So much for American values

The Clinton sex scandal reveals very clearly the centrality of family values in American public discourses. What constitutes these family values? In America the exaggerated anxiety about upholding the structure of the family contradicts the American slant towrads a free market, competitive economy.

For, the tilt towards privatisation and corporatisation dehumanises human labour with disastrous consequences for family and other social relationships. Women, of course, are at the receiving end, seeking solace in spirituality, meditation or, like the First Lady, dropping their careers and being proud of their sexually debauched husbands even if they publicly admit to have “sinned”. Thus the upholding of “family values” in America is in effect a weapon to subordinate women to the patriarchalpolitical culture which is entirely at the mercy of the market forces. It is then no surprise that it is one of the most popular slogans in that country.

American family values are to be upheld by women alone! In the Clinton scandal also the wife was to play the key role in stabilising the rocking ship of family values. All eyes were fixed on Hillary Clinton. And true to the American woman, she played her role very well. The public gaze was on her and the moment she declared that she was still “proud” of her husband, the family was seen to be intact and the Clinton popularity graph began its upward journey. The example set by the First Lady, a lawyer and a feminist, should make women all over the world hang their heads in shame. One would have been impressed if she had declared that theirs was an open-ended marriage (which by all accounts it appears to be) with space for extramarital liaisons.

But that streak of radicalism in the “permissive” and “ultra-modern” American society would have both herand her husband’s popularity rating plummet. So even as Clinton publicly declares that his extramarital fling amounts to “sin”, she professes her “pride” in her sinner husband.

The irony of fate is that it is from these stifled societies that the eastern world has to hear endless sermons about the need to free women from the bondage of tradition and religion that reduces them to boring pativratas (husband-worshipers). It requires no imagination to figure out the stereotypes of eastern cultures and their women folk that would have been churned out by the western media if a Clinton-like sex scandal was to take place in Asia. One doubts if any Indian wife would have degraded herself to the level of Hillary Clinton. But if God forbid she did, it would have been promptly attributed to the innate cultural backwardness of the eastern societies. In the end, the main hero of the scandal, Clinton, may have emerged clean and correct but the American culture surely stands exposed.

The writer is a Reader inHistory at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi