What was he up to? Well, contrary to what seems to be every man jack on the street’s opinion, Bill Clinton wasn’t just slicing himself off a piece of strange, as Magic Johnson might say. Even back in the beginning, when Betty Currie first buzzed the lock on Willy’s West Wing zipper, l’affaire Lewinsky wasn’t about getting laid. It was about getting laid and then being made to feel bad about it afterward.
Very bad. Bad, bad, bad Billy.
Orgasm isn’t the goal. Humiliation, shame, the ha-ha jeering of the multitude that stings of disgrace-that’s the goal.
I should know. I ministered to men of power through thousands of $500-a-pop sessions, “role-playing,” in the euphemism of the day, as “Mistress Sonya,” owner-operator of a thriving S&M boutique in midtown Manhattan, administering verbal pistol whippings and sometimes literal pizzle whippings to worms who walk as men and who feel a deep need to feel shame.
Please allow me to introduce myself, I would say to them, I’m a girl of wealth and taste. More taste than wealth, which is where you, maggot-dicked smear of sperm-marbled feces that you are, come in.
I’ve since retired from this line of work, having summed up my experience in a memoir, Unnatural Acts . But I’ve come to the conclusion that I was a gal who caught a wave. It was the Big Kahuna, too. Just a glance at the front pages indicates we are witnessing the flowering of abject humiliation as a great national pastime. This is the Age of Shame.
I’m watching what’s going down in Washington, and I’m seeing a lot of people who are missing the point entirely. My sister up in Coxsackie, N.Y., for example. “How could Clinton think he could get away with it?” But he didn’t think that. These guys, my clients, stepping freshly shaved and gleaming from the corridors of power, smelling (they hope) like perfumed soap, don’t want to get away with it.
They want to squirm with feverish, mewling, ego-rolfing embarrassment, whinnying with pleasure all the while, their prostates humming like Hanukkah dreidels. “Approach thy God with fear and trembling,” quoth the Bible, and do these guys ever.
Monica Lewinsky was only the setup. The barrage of scorn, the calls for the “I” word, the Starr Chamber-that’s the payoff. And yes, this storm of controversy that is surging around the President, this is worth whatever it takes. Bill Clinton is getting his money shot’s worth now. It’s what he was after all along. “That fat pantload in the White House,” Don Imus calls him. Bill Clinton has messed his diaper both fore and aft. Power is an aphrodisiac, but so is shame.
Let me tell you about another leader of the free world, an ambassador attached to the United Nations who used to be one of my regulars. His name would be immediately recognizable, but it won’t be divulged here, as I don’t whip and tell.
That crumbling pantload of a man used to show up at my door already breathing heavily, the dark rings below his sagging eyes bulging like a pair of overstuffed diplomatic pouches. He’d have an elaborate scenario all prepared. Had it all written down. With trembling hands he extended to me scribblings from the same pen that had just signed treaties of state.
Always, a letter. From his “governess,” who was writing to inform me that Mr. Modern-Day-Metternich had been a baaad boy. I was to spank his naughty naked bottom. As I was doing it, he insisted on me saying the phrase as I was doing it: “Spank your naughty naked bottom.”
So I’d read in the papers that Naughty Bottom was involved with some very delicate high-level diplomatic maneuverings. Eventually, I noticed there was a method to his badness. A rhythm. For every high in his life, he had to have a new low.
After every session of Naughty Bottom’s saber rattling at the United Nations, I knew to expect a visit. The humiliation he demanded seemed to vary in inverse ratio to the point-type of the headlines he’d garnered in The New York Times . There’s probably a mathematical formula to be pursued here, but I am too weary to do it.
It’s tiring, playing top to their bottom. The press should know, as that is effectively the role it has played, and played well, for Bill Clinton over the past weeks. Drew Friedman’s illustration in The Observer (Feb. 2) of Kenneth Starr as Torquemada vaguely reminded me of opening my door to my clients.
Another example: the Oscar winner who, the day after the ceremony, jetted all the way to New York to resume our pas de deux. Although he used to be a regular, it had been about six months since I’d seen him. Then I and about a billion other people around the globe saw this guy deliver his suave acceptance speech. He was not so glib 48 hours later, stuttering as he begged me to cram a six-inch chrome dildo up his … Mountain high, valley low.
Those Europeans who lecture us on our Puritan sexual hang-ups just don’t get it. The paradise of equality and guiltlessness that the sexual revolution promised and which the Continent smugly claims for itself-well, besides being a hoodwink, it turns out we don’t want it.
The feminists don’t want it. They prefer to spank men. The men don’t want it. They prefer to be spanked. Both genders prefer sex the old-fashioned way, out behind the woodshed: nasty, brutish and short.
“Sex should be like drinking a glass of
“Sex is just friction,” said Screw magazine editor Al Goldstein, echoing the Bolshevik.
Nope. Not in neo-Puritan America, it isn’t. It is a lopsided leopardskin pillbox hat filled to the brim with stale ecstasy, random mortifications, crease-folded memories, ass-scalding emotional pain, “urgencies false and otherwise,” as Neal Cassady would say, dithering idiocy, big bang mojo and just a spoonful of sugar. It’s so overloaded that it’s only natural when it sometimes topples over.
Welcome to the Age of Shame.
Humiliation is the amyl nitrate popper we suck in just at the moment of the Little Death. It’s the spice in the vice. It accentuates the pleasure. Humiliation is rope twisting off our oxygen as we auto-eroto-asphyxiate.
The game being dealt in Washington right now is one of bumble-puppy, which used to refer to card games played intentionally against the rules. It’s not that Bill Clinton wants to get caught. That’s not quite it. It’s that breaking the rules is itself the essence of the game.
Bill, I’d come out of retirement for you. You’ve embarrassed yourself so often that I bet it’s beginning to feel a little old. You’re probably looking for new fields to conquer, new depths to plumb.
I guarantee I could wipe that stupid grin off your mug. I could introduce you to a whole new universe of mortification. Give me a call at 970-KAPOWIE. I’m ready when you are.
