The Ultimate Men's Club

By MARGARET CARLSON

There may be no better place in America for a referendum on male domination than the U.S. Senate. All white, mostly over 50, cosseted and toadied to by fawning aides, uninhibited by women, the Senate may be the most visible concentration of full-frontal prefeminist thinking left.

If it weren't for that, the Judiciary Committee might have found a way to evaluate Professor Anita Hill's charges against Judge Clarence Thomas confidentially. But it was easier to consign her to the category of she- devils, like Fanne Foxe, Elizabeth Ray, Tai Collins, Donna Rice, who rise from a public official's past to bring down a man simply for being, well, a man. In this postgraduate Skull and Bones, most of whose members hardly need to worry where their next million is coming from, it is hard to empathize with someone worried enough about her career that she would overlook offensive conduct until it became literally a federal matter.

Senators don't interact with women as colleagues -- they have only two -- and most of the other women they come in contact with are subservient. According to a 1991 study by the Congressional Management Foundation, women hold 31% of the top four positions on Senate staffs. Among those, women account for 24% of the very top post of administrative assistant. They earn 78 cents to every dollar their male counterparts pull in. Still, the preponderance of females is found in the catchall legislative jobs, where, as one staff member says, "taking good notes and neatness count."

When the Senate is not operating like a men's club, it behaves like a family -- a patriarchal, dysfunctional family. Not only does the Senate have all the institutionalized forms of sexism common in the corporate suite, but by dint + of its privileges and power it is one of the few places where acting like a cross between a rock star and the dictator of a banana republic is tolerated. One of the sessions during orientation for congressional spouses is on how to live with a celebrity. It's an atmosphere, says former Missouri Lieutenant Governor Harriett Woods, who now heads the National Women's Political Caucus, where "Senators prey on women as if they were groupies." One wife has remarked that a reason members spend so much time at the office is the adoring staff. There's too much reality at home.

Despite an overabundance of leather, the offices resemble living rooms. There are 14 dining rooms, a gym with a sauna and steam room, and a pool; the women's facility, by contrast, has been described as "six hair dryers and a Ping-Pong table."

In the absence of production quotas or a bottom line, the only measure of performance in the Senate is how much one pleases the boss. Much of the work is servile, not intellectual or history-making. Getting coffee is not a courtesy but part of the job description; being sent to the boss's house to pick up a tux and a change of underwear is all in a day's work.

Although the Senate has no shortage of clerical staff, female professionals are still expected to act as hostesses, showing a constituent, a defense contractor or a contributor around. In a Senate dining room, a young aide delivering papers to her boss was asked to remove her jacket so that a constituent could get a better look. She did. To someone operating in that atmosphere, perhaps, as Senator Arlen Specter said at Friday's hearing, talk of "women's large breasts" hardly seems such a big deal.

While the Senate is full of selfless older women, happy to substitute the life of the office for a life, it also has a huge contingent of postfeminist younger women, who think being asked to walk the dog and clean up after the mutt is the price one pays for invaluable experience. Says an aide to a Democratic Senator on the Judiciary Committee: "You know what the code is, and if you want to be involved, you know what you have to tolerate. It's happened to me, and I never call anyone on it. You have to show you are tough enough to take a certain kind of harassment."

Fear of hypocrisy may have kept Democrats on the Judiciary Committee from taking charges of a personal nature seriously. Certainly Senator Edward Kennedy -- recently shamed for taking his son and nephew barhopping on a night that ended in an accusation of rape -- is not the ideal person to sit in judgment of someone else's sexual manners. The man who waited 10 hours before reporting that a young female staff member was drowned in his car at Chappaquiddick, and stonewalled for much of the subsequent investigation, must have wanted to avoid the moment that faced him last Tuesday when the situation required a public statement on Hill's allegation: "The Senate cannot sweep it under the rug, or pretend that it is not staring us in the face." Other members have had personal embarrassments as well: Senator Dennis DeConcini is one of the Keating Five; Senator Joseph Biden had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race because of plagiarism; Senator Patrick Leahy had to resign from the Intelligence Committee after admitting he had leaked a confidential document.

After it became impossible to ignore the charges, the Senate's major preoccupation, like that of an exclusive club, was an infraction of its bylaws. Senator John Danforth, Thomas' chief handler, harrumphed, "The cloud of doubt was created by a violation of the rules of the U.S. Senate"; so Danforth maintained that the doubt was not valid. Anyway Thomas had given Danforth his gentleman's word, and that was enough for him. Says Woods: "It's the male, Yale, class response. It's infuriating to women because it's the club they never belonged to."

When a contingent of seven House members marched down the marble halls of the Senate to the Democratic caucus room to ask for a meeting about sexual harassment, they were told they couldn't come in. Said California Congresswoman and Senate candidate Barbara Boxer: "What could be more symbolic than that closed door?" Some Senators "got it" better after some sensitivity training at home. Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jim Exon said they didn't realize how serious the issue was until they talked to their wives. Said Boxer: "If there were more women in the Senate, they wouldn't need to rely on spouses to tell them what's important to 51% of the American population."

The rules of Congress are arcane, often unwritten, and demand a lifetime of male bonding to understand. It's bad form to call one's deepest philosophical enemy anything but "my distinguished colleague," or to continue a political argument after hours. When cries went up for a list of Capitol Hill check bouncers, House Speaker Tom Foley protected Democrats and Republicans alike, as does the Ethics Committee. So ingrained is the clubbiness that partisanship often seems like a Hulk Hogan spectacle, faked for the C-SPAN audience.

But something happened last week that may, for better or worse, permanently destroy all that comity. Senator Hatch opened the hearings in disgust, saying that if the Democrats had only asked for a closed executive session, the committee would have been spared its Friday circus. Senator Alan Simpson, who usually manages to hide his meanness behind an Andy Rooney facade, warned Hill that she would be "injured, and destroyed and belittled and hounded and harassed -- real harassment, different from the sexual kind, just plain old Washington-variety harassment." What debates over the budget, arms control, abortion or the gulf war did not destroy was finished off by televised hearings that stripped bare the sensibilities of two witnesses and the Senators who questioned them. The club may never be the same again.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Nigel Holmes and Leslie Dickstein

CAPTION: HOW ANITA HILL'S ALLEGATIONS CAME TO LIGHT

With reporting by Hays Gorey and Nancy Traver/Washington