As this country obsesses over the nuances of Presidential adultery, blow jobs, and lies to the Grand Jury about blow jobs, too many of us have forgotten the more important aspects to this "just sex" scandal: The President is possibly guilty not only of the sexual exploitation of a 21-year-old intern, but also of sexual assault against two (and perhaps many more) women.

The media and the political right have certainly forgotten about this. Though just months ago they feigned unending concern about the assault and harassment claims made by Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, they have now abandoned the issue. They no longer need it for their power plays against the President. The political right now openly demonstrates how much it ever cared about the accusations themselves and the women who made them: Not at all.

Unfortunately, the left--progressives, liberals, and the many others grouped together by a social compassion and concern for human rights--doesn't seem to care, either. And this is why the right will very likely win the battle to impeach the President and thus further its own agenda. The left, which has opposed President Clinton on so many issues, has decided this one issue doesn't matter. Let's get back to the real issues concerning this country, the left says. Let's stop talking about sex.

But sex matters, and everyone knows it does. Sex, public discussions about sex, and private sexual behavior made public, matters to everyone, including to those on the left--not merely because it titillates and distracts, but because sex is one of the most fundamental and illegitimate ways that power and identity are organized and acted upon in this male supremacist culture. When peoples gender-based power (or powerlessness), identity, relationships, and place in society are exposed and called into question, people care. But so far, thanks to both the right and the left, few seem to care in a way that leads to positive change.

Sex, as it is organized in this society, is the most common way in which human rights violations, injustice, and inequality are acted out. Acts of sexual injustice continue to be protected by the right as moral, and by the left as personal freedom. This difference creates a superficial political opposition over a fundamental agreement.

Both the right and the left have taken an active role in protecting traditional sexuality. The right attempts to undo the gains of feminism by reasserting the patriarchal family structure and, at the same time, taking every action possible to disempower females. The right, which has met with enormous success under the Clinton administration, presents its agenda with a moral face, and a promise a safety and dignity to women who cooperate with the oppression. It has met with such astounding success this past decade in large part because the left does not present a truly moral alternative.

While the left has largely accepted gender equality in principle, it is just as reluctant as the right in giving up organized male supremacist sexuality. The left has responded to feminism's success and the breakdown of the patriarchal family not by trying to reassert the traditional family, but by actively defending as freedom, or dismissing as unimportant, its substitute: Mens intensified sexual aggression against girls and women via pornography, libertine television and movies, prostitution, private sexual assault, and a culture that imposes sexual demands on girls at a younger and younger age.

There is no moral face on this new assertion of male supremacist sexuality other than, "They like it," or, "It's not a real issue," or, "It's about personal freedom and choice." There is minimal pretense of decency, and almost no promise of safety or dignity for its targets.

So whenever sex is made a public issue--as was the case was during the welfare reform debate (family values), and now again through the Presidential sex scandals--the right always wins, because the male supremacist right has effective tools of moral propaganda, and the male supremacist left does not. The right then uses the issue of sex to slip through its other reactionary policies as riders. They are not stupid. After all, the left can present genuinely moral responses when it comes to the other "more important" issues. But when it comes to sex, the left sneers, stammers, and goes blank.

Because the left's agenda is by and large about justice, equality, and human rights, the only way the left will ever be effective against the right's moral pretenses and strategies is to give up its own pretense altogether, specifically its hypocrisy, and begin to apply its human rights principles to sexuality--to mundane, socially organized sexual interaction--and then place this concern as high on the agenda as any other issue, such as militarism, corporate corruption, imperialism, environmental destruction, etc.

Let's consider a scenario. What if leftists did care about the President's behavior toward women? What if we applied our stated belief in privacy to the former intern's personal background instead of the President's exploitation? What if we made some connections between this issue and that issue--for instance, between the President's alleged sexual assaults and his willingness to bomb innocent civilians of a third world country?

If the President's exploitative and possibly criminal behavior toward women mattered to the left, things might look very different these days. Ken Starr's politically motivated inquisition might have been modified and even redirected by our demands for a responsible investigation and a more practical and structural response. We might have (and still could), for instance, demand that women assaulted or harassed by powerful politicians have some recourse short of having to file a sexual harassment suit or criminal charges (neither of which are real options since doing so only leads to the destruction of the women's reputations). Such an alternative system could be oriented toward stopping problems, rather than offering the public accounts of abuse for political football.

Leftists, rather than accepting the right's premise that this issue is about extra-marital sex and lying about it, could articulate the important distinctions between consensual sex based on empowered decision-making (ex. Gennifer Flowers), the grey area of consensual sex but not necessarily empowered consent (Monica Lewinsky), and criminal sexual assault (Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and possibly many, many others). Leftists, by making these distinctions, could have objected to the media's mind-numbing presentation of lurid irrelevancies, not by complaining that the issue itself is irrelevant, but by insisting that the media respectfully address what is important about the issue.

Finally, if leftists had genuinely cared about the women allegedly abused and exploited by President Clinton, it is possible that Clinton would not have bombed Sudan and Afghanistan as a diversion to his "inappropriate relationship" confession. If there had been from the beginning a response of genuine concern about human life (the individual women's lives), Clinton wouldn't have assumed he could get away with blasting away the lives of many more individuals on the other side of the world.

If the left is ever going to start winning its battles against the right, it will have to realize there is no room for moral inconsistency. We can't successfully fight for ethical foreign and domestic policy while protecting unethical sex, no matter how hard we try to bury the issue as private and unimportant.

It is a law of nature: A truly ethical agenda ultimately has unstoppable power. A partially ethical agenda, full of holes and discrepancies, can only flounder and sink.

--Adriene Sere is starting up a feminist publication for the Seattle area. Visionary and talented feminists who want to participate are invited to contact her at bm317@scn.org.