks on the United States. If Turner’s explication of Ndembu social life or the Brazilian Umbanda was distant to my students and me, then the social dramas unfolding around us made Turner’s theory and analysis come alive.

But it is another September 11 that prompts this analysis. Only in retrospect and with no small amount of irony, do I recall that on September 11, 1998, the U.S. House of Representatives released the Starr Report to the public. Eight months before, Monica Lewinsky’s name first appeared on Matt Drudge’s internet website, the Drudge Report, and media frenzy in the intervening months whipped the public’s appetite for the details. On September 11, 1998, these details, in 2,600 pages and eighteen boxes delivered to the House of Representatives, were uploaded into cyberspace.[1]

Seven years later, it’s difficult to remember the media frenzy, and even harder to grasp our two-year cultural fascination with Bill Clinton’s sex life.[2] But I’d like to imagine Victor Turner—back from the grave—having a hay day with MonicaGate as the textbook case of his theory of the social drama. The antagonists were “star members” of their groups, the breach was sexual and salacious, no group escaped side-taking and meaning-making in the crisis phase, and the drama’s redress, an impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, was—to say the least—historically monumental. Democrats and Republicans shook hands afterwards in the rotunda of the Capitol Building in a “Kodak moment” for Turner’s notion of “reintegration.”

Communication scholars have utilized the lens of Turner’s social drama to explicate events as varied as the 1984 Winter Olympics (Farrell), anniversaries of John F. Kennedy’s assassination (Berg), and Detroit auto worker strikes (Fuoss) for the ways that narrative and spectacle are organized in and around the phases of the social drama. But the social drama is only half the story; Turner expends just as much effort in his works attending to cultural performances born out of the social drama. That is, social drama is the “raw material” for performances that reflect critically on the content of that social interaction. Turner utilizes a linguistic analogy, the “moods of culture” to characterize social life as moving between the indicative (“it is”) and the subjunctive (“may be,” “might be,” even “should be”). For Turner, “A social drama is mostly, at least on the surface, under the sign of indicativity. That is, it presents itself as consisting of acts, states, occurrences that are factual, in terms of the cultural definition of factuality. Every culture has a theory that certain ‘things’ actually happen, are ‘really true,’ that ‘have been’ or ‘are’” (41). “Most cultural performances,” Turner argues on the other hand, “belong to culture’s ‘subjunctive’ mood.’” Ritual, festival, carneval, folk stories, ballet, staged drama, novels, epic poems—a multitude of culturally recognized genres—are drawn from the “raw stuff” of social drama. Most importantly for this analysis, Turner claims that “what began as an empirical social drama may continue both as an entertainment and a metasocial commentary on the lives and times of the given community” (39).

The Clinton-Lewinsky saga is exemplary of the interplay between indicative social drama and subjunctive cultural performances. Richard Schechner (Performance Theory) describes this interplay as a mobius strip: the social drama’s conflicts and characters fund the content of performances; and performances, in turn, color and inflect the social drama.[3] At every turn in the indicative social drama that was the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, a running metasocial commentary and critique occurred on the Internet. Hundreds of web sites, with names like “Official Guide To Zippergate,” “Tasteless Clinton/Monica Lewinsky Jokes,” “Starr Report—Just the Erotica,” and isleptwiththepresident.com, held thousands upon thousands of jokes, parodies, one-liners, poems, book titles, graphics, and song lyrics.[4]

While Turner couldn’t have predicted the rise of the Internet as a technology conducive to cultural performance, he certainly forecast its critical potential and the techniques it utilizes: “Genres of cultural performance are not simple mirrors but magical mirrors of social reality: they exaggerate, invert, re-form, magnify, minimize, dis-color, re-color, even deliberately falsify, chronicled events” (Turner 42). My first encounter with this magical mirror began on a tiny web site entitled, “In His Own Words.” “Impeach me!,” photo-shopped as a sign on Bill Clinton’s back, was the first image posted on the site.[5]

The now infamous encounter captured by CNN on video was typical (as we soon learned) of Lewinsky’s efforts to put herself in Clinton’s sight line. This image stood for the entirety of their two-year affair—at once clandestine and very public, at once cloyingly sweet and unashamedly licentious. This “photo-shopped” version, one of only four other manipulated photos on the site, is a stroke of genius. Casting Clinton as the butt of a school-boy joke speaks to a very sophisticated critical apprehension of the social power attendant to hegemonic masculinity, its institutional performances by men who enact it, and the cracks in the façade opened wide by social critique.

This essay explores just a fraction of the verbal and visual jokes posted on the Internet, from 1998 through 2003, to argue that the portraits of the President and his women are cultural investments in and protections of hegemonic masculinity. These texts work very hard to shore up hegemonic masculinity and to rescue heteronormativity. This cultural production is accomplished through the women of the social drama, especially Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The lessons of Clinton-Lewinsky saga, some seven years after the drama’s resolution, speak to the perpetuation of gendered binaries and hierarchies in the service of phallocentric orders.

Hillary Clinton is a(n):
a) model wife and mother.
b) icon of late-20th-century femininity.
c) obstacle.
d) inappropriate companion for the leader of the free world.

If answer “c” is putatively Monica’s choice, the other three alternatives are vividly portrayed on the Internet, capturing both contemporary understanding and confusion regarding gender roles and sexuality embodied in Hillary.

“Model wife and mother” might seem an odd label to apply to Hillary, but many of the texts paint her in just this role: vigilant in protecting her child and her family; understanding and forgiving of Bill’s sexual dalliances; the unwitting, blameless victim of circumstances. Perhaps the best example of this is her portrait in Starr Wars. In the far background of the picture, shielding Chelsea’s vision[20], she performs the “model role” of wife and mother.[21] Unassuming, unassertive, backdrop to the real action—sexual and political— nevertheless she is a necessary character in the drama.

This laundry list of characteristics of model wife and mother, vigiliant, protective, and unwitting victim, is also a laundry list for the role of First Lady. For Germaine Greer, the primary function of the First Lady is to “reassure us of the head of state’s active heterosexuality” (22); her second function is to be a “virtuoso housekeeper.” Anastasia Sims adds motherhood to the list: "being a good first lady meant hailing, modeling, and promoting publicly the civic values that good mothers historically instilled" (576-77). The First Family, and the “joint image-making” that creates it (Troy) takes the social imaginary family to its zenith. Darlaine Gardetto writes:

The Family (capitalization intended) understood as Mom, Dad, and the kids—with Dad as primary if not sole breadwinner and Mom serving as an emotional support for her husband and as emotional core of the family—is the social imaginary family. . . This way of thinking about familial relations, I argue, contributes to women’s subordination by supporting the idea that women’s proper place is in the home. The social imaginary family is linked to the first lady symbol. (226)

“School Children” is a brilliant commentary on this conception of family, with its prominent father and supportive mother, surrounded by the kids. Captioned on the site as “What the President is teaching our children,” the public debate over the President’s morals and “character” is transformed into images that make no mistake about the lessons learned. The children’s expressions run the gamut—from obliviousness, nonchalance, eagerness, to shock—but Hillary’s expression is thoroughly supportive. Her neat, buttoned-up, “model First Lady” attire contrasts vividly with the nude women, the “wild ladies,” in the (President’s story) book.

Texts on the Internet also speak indirectly to the “model” wife’s ability to look the other way and to suffer the indignities of infidelities with a smile on her face. “An Invitation to the White House” does just this. This is a “photo-shopped” cover of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book, An Invitation to the White House: At Home with History, published in 2000 by Simon and Schuster to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the White House. The book is thoroughly invested in constructing Hillary as first “Homemaker,” with sections entitled “Making This House a Home,” “Christmas at the White House,” and ninety pages of recipes from the White House kitchen. The front flap of the book can be read satirically in light of the doctored version: “This is a White House you won’t see on any public tour: As historian Carl Anthony writes in his introduction, ‘This book makes the rooms come alive—one can almost taste the food and hear the music’” (front flap). The Internet text invites the viewer to add, “and watch the soap opera!”

Hillary’s posture features the multiple roles of First Lady: hostess, tour guide, homemaker, perhaps even a reference to her role as holder of the “white glove pulpit”—the power afforded to First Ladies to advocate social programs and agendas.[22] So much in this text complicates these public functions with the private affairs that centered the social drama. Here, the white glove is dubiously singular—for perhaps Hillary is making sure she leaves no fingerprints on the “Billing Records” from the Travelgate affair? The portrait on the wall (in soft focus on the real book cover) is now Karl Marx.[23] Bill holds a teddy bear, a gift from Monica. Most importantly, Hillary seems oblivious to the shenanigans under the desk: the “model wife and mother” is the last to know.

Many of the jokes that feature Hillary as model wife are, once again, borrowed from the cultural storehouse of philandering husband jokes, slipping in the names—Bill and Hillary—in place of generic husband and wife.

• What’s the worst thing Bill ever heard during sex? “Honey, I’m home!”
• What does Bill say to Hillary before a romantic interlude? “Honey, I’ll be home in 20 minutes.”
• Why did Bill Clinton cross the road? To get back to the White House before Hillary did.[24]

A riff on these husband jokes also points to the lack of desire, lack of sexual activity, and lack of sexual experimentation within a long-term married relationship.[25]

• What position does Hillary play on Clinton’s sex team? Left out.
• Who is the only woman in the White House not having sex with Bill? Hillary.
• Bill + Monica=Slick Willy. Bill + Hillary=Slack Willy
• When asked what was the difference between a night of bowling and a night with Hillary the president replied, “If I had to I could eat the bowling ball.”
• The Right Wing Cabal said they're no great fan of Hillary, but they don't think she sucks.

The limerick is a poetic form that flowered during the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, and its typically bawdy content grafted neatly onto the sexual saga. While most of the poems feature Lewinsky, this limerick is unusual for its focus on Hillary.[26]

There once was a prez named Bill,
whose interns all know the drill.
He’d say, “Get on your knees,
and service me, please!
‘Cause I don’t think Hillary will.

Hillary as “model wife” is neither an object of sexual desire nor a desiring subject. In the jokes, Hillary’s unwillingness to engage in oral sex is a vivid contrast to Monica’s exuberance, shoring up wifely sexual duties as decidedly boring, prudish, and vanilla. That Hillary “suffers in silence” as model wife is evidenced by jokes that name her as the object of derision, but never give her first-person voice.

The second choice in the multiple-choice question, “Hillary is a(n) icon of late-20th-century femininity,” is fascinating testimony to our cultural awareness of changing roles for women, the pressures brought to bear by shifting political, economic, and sexual tempers, and the centrality of Hillary as “icon” in the cultural landscape. Karrin Vasby Anderson neatly summarizes Hillary’s lighting rod capacities:

During her tenure as first lady, Clinton either was reviled or lauded for the challenges she posed to traditional femininity. She was seen as an icon of feminism, a threat to femininity (or masculinity), an embodiment of the complex roles facing modern women, an everyday baby-boomer struggling with marital problems and empty-nest syndrome. (109)

The jokes on the Internet become a catch-all for these conflicts, capturing numerous double-binds: professional woman and homemaker; sexually desired and desiring; at once responsible for her husband’s behavior and unable to do anything about it. A number of jokes pun on “first” in First Lady, as well as incorporating other “news” items:

• Why does Hillary want to have sex with Bill every day at 5am? She wants to make sure that she is the first lady.
• How does Hillary feel? She may be the FIRST LADY, but she won’t be the LAST.
• What’s the name of Hillary Clinton’s new White House intern? Lorena Bobbit.
• What does Bill tell Hillary after sex? Nothing, she hears about it on the evening news.

These jokes seem particularly poignant renditions of many married women’s lives: “A First Lady symbolizes the collectivities of wives who are caught between the symbolic spaces of the political and domestic spheres, and who are under attack for having access to power” (Edwards and Chen 386).

The most interesting approach to Hillary in the multiple-choice application is “inappropriate companion for the leader of the free world,” for it opens the door to a number of parodies and pictures of Hillary, as well as highlighting the complementarity of gender roles. If Bill is the paradigmatic masculine “leader,” then Hillary must be the paradigmatic feminine “follower.” The texts on the Internet thoroughly blast her for her unwillingness to play this complementary role: “Why does Bill Clinton cheat on Hillary? He wants to be on top.” Perhaps playing on Newt Gingrich’s mother’s infamous interview, in which she characterized Hillary Clinton as “rhymes with rich,” the jokes freely use the real term.

• Why did Bill Clinton buy a MALE chocolate Lab for the First Dog? Because there was already one FIRST BITCH in the house.
• Have you heard the new meaning for the word B.I.T.C.H.? Bill’s In Trouble, Call Hillary.

If the first joke pours venom with all capitals, then the second rallies around the power captured in the word. This “power,” however, takes a number of turns in some amazing graphics. In Lord of the Flings, Hillary is “The Witch Queen,” and an uncaptioned text takes a delightful S&M route to her power. Perhaps the most powerful critique of Hillary pastes her face onto a portrait of Hitler, captioned “the Fuhrer.”

Whether witch, dominatrix, or the most reviled man in contemporary history, Hillary clearly stands for contemporary fears and confusion about feminine power—mythical, sexual, and political. Without the watchdogs of mainstream media, the Internet is a forum that takes those fears to the limit and is fearless in attributing sources:

In response to many inquiries from her devotees, Judith Martin (“Miss Manners”) has decreed that the preferred term whenever addressing or referring to first lady Hillary Clinton, is “madam.” Citing Teapot Dome, Watergate, Iran-Contra and Zippergate, she said, “It’s become clear to me that the President’s wife essentially is responsible for running a house of ill repute.”

This “madam” joke nicely illustrates the tension all First Ladies have felt, caught in the public/private bind, especially in the age of celebrity. “How do you maintain your privacy while peddling your life story?” (Troy 379). Texts on the Internet exploit this tension and revel in speculation.

Indeed, the Internet gives loud voice to quiet rumors of Hillary’s possible love affair with Vince Foster and her “questionable” sexual orientation (Templin). In her analysis of editorial cartoons, Templin writes, “To actually portrait Hillary Clinton as a lesbian in a cartoon would be more daring than a mainstream newspaper could allow and presumably would be libelous” (25). Internet jokes, however, fear no such repercussions. Lesbian jokes on the Internet, however, have a decidedly homophobic flair, casting the lesbian as a “failed woman” or “wannabe man.”

• How did Bill and Hillary meet? They were both dating the same girl.
• Official “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” alert: We no longer support the theory that Hillary had an affair with Vince Foster. It’s Janet Reno. Pass the word.
• "You know two weeks after Bill Clinton leaves the White House, he'll be a free man."
"Yeah, so will Hillary."
• Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her dad.
• Hillary sleeps with as many women as Clinton and almost as many dead men.

The “photoshopped” Spy Magazine cover caption, “Where that shady $100,000 came from and what it bought,” references Hillary’s $10,000 investment in cattle futures and its $100,000 return. As the wind blows, reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe’s famous Seven Year Itch scene, the graphic reveals not only her tighty-whities, but her erect and moving penis. While Marilyn’s dress was white, Hillary’s is black, recalling witchery, the “dark” arts, and cultural condemnation of blackness (Dyer). Taking the cliché, “the real pants in the family” to its logical extreme, “Hillary’s Big Secret” not only portrays Hillary’s sexuality as threatening to Bill’s masculinity, but as thoroughly “unnatural,” appropriating the phallus and the power that adheres there. That she “bought” this penis, supposedly through a sex-change operation, recalls our cultural fear of transgendered individuals: “If we have a sense of ‘rightness’ about ourselves as men or women, gender outlaws scramble it. Gender dysphoria—even someone else’s—literally gets us by the short hairs, where we live, between our legs” (Califia, Sex Changes 2). Drawing Hillary as a “gender outlaw” cuts deep.

In the two years that comprised the indicative social drama, an odd thing happened: whenever Bill Clinton’s polls went down, Hillary’s went up, and vice versa (Pope). This is testimony perhaps to the zero-sum game that is masculine and feminine balance of power and our cultural inability to imagine gender and sexuality performed differently. Texts that paint Hillary as model wife, mother, an icon of contemporary femininity draw from a vast storehouse of cultural constructions of “woman,” drawn always in familial, political, social, and sexual relations to men. Hillary’s “inappropriateness” comes precisely at those moments when she is drawn without reference to men—as lesbian, dominatrix, or ice queen—or when she appropriates the “big secret” that is phallic power. These pleasures script her outside the phallocentric order that reduces all to the masculine. Hillary, in these multiple constructions of feminine and masculine on the Internet, is representative of larger cultural fears and desires—that of the feminine unanchored from its binary and hierarchical pairing with the masculine.

While the social drama scripted her most often as the wronged, yet supportive, wife, the cultural performances on the Internet found so much more to talk about. The future of Senator Hillary Rodam Clinton and her putative run for President remains part of the tripartite chronology of culture at play: parodying the present, subverting the past, and “mortgaged to the future in the form of a store of possible cultural and social structures, ranging from the bizarre and ludicrous to the utopian and idealistic” (Turner 170). Soon, I believe, we’ll start seeing cultural performances of a different kind, attendant to the possibility of a second President Clinton. Like the social drama and cultural performances that debated competing definitions of sexual relations, competing definitions of the masculinity and heterosexuality of the Presidency will surely center those conflicts. “Madame President” is already a double-entendre.

Of Phallocentrism, the President’s Penis, and Accomodations of Interest

A number of critics tried to account for the cultural lessons learned in the Clinton-Lewinsky saga. David Steinberg, psychologist and editor of a special edition of Sexuality and Culture dedicated to the affair, gave this advice to future politicians: 1) tell the truth if some non-standard aspect of your sexuality is exposed; 2) emphasize the consensual nature of any sexual encounters, however unconventional; 3) do not apologize for having a strong sex drive; and 4) trust the American people to understand and appreciate the reality that sexual energy does not always stay within the strict boundaries of social propriety, especially for the rich and famous. (10) Good advice for powerful white men. The same advice directed at Monica Lewinsky or Hillary Rodam Clinton, however, reveals the phallocentric boundaries and norms of heterosexuality with masculine sexual pleasure at its center. For Elizabeth Grosz, Phallocentrism conflates the two (autonomous) sexes into a singular ‘universal’ model which, however, is congruent only with the masculine. Whenever the two sexes are represented in a single, so-called “human’ model, the female or feminine is always represented in male or masculine terms. Phallocentrism is the abstracting, universalizing and generalizing of masculine attributes so that women’s or femininity’s concrete specificity and potential for autonomous definition are covered over. (94) The impossibility of “human” sexual expression is made explicit in the social drama and in the cultural performances born out of it. At the center of both is the President’s penis. Lauren Langman claims, “The real audience [for the impeachment trial] was public opinion as each side tried to present competing images of Clinton that fell into two categories, the immoral Anti-Christ who personified evil, sin, and perfidy and the effective leader who had a problem keeping his zipper up” (525). Clinton’s penis centers both portraits of the man, whether it is characterized as “root” of all evil or as bothersome, if willful, appendage. Loren Glass explores the calculus that is patriarchy/phallus/penis in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair: Patriarchy to a great degree depends upon concealing the anatomical penis behind the symbolic phallus. The penis—in the end a paltry thing—must be concealed if its fictional equation to the omnipotent phallus is to be sustained. All this attention to the President’s penis reveals that the patriarchy is in trouble, that traditional discourses of masculine symbolic authority are disintegrating. (After the Phallus 547) I would argue that this social drama and its attendant cultural performances did not evidence, or even foretell, the disintegration of patriarchy, but instead laid bare the social performance that is hegemonic masculinity and its reliance on complementary performances of femininity to produce it. The women in the drama—Hillary Rodam Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Betty Currie, even Chelsea Clinton (the list of women does tend to go on and on)—are always cast as both peripheral to that social power yet thoroughly implicated by their sexualized roles as wives, willing lovers, unwilling lovers, secretaries, and daughters. More than sexual, racial, or economic “double standards” for women and for men, the social drama—as formal and informal institutions and procedures—works hard to veil the phallocentric order, even as the categories “man” and “wife” are hailed as social expectations. If Loren Glass misses the mark on the disintegration of the patriarchy, then Glass’ analysis of the continued vilification of women in the drama is thoroughly on the mark: “Clinton gladly concedes power to careerist ‘ice queens’ like Hillary Rodman, Janet Reno, and Madeleine Albright, while eagerly pursuing blowjobs from trashy young sluts like Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones. As a model of the new sensitive male, he can have his cake and eat it, too” ("Publicizing," 30). The performances on the Internet reveal the faultlines in cultural constructions of masculinity, even as they mask and protect the political and social power that produces masculine subject positions. “Gender equality” in a phallocentric system is an impossibility. Turner writes of the social drama, "Every social drama alters, in however minuscule a fashion, the structure of the relevant social field" (92). These alterations, Turner notes parenthetically, are not a “permanent ordering of social relations but merely a temporary mutual accommodation of interests” (92). The cultural performances on the Internet serve phallocentric orders: shoring up hegemonic masculinity, rescuing heteronormative sex acts, and painting femininity as complement to masculinity. Despite its walk through “taboo” notions—unveiling the President’s penis as “stupid” or Hillary’s penis as a “secret”—the cultural performances manifested on the Internet never truly threaten the cultural order. Instead, the cultural performances are fun-house mirrors of hegemonic masculinity that parody its faulty performance, but never its primacy. The phallus remains—laughed at, pointed to, commented on—but never unsecured from its rightful place. In between the “wild” ladies and the First Lady were a number of women that both the social drama and cultural storehouse of jokes handled with relative care. Paula Jones, Kathleen Wiley, and Juanita Broadderick offered painful accounts of unwelcome advances, touching, and, in Broadderick’s case, rape. The antagonists in the indicative social drama, the “vast right wing conspiracy,” surely could use these women and their accusations to remove a sitting President? They failed, of course, revealing not only a level of cultural uneasiness about abusive masculine power and its potential, but a larger rift in hegemonic masculinity and the institutions that bolster it. Unable to make the terms “sexual predator” or “sociopath” stick in the media, in Arkansas federal court, or in the U.S. Senate, the antagonists in the social drama didn’t even try. Instead, they fell back on legal performatives divorced from sexual deviancy, aggression, or violence: perjury, subordnation of perjury, tampering with witnesses, obstruction of justice—all of these infractions concern words that produce their effects, instead of the sex acts performed. The deflected attention to “lying about sex” secured the President’s masculine prerogatives, white privilege, and active heterosexuality; any attention to a rape in a hotel room in Little Rock, Arkansas, some 25 years ago would cut much too close to the bone. The social drama’s resolution, its “temporary mutual accommodation of interests,” was satisfactory. Cultural performances on the Internet left Juanita Broadderick alone. Her story was not fodder for jokes, images, or parody. And therein lies the seriousness of cultural play and our collective inability to reimagine power divorced from the interlocking mechanisms that produce sexual discourse, identities, and institutions. The metacommentary available on the Internet lovingly lampoons performances of hegemonic masculinity and remembers heteronormativity as accomplished through women, but the comic route is closed off when sexual power and privilege exceed its reach. The tragedy that was Broadderick’s tale, its unserviceability to the indicative social drama and its untouchability in cultural parody, is testimony to the difficulty of erecting a sexual politics that enables choice. For Foucault, this sexual ethics is not about “freedom of ‘sexual acts,’” but “freedom of sexual choice,” including liberty not to manifest choice at all (251). While the indicative and subjunctive moods of culture focus on the sexual acts and the discourse that valorizes or erases them, the ellipse in both constructions of sex is sexual choice. When a sexual ethics of choice pervades discourse, identities, institutions, and culture, the social dramas and attendant cultural performances will really be something to see. Until then, social dramas and cultural performances continue. Indeed, the social drama of Bill Clinton might best be sandwiched between Gary Hart’s aborted bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1984 and Arnold Schwartzenegger’s successful bid for the California governorship in 2004. The rules are changing. The relevant social field, however, is still very much about “mutual accommodation of interests,” and the women—groped, touched, and fondled—are again lost from our collective memory and from Internet web sites.

Notes

1. Wire service reports the next day detailed the “cyber-gridlock” as millions of Internet users logged on to read the Starr Report. Twelve million people, according to Ken Allard of Jupiter Communications, tried to access the Report on Friday, September 11. CNN Interactive, at 2:45pm, reported garnering 340,000 hits per minute on their site; American Online reported 62,000 downloads during the first hour of its posting (Kaplan and Huhn) and 600,00 users logged on simultaneously (Reid and Hume)

2. The saga of Bill Clinton’s sex life unfolded in fits and starts over two years, but the week of January 17, 1998, when the name Monica Lewinsky first hit the headlines, was unprecedented.

A Washington research foundation, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, studied the amount of coverage during the first week of the scandal on the evening newscasts of the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), and concluded that the Lewinsky story was the media’s “biggest feeding frenzy” ever. Between Jan. 21 and 27 [1998], the networks ran 124 stories on the scandal—more even than the 103 they ran during the week following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, last August. To be sure, the public ate it up: audiences for the shows soared. (Phillips 23)

3. Perhaps the best example of this metaphor is Saturday Night Live’s Will Ferrell’s brilliant impersonations of Attorney General Janet Reno. When the real Reno crashed through the set, surprising Ferrell, suddenly the social drama (the “actual” events) met cultural performance (the “what if” of play) head on.

4. The names of web sites I found most useful in collecting texts for this analysis are listed below, but none of them are active sites on the web. In September of 1998, startingpage.monica had six screen pages of links to Monica/Bill websites. I counted over 500 active sites. I think we’ve lost—with the exception of this analysis and my shoddy attempts at archiving—an amazing compendium of cultural material such as “Tasteless Clinton/Monica Lewinsky Jokes: In the Beginning”; “Official Guide to Zippergate”; “A Bill Clinton Joke Compendium”; “Banjo Bob’s Joke Page”; and “Welcome to the Clinton Humor Page.” In 2005, the Monica Lewinsky webring had only 24 active sites. The Monica and Bill Page is typical of what was once available. The Bill Clinton Joke-of-the-Day Page contains archived years worth visiting.

5. This tiny website stayed active for only a month. I did find this same image here.

6. In the years since Monicagate, a number of scholars have tried to make sense of the political, social, and sexual lessons of the saga. Not surprisingly, distinctions between the personal and the political centered much of the discussion. Political scientists turned again to polling data to rethink notions of framing policy issues, media effects, and public perception (see Shah, Watts, Domke, and Fan; Lawrence and Bennett; Ahluwalia; and Miller). Most found the divide between private and public either firmly fixed or operating as backlash: “For most, the scandal was not about the rule of law or punishing a president who had lied under oath or obstructed justice; it was about a zealous special prosecutor who had spent many of their tax dollars doing the dirty work of the far right wing of the Republican party” (Miller 728). Media theorists and professionals were especially hard on themselves, asking “What went wrong?” in their journalistic accounts of private affairs (Hickey; Witcover; Steep; Gartner). Public interest and “sex sells” are still at the heart of political scandal news, but caution in utilizing Internet sources is the new watchword. For feminists, the public/private debates ought to have been a dream come true, but sophisticated critiques of the gendered constructions of public and private didn’t enable new ways through the impasse (see Elshtain; Deem; Holmes; Perloff).

7. And for purposes of academic citation, equally difficult. In this essay, I do not offer web addresses for specific items. Most of the same jokes appeared on dozens of sites; the images were spread, and repeated, across them. In 1998, I cut and pasted from dozens of web sites approximately 40 pages of jokes—single spaced, in 8-pitch font—to save space and paper. These hard copies and jpeg files saved on my hard drive were my “data” for analysis.

8. The Dreyfus Affair is one of two Western examples Turner often mentions as a well-known social drama. Turner’s second example, and much more familiar to Americans of my generation, is Watergate.

9. For analyses of the masculinity of the office and of individuals who have held it, see Edelmen, Jamieson, Tulis, and Medhurst.

10. I discovered several versions of this particular joke. The highest numbers were 1,200 women; 98% of them said “never again.”

11. See Mary Lefkowitz for a critique of Joseph Campbell’s monomythic cycle as a thoroughly masculine view of heroism and heroic action.

12. I found more than 10 different versions of this text across the Internet, and this is just a tiny sample of poems that continue for up to 30 stanzas, encompassing a wide spectrum of Clinton infractions. Only last year I stumbled across the “real” author’s account of what happened to his creation. Tom Tomorrow, a political cartoonist and creator of This Modern World, created a cartoon with Ken Starr as “a Grinch-y independent counsel grilling Bill Clinton in a Dr. Seuss-style rhyme.” The dialogue was cut from the cartoon, pasted into e-mail, and began its internet journey with new additions by “folk” and without Tomorrow’s name. Tomorrow said, "Thanks to the instantaneous nature of the Net, by the time people saw my cartoon they accused me of plagiarizing ... myself” (Stecker).

13. The Starr Report offers this definition: “Phone sex occurs when one or both parties masturbate while one or both parties talk in a sexually explicit manner on the phone” (Malti-Douglas 90).

14. The two-year long social drama of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair created an ever-shifting debate about the breach. Just what “rule” did he break? Clinton lied under oath. Clinton had an extramarital affair. Clinton obstructed justice. Clinton committed perjury. Clinton engaged in sexual relations with an employee. Clinton dishonored the office of the presidency. Pick a breach, any breach.

15. I do not mean to infer that the label alone is not harmful to women. Alex, a prostitute Sallie Tisdale interviewed, said: “It’s still true that the worse thing you can say to insult a woman is to call her a whore. ‘You fucking whore.’ It’s hard to grow up hearing that all your life and not internalize it. I know I have and it pisses me off, because this is a great line of work and it sucks that I have to carry around everybody else’s shame about it” (Tisdale 207).

16. Sallie Tisdale summarizes the amazing work of Martha Stein, a social worker who befriended prostitutes, and over four years, “claims to have watched 1,242 men with dozens of different women.” Tisdale relates some “surprising” findings of the sexual wants of these white, upper-class professional men: “Ten percent ‘exhibited homosexual impulses’; four percent cross-dressed during sex; forty-three percent wanted to perform cunnilingus. (A number of others said they were interested but too shy). One-third wanted anal stimulus or penetration. One-fourth had some kind of sexual dysfunction such as impotence. Almost every one wanted fellatio” (184-85).

17. “Initially, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President would not let her perform oral sex to completion. In Ms. Lewinsky’s understanding, his refusal was related to ‘trust and not knowing me well enough.’ During their last two sexual encounters, both in 1997, he did ejaculate.”

18. Gary Hart jokes, according to Dundes, centered on cunnilingus and fellatio, perhaps because of the many puns available on the name Donna Rice: “Have you heard about the Gary Hart diet? You eat rice three times a day and lose everything” (Dundes 45).

19. Joan Didion’s observation on the Starr Report is fascinating. Didion characterizes the Starr-Report-Monica as the quintessential unreliable narrator. That is, “a classic literary device whereby the reader is made to realize that the situation, and indeed the narrator, are other than what the narrator says they are. It cannot have been the intention of the authors to present their witness as the victimizer and the president her hapless victim, and yet there it was, for all the world to read” (244).

20. Chelsea, interestingly enough, is not a common subject of joking, perhaps reflecting an understanding of what is “too much” in the realm of cultural parody. But one joke does stand out, not as condemnation of Chelsea, but as an indication of the difficult position her mother is in and her father’s role in creating those difficulties: Chelsea was getting ready to leave for college and Hillary used this opportunity to have a mother-daughter heart-to-heart talk. Hillary said, “We need to talk about sex and about being responsible. Are you sexually active?” Chelsea answered, “Not according to Dad.”

21. Perhaps the most telling criticism of her as wife and mother comes, not from the Internet, but from the Starr Report. Malti-Douglas analyzes the Starr Report’s frequent mention of the “absent” Mrs. Clinton:

Is the reader to surmise that Mrs. Clinton’s travels are what set the events in motion? The moral is clear: a wife should be by her husband’s side. In the sexual-moral world of The Starr Report, the liberated-woman First Lady has her share of responsibility in the affair. Thus it is that the narrator remarks that: "During the fall 1996 campaign, the President sometimes called from trips when Mrs. Clinton was not accompanying him. During at least seven of the 1996 calls, Ms. Lewinsky and the President had phone sex.” From Mrs. Clinton’s absence on the campaign trail, one progresses to phone calls to Lewinsky and from there to phone sex. (50-51).

22. First lady scholarship is a fascinating corner of history that questions malestream approaches to history centered on men’s public roles and policies. See, for example, Mayo and Meringolo; Caroli; and Gutin.

23. This web-site attributes Clinton’s presidency and policies to communist motives. The sexual social drama grafts nicely onto political ideology here, reflecting Laura Kipnis’ Marxist analysis of adultery: “Perhaps in the analogy of workplace protest we may find an idiom, like communism as theorized by Marx and Engels, through which to think about adultery as a form of social articulation, a way of organizing grievances about existing conditions into a collectively imagined form, and one which offers a vehicle for optimism about other, better possibilities” (294).

24. All of these philandering husband jokes were also told of Gary Hart (Dundes).

25. In her analysis of editorial cartoons published in newspapers depicting Hillary Rodman Clinton, Charlotte Templin explores a number of cartoons that picture the Clintons in bed: “Characteristically, the Clintons lie in bed back to back or side by side focused on documents, a book—something other than each other” (27).

26. Many Internet sites posted these three limericks as the “winners” in a contest that challenged writers to combine the names Monica Lewinsky and Ted Kaczinski, the Unibomber:

There once was a girl named Lewinsky
Who played on a flute like Stravinsky
‘Twas “Hail to the Chief”
On this flute made of beef
That stole the front page from Kaczinski.

Said Bill Clinton to young Ms Lewinsky
We don’t want to leave clues like Kaczynski
Since you look such a mess
Use the hem of your dress
And wipe that stuff off your chinsky.

Lewinsky and Clinton have shown
What Kaczynski must surely have known:
That an intern is better
Than a bomb in a letter
Given the choice of how to get blown.

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