The Clinton Meltdown: The Sex Files

TO an outside observer, nothing is more striking in the scandal surrounding President Clinton than the fact that everyone involved is completely bewildered by sex. Indeed, we can see in this humiliating episode the cost that America has paid for the sexual revolution. We in Europe did not escape this revolution; but we did not make it the basis of our lives. Nor did most of us adopt, as so many Americans have adopted, the Kinsey view of sex, as a tingling of the genitals, with orgasm as the goal and the partner as the means to it.

Nor did we draw, as official opinion in America has drawn, the inevitable conclusions of Kinseyism: for example, that there is no difference in principle between heterosexual and homosexual intercourse, that there is no distinction between pure and perverted desire, that chastity is an available choice but not a virtue, and that the only moral questions that surround the sexual act are questions of consent and safety.

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Roger Scruton

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TO an outside observer, nothing is more striking in the scandal surrounding President Clinton than the fact that everyone involved is completely bewildered by sex. Indeed, we can see in this humiliating episode the cost that America has paid for the sexual revolution. We in Europe did not escape this revolution; but we did not make it the basis of our lives. Nor did most of us adopt, as so many Americans have adopted, the Kinsey view of sex, as a tingling of the genitals, with orgasm as the goal and the partner as the means to it.

Nor did we draw, as official opinion in America has drawn, the inevitable conclusions of Kinseyism: for example, that there is no difference in principle between heterosexual and homosexual intercourse, that there is no distinction between pure and perverted desire, that chastity is an available choice but not a virtue, and that the only moral questions that surround the sexual act are questions of consent and safety.