Can We All Please Leave Bill Clinton's Penis Alone?
A new study about sexual habits and a memoir continue the nation's obsession with the former Commanding Member-in-Chief. It caused one of the great national scandals of our day, but it is time to give the old boy a rest.
Clinton is a very charismatic and handsome man whose ability to make anyone—especially women—feel special just by talking to him. His prowess is as legendary as his appetite, so it's not news that he got around with the ladies. Still, Norman Mailer's ex Norris Church Mailer felt the need to address her time in the sack with Clinton as part of her new memoir. And when it came time to pick an excerpt for the Daily Beast, which passage do you think the website selected? It was about Mailer's time playing with Clinton's Slick Willy, of course.
Mailer is way too much of a southern lady to get into graphic details, but her courtship with the future president is probably the only part that most Americans care about. This is the trouble with having a sexually potent president. No one wants to hear about Ronald Reagan making babies with Nancy or either of the Bushes getting it on with their dowdy wives. But with randy old Bill, even a decade after he left office, his hang-down seems to creep back up in the media every so often for another bit of show and tell.
Maybe it's because of that whole sex scandal in which he got impeached for lying about playing hide the cigar with Monica Lewinsky. That unfortunate sidestep—a transgression the vast majority of Americans have forgiven the old man for—has been trotted out again by a group of researchers at the University of Kentucky who have found something they call the "Clinton-Lewinsky Effect." The group interviewed a bunch of college-aged kids and only 20% of them said that oral-genital contact was "having sex" as opposed to 40% of students who said the activity was "having sex" in 1991.
Of course the researchers concluded that this meant that the Clinton scandal—in which he said he "did not have sex with that woman" and changed the definition of "oral sex" to mean "employer/intern fun time" rather than actual sex—is what caused this decrease. This one event changed the way a whole generation feels about going down, apparently. They don't take into account the collective eye roll that followed when Clinton revealed his definition of "sex" did not include blow jobs in the Oval Office.
They also don't take into account that anything else happened between 1991 and 2010 other than Bill Clinton's Almighty Pecker. How about a continued rise in promiscuity along with a rise in right-wing Puritanism ushered in by Bush and his abstinence-only bullshit? Don't you think that would make kids want to find new ways to experiment while simultaneously inventing creative rationalizations that they're not sluts? Also, the kids in the study were between the ages of 7 and 11 when the Clinton impeachment trial took place. They might have been old enough to watch the news, but they were certainly not old enough to understand a silly semantic argument about sex acts they hadn't yet experienced, at least not in a way that would dramatically effect their own sexual behavior 10 years in the future.
We think that we have discovered the Clinton-Lewinsky Effect Effect. It's where researchers name their study after a famous sexy president so that it will get way more media attention than it would otherwise. Of course these people struggling for attention in some obscure journal about sexual science would know that Clinton's name is always big business. After all, we haven't had a new sexual obsession since the last decade. But it's time to move on, people. As Bill Clinton ages, his attraction won't lessen, but his virility will. He's getting to the age where continued scrutiny of his genitals is becoming unseemly.
Aren't there some new fertility fetishes out there for us to worship? What about Obama? He may not be putting his presidential seal in as many places as his Democratic predecessor, but he is young and attractive. Where is the unfettered lust for him? He doesn't have the same kind of attractive deviance that Clinton once had, but he's better than nothing. John Edwards would have been a great bet if his very active manhood weren't attached to such a world-class cad. Scott Brown is way too right wing. Mitt Romney too Mormon. And Joe Biden just too—ew! Sure, there aren't any great replacements, but we need someone to stand up strong and tall, because our love for Billy C is beginning to wilt.