The Last Yankee

Mark Foley's one-handed defense of America's real pastime

Tim Cavanaugh | October 4, 2006

Institutional sex scandals come in only one package these days. The downfall of former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) has become a gift that keeps on giving, but in its broad outlines it isn't much different than the sexual abuse accusations that rocked the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in 2002. In both cases a media organization turned up a story that had been kept quiet by authorities: In the case of the Catholic Church, The Boston Globe provided the most voluminous documentation on a story that had been simmering for decades; in the case of the Congress, ABC News broke a story that Florida papers had apparently been sitting on. In each case defenders of the organization were quick to savage the media outlet in question. Neither case contains as much sex as initially advertised: Cases of actual pedophilia in the Catholic Church were rare, and instances of pederasty (that is, incidents involving adolescents rather than pre-adolescents) somewhat more common; as Kerry Howley noted yesterday, "the Mark Foley pedophilia sex scandal lacks two things: pedophilia and sex."

For different reasons, opponents of and apologists for both the Church and the Republican leadership found it convenient to accentuate the sexual aspects of the respective cases. For opponents the motivation was obvious: Both organizations trade in the regulation of human desire and are not shy about promoting their own virtues, and the scandals revealed pitch-perfect hypocrisy. But the apologists have a more complex goal: The kid-happy Republicans who are falling over themselves to denounce Foley's "obscene," "abhorrent" and "sick" antics (it's disappointing that Rep. John Shimkus, the Illinois Republican who chairs the House Page Board, hasn't yet made the two-fingered gagging gesture in any of his news conferences, but there will be plenty of time for that) are engaged in the same game as Catholic apologists who scrupulously counted each instance of improper touching a few years ago. Maximizing the questionable sexual behavior minimizes the obvious failures of management that constitute the real scandal.

This is a tried and true formula: First mischaracterize the nature of the scandal, then defend the mischaracterization. So far, however, it has proved fruitless. Mark Foley's attempt to blame the whole thing on a never-previously-hinted drinking problem is a strategy for which the number of sellers (one) is far greater than the number of buyers (zero). The House leadership may do slightly better, provided the amount of energy left in the scandal is smaller than the amount of doubletalk left in House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).

Keeping the focus on Foley's pathetic attempts at sex also point up the story's most visionary element: the normalization of masturbation as the true national pastime. With the possible exception of some enchanted evening in San Diego, Foley's lawyer claims that the congressman conducted his affair with a House page entirely in the virtual realm. Hard as that is to believe, it dovetails with ABC's Brian Ross' decision to call one of Foley's trysts "internet sex." This is an odd term, like "phone sex," that gussies up an ancient practice with a fancier or more salacious name. It's not sex at all: It's masturbation. Whatever her failings as a U.S. Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders never had to resort to such euphemisms or blue-phemisms.

Foley was not shy about his preference for manual stimulation, even the form of two-man solitaire that frequently surfaces in the sexual explorations of youngsters (and legislators whose mid-life crises involve full-blown adolescent regression). "[D]id any girl give you a haand job this weekend," he asks his prospective boyfriend at one stage. When the boy replies that he's now single (and, tantalizingly, available), Foley asks the obvious followup: "[D]id you spank it this weekend yourself." And to the boy's reply that he is too tired, Foley gives what will undoubtedly become the capstone of his career: "[I] am never to busy haha." (All quotes are direct and uncorrected.)

There's an element of bragging in that last line, a close cousin to the kind of porn spams that promise "You'll be able to yank it like a pro." This is something new, and it's to the left-handed credit of Foley that he's at the forefront of it. Masturbation used to be vaguely shameful. Long after autostimulation was no longer regarded as sinful or unhealthy or a cause of blindness or hairy palms, it was still looked on as something of a failure, evidence that you were unqualified for sex with another adult human. For Foley, masturbation is not only a practice without shame, but a matter of great fascination, as this not-safe-for-work exchange will demonstrate: