The hand of God rose just as the swords of the king’s armies prepared to land on the necks of the rebels of Paris: The people, the diarist Pierre L’Estoile recorded, cheered the fanatic priest who plunged his knife into Henry III’s belly in 1589. An angry subject declaimed the king was a “buggerer, son of a wh***, tyrant.” Earlier reviled for his excesses with Venetian courtesans like Veronica Franco, Henry III was later said to have surrounded himself with jewelled and painted mignons or dainty young men “blaspheming, fornicating and following the king everywhere.”
For the pious, real responsibility for the regicide of 1589 lay with a woman: The queen-mother Catherine de Medici, today remembered as a great patron of the arts, was decried as a virago and sexual vampire who had emasculated her son.
Even as the world contemplates the extraordinary spectacle of former US president Donald Trump being tried for making hush-money payments to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, one critical element hasn’t got the attention it should. For the first time in modern political history, a man is being shamed for a sex scandal. The humour centres around the shape and size of Trump’s penis, his obesity, and his lack of taste.
The change in the gender narrative is at least as consequential as wars and economic revolutions. Patriarchy has been one of the most important forces in holding up the world order, and perhaps, just perhaps, it is cracking.
Large numbers of possible explanations exist for the historically-exceptional disappearance of Eve and the serpent in the Trump narrative. Late in the last decade, the exposure of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein energised feminist movements protesting against abuses by powerful men. The rise of social media helped bypass editorial gatekeeping that protected élites. Liberals in the media, long mocked by Trump, might be getting their moment of vengeance.
The private on the public state
Politics in the 18th and 19th century US wasn’t devoid of sexual misconduct. Federalist politicians attacked former president Thomas Jefferson’s “Congo Harem,” while William Henry Harrison was alleged to have seduced a teenage girl. The sixth president John Quincy Adams was even alleged to have used a sex-worker to entrap Emperor Alexander of Russia. Libellous newspaper articles and abusive speeches were the stuff of politics. Like many religious societies, Americans believed that a just polity had to be entrusted to moral leaders, John Summers observes.
The tremendous influx of women into the workforce in the late 19th century empowered some to assert that powerful men should not be protected by sexual double-standards. Teenager Madeline Pollard successfully sued the politician William Breckinridge, journalist Patricia Millard writes, for resiling on his promise to marry.
From the early 20th century, though, the organised press colluded with political and financial power to keep personal scandals out of the public space. The affairs of presidents Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were widely known—but they only emerged into the light decades after their deaths.
The sexual life of president John Kennedy, again, remained largely unknown to the public. In a superb essay, journalist Caitlin Flanagan points to the tragic impact Kennedy’s affairs had on first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Fathered by an alcoholic, wife to a womaniser and then an abusive-controlling tycoon, Jacqueline lived a life “dependent on the kindness of sadists.” Melania Trump can make clear her disdain for her husband’s behaviour; Jacqueline Kennedy could not.
The media-politician compact did sometimes tear: Arkansas congressman Wilbur Mills stopped his car and stripper Fanne Foxe jumped out of it into a fountain in 1974. Former Colorado senator Gary Hart’s presidential campaign in 1987 was undermined by infidelity charges. Though American activist Donna Rice’s reputation, she was to note, was also destroyed in the process.
The manly-man mode of politics
Leslie Smith’s work on modern American sex scandals points to the existence of a manly-manhood card, which gives absolution to the men involved—even among morally-straight-laced Evangelical audiences. Figures like Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Arnold Schwarzenegger represented a kind of masculinity now sometimes called toxic, and then as just honest and virile. To this, we might add the likeable rogue, and the wily-but-amusing predatory entrepreneur-president.
Monica Lewinsky was cast as a naïve but sexually-provocative siren, with the question of the power relationship between her and former president Bill Clinton receiving little examination. For the most part, Clinton evaded the issue by apologising to his nation and family, but not to his young employee. The narrative, Lewinsky later revealed in a biography, had devastating personal impacts.
Evangelism and White nationalism, Smith suggests, have been powerful carriers of an ideology which casts the nation as a childlike family, in need of protection by a masculine father. The politicians who felt compelled to apologise for their actions—think John Edwards or Anthony Weiner—were derided as inadequate examples of manhood.
Like their counterparts in the US, European leaders of the period enjoyed similar immunity. The Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi—accused of having hired sex-workers and aspiring showgirls to give what came to be known as bunga-bunga parties for his powerful guests—became something of a folk hero. For his working-class supporters, scholar Alessandra Gribaldo observes, the use of wealth and power to possess women was an aspirational ideal.
Mass-media moral outrage directed at former United Kingdom war secretary John Profumo paled in comparison with the abuse directed at the sex-workers he was involved with. Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, barely out of their teens and from embattled backgrounds, were dismissed as call girls, journalist Sarah Hughes notes.
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A crack in the wall?
The gaze on Trump is remarkably different. Of course, the age of predatory men isn’t behind us, but it does seem to come with costs for perpetrators. Last year, Liberal Democratic Party heavyweight Takeru Yoshikawa was eased out of his seat in the Japanese parliament, after he was outed taking a underage college student out for drinks and then giving her ¥40,000 in cash. Lawmaker Hiranao Honda was compelled to resign after saying, “I’m not far off 50 years old, but if I had sex with a 14-year-old, I would be arrested, even if there was consent. It’s strange.”
Long coerced into silence, women in Japan have been organising to push back against sexual harassment in the workplace and during job interviews, Thisanka Siripala reports. There isn’t uniformly good news from everywhere—the hounding of former Finland prime minister Sanna Marin would have been unlikely if she was male, as Van Badham writes—but change is becoming evident.
Totalitarian regimes, of course, don’t embarrass political leaders in this way. Tennis star Peng Shui simply disappeared from public view when she accused former Chinese vice premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Women’s rights activists were shuttered out of social media, and were sometimes detained, after calling out powerful men for sexual assault or misconduct. Leonid Slutsky, head of the State Duma’s foreign affairs committee, was exonerated from charges of groping multiple women journalists.
The sex scandal, the story of Henry III tells us, long predates the era of mass media and its discursive elements have proved durable. Though the excesses of empresses, kings and popes titillated élite contemporary commentators, historian Michael Farquhar reminds us, they acquired political salience only when the violation of cultural norms was held to be responsible for harm to the body politic. Henry IV redeemed the monarchy in France by relentlessly womanising, and fathering six illegitimate children.
Finally, the Trump case shows, there might be a crack in the iron fortress patriarchy has ensconced toxic masculinity within. Their fall could mean seismic changes for the world order itself.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)