Anyone who spent this past hot, sweaty summer in D.C. remembers the sex scandals that loomed large in the nation’s media coverage. We were assaulted daily by front-page images of a shamed Anthony Weiner, breaking down after a futile attempt to explain why he felt compelled to tweet pictures of his genitals to young girls across the country.
If Weinergate wasn’t enough, accusations then surfaced about Congressman David Wu’s alleged sexual encounter with a teenage girl. And, of course, there was the infamous photograph of the Congressman himself in a tiger suit. Needless to say, Wu, like Weiner, promptly resigned right before the big U.S. debt downgrade, by which time we had realized that our nation’s politicians were, in fact, going mad.
What do sex scandals tell us about politics, and what does politics tell us about sex scandals? These seem to be the age-old questions that are rearing their ugly heads with new allegations of sexual harassment directed toward presidential candidate Herman Cain. With four women having come forward claiming they were harassed by the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, there has been a significant response.
Yet the reaction has not been exactly what one might have expected. According to Reuters, donations to Herman Cain’s campaign have actually increased since the allegations, and Cain has still managed to raise $1 million in the past couple of days since the first accuser came forward.
In a defense that is reminiscent of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s rebuttal against his own sexual harassment charges, Cain has argued that race is the main reason why he is being targeted by the media. Thomas, who described his own encounter with sexual harassment allegations as “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” escaped from the allegations relatively unscathed and went on to become a Supreme Court Justice. When asked her opinion on the Cain allegations, Clarence’s accuser, Anita Hill, was quoted in a recent Forbes article as saying “race trumps gender.”
Regardless of whether or not one agrees with Hill’s statement, the Cain allegations remind us that race and gender are still very much present—often in an ugly way—in our nation’s politics. This may seem an obvious fact, yet it’s sometimes easy to forget how much the prejudices in the politics of race, gender, and class are affecting domestic and foreign policy. When a sex scandal bursts onto the scene, we see an explosion of many of the simmering tensions that exist in political life daily.
Businesswoman and commentator Krystal Ball, who campaigned for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, is another victim of this prejudice. When photos surfaced of the would-be congresswoman from a holiday party years earlier dressed as a “naughty Santa” with a dildo in hand, Ball received national attention. The pictures, unfortunately, were the wrong kind of publicity for her campaign.
But Ball responded to the incident by labeling it as “outrageous” and “sexist” and pointing out in a powerful Huffington Post op-ed that “society has to accept that women of my generation have sexual lives that are going to leak into the public sphere.” She has since become an outspoken critic of the “idea that female sexuality and serious work are incompatible.”
It is evident from experiences such as Ball’s that Americans care about sex scandals, but it is also evident that one’s race or gender is inescapable in the face of such a scandal. In short, it seems apparent that what you can get away in with in politics depends on how white, black, male, or female you are.
Many of us—his supporters included—will probably agree that President Clinton (who happens to be a white male) got away with a lot when he claimed: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The woman in question, as we all know, was 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinksy, whose voice and dignity were pretty much swept aside during the scandal.
A glance at the public response to any sex scandal reveals that the perception of sex scandals in politics is inevitably colored by race and gender. In the case of Herman Cain, I, for one, am wondering how many women will have to come forward in order to make the skeptics start taking the accusations seriously—how many women it takes to go against the word of a man. I am also wondering whether or not this is indeed a lynching—how much of the negative publicity is because Cain is African-American. Whether race trumps gender or gender trumps race, the sex scandals, just like politics, seem unable to escape this kind of stereotyping.
