ABSTRACT
Sex scandals in the mass media are often analysed for the moral lessons they impart, with emphasis given to the listening and/or reading public of the importance of sustaining normative sexuality and other behaviours. But arguably not all sex
scandals have moral lessons, and even if they do, sex scandals differ in content, form and direction according to the gender, age and status of the individual, of the presumed audience and the cultural context in which events take place. In comparing the encounters of three men with prostitutes – televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, actor Hugh Grant and presidential advisor Dick Morris – Gamson (2001) illustrates how each ‘story’ produces a different moral lesson as a consequence of the office of the man involved. So Swaggart is revealed, through the inconsistency of his preaching and personal action, to be a hypocrite; Grant – consistent with his cultivated public persona and typecast characters – emerges simply as reckless; Morris – because he is a politician – is shown to be amoral and disloyal. The institutional context, and the moral constructs that inform them, shape the telling of the scandal and the lesson to be learnt. Because of their public access to wealth, and their exercise of power and privilege over other humans and other resources, senior politicians (including heads of state) surrender much privacy and control over their bodies. They are always under surveillance in open state systems because the rest of us are subject to them (they make and/or exercise the laws) and at the same time, we support them electorally and/or fiscally. Out of office, they reclaim privacy and so their individual bodies and their uses. Salacity sells only when there are political reasons for and advantages in gossip and scandal. Recent media scandals provide examples of this. Sexual scandals are not new, of course. Many scandals of the past 50 years or so have still to sediment as mere footnotes of twentieth-century history, not because of the details of the sex, but because they provided leverage for political action and sometimes constitutional crisis. Before The Second World War, the most obvious UK example is the abdication of King Edward VII to marry twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson. The UK also provides the best example of sex scandal from the Cold War, when tensions between ‘the west’ and the Soviet Union were at a height. In this case, the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, had a brief affair with showgirl Christine Keeler. She had also, it transpired, had an affair with a senior naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy, and while the tabloid press made much of the sex and her personal style, the central issues were lies, state secrets and political vulnerability. US President Bill Clinton’s famous statements that he did not have ‘sexual relations’ with Monica Lewinsky, at a White House Press Conference and in his deposition in Paula Jones’ civil lawsuit against him (for sexual harassment), echoed earlier reactions by politicians when exposed for impropriety by the media. Although the tawdry details of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair are still part of public memory as well as wiki commentary and archived court files, in the end the media reports faded out. There were many reasons for this, not necessarily because of the actions themselves, but because of general embarrassment of the mundane details, and the fact that, in describing such acts, the corporeal and sexualised body of the man dominated and so undermined the office. More recent examples of scandal do not simply reiterate the ways in which sex is used to destabilise political power. Rather, they test the boundaries of social justice, sexism and heterosexism. To illustrate this, in this chapter I discuss two cases, both from the global south – namely those of Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia and Jacob Zuma in South Africa. In both cases, sex is the entry point to questions of power and its misuse.
