Sexy Beast–Joe Biden And The Terrible Waste Of The Aphrodisiac Of Power

The White House has always been a seamy place.  JFK bedded actresses, spies, and Marilyn Monroe there. LBJ’S Secret Service detail pimped for him, and every president in history with a few exceptions had liaisons, trysts, lovers, and mistresses.  It was a perk of the office, a given, one of the few unadulterated pleasures of the presidency.

Now it is a dry, humorless, and sexless place – a parsonage, a shuttered priory, a musty cellar of penitence, a dismal place. After all, dalliances have their consequences not only for marriage but for the nation, and Biden remembers how women turned against Bill Clinton saying they could not trust him to lead the country if he could not be faithful to his wife.  

Clinton’s wife, of course, put up with his infidelities, trailer-trashy and inconsequential as they were, Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird, and all the rest, unwilling to risk their positions as First Ladies but actually proud to have such virile, uncompromising men in their bed, turned a blind eye.

Bill Clinton’s Oval Office interludes with Monica Lewinsky were snickered at by men everywhere.  Here was the most powerful man in the world, heir to the great lovers of the White House, who diddled in his Presidential Chair with a groupie when he could have had any woman any way. 

When Clinton parsed ‘depends what is is’ deconstructing ‘sex’ before Congress like the legal scholar that he was, he was finally being honest.  No respectable man would ever consider the tawdry fellatio of Monica other than ‘depending’, not the real thing, not the macho taking of a woman but sitting there in his swivel chair, eyes closed, being taken.

President Mitterrand of France never denied his assignations or mistresses, and weeping openly at his grave were his longtime mistress, his illegitimate daughter, and his wife. 

One of his successors, Nicolas Sarkozy had an open affair with his actress mistress Carla Bruni who lived in the Elysees with him.  No one doubts the lovers of Putin and the concubines of Xi.  Even the Iranian mullahs, as ascetic and censorious as their public office demands, are still legatees of the harems of the East when pashas slept with different beautiful women every night.  

Henry VIII never stopped with his six wives, nor was any other Henry content with the women approved by court and state.  Shahs, shoguns, emperors, princes, kings, courtiers, prime ministers and presidents all had lovers and mistresses.

Henry Kissinger once stated that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac.  No woman could resist a man of power; no man of power could resist the allure of a beautiful woman.  Even abstemious Jimmy Carter, one of the few faithful American presidents, admitted that he had lust in his heart, quoting the Bible in a confession of sexual desire.  Under other unnamed circumstances, he might act on that frustrated lust, but not as long as he was seen to be the model of rectitude, moral posture, and absolute fidelity.

Abstemiousness, or at least sexual reserve, is partisan. Donald Trump was a Republican’s Republican.  He squired beauty queens, was always seen with a coterie of seductive women, and gave no apologies for his machismo.  He was not only an example of Kissinger’s aphrodisiac power; he lived in a non-censorious, non-politically correct world where sexual affairs were not only condoned but admired.  Trysts with beautiful women went along with yachts, homes in Rimini and Gstaad, limousines, and banquets and was indeed Republican.  Money, power,  and sex were interchangeable currencies.

Progressive Democrats are equally consistent but diametrically different.  Their universe is dark and purposeful. There is no room for dalliance when there are so many problems in the world to solve. Combatting global warming, misogyny, homophobia, and racism requires assiduous effort.  As importantly women are not men’s playthings, but minds in universal bodies – physical shells without sexuality, only housing for the intellect.  Given these two arbitrary constructs, it is no wonder that Joe Biden’s White House is a cold, sexless place.

There is not an eighty year old man alive who has given up on the idea of sex.  Whether or not men of a certain age can perform with the same virility as decades before is of no issue.  The obsession with sex is a lifetime affair, and thanks to Viagra men well past their prime can enjoy women.  While Biden’s women might not be the caliber of Marilyn Monroe, nor sexually aroused by him, his office permits sexual lease, purchase, and exchange. 

Eliot Spitzer, the former Governor of New York frequented high-end prostitutes at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.  He had neither time nor inclination to pursue women – he was a difficult man with little patience – so beautiful, talented, experienced prostitutes were just fine.  Rings of such beautiful women for sale and the guarantee of absolute security of silence were common in Washington; but word got out anyway, and the cancel culture had its way. Adulterous sex was a hanging offense, and he was dunned out of office.

Welcome To New York is Abel Ferrara’s movie about a wealthy, powerful, promiscuous French politician who is accused of rape by a New York City prosecutor.

The movie is loosely based on the story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund and presumptive President of France who was accused by an African maid of rape.  The prosecutor, Cyrus Vance Jr. overstepped his bounds, apparently motivated by political ambition, and pursued the case against Strauss-Kahn despite increasingly exculpatory evidence, and it was dismissed.  Strauss-Kahn returned to France, his political career ruined, but because of his financial genius, remained a well-remunerated consultant.

Ferrara’s story, however, is not a fictionalized account of a long legal process nor a biopic of Strauss-Kahn.  It is the tale of an unashamed philanderer who refuses to be put in the cage of conventional morality.  He is neither proud of nor guilty over his infidelities and sexual appetites.  It is who I am, he says, a self-described libertine whose supposed immorality is other people’s problem, not his.

The real-life Strauss-Kahn was no less defiant.  When he flippantly rejected charges of procuring, he said that he had no idea that the women at a party he attended were prostitutes.  “All women look the same without their clothes”, he said.  “I did no wrong”. 

The wife of the fictional Strauss-Kahn, played by Jacqueline Bisset, has stayed with her husband for twenty years less out of love for him than her desire to be First Lady of France.  Her fabulous wealth is not enough, and only the position of La Présidente will satisfy her ambition.  She knows her husband well, and has tolerated if not accepted his sexual profligacy because it is inconsequential and irrelevant given the intellectual brilliance and political savvy of the man.

At the same time Devereaux  – the Strauss-Kahn of the Ferrara film – knows that his wife will never leave him.   He, then, has it all.  He is wealthy and powerful on his own merits, is awarded even more wealth and status because of his wife’s family, and free to be as licentious and sexually active as he wishes.

Joe Biden could be another Strauss-Kahn.  Nothing is holding him back except the censorious ethos of the times – the damning, Puritanical, intolerant prudery of the Left.

On the other hand, perhaps Joe Biden really and truly loves his wife and has never thought of another woman. Biographies of Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter describe their devoted, loving, faithful relationships with their wives; and Biden might be in the same small, surprising group. Unlikely but possible.

A celibate presidency is a waste.  As in the Strauss-Kahn example, Presidents can have their cake and eat it too; and Biden in the few years remaining to him in office may come around. You never know.