Women are, apparently, the great sanitizing machine. We're the culture's laundry, where everything gets clean.

I'm trying to read "The Year Women Got ‘Horny’/Women reclaimed a word once the province of crass boys and men who are boys" by Tracie Egan Morrissey in the NYT.

Phonetically speaking, 'horny' is ugly. It lends itself to a nasal sound that’s comically inelegant. 'Horny' has benefited... from that same so-bad-it’s-good rationality."'I used to hate the word,' Sophia Benoit said. 'I used to think it was so disgusting.' Ms. Benoit writes a column for GQ about the sexiest things that men did during the month, called 'Horny on Main,' which on the internet means posting sexually charged content to your main social media account, as opposed to posting on a separate, and likely secret, account that was created for that purpose... 'But I love it now, because I think we, especially women, have reclaimed it and made it not gross,' Ms. Benoit said

Well, of course, when it's about women, it's not gross.

Twenty-five years ago, William Safire wrote about 'horny” for his etymology column in The New York Times Magazine, noting that a “horn is hard; it is shaft-shaped; since the 15th century, it has been used as a symbol for the male’s erect sex organ.”

Let's go read that old Safire column, because there had to be a reason why the subject came up — something in the news that half-century ago. Aha!

Toward the end of "Meet the Press"... we were discussing Whitewatergate. David Broder of The Washington Post took issue with my suspicions of heavy financial scandal ahead. "If you told me that Bill Clinton was very horny or very ambitious," Mr. Broder opined over the NBC network, "I would have no trouble believing it. If you told me that he was money-hungry and was cutting corners for money, I'd say that doesn't sound like the Bill Clinton I know."

When the show ended, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and columnist looked around and innocently asked, "Can you use a word like horny on television?"... In my opinion, no... Instead of "if you told me he was horny," try "if you told me he played around a lot." (In formal newspaper writing, of course, you could not use play around, except in a quotation; you would have to use terms like promiscuous or the fuzzier, less judgmental sexually active, or if referring to a specific state, sexually aroused.

So it was about Bill Clinton, and having just spoken of the notion of women as the cultural washing machine, I must note the havoc caused in America when that man, Mr. Clinton, sullied a woman's dress and she chose not to clean it.

By the way, that Safire article is from February 6, 1994 — and that was 4 years before the name Monica Lewinsky first appeared in the NYT... in an editorial called "A Crisis From Petty Sources" (January 28, 1998):

There is a general reluctance to have the private life of any President become a matter of public inquiry. In some quarters there is a willingness to believe that Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater Independent Counsel, has a vendetta against this President and that the far right's backing of Paula Jones is designed to destroy his Presidency. Yet the political good will that normally flows toward the White House is constantly being blocked in Mr. Clinton's case by reports -- unproven, but disturbingly persistent -- of unrestrained personal behavior and of fund-raising that flouted the law. More seriously, this Administration repeatedly forces its supporters to choose between loyalty and respect for the law.

Those are Clinton Administration themes established long before the charges that Mr. Clinton had a sexual relationship with a White House intern then 21 years old, Monica Lewinsky, and later instructed her to lie about it in a sworn deposition. Mr. Clinton has denied the charges, and on the surface they seem so tawdry, the alleged impropriety so avoidable by a mature leader, that it is hard to comprehend their potential impact.....

It is not the legality of anyone's sexual behavior that is at issue here. The legal questions before Mr. Starr are obstruction of justice, perjury and suborning of perjury....

ADDED: On publishing this post, I realize that my post title is a rhyming couplet. Ragged poetry. I wouldn't have done that on purpose, but I won't change it, even though I have an idea for a better title. I'm thinking of the famous Nixon quote:  "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."



I'm thinking, for my alternative post title: "Well, when women do it, that means that it is not gross."