Happy New Year, AskHistorians! You may now have historical relations with 1998.. The autoreply bot would require me to ping /u/sunagainstgold or someone.
"Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1?" "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky."
I have the impression that, before 20 years ago, in the US oral sex was in general considered to be an unusual activity, "an advanced topic" so to speak, but that it became far more discussed and usual.
Did attitudes change significantly in 1998 specifically? If so, was it simply because oral sex was being discussed on the news endlessly, perhaps normalizing it? Or was it due specifically to President Clinton's answer, that oral sex wasn't really sex?
Was there any opinion polling or other evidence on this subject at the time?
Norman J. Ornstein, Thomas E. Mann, The Permanent Campaign and Its Future, p. 71, indicates that pollsters did ask about oral sex at the time, but that source doesn't answer these questions.
I am fairly confident in saying we don't have the tools to answer this question. To put it simply, we have opinions about oral sex after 1998, but no real comparison questions from before 1998.
Without getting into the complicated issues around what National Institute of Health funding can be used for when conducting surveys around sex (short answer: it needs to be very health related, meaning mostly AIDS/safe sex, but there have been a few other things like erectile disfunction), there are just very few survey period about sex from that time.
I checked the normal places I go to check for public opinion trends, Gallup and the General Social Survey. I could find applicable questions at neither. I went to the Roper Center's database, which is the best database of America polling results, and there were no opinion polls about oral sex in the decade before the Clinton-Lewinski scandal broke in early 1998. The polls within the 1998-2000 period generally did not ask similar enough questions for me to compare.
In the pre-1998 period, the only really applicable poll was one for Time Magazine which asked, among other things,
Do you think the federal or state authorities should be able to pass laws: making acts of oral sex illegal?
30% said yes, 63% no, 7% were undecided. For those curious, the numbers for anal sex were 47%, 46%, and 7%. For limiting the sexual acts two adult men can engage in, 44%, 49%, 7%. (How more people can think the government can limit anal sex than sex acts between two adult men, I can't understand but those sort of human inconsistencies show some of the limits of polling data.)
In January 1998, when the scandal was first breaking, Newsweek sponsored a poll:
Do you think a man and woman are "having sexual relations" if they only engage in oral sex, or not?
76% said yes, 12% no, 12% didn't know.
In July, Time/CNN asked a fairly similar question:
As a result of the allegations against Bill Clinton, the issue has arisen of what actions constitute sexual relationships. If Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton .... engaged in oral sex ... would this constitute sexual relations or don't you think so?
87% said sexual relations, 7% not sexual relations, 3% not sure, 3% refused.
An ABC News poll from September 1998 asked the question in a slightly different way:
Do you think the words "sexual relations" refer just to sexual intercourse or do you think the words "sexual relations" refer to both sexual intercourse and other sexual activity such as oral sex?
13% just sexual intercourse, 81% both intercourse and other sexual activity, 6% no opinion.
Of course, asking these questions in the context of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal is somewhat fraught. In his deposition, Clinton was asked whether had "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky, where he famously answered, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." By all accounts, Clinton was a talented lawyer, and had asked the opposing lawyers to define sexual relations. The deposing lawyer agreed,
For the purposes of this deposition, a person engages in "sexual relations" then the person knowingly engaged in or causes--
- contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desires of any person.
- contact between any part of the person's body or an object and the the genitals or anus of another person; or
- contact between the genitals or anus of the person and any part of another person's body.
Contact means intentional touching, either directly or through clothing.
Clinton's lawyers got subsections 2 and 3 struck, leaving only section 1 in force. Clinton therefore argued that he did not commit sexual relations with Lewinsky because he never had contact, either directly or through clothing, with Lewinsky's genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks. For oral sex, she had contact with his genitalia, but he only had contact with her lips and mouth. For penetrating her with a cigar, he did not have direct contact with her genitalia (note: I'm not sure Clinton ever admitted penetrating her with his cigar; in Lewinsky's account of the same incident, in the hallway by the Oval Office on March 31, 1996, as detailed in the Starr Report, she said that time Clinton "focused on me pretty exclusively", kissing her bare breasts and fondling her genitals, which obviously would fall under the deposition's definition of sexual relations. Lewinsky stated that Clinton brought her to orgasm on two occasions). Therefore, he argued, even while she had sexual relationships with him on multiple occasions, he never had sexual relationships with her. Remember this is the same situation where lawyerly Clinton asked what the definition of "is" was. ("It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.") This complex background may have had some effect on the answers.
It seems that most people already thought that oral sex counted as sex, but this year of discussing pushed that number up slightly higher. But is this data or noise? What other effects the scandal had on the nation's opinion of oral sex, this data can't tell you.
I will add that Fox News conducted a survey in July 1999 that asked:
There have been several recent report [sic] that more and more teenagers are engaging in oral sex. Do you think the graphic description of President (Bill) Clinton's behavior with Monica Lewinsky have done a lot, a little, or nothing at all to encourage this increase?
Overall, 26% said a lot, 26% a little, 40% nothing at all, 7% said not sure. When we break this down by partisanship, these numbers are 18%, 23%, 51%, 7% for Democrats, 36%, 30%, 26%, 8% for Republicans, 26%, 26%, 42%, 6% for independents. Among young people (18-34) who are closest in age to these teens they're asking about, the numbers are 19%, 33%, 45%, 3%. I'm not sure in the end though what this sort of question actually tells us.
I also do not know which "studies" the Fox News survey question is referring to. There are two the annual survey sent out to American high school students, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and the Monitoring the Future Survey, which could track differences in behavior (at least among high school students), but I haven't seen any work on either and looking at their questions and Clinton. I'm not sure they consistently ask about oral sex.
I found various other surveys of young people and oral sex, but all seem to be after 1998.
One small note is that JAMA, Jounral of the American Medical Association, planned to publish an article in its January 1999 issue by two researchers from the Kinsey Institute called "Would You Say You 'Had Sex' If...?" This was during the midst of Clinton's impeachment trial. The executive vice president of the AMA strongly objected that this "inappropriately and inexcusably interjecting JAMA into a major political debate that has nothing to do with science or medicine" and fired the editor before the article was even published. The Kinsey Reacher's article itself is probably of limited usefulness in answering the question: it is a survey of college students on one college campus from 1991. For a review of this see, Tom W. Smith's article "The JAMA Controversy and the Meaning of Sex".
This article finds two other surveys not in the Roper Database asking whether "sexual relations" covers "oral sex". With these new data points, we see in January, Princeton Survey Associates (TIME) found 76%, 12% No, 12% don't know/no response (included above), ABC News in August 73% yes, 22% no, 5% don't know (new), ABC News in September 81% Yes, 13% No, 6% Don't Know (included above), and finally Gallup from September 73% Yes, 20% No, 7% Don't Know (new). The article in general is a great look at the difficulty of polling about sex.
All told, I haven't run statistical tests on these data, but it seems like when we look at all the data, we don't really get a sense that opinions about oral sex changed over the year. If there is a change, it seems like perhaps over the year more people made up their mind or became comfortable discussing it, as the "Don't Know"/"No Response" category seems to go consistently down. There may be a slight upward trend over the year, but it seems to be a fairly effect and could well be random.
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, as best I can tell with the very limited data available, had little effect on Americans' opinions about oral sex, at least whether or not it counted as sex, which was the main question pollsters asked.