Mike Kinsley has long been brilliant at jabbing people on high horses. Now he’s climbed on top of one. Kinsley has long advocated the removal of any public figure’s privacy and so is delighted to see Arnold’s lively sexual past come back to haunt him. But he’s particularly outraged by AS’s recounting in an old interview in Oui magazine of an alleged “gang-bang” between a bunch of bodybuilders and a woman. Here’s what Mike says:
But if it did happen, exactly as Arnold described it in 1977, it’s pretty disgusting. It’s disgusting even if it was consensual all around. It’s disgusting even though Arnold wasn’t married at the time. It’s disgusting even if this amounts to applying the standards of the 21st century to events of the mid-1970s. Schwarzenegger isn’t running for governor of California in 1975.
But why is group sex between consenting adults in private “disgusting”? I guess disgust is not something you can justify or explain. It’s a feeling, not an argument. As for arguments, I can understand why someone who takes a culturally conservative view of sex might feel this way, but a good libertarian-liberal like Mike? Kinsley’s attempt at a justification is that the incident, even if made up, reflects “an attitude toward women that is not acceptable in a politician.” Hmmm. Is this the same Mike Kinsley who defended Bill Clinton? By any standards, AS’s sins are, in fact, far less significant than BC’s. Arnold’s gang-bang wasn’t sexual harrassment, so far as we know, which gives Arnold a moral advantage over the ex-prez. It wasn’t adultery, ahem. It wasn’t hypocrisy, as Kinsley concedes, which gives AS another advantage over Clinton, who was busy signing the preposterous “Defense of Marriage Act,” while getting sucked off under the table in the Oval Office by an intern. It was private and consensual. For all we know, the woman had a great time. Does Kinsley believe that all women are so sexually vulnerable that they cannot consent to such group sex and enjoy it? Why does this harrumphing sound a little like partisanship to me?
