How Carrie Fisher's Dinner with Teddy Kennedy and Chris Dodd Illustrates a Great Sexual Double Standard

COMMENTARY | While people are still in an uproar over whether Herman Cain did or did not sexually harass women, Carrie Fisher, best known for playing Princess Leia in the "Star Wars" movies, has a much creepier story about two Democratic senators.

It seems that Fisher was having dinner with the late Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Chris Dodd one evening. This alone, considering the history of those two men, was risk-taking on a high level. At one point, Kennedy asked her whether she would be having sex with Dodd at the end of the evening. Dodd, apparently very excited, looked on expectantly. Fisher politely demurred. Kennedy, not a man for taking no for an answer, asked whether Fisher would have sex with Dodd in a hot tub. At this point Fisher replied that she was not any good in water.

This story, related in Fisher's new book "Shockaholic," is another reason why genuine satire is very hard to pull off, if not dead entirely. Where was a Jedi Knight when one needed him?

"This is not the actress you're rutting for."

Fisher was, by all accounts, lucky to get away with a moderately amusing, albeit sordid, story about herself and a couple of depraved senators. Kennedy and Dodd were notorious drinking and wenching buddies, mad, bad, and dangerous to know, especially if one was an attractive woman.

Around the time Fisher was getting grossed out by Kennedy's suggestion of hot tub sex with Chris Dodd, the two committed what has come to be known as the "waitress sandwich" at a Washington hot spot called "La Brasserie." The story goes that while their dates were in the lady's room, the two fun-loving senators grabbed a waitress and made wrestled her to the floor, with Dodd on the bottom, the waitress in the middle, and Kennedy on top. Only the intervention of another waitress prevented things from going further. The two senators fobbed the incident off as boyish hijinks gone too far.

The two boys, Kennedy and Dodd, were in their 50s and 40s, respectively.

Kennedy, whose behavior at Chappaquiddick in leaving a young woman to drown, was far worse than any modern politician has ever been accused of, died in the Senate a few years ago. Chris Dodd recently ended his Senate career for reasons of health.