newjerseynewsroom.com

BY SUSIE WILSON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

SEX MATTERS

What do "Downton Abbey," the Masterpiece Classic series whose second year came to an end for millions of viewers last Sunday evening, and the two-part documentary, "Clinton," which aired this past week, have in common?

Both appeared recently on public broadcasting stations, drew large numbers of viewers, involved mansions occupied by important people, and contained the elements of soap opera. Yet the two dramas—one fantasy and the other quite real—are also linked together by sex and lust (as in, “intense or unbridled sexual desire”).

Downtown revolves around the lives of a titled English family, headed by Robert, Earl of Grantham, and their servants, who reside in a grand house and struggle with the social aspects of life’s ups and downs during and immediately after World War I.

Clinton covers the successes and failures of William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, who lived in The White House, a historic mansion, and struggled with the ups and downs of his political and personal life, which involved his family and a member of his staff, for eight years starting in 1993.

In Downtown, Lady Mary Crawley, one of three daughters of Lord Grantham, is at the heart of a cover-up that doesn’t get resolved until the very last hour of the second season of the series. When asked by Matthew Crawley, the man with whom she has had an off-again, on-again relationship, why she made love and lost her virginity in a one-night dalliance with the son of the Turkish ambassador, an overnight guest at Downtown, she answers him directly: “lust.”

In the second of the two-part Clinton program that aired last week, we learn that “sparks fly” when the president meets Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Within hours of the meeting, the two have their first sexual encounter and begin an affair that lasts for over a year. Shortly thereafter, the cover-up begins.

The President, unlike Lady Mary, does not acknowledge his feelings of lust. Rather, he represses them, telling the special prosecutor who is investigating possible charges against him of perjury and obstruction of justice, “I never had sex with that woman.” He believes that whatever sexual acts he performed would not fall under the definition of sex.

The cover-ups that result from these initial feelings of “lust” emerge differently in the TV dramas: The ambassador’s son dies of a seizure in Lady Mary’s bed after his sexual encounter with her. A maid helps Lady Mary and her mother, Lady Cora, take the dead man back to his own bed, where he is “discovered” the next morning. The word of his death travels through the servants’ quarters.

In order to separate the president and the intern, a member of the White House staff arranges to have her transferred to the Pentagon. There, as fate would have it, Lewinsky encounters employee Linda Tripp, who wants to do anything she can to embarrass Clinton and damage his presidency. Tripp becomes Lewinsky’s confidant, hears many details of the affair, which continues despite the change of locales, and suggests that she tape her phone conversations with the president, saying that there is nothing illegal about this action.