THE SINS OF LATE NIGHT: DAVID LETTERMAN

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Some people just get caught with their pants down..HJS
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ARTICLE REPRINTED FROM NYTIMES.COM
The Sins of Late Night
By Eric Etheridge

Ever since David Letterman broke the story of his office love-life, Opinionland has been struggling to get a handle on the sins of the new Dave. Here was a sex scandal without the easy handholds offered by the moralizing politician, the sanctimonious preacher, the lecherous director or the breezy actress who gets caught having sex with the wrong person or the wrong sex or on the wrong side of the a video camera.

Is it wrong, what he did? Is Letterman a hypocrite? His confessional remarks last Thursday and then again on Monday were riveting TV, but was Letterman just being a showman, or was he sincere? Mike Potemra at National Review says yes. “I thought tonight’s apologies from Letterman were touching and appropriate,” Potemra wrote late Monday night.

He voiced quite accurately what it’s like to pick up the pieces after a family or relationship disaster. Part of it, of course, may be that the quality of writing in big-league entertainment is higher than that in politics. . . .

But I don’t want to believe (and, in the absence of information, I don’t have to) that it’s just that kind of skill — good writers, professional presentation. What Letterman is coping with is a very real, very sad situation that could cost him his marriage. If I’m ever, God forbid, in such deep trouble, I’d want to have the kind of grace he displayed this evening.

Lisa Schiffern, also writing at National Review, wasn’t so convinced, not that she found the absence of sincerity troubling. “I thought Letterman’s extended apologies [Monday] night were very, very funny.”

He has always been able to use timing — particularly the silences — better than most, as he did in his public apologies to wife and staff. He’s better at mock remorse than lip-biting Bill Clinton, and does Midwestern, Protestant guilt more subtley than Garrison Keillor, who is a genius on the subject. His mockery of the rituals of remorse we demand from adulterous politicians or abusive or addicted celebrities — “This is only phase one of the scandal. Phase two, next week I go on Oprah and sob.”— was spot on. That’s why they pay him the big bucks: For $30 million a year, you get a slick performance, even under duress. . . .

I don’t particularly care about what he has done, since it never occurred to me that Letterman was a paragon of moral probity. He is a comedian, who held out against marriage for a very long time, which might indicate serious resistance to the strictures of monogamy. I suspect that, as the story unfolds, it will become more sordid. It’s hard to see David Letterman as a victim. And for me, it is hard to see brilliant damage control as sincere remorse.

Like Schiffern, TV critic Tom Shales sees Letterman as a comedian, which therefore means he’s exempt from charges of hypocrisy: “Letterman can continue to lampoon sleazy political figures with no real fear of hypocrisy, however, because a TV comic is not an elected official responsible for the well-being of the nation or its citizenry.”

Letterman’s monologue is not a nightly sermon full of moral lessons preached to politicians or the public. His stance is that of the proverbial court jester, a clownish figure with a mandate to prick the powerful — not set himself up as a model of virtue.

Letterman’s big mistake, says Shales, is that his new image as an office Lothario is clashing with the standard neutered public persona that men comedians have always projected:

Over a century of movie and TV comedy, male comics, however fabled their off-screen sexual exploits, have traditionally been asexual figures on the screen. Comic heroes may have longed for and even lusted after desirable leading ladies, but sexually they were all bark and no bite. What Letterman has done, or allowed to happen, is foul up our perception of him by allowing his private self to share air time with Public Dave, the one we know and love — the wisecracking, self-deprecating, overgrown adolescent who has one of the keenest, cleverest and funniest comic minds of all time.

“Will he survive this bout with ill-repute?” asks Joanna Weiss at the Boston Glode.

My best guess is yes. Letterman’s studio audience lapped it up and showered him with applause. His guests seemed unfazed, even as Letterman kept joking about the scandal; this is still a fantastic and ever-better-rated forum for a plug. And if Spitzer can try for a comeback, who couldn’t? We are, alas, accustomed to celebrities behaving badly. Capacity for forgiveness is a virtue, to be sure. I hope, for everyone’s sake, that he and his wife can make amends. But I’d feel better about it all if Dave — and a lot of his fans — could acknowledge precisely why what he did was wrong. And I’d feel better still if I knew that the “Mad Man” days of office sexual politics were truly behind us.

Writing at Vanity Fair, Dee Dee Myers also invokes the Mad Men days but, contra Weiss, she thinks the fact that Letterman’s affairs became public means we are now in a different, if still messy, era.

Some have argued that Letterman’s survival will be just one more sign that popular culture has become a cesspool of tolerance run amok. But isn’t it also true that a generation or two ago, Letterman would have paid no price—no public humiliation for his “creepy” behavior, no potential repercussions from the women he had sex with, no pledges (no matter how fleeting) to try to put things right at home—because none of it would ever have become public?

When people’s private lives become public, we don’t always like what we see. But there can be value, and even justice, in ensuring that bad behavior that was once protected is exposed. That isn’t always enough. But it beats the alternative.

Writing at Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory wants to know “Why aren’t feminists mad at Letterman?” The answer, she thinks, is that “as far as we know, Letterman’s affairs with staffers were consensual.”

Workplace canoodling happens all the time, and so are young women frequently drawn to male superiors. Many find power imbalances to be very sexy — and more power (or less, as it were) to ‘em. There is nothing inherently wrong about a sexual relationship between two adults who are at different points in their careers. It would be awfully patronizing to suggest that women aren’t capable of meaningfully consenting to sex with a workplace superior. That isn’t to say I don’t pass personal judgment on Letterman for sleeping with young women who were from the sounds of it at the starts of their careers — oh, judgment abounds, believe me! But is it illegal, is it sexual harassment?

Clark-Flory posted her analysis on Monday. Had she waited a day, she could have had her feminist outrage, courtesy of NOW, which released comments by its president, Terry O’Neill.

Recent developments in the David Letterman extortion controversy have raised serious issues about the abuse of power leading to an inappropriate, if not hostile, workplace environment for women and employees. In the case of Letterman, he is a multi-million dollar host of one of the most popular late-night shows; in that role, he wields the ultimate authority as to who gets hired, who gets fired, who gets raises, who advances, and who does entry-level tasks among the Late Show employees. As “the boss,” he is responsible for setting the tone for his entire workplace — and he did that with sex. In any work environment, this places all employees — including employees who happen to be women — in an awkward, confusing and demoralizing situation.

Most women can attest to the fact that many workplaces are plagued with inappropriate behavior by men in power. The latest Letterman controversy sheds new light on the widespread objectification of women in the workplace.

At Gawker, John Cook took issue with O’Neill’s analysis:

We agree that bosses shouldn’t sleep with their assistants, and that it’s—in the words of one noted wag—”creepy” when an international celebrity starts screwing around with someone in his employ who is decades younger than he is. It’s crude, and selfish, and gross, because it takes advantage of youth and inexperience and star-struck awe. . . .

But is it an offense against feminist principles? We guess so, if it turns out that Letterman’s bird-dogging turned Worldwide Pants into a sex-crazed hothouse where trapped women faced horrible decisions every day about what they were willing to do to get ahead, or to not get fired. Or if, in NOW’s words, it created “an awkward, confusing and demoralizing situation.” But we don’t know yet if that’s the case, and NOW’s simple assertion that it was so doesn’t actually make it so. As far as we know, the women involved were adults, and there are no accusations of untoward bargains or indecent proposals. Just gross, creepy, consensual sex. Letterman’s wrongs here were moral and personal in nature, and NOW wants to cast them as political and possibly legal transgressions, and place the uncertain future of some 16-year-old who’s “confused because the messages she sees on television and news reports appear to make it okay to objectify women” on his shoulders.

Maybe we’re insufficiently conversant in some relevant threads of feminist theory, but is it just automatic now that when you sleep with someone who’s in an unequal power relationship with you, you’re treating them as a sexual object? Is it impossible to view an employee to whom you are sexually attracted as a subject, someone with their own needs and wants and autonomous desires, worthy of respect? Just asking, because there’s no indication—yet—that Stephanie Birkitt or any other women involved were in any way objectified, ever, by anyone. Maybe Letterman just thought of them as pieces of ass. Or maybe he really liked them, a lot, and enjoyed spending time with them, and was interested in their lives, and wanted to sleep with them, and they let him. Creepy, yes. But not every sexual encounter is an object lesson in feminist dogma.