Sex happens.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Pres. Clinton's sex scandal

The Monica Lewinsky crisis throws a new light on that enigmatic photo of Bill and Hillary, their generous flesh covered only in bathing suits, mock-waltzing together on the beach in St. Thomas. Despite the first couple's coy complaints about the supposed invasion of their vacation privacy, almost everyone assumed the shot had been cleverly posed by someone employed by the President's anti-Paula Jones publicity campaign. After all, in real life, what amorously inclined, privacy-deprived couple--finding themselves in a gorgeously lonely spot--would leap to their feet, whistling Strauss?

But now that we know that the President, insufficiently chastened by Paula Jones's charges of sexual harassment, has, in all likelihood, been carrying on with every female within grabbing distance--who is to say that he was not simultaneously romancing Hillary, too? A man of such gargantuan appetites might easily, in the odd moment of need, mistake his own wife for a bimbo.

Technically speaking, it is not yet a crime in the United States for a man, even a married one, to have sex with a consenting twenty-one-year-old. The legal snare lies in the accusation that Clinton urged Lewinsky to lie about their affair under oath, should Jones's lawyers subpoena her in order to help establish the President's alleged runaway priapism. But if Clinton is impeached, the real issue will not be the mere suborning of a witness, but our entire culture war over sex, sexuality, and various other pathways to pleasure.

For years now, the right has been inching ahead in our civil war over culture and morality, leaving America in the grip of a pitilessly Puritanical backlash. The tragedy is that Clinton might once have been able to turn this backlash around--if only, as in so many other issue areas, he had been brave as well as cute and smart.

Clinton, like the rest of the boomers, grew up in a society that was far more indulgent of male philandering. In John F. Kennedy's time, as has often been noted, men of power actually gained points by guzzling and grabbing. Certainly it did not seem to hurt JFK that dozens of his aides and Secret Service officers witnessed his trysts with whole pools full of babes at a time, or so Seymour Hirsch reports in The Dark Side of Camelot. In the culture of the early 1960s, executive men in gray flannel routinely lapped up their martini lunches, leered at the hat-check gal, and staggered back to the office to pinch their secretaries' butts. All this was...