It is in principle an abuse of power for an employer to have sex with an employee.

You may be asking yourself, why is Alex writing this? Surely, this is a no-brainer. Or, like a friend of mine, you may be saying, Alex is an idiot to think that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted Monica Lewinsky.

Let me be absolutely clear: Bill Clinton got away with doing something that the manager of a McDonald’s would be fired for. Why he got away with it, I will let other people speculate about. But allow me to suggest that it’s the same reason that OJ Simpson is polluting our culture with speculative interviews about whether he murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, while Orenthal the bus driving murderer would be on death row in California.

It bears repeating in this day and age, when Donald Trump is President with all the baggage that entails, that sexual misconduct is sexual misconduct whether it is legal or illegal. Legality is not an excuse for improper conduct. Much of improper conduct cannot be regulated through the law, but must, instead, be regulated through self-reinforcing cultural norms. Those norms are weakened every time that Bill Clinton is applauded, and Donald Trump cursed for his Clintonian sexual appetites, because it is clear that Clinton’s sexual assaults are considered charming secretive peccadilloes, while Trump’s are grotesque clandestine…