"A president who uses the power of the Oval Office to seduce a 20-something subordinate is morally bankrupt and contributing, in a meaningful way, to a serious social problem that disadvantages millions of women throughout their lives."

Matthew Yglesias takes a strange position on why Bill Clinton should have resigned.

[L]ooking back through today’s lens, this whole argument was miscast. The wrongdoing at issue was... a high-profile exemplar of a widespread social problem: men’s abuse of workplace power for sexual gain. It was and is a striking example of a genre of misconduct that society has a strong interest in stamping out. That alone should have been enough to have pressured Clinton out of office....

I think the key to understanding what Bill Clinton did wrong is equality in the workplace.  So Yglesias is right to stress Clinton's use of "the power of the Oval Office" and "men’s abuse of workplace power," but the point shouldn't be that Bill Clinton or some other powerful man achieved "seduction" or "sexual gain." Rather the problem is that the workplace conditions are unequal because of sex. That's why it doesn't matter that Monica Lewinsky was happy and enthusiastic about her love affair with the President. One woman got special access to the President, but other women did not, and the workplace for men had nothing to do with sex.

What Yglesias wrote suggests a more wide-ranging critique of sex — that it's a "social problem" that men can use power that they've acquired in their careers to attract women. I personally believe a woman is better off with a sexual partner who's close to her age and not significantly more powerful economically or politically, and I may privately think less of some men who use their economic or political power to get relatively easy access to a young or naive woman who is — even in her own self-interest — eager to use a man to advance her own condition in life. But I'm not going to call that a "serious social problem" or say "society has a strong interest in stamping out" that sort of thing, especially when the idea is to remove a man from a position of power he's worked hard to attain.

Maybe Yglesias didn't mean to suggest all that. But it's a little funny, as a thought experiment, to think of all the politicians who seem to be part of the "serious social problem" by having spouses they "seduced" when there was a big power differential. I know he's not in Congress anymore, but should Dennis Kucinich have been expelled for getting a beautiful woman 30 years his junior to marry him?

I wanted to find a good video to go with that last question, and look at this incredibly sexist "Daily Show" clip I found (from 10 years ago):

You could never do a comedy bit like that today.