the presidential penis

Music: Sparklehorse:Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (2006) Leave it to Jim Aune to discover this prurient pay-pal enterprise: Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones have filmed themselves discussing their sexual adventures with Bill Clinton. Divided into seven segments (each of which are downloadable for $1.99 charge), the women discuss how Clinton's advances were (apparently) criminal and how his infidelity made their lives difficult.

I've purchased and watched a segment for you, dearest reader, as I know you're just as curious as I am about the content of "Two Chicks Chatting." They discuss in vivid detail Clinton's lovemaking style and skills and assess the quality of his penis in its three modes: erect, semi-erect, and flaccid. Paula repeatedly demonstrates the size of Clinton's manhood using her pinky finger, and debates with Gennifer for some minutes whether or not the penis is "bent." Paula argues that perhaps it appeared bent to her because Clinton was semi-erect. Because the penis was not bent when she had relations with Bill, Gennifer speculates that Hillary "bonked him on the pee-pee" for his infidelities, and that's why it's bent.

Aside from its obvious adolescent appeal, the event of this video is fascinating because of the way it represents what I'll term "the new publicity" or "postmodern publicity" in respect to the symbolic phallus. By "new publicity"---or should that be "pube-icity?"---I mean to capture the way in which the most intimate and private thing is self-publicized for recognition and/or monetary gain. The new publicity really began with the Pam Anderson/Tommy Lee sex tape scandal, and then was set firmly in place by the Paris Hilton sex tape. The former was an accident, but the latter was not, and once we begin thinking about someone deliberately publicizing what is presumably the most private of affairs, we must admit that "public affairs" has taken on a new meaning in our times. The implosion of public/private represented by YouTube.com and other modes of self-publicization is about intimacy and public presentation, or rather, a new, strange mode of anonymous intimacy. Anonymous intimacy is not restricted to sexual situations (or strictly sexual situations, I should say), but is also observable with, say, these "cutting" videos on YouTube.com, or online communities in which self-mutilators share stories about their inner pain (and attempts to inscribe the "law-of-the-father," as it were).

I say that cutting videos and the leaked sex tape are both examples of the anonymous intimacy of the new publicity because they both concern the "symbolic phallus." Let me explain.

In early life the conditions of intimacy are established over a love object. Freud said this was the penis, of course, which represents something that the mother presumably wants. Rereading Freud, however, Lacan argues that the biological penis ("real phallus") is really inconsequential. What matters, Lacan says, is that there is an object of focus---some thing---that we believe our primary parent wants and we try to be this thing, or become it. The infantile way of thinking is, "if I can become the thing mommy wants, then she will recognize me, love me." Lacan calls this thing the "imaginary phallus." Later in life when we understand sexual difference we can mistake the real phallus for the imaginary object, but, of course, that's a mistake.

Whence the "symbolic phallus?" Well, we can think about Lacan's retelling of the Oedipus complex: in the beginning there was mommy/child, then there was mommy/child/imaginary phallus. Or three objects, if you will. Now, when the child is old enough to start to understand identity, she realizes there is a "fourth term"---daddy. That is, the child realizes there are other objects to love besides mommy, and that mommy's recognition of others means the dyadic deal is not sealed. Alternately, the new parent says, "no, you can't has teh phallus!" The second parent prevents the child from identifying with the imaginary phallus, the presumed object that will get mommy's love.

This realization becomes, as it were, the moment of "castration," when we have to give up this quest and accept our fate: there is language, the world of "no," the law of void, the reality of having-not. The symbolic phallus "is not a fantasy," says Lacan, "nor is it as such an object . . . . It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes." Lacan says that "the phallus is a signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified." So what does that mean? In one sense, it means the signifier has an agency of its own and that it works on us; we do not control the symbolic. In another sense, it means that the symbolic phallus is the signifier for that which is desire, or to put it in a Cartesian way, the signifier for desiring as such: desiring exists. And for desire to exist, you cannot have its object (otherwise desire would cease). So the symbolic phallus represents castration in the sense that once we become linguistic creatures we have to "give up" something that we haven't and will never have. This is why the symbolic phallus is "the signifier which does not have a signified."

Now, why did I go into these distinctions between the penis, the imaginary phallus, and the symbolic phallus for discussing anonymous intimacy? Because I think at some level the "new publicity" is goaded by a kind of infantile desire to become new subjects, to invite castration again (or rather, as in the case of cutters, to finish the job). Although "Two Chicks Chatting" is ostensibly siliceous and akin to a kind of Penthouse letter, is the video really about the real phallus? Is the topic of "the presidential penis" really about Bill's dick? No, of course not. It's about the symbolic and the agency of the symbolic, about reminding Clinton that he does not have the phallus even though he thought or thinks that he does.

Obsessive neurotics are individuals who believe they can be or get to the unfettered autonomy represented by the signifier without a signified; if anything Primary Colors was demonstrative of Bill Clinton's obsessions. Laughing about Clinton's diminished prowess is one way "castrate" Clinton, of course. What's even more interesting about "Two Women Chatting," however, is the segment dedicated to Hillary's run for office. Will Hillary make a good president? No, says Paula, "she's let her husband womanize all these women." Flowers follows, "she's an enabler." Both women characterize Hillary as if she is Bill, just another obsessive neurotic.

As interesting as the table-turning (and profit-making) "Two Chicks Talking" represents vis-à-vis the phallus, however, there is still the issue of disclosure, the anonymous intimacy of publicizing private details, and this is a characteristic the video shares with teenage cutter exhibitionists. With cutters, it's easy to see the process as a kind of writing on the body, a way to somehow bring the signifier into the self, a sort-of self-castration. Hence one might speculate that cutting is often a recourse to individuals---especially young people---who are in single parent households (my own therapist disagrees with me here based on her experience, but I think she takes the "absent father" reasoning too literally). Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers prurient publicity stunt is obviously different: here we see an attempt to negate the symbolic phallus, which is impossible. The more they poke fun of the real phallus, the more they demonstrate the elusive power of the signifier of desire as such: the more they laugh, the more they enjoy.

What's the upshot, so to speak? I'm not quite sure yet. I'm not quite certain what to make of this Jones and Flowers dialogue except that it represents a new era of profitable publicity---and in particular, an era in which media technologies have made it possible for us to explicitly confront a looming crisis of masculinity. I don't mean the "crisis of masculinity" ballyhooed about for the past decade, the threat of the metrosexual, and that sort of thing. I mean the crisis that results when nothing is off-limits, when everything is permissible, when there truly is nothing sacred---when there's no one to spank and scold. I mean, in other words, the crisis of daddies, "father trouble." In other words: is an assault on sovereignty at issue here? Are the forces of production central to postmodern capitalism truly eroding the keeper of the Grand No! and is this new anonymous intimacy the result? The very idea of the "presidential penis" somehow bespeaks the impotency of the Office of the President in our times of postmodern publicity. I'll keep thinking . . . and when I figure it out, I must write an essay titled "The Presidential Penis" and submit it to Presidential Studies Quarterly.