Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, is running for president. Kamala Harris, the Democratic senator from California, is too. Booker is African-American, Harris is the daughter of a Tamil Indian mother and a Jamaican father. Those are not likely to be issues, but here’s what’s suddenly becoming an issue in their bids to become president — their love life. Booker, 49, is unmarried, and has never been married, and Harris, 51, who is married and stepmom to her husband’s two children, once dated former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in the 1990s, who was estranged from his wife at the time, and is being talked about with the tired troupe of a woman “sleeping her way to the top.”
And now the conversation about them is less about their policies and what kind of president they might be, and more about their romantic-sexual lives.
Meanwhile, we have a president in office who has paid off two women he slept with while married to the mother of his youngest child, and who openly cheated on his first wife with wife No. 2, who declared on the cover of the New York Post that he was “the best sex I’ve ever had” while his three children with his first wife were age 12 and younger. Trump has had five children with three women.
But, I have no problem with this — divorce and remarriage happens. Affairs happen, and they happen to presidents — from Washington to Jefferson to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Clinton to, well, let’s just say a lot.
Yet somehow that seems to be acceptable — preferable? — to someone who is not married. As long as the president is married (and, since our presidents have always been men, perhaps we can read something more into that), all is good. Marriage “tames” a man, keeps him from committing crimes (wait, what?), keeps him honest (wait, what?). Well, obviously not *all* men.
Still, this confuses me. Does it confuse you?
Single people under fire
What I have a problem with is how, in 2019, we are still questioning the romantic choices of single people. We keep wanting to shove people into a one-size-fits-all narrow amatonormative box — you need to be married and you need to have kids (well, we did have five presidents who didn’t have biological kids, but that was a long time ago).
No one knows that better than poor Jennifer Aniston, who is evidently pregnant yet again, presumably with former hubby Brad Pitt.
And now we’re going to be inundated with “everything we know” stories about whom Booker is dating (he says he has a “boo“) and whether she’s “worthy” — you know, not just beautiful but smart, passionate, talented …
As for Harris, well, we don’t really know if the former attorney general of California and former district attorney of San Francisco would have gotten to where she is without Brown’s help all those years ago. I mean, can smart, ambitious women actually achieve things on their own without a man’s help?
I dunno …
As Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post:
Plenty of us have, after all, spent an awful lot of time discussing Bill Clinton’s willie and Anthony Weiner’s wiener: it’s not that we don’t talk about the sexual predilections of male candidates. But we do talk about them in a different way. We talk about men abusing power. We talk about women not even deserving power. The distinction matters, because the conversation isn’t really about sex, it’s about legitimacy. It’s about who we think has earned the right to be successful, and what criteria we’ll invent, and who we’ll apply it to.
Fearing an ‘untamed’ man
Meanwhile, who knows what damage an unmarried man might do in the White House. Without the taming influence of a wife, his power could go unchecked and he could put our country into bad situations.
Oh, wait …
That people are talking about Booker’s single status means we haven’t fully embraced the single lifestyle or trust people who don’t feel compelled to wed despite the fact that we’re 45 percent of the American population. Unmarried men are seen as commitaphobes and players (Remember how people talked about George Clooney until Amal Alamuddin came along?) or losers living in mom’s basement. How about this — maybe they just want to be single? Not that this is scientific, but in a well-read blog, dating coach Evan Marc Katz (with whom I sometimes disagree) writes that men enjoy being single more than women because “We can separate sex and love, we define ourselves by our work, we don’t lack dating options, we get 95% of our needs met without female companionship, and we don’t talk about relationships nearly as much.”
But can they run a country without us?
I like Booker and Harris. I want to hear what they’re going to be talking about as the presidential race moves along, what they stand for, what policies they want to promote. What I don’t want to hear about is their romantic and sexual dating life — current or past — unless there are some legit #MeToo moments.
Because if grabbing pussies of women other than your wife when you’re married doesn’t stop you from making it to the White House, then consensually enjoying pussies when you’re unmarried shouldn’t stop you either.
Want to know how to individualize your partnership? (Of course you do!) Read The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press). You can support your local indie bookstore or order it on Amazon.
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