Dangerous Liaisons

Why would a bright young woman like Chandra Levy fall for a married man more than twice her age? Over the past several weeks, commentators have offered a range of wrong-headed answers. Next to nothing is known about Levy’s alleged affair with Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres), and nothing at all is known about whether it had anything to do with her disappearance. But an absence of facts has not deterred the commentators from laying blame.

Some blame Washington, a place columnist Andrew Sullivan dubbed an “anonymous entrapment zone.” Ignoring the fact that only a small percentage of the 30,000-plus female interns in Washington this year will ever have so much as a conversation with a member of Congress, Sullivan posits that young women are almost invariably “bowled over by a power differential that is hard to resist.” Few are “in any real position to say no to a persistent older charmer,” Sullivan wrote in the New York Times.

In reality, of course, not only are most young women perfectly capable of spurning an aging philanderer, they can report him to law enforcement. The Congressional Accountability Act prohibits harassment by legislators and other congressional employees.

Legal protections against sexual harassment in the workplace are among the benefits bequeathed to this generation of young women by feminist forebears who campaigned for their passage. It is more than a little ironic, therefore, that some commentators actually blame feminists for young women’s misbegotten affairs.

The illogic goes like this: Because feminists believe that women should be free to govern their own sex lives, they set up their younger sisters and daughters to have immoral, self-destructive relationships. Or as anti-feminist author Danielle Crittenden put it when asked about Levy and Condit, thanks to feminism, women “go out and lead the same promiscuous, emotionless sexual life as men.”

In point of fact, respect for oneself and one’s body has been a perpetual theme of feminism since its inception. But that does not prevent columnist Mona Charen from asserting that Levy and others are victims of an ideology that fails to “instill a sense of dignity, honor and self-respect in young women.” Nor does it deter several commentators from pining for a pre-feminist age in which, as columnist Cal Thomas put it, “Women were told to save themselves for marriage and for a commitment from a man who truly loved them and not just their bodies.”

Nor is feminism the only system of principles that pundits have contorted to make their pet points about Levy. Even scientific theories have fallen victim. Stretching an insight from evolutionary biology well beyond what any sensible biologist would, a sociologist told Newsday that young women are “hard-wired” for May-December mating. “Women are attracted to power and status and wealth because it is reproductively advantageous,” Linda J. Waite told Newsday.

Never mind that the vast majority of relationships worldwide are between people who are close in age, status and social standing. In the pseudo-bio view, interns are hapless victims of an inborn drive to make babies with any man who has the wherewithal to support and protect them.

Predictably, other armchair analysts take the opposite view. Rather than nature, they blame society. “We have a very serious societal problem here,” declared Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican congressman, in a television interview. “This is part of the condition we are in now,” author William J. Bennett said solemnly on another show.

That condition, Bennett explained, is an aversion to condemning other people’s behaviors. In the Levy-Condit liaison, Bennett sees proof positive of our collective unwillingness “to pass any judgment about people’s private lives.” If only people still condemned immoral behavior, Bennett suggests, Levy and Condit might have kept their hands off each other.

Other pundits have echoed the theme. Betsy Hart, who appears on CNN and the Fox News Channel, wrote an Op-Ed for the Chicago Sun-Times in which she called for “a willingness to make what today have become those dreaded ‘value judgments.”’

To hear Hart and Bennett, you would think that Americans are not judgmental, when, in fact, surveys and other evidence show we are highly judgmental about many matters, including affairs. In a recent survey, 80% said that adultery is always wrong, about the same percentage who gave that answer in the 1970s.

One need only tune in to talk radio or to television shows hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael, Bill O’Reilly or Chris Matthews to be knocked over the head by the volume of value judgments about people’s behavior. Remove the moral outrage and judgmentalism, and those shows would have lots of dead air.

An obvious irony of the death-of-outrage argument is the condemnation that has been hurled at just about everyone associated with Levy and Condit, from his staff to her family. It was unseemly enough when one pundit after another assailed Chandra Levy’s aunt, Linda Zamsky, for acknowledging that she once encouraged her niece to pursue Condit. (The aunt also says she raised doubts about the relationship.) Even Levy’s devoted father has been held liable.

“It’s an old story: Doctor [professional] daddy spends more time with patients [clients] than he does with his little girl, who takes up with a father figure.” So wrote E.J. Kessler, deputy managing editor of the Forward, a Jewish weekly, apparently oblivious to the high level of concern and affection that Robert Levy, a physician, has exhibited in numerous television appearances since his daughter’s disappearance. According to reporters who have spoken with them, people who know the family describe Dr. Levy as a caring father.

Not that it would matter to pundits, mind you. Commentators have already implicated caring fathers as well. In an interview with the Modesto Bee, the Levys’ hometown newspaper, Beliza Ann Furman, author of “Younger Women, Older Men,” warranted that women who go for married men have either of two types of fathers. Some have doting dads who tell them how cute they are, thus creating a hunger for lovers who will do the same. The rest have distant dads who leave them desperate for attention.

Amid all these wildly contradictory theories, what’s the answer? Why do some young women get involved with much older, married men?

Don’t ask me. I’m one pundit who tries to avoid making big generalizations based on little information.