It wasn’t just the Strauss-Kahn and Schwarzenegger sex scandals vying for the headlines last week; Boxer Sugar Ray Leonard revealed that he was sexually abused as a teenager by a prominent Olympic coach, and the Catholic Church released the results of a five-year study on the priest sex abuse problem. Scandalous male sexual behavior, ranging from the scummy to the predatory, seemed to be the motif of the week.
I couldn’t help wondering: Where are all the female sex scandals?
In the midst of these events, I happened to be reading Keith Richards’ memoir, “Life,” a book crammed with shrewd observations. I was particularly struck by his passing remarks about the groupies who congregated at their hotel room doors whenever the Stones came to town. Richards, who describes himself as fairly indifferent to racking up sexual scores, nevertheless makes use of these women, occasionally for sex (the traditional exchange), but also for other things. “They were providing a service… like the Red Cross. They’d wash your clothes, they’d bathe you and stuff.” Most of them were not particularly attractive, he comments. And though grateful for their ministrations, he still wonders why they were doing it.
Well… because people use sex for a variety of purposes, which may not have anything to do with sexual pleasure, per se. Consider these allegedly unlovely young women, getting to feel temporarily affirmed and desirable by playing nursemaid, sexually and otherwise, to a semi-comatose Stone. I’m not discounting the excitement of hanging out with rock stars, but the entry price for these women was a certain amount of self-abnegation. Obviously people—men and women both—do often use sex as a curative, to assuage something, to feel a certain way about themselves: this is hardly unknown in the annals of human behavior. At its extremes, or its most compulsive, we call it “acting out.” At its extremes, its most malign, as with the allegations against DSK, it erases the other person, to a criminal degree. At the extremes of the female malign, one only erases oneself.
In her influential 1991 book “Female Perversions” (later made into a movie starring Tilda Swinton), psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan writes that we tend to think of sexual perversions as a male province only because female perversions are more hidden. In fact, they’re hidden in plain sight. The point is applicable to sex scandals too, I believe. According to Kaplan, perversions aren’t primarily about illicit or deviant sexual behaviors, they’re actually pathologies of gender identity. “What makes a perversion a perversion is a mental strategy that uses one or another social stereotype of masculinity or femininity in a way that deceives the onlooker about the unconscious meanings of the behaviors she or he is observing.”
One of the things that causes so much commentary in high profile sex scandals like the DSK case is that they confirm our worst gender stereotypes: i.e., men as uncontrollable testosterone-driven beasts—”a rutting chimpanzee”—as one of DSK’s previous accusers described him. But according to Kaplan, drawing on the work of psychiatrist Robert Stoller, the stereotypical behavior is actually a subterfuge. It’s a way of hiding something from both the actor himself and the rest of us—typically some secret shameful wish or fantasy, for instance to be passive or submissive himself. A wish completely opposite to the public behavior. Displays of macho prowess function like a sort of hiding place, in other words. For what precisely we can’t know, but then neither does the person doing the acting out.
Women are capable of the same kinds of subterfuge, but when a women employs similar strategies, pressing toward the extremes of stereotypical feminine behavior—becoming more self-abnegating, more submissive, hyper-motherly, or submerging her own identity in crippling ways—this looks close enough to acceptable femininity to go unremarked upon. According to Kaplan, perverse female strategies are behaviors that caricature stereotypical feminine gender ideals like cleanliness, innocence, and submission. Indeed, Richards describes his groupies as “very mothering.” But why exactly would they want to mother him? Ick. Women too, are capable of perverse behavior, and enlisting others in such stratagems, but this kind of thing generally doesn’t make the headlines. Very occasionally we see women getting themselves into scandals in ways we’d consider “masculine”—high school teachers sleeping with their students for instance—but it’s rare. More often, when we see a woman behaving in caricatured feminine ways, the response is, “Thanks for doing the laundry, baby.”
To return to the scandalizer of the hour, DSK, the point is—if the allegations are true—that if we buy the hyper-masculine performance, we’re collaborating in the subterfuge. The standard line about men caught in such situations is that they think they’re powerful enough to “get away with” caveman behavior, to skirt all consequences. But what if evading consequences isn’t the purpose? What if these kinds of scandals keep exploding into public view precisely because there’s a need for an audience, one who will confirm the scandalizer’s super-virility and ignore whatever contravenes it?
If sex scandal isn’t an equal opportunity employer, it’s not because women lack the talent for acting out sexually, it’s because we mostly do it in ways that victimize ourselves instead of other people. Unfortunately, that’s still not illegal.
Laura Kipnis is a Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Her latest book, “How To Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior ,” will be out in paperback in September.
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