c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)
UNDATED _ Where, many asked indignantly, were America’s feminists and other self-conscious moralists when the president of the United States sexually harassed a young woman half his age and in his care?
Where are they now, we might ask, when world champion recluse and author J.D. Salinger is revealed to have seduced Joyce Maynard when her 18 birthdays were about a third of his 53 years? Like the president’s, his cover story is that he was only encouraging a young woman in her career.
In fact, both Monica Lewinsky and Joyce Maynard have been almost gleefully attacked as the seducers in these non-passionate plays. It was all their fault, commentators tell us, and the two women have further disgraced themselves by writing memoirs of their June-November relationships.
Maynard, now 45, has received further outraged public scolding for recently selling the letters the author of”The Catcher in the Rye”wrote to her a quarter of a century ago. She needed the $140,000 she finally cleared from them to pay college tuition for her children.
Meanwhile, Maynard has suffered low criticism in high places. The ever morally complacent National Review describes her as an”opportunistic onetime nymphet.”And Maureen Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for bringing a”moral”viewpoint to her commentary on President Clinton’s behavior, refers to Maynard as a”leech”woman.
In short, and in public, both Lewinsky and Maynard have been left as rape victims often are _ raped anew in cross-examinations by defense attorneys. These young women are characterized as the true predators who flaunted their youthful allure; they are the ones who”really wanted It”and so”got what they deserved.” The men involved are, in this scenario, victims, just innocents abroad, the noblest of the noble, going about their governing and writing until these women, wily as World War I spy Mata Hari, entered their lives and, in a weak moment _ we men all understand that, right? _ fell. What else could they do, if they were real men, but be seduced?
Such men, like men before the new Feminist Consciousness revealed that their masculinity was base metal instead of gold, would, as the amoral saying goes,”get a pass”and return to their lives and wives as mildly heroic survivors of the Eternal Female Predator. (Don’t forget who offered the apple to Adam.)
But isn’t this preposterously immoral interpretation of the male’s role in seduction now out of date, condemned in every world but the real one as profoundly anti-woman? That is what we have been told by self-confident moralists who were outraged by the slightest hint of a man’s being attracted to a woman, as in the hot-seat Senate hearings on Justice Clarence Thomas or around the water coolers in many offices.
The cases of both Lewinsky and Maynard reveal that we are still ready to pillory the woman, for we have banished them, like the scapegoat of old, into the wilderness bearing our sins in their backpacks.
The predators in both cases are men in their 50s acting pretty much as they always have, that is, trapped in eternal adolescence, taking sexual relief where they can get it. Clinton and Salinger have kept their slippery historical niches, but they have cast aside the women _ the children, really _ that they themselves seduced.
Never have so many witnessed so much hypocrisy committed by so few. This failure to see how feminists and all others have reverted to a primitive moral outlook echoes the 12th century story of Abelard and Heloise, the former the middle-aged tutor-seducer, the latter the young student seduced. Exposed, Abelard let Heloise take part of the rap, and he returned to a monastery while she was forced into a convent.
Years later she wrote to him, asking only that he tell her the truth of what had happened between them _ that”you took me out of lust and put me away out of fear.” Abelard’s reply did not answer this piercing question but invoked the piety defense:”I will pray for you …” We have just witnessed this myth re-enacted in Bill and Monica and J.D. and Joyce, with Clinton’s wish that Monica may”get on with her life”being the post-modern equivalent of praying for her.
Like Heloise, we would like the truth out of these men. Did you take these women out of lust and put them away out of fear? How sad that even the National Review, Maureen Dowd, the feminists _ and the rest of us _ let them get by without answering that question.
DEA END KENNEDY
