Liz Phair's singing on the radio about the health and beauty benefits of ingesting sperm: "Gimme your hot white cum," goes the lyric. (Probably a metaphor.)

A male friend of mine propounds the theory that sperm has a sedative/soporific quality, and that he's known women who found a mouthful thereof a surefire sleeping potion. I find this quite plausible, and it gives an additional reason for male insistence that women learn to swallow. We might also want to factor in the tranquilizing effect of the sucking itself. There's a good reason they call those plastic jobbies you shove into babies' mouths "pacifiers."

(Though irretrievably heterosexual in my orientation, I don't make that a matter of moral principle, and have sucked two cocks in my time. I can report that it's quite relaxing -- more so, in my experience, than eating plunce, which is enormously enjoyable but quite different in its effect, at least on me -- more of an appetizer or jump-starter than a calmative.)

Books on sexuality nowadays almost without exception emphasize the importance to healthy relationships of oral sex. Men, of course, are encouraged to use their mouths to pleasure women at great length, and to savor their odors and juices. Most of the ones I've browsed, in the interest of fairness, make a point of urging women to consume the results of their efforts in that direction, with grace at least and gusto if possible.

So, with all this in the air, am I the only one who finds it significant that the entire Monica Lewinsky scandal hinged on a little Jewish-American Princess's prissy refusal to swallow?

Had she done so, Ken Starr would have found no semen traces on the famous "little blue dress," therefore no identifiable DNA, and thus, so to speak, no "smoking gun." The result? Clinton's second term might have actually moved some mildly liberal projects forward; millions of dollars in nonsensical investigative costs would have remained in the public coffers; the media would have had to find something else to cover; and we'd all have been spared the international embarrassment of right-wing prudishness parading itself before the entire world as righteous indignation. Say what you want about the French nowadays, but they're surely adult in their relationship to sexuality, whereas we are at best adolescent.

Whatever drove Bill Clinton to take up with this appalling little JAP -- whether satyriasis, the erotic consequence of power, or not getting enough at home -- I would propose that, all else aside, spitting out the seed of POTUS (the acronym of President Of The United States*) ain't fittin'. Indeed, whether you spill it into the sink or a handkerchief or tissue doesn't matter; under any circumstances this constitutes a downright unpatriotic act.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it treasonous, but this fundamental disrespect for the presidential sperm, the Oval Office spunk, degrades the presidency itself, while setting a terrible example for young women everywhere. It's fundamentally undignified. After all, if a mere callow intern can treat the jism of our Commander in Chief -- his seed, his very essence -- so disdainfully, how can we expect the rest of the world to respect him?

Since so many people talk casually nowadays about amending the Constitution, I would propose a constitutional amendment making it mandatory for wives, husbands, and lovers of the president of these United States, regardless of the gender of either party in the act, to fully savor and venerate the sexual secretions of POTUS.

Seems to me we'd all be better off if the leaders of the world got laid on a regular basis. And especially if they got thoroughly eaten out. And particularly if -- regardless of gender -- their lovers swallowed.

As for Lewinsky, her subsequent behavior -- that adolescent expectation that somehow she'd become the center of Clinton's life, to the exclusion of all else, including his presidency itself, the political life of the nation, national and international diplomacy -- exemplifies the old joke about the Jewish girl's idea of sharing: Her problems are your problems, and your problems are your problems.

Listening to her whine about him not returning her calls convinced me she merited the designation idiot, in the original Greek meaning of the word: someone undeserving of any public position, even that of lowly intern. Even kneeling.