The misanthrope's corner.

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

AMERICA has no peer when it comes to contradictions but we surpassed ourselves with our recent creation of what has to be the last of the red-hot oxymorons: the helpless, insecure femme fatale who never grew up. Delilah is now a poor kid who needs counseling.

Our sensuality is sealed under an adult-proof cap and any attempt to pry it off leads to failure and frustration. Monica Lewinsky's porn version of spin-the-bottle moved one columnist to quote wistfully from Ben Franklin's letter in praise of sex with older women, but nowadays that means Mary Kay LeTourneau, the 36-year-old Seattle grade-school teacher who gave herself to her 13-year-old pupil and had his baby. Authentic female voluptuousness is so scarce that we don't even have anybody who can do the Carmen number right. If you want a fiery temptress with a knife in her stocking, you have to make do with Diane Zamora, identified in news stories as "the diminutive former midshipman."

It all goes back to Bill Clinton's arrested development. If you want an 'R' Us, he's it. In an earlier column on the White House sex scandal I predicted that Monica Lewinsky will never be called a "fellatrix" because Americans do not love language, but I see now that I was wrong. Why should we take up a hard-edged Latinate word when "oral" connotes children fixated on perfect safety and security? I take it all back: "oral sex" is the perfect description for this act, in this place, at this time. Say it to yourself and you can hear the gurgle of a contented thumbsucker and the promise of "comfort food": sodomy as macaroni-and-cheese.

Reading matter? Any adult deeply moved by Leaves of Grass has an assy-gassy mind ruled by an achy-breaky heart. Walt Whitman belongs to the interlude Clinton admirers call "youthful idealism" and do their best to stretch into an eon. This is when Ravel's "Bolero" sounds wanton instead of monotonous, when Lady Chatterly's Lover comes across as spontaneously free instead of unconsciously funny, when Mary Queen of Scots is a romantic heroine instead of a self-destructive idiot. Leaves of Grass is a State of the Union message in verse: unstanched puerile prattle with every scheme but a rhyme scheme.

The return of the gifts was pure rite-of-passage, the teen steadys breaking up: "I don't think we should see each other anymore," the thumb through a stack of 45 rpms, unwrapping the adhesive tape from the too-large class ring. Mike McCurry's observation that this could, after all, be a "very complicated story" only added to the Ricky Nelsonness of it all. Parting steadys can never remember whose records are whose or agree on what to do about birthday presents. I half-expected the next trumpet fanfare of "CNN Breaking News" to open on Clinton toeing the dirt and mumbling, "I want you to have it."

White House infantilism is so relentless that whenever someone accidentally strikes a note of maturity it produces sudden weird images and a kind of out-of-sync joy. Clinton's grim reference to "that woman" rescued the femme fatale from therapy and put her back before a Middle European firing squad. That word "compromising" transferred her to the Old Bailey, and "hatpins" became weapons of female self-defense for a few puzzling seconds, until I realized that what I call a hatpin is unknown to Monica, who has taken the Fellatrix Oath: First, do no harm.

What turns the scandal into a primal bog of arrested development is Clinton's selfish sexual preference. It's on a par with the innocent selfishness of an infant whose world is its wants, the blind selfishness of a fetus battening on its host. I can't understand why a woman would tolerate such one-sidedness. Back in my wild youth, men were so solicitous of female pleasure. "Do you like this? . . . Does that feel good? . . . Here? . . . There?" They went on and on, sometimes irritatingly so, but their hearts were in the right place even if some other things weren't. No man ever asked me to service him as an isolated act, but evidently today's men expect it -- or they will now.

This is what feminists call liberation, but not all of them are playing the indulgent mother to our ageless P. One of them -- the one that too many conservatives love to hate -- laid into him like Carrie Nation. Interviewed in England by the Guardian, the underappreciated Andrea Dworkin said:

"Bill Clinton's fixation on oral sex [is] the most fetishistic, heartless, cold sexual exchange that one could imagine. . . . The second issue that concerns me is what Hillary Clinton is doing, which I think is appalling. She is covering up for a man who has a history of exploiting women. It's pathetic. She should pack her bags and leave."

Here comes the best part: "I have a modest proposal. It will probably bring the FBI to my door. But I think that Hillary should shoot Bill and then President Gore should pardon her."

WHEN Clinton's post-scandal approval ratings soared the Left saw blase sophistication and the Right saw moral corruption, but Americans are neither sophisticated nor corrupt, just childish and democratic. What they really approve of in Clinton's behavior is the way he takes the adult out of adultery and the in out of sin. If he had kept a soignee thirtyish mistress and visited her discreetly the whole country would have felt threatened. Mistresses are for kings and discretion is elitist by definition, but love on the rope line suggests a limitless participation that reduces adultery to the minor crime of tumescence in office.

To prevent his kindergarten from swelling beyond the acceptable class size that concerns him in tranquil moments, he ought to reconsider a woman he met a few years ago: the five-hundred-year-old Peruvian mummy he said he'd like to date.

She might not be bad if he put his mind to it. As Agatha Christie said: "An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have. The older she gets, the more he is interested in her."