The First Porn President

“I can now retire from politics,” he said—the king of cool, the ironist in chief—“after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way”: JFK, speaking to the vast audience at Madison Square Garden as Marilyn Monroe tottered away on her high heels, in her flesh-colored dress, leaving behind the hot trail of her sexual desire glowing in the darkness. In less than two years, they would both be dead, but that moment will live forever, reminding us always of our first and only Playboy president. The “playboy,” as the publication invited its reader to think of himself, was urbane, sophisticated—able to handle a wide variety of amorous women, from the Miss Porter’s sophisticate with her expensive underwear and afternoon passions to the Hollywood showgirl whose naked photographs had been published against her wishes in that very magazine. In reality, of course, the Playboy reader was just as likely to be a henpecked masturbator, trying to find a few minutes away from the old ball-and-chain while he gazed at a shaking image held in one ever-tightening fist. But that homely truth was beside the point. It was the way he thought of himself when the pages were shaking that really mattered, and what Playboy said was this: You know how to handle all of these beautiful girls, they are here for your pleasure, and they will only add to your legend.

Bill Clinton was our first frat-boy president. He could cheerfully reach into an enthusiastic intern’s pants and then, without washing his hands, pick up the phone and conduct the nation’s business. He was careless, self-confident, a winner. He would deny, deny, deny, but when there was no plausible version of reality by many of the things that he brought on himself through his mistreatment of women.