There are forces at work in the world that are bigger than you or me. They are bigger than any of the little people like you and me, bigger than any of the big, powerful movers and shakers, bigger (even) than all the movers and shakers combined.

History is one such force. Nature is another, death a third. And sex -- that primal force encoded into every cell of our bodies -- is a fourth monumental, primal force that -- like history, nature, and death -- cannot be brought to heel by the dictates and preachings of mere humans. All in all, it doesn't matter whether you like it or not, whether Bill Clinton or Ken Starr like it or not, whether I like it or not -- that's just the way it is.

Now, Ken Starr has made it very clear that he doesn't like the uncontrollable nature of sex one bit. He doesn't like at all that sexual desire causes people to behave in ways that he and his Bible don't approve of. Of course he speaks for a fair number of people when he takes that position.

I think that people like Ken Starr and Tom DeLay, egomania aside, truly believe that anyone who organizes their life in opposition to (their) God is going to be in deep trouble, both in this life and in what they presume will be the next. Of course, their God is one that's doesn't exactly relate to the sexual life force as a playful but lovable coyote that likes to stick pins in overblown moralities and complicate issues about what the Good Life is really all about. So Ken and Tom treat sex as something pretty damned close to the devil -- which is to say something you have to be on guard against most every moment lest it take you over and leave you roasting in the fires of your own private Idaho.

Bill Clinton is another story again, and there's something about this particular difference between Bill, Ken, and Tom that helps explain why the latter two have lost touch with reality and the American people and seem willing to destroy the Republican Party for all time if that's what it takes to exorcise Slippery Bill from the White House. To be sure, there are more than a few ways that Clinton is disturbingly similar to Starr and DeLay, and Clinton would certainly be the last person on earth to define himself as some kind of sex radical. But I daresay that the President has spent his adult life in pretty much of a friendly relationship with the length and breadth of his various sexual desires. I think he's friendly to his sexuality, even when those desires fall outside the neat and tidy rules of "proper" behavior that irrepressible Eros loves to violate. And there's something about that basic attitude of Clinton's -- maybe it's a generational thing -- that got the Ken Starrs and the Newt Gingriches and the Tom DeLays in severe snits long before anyone knew Monica Lewinsky from Marilyn Monroe.

However apologetic Bill Clinton may be about specific sexual behaviors when it is politic for him to do so, he is nonetheless an unapologetically sexual man, the first such in the White House since John Kennedy. Indeed, part of Clinton's appeal, especially among younger people and women of all ages (who admit in large numbers to sexual fantasies about President Bill that would be unimaginable with George Bush or Richard Nixon), has been that he's a sexy sort of guy. Word is that the man gives good hugs, gives good head and, for at least one period of his life, liked his women two at a time. So I'm betting that, at least up until this past year, Clinton has been the sort of person who appreciates the primal power of sexual feeling and desire, someone who has embraced sex as a fundamentally positive force.

As for me, I unambiguously glory in the knowledge that sex is in many ways an undeniable force, and that it keeps on cropping up in ways and at times that surprise everyone. Fortunately, I'm not very vulnerable to people who may think my sexual views improper, so (unlike Clinton) I can speak out pretty directly about how I feel and who I am. Basically, the way the Ken Starrs of this world feel about (their) God is very much how I feel about sex: If you organize your life in opposition to it, you're going to be in deep trouble -- deeply miserable yourself and therefore seriously toxic to the people around you.

As I see it, organizing your life in basic opposition to sexual desire, or without acknowledging the awkward reality of how that desire works (in contrast to the ways we are constantly being taught sexual desire should work), is like organizing your life in opposition to any other fundamental law of nature -- like gravity. What could be more foolish and self-destructive? ("Honey, I just walked out of the second story window and damn if I didn't get smashed by the ground again! Can you believe it??!! I don't understand why this keeps happening.")

Of course, sexual desire and practice can and must be regulated by social codes, but those social codes must fundamentally acknowledge and honor the way sexuality works. A social system, like the one we all suffer under, that tries to repress sexual desire in unnatural ways -- ways that contradict the nature of the desire itself -- the main result is not ethical behavior, but rampant hypocrisy.

Sex will have its way with us, one way or another, whether we like it or not. It's simply that big. The real question up for discussion is how to work with the sexual force to give it expression in ways that make people happy, protect people from emotional damage, and minimize how much people lie and feel guilty about who they are and what they do -- to their mates, to their friends, and to themselves. One of the greatest casualties of antisexual morality that dishonors sexual desire is that it deprives people of the opportunity to be truthful about who they are as sexual people, and to therefore to be sexually whole.

According to The Janus Report, two-thirds of American married men and one-third of American married women have had extramarital sex. Given that the people interviewed still have a lot of living to do, that means that the great majority of married Americans will have some kind of extramarital sex before they die. Statistically speaking, extramarital affairs are the American norm. Yet, except for a very few couples, all this extramarital sex takes place under dark clouds of secrecy, deception, guilt, and betrayal -- all of which (unlike sex) are inevitable killers of intimacy, joy, and soul. If extramarital affairs are in fact wreaking havoc on the institution of marriage in America, it may well be that the damage comes more from the guilt and deception than from the sex itself.

I happen to believe strongly in the importance of telling the truth, and particularly about telling the truth about sex. I believe this, however, from a practical rather than a moral perspective -- another point in the road where Ken Starr and I part company. I don't think that lying makes someone a morally stained individual who needs to be cleansed, punished, or publicly humiliated by society. I do think that lying, much more importantly, by its nature destroys both the relational integrity of people intimately involved with each other, and the emotional integrity of the individuals who distort the truth. The real problem with lying is that it requires a kind of emotional distance and dual reality that make it all but impossible to offer oneself to a loving partner in a vulnerable, unguarded, unprotected way -- the basis of real intimacy.

That said, I also believe that lying is inevitable, often understandable, and not always the wrong thing to do. To start with, no human being is ever entirely honest -- neither with him/herself nor with his/her loved ones, friends, and acquaintances. Telling the truth is always a relative matter, no matter how the Commandments are interpreted or how worked up sanctimonious types on Capitol Hill get about President Bill. No matter how skilled we get at taking our real selves out from under protective wraps, we are always prettying up the picture to some extent -- excluding or retouching aspects of ourselves that we just can't bear to see directly, let alone expose to others. And that is especially true of our sexual selves, given the profound ways we have all been taught to drape sex with shame and guilt.

When I hear of someone lying about sex -- lying, say, to their spouse about an extramarital encounter or affair -- I don't think of it as some kind of personal character failure. I see, rather, the inevitable consequence of the way our general unwillingness to look sex in the eye puts people in impossible sexual double binds. Ironically, given the degree of sexual confusion, insecurity, and misrepresentation we all have internalized, telling the truth about sexual matters often becomes an act of cruelty, rather than one of kindness.

John and Mary have been married for ten years, or twenty. They love each other very deeply, love the life they have built together. They have a couple of kids whom they also love and would never want to hurt. At the same time, their sexual connection is not what it used to be, or maybe sexual connection was never the core of their relationship. Maybe they're good at talking about these kinds of things with each other; maybe they don't feel comfortable talking about them at all. Maybe they're really unhappy sexually; maybe they're not so miserable, just a little glazed and world-weary.

For most real live American families, there will be some point at which John or Mary has a sexual connection with someone else. Let's say it's Mary, just to keep the pronouns straight. Maybe she experiences something wonderful that she hasn't experienced in a long time, if ever, something important enough to her that she's not ready for it to end just yet. Maybe she remembers how important good sex is to her, despite her efforts to convince herself that her mediocre sex with John was no big deal. Maybe she remembers how good it feels to be sexually alive and desirable. For whatever reason, she comes away from her forbidden experience nurtured, reinvigorated, and -- in our culture -- deeply conflicted and guilt-ridden about what to tell, or not tell, John.

If she decides not to tell John what's going on, is she being hateful for deceiving him, or loving for protecting him from a truth that will be extremely painful for him to hear? Will it help her marriage, her husband, or her children, to be truthful about what she feels, or will it only cause everyone more pain? If she tells John the truth, just how vivid should she be in describing her sexual experiences, or the good feeling she gets from them? Would telling John the truth mean that her affair would have to end? Would it be good for Mary, or for John, to have it end? What would it be like for the affair to continue, with John knowing what was going on, and when?

How many husbands and wives really want to know the truth about what is going on with their spouses sexually when that truth will severely challenge their own feelings of inadequacy and self-worth? How many could respond with appreciation and understanding to being told painful sexual truths, rather than being consumed by hurt and blame?

Given the way we've got things structured, Mary really doesn't have any good alternatives, so she must choose the lesser of some very substantial evils. Unless couples want to take on the substantial work of confronting extremely difficult issues and feelings, the lesser of those evils may well involve some secrecy and deception. Are the Marys of the world to blame for this unhappy situation? Are the Johns? I don't think so. I think the primary blame needs to be put squarely on the system of shame and dishonesty as it relates to sexual desire. If, under our moral code, most people are turning out to be sinners, maybe it's our notion of sin that's gone astray.

At this point in my own life, I deeply believe that it's the truth that sets both me and my partner free to be the best of ourselves, and to be the happiest that we can be together. But I don't forget for a minute how painful sexual honesty can be, and I'm neither surprised nor disdainful when most American families choose some version of "don't ask, don't tell" instead.

These are the dilemmas and complexities that lie barely under the surface, yet are only slightly alluded to in the media, while the drama of sex and betrayal in the White House plays itself out vicariously for all of us in the way that only the lives of movie stars used to do. (Wasn't it Jerry Garcia who said that after Ronald Reagan all Presidents would have to be movie stars? I wonder if this was what he had in mind.) Fifty million Johns and Marys have been sitting in their living rooms, month after month, watching a President get caught in an affair and discussing what he does about it. You can bet they're thinking about the times they themselves have been caught in secret affairs, or caught their spouses, or about the affairs they've had that have never come to light, or the affairs they're afraid the other person might be having right now. Bet it's made for some pretty awkward dinner conversation. Is it any wonder that people just want this particular aspect of the evening news to go away?

More pointedly, the very same thing is true -- only in higher percentages -- for the 535 Senators and Congressmen and their 535 spouses, which is where Larry Flynt (bless his tortured soul) comes in. Now, Larry Flynt is not my basic idea of a social hero. The racism and misogyny in Hustler, just for starters, is simply horrendous. But I have always admired Flynt's outrage at sexual hypocrisy, and his commitment to exposing it wherever he can -- a commitment that, among other things, has stuck him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

"Desperate times require desperate measures," says Larry, promising to rain hellfire and damnation right here on Earth by exposing the secret sexual lives of the Capitol Hill Gang "until someone raises the white flag." As I'm writing this, he says he's got ten people -- one Senator, eight Congressmen, and one "high-ranking official of a Republican organization" -- that he's ready to out, based on credible, researched information from their various amours. You'd better believe he's got about 525 out of 535 elected officials and their spouses sleeping quite uneasily every night, and thinking a whole lot more seriously than they did before that they, too, would like to see this whole issue go away. Of course, these are the people who have the power to accomplish just that.

Sexual McCarthyism, some call it. But being an adulterer in 1999 is not the same as being a Communist in the 1950s. It was never the case that half the adults in America were Communists, but it is the case that half the adults in America are now (or ever have been) involved in extramarital affairs. It's quite possible now, as it was definitely not possible then, to simply say to one's discoverer, "Yes, it's all true. So what?" and have life go on relatively undisturbed.

There's a wonderful, if somewhat overblown, scene at the end of the movie Dangerous Beauty that came to mind when I first heard about Larry Flynt's crusade. In it, Veronica Franco, the most famous and cultured of Venetian courtesans in 1583, is on trial for her life, under the gun of the Inquisition. Rather than see her killed, first one, then two, then dozens of her clients among Venice's elite -- legislators, prominent businessmen, even a cleric -- steps forward to announce -- all with a good deal of embarrassment -- that he has enjoyed her favors. The agent of the Inquisition, unable to collectively condemn all these good and noble men, is undone and Veronica is saved. (All of this actually happened, by the way.)

If all were right with the world, this is what we'd witness over the next few weeks -- so many Senators and Congressmen holding press conferences to announce their sexual meanderings before Larry Flynt did it for them that the whole nation could relax and have a good laugh at how silly everyone's been being about extramarital affairs all this time. All at once, we'd grow up as a culture -- catch up to, say, the French, whose politicians are able to engage in sexual affairs without ever worrying that their careers will end if they are discovered, and who laugh every day at how immature les Américains are about these things. More importantly, we would relieve some fifty million American adulterers of the burden of guilt and shame, which would probably do more for the national emotional landscape than peace in the Middle East.

Well, to come down to earth, we're probably not at that moment of collective epiphany just yet, but we do seem to be edging closer to some sort of attitude realignment about this particular sexual issue. If the American people can remember this particular national embarrassment long enough to punish the Republican Party in the 2000 elections, we may yet come to bless 1998 as the year in which American sexual politics took something of a Great Leap Forward.