A family man once again, and fiercely so, President Clinton vows to protect his privacy even as Monica Lewinsky's has been irrevocably shattered. That's what happens when the man -- typically -- gets to control the story, say what it didn't mean. Nell Bernstein is a Bay Area journalist and editor of YO! (Youth Outlook), a newspaper by and about young people published by Pacific News Service.

Here's a new one for you: the guy who ruined a girl's reputation by telling everyone they didn't have sex.

The lie President Clinton copped to last night is the reverse of the standard one. As a rule, the boy says he did something with you or you did something to him that you did not in fact do.

He does this to enhance his reputation at the expense of yours.

But now the biggest man on campus admits he flipped the script: "let's, and say we didn't," ("Are you kidding? With that woman?")

Either way, the lesson is the same: Sex between a man and a woman may take two in private, but once it gets into the public arena, HE's the one who gets to define it -- and to define her. "It didn't mean anything. She's nothing to me." Should this lead to a scandal, the first thing to go is her "credibility," her right to be the one who says what happened, what it meant.

Knowing this, who could begrudge Monica her unwashed dress, both souvenir and proof? It's all she's got now, besides a reputation that will dog her all her days.

In these post-shame days, a "bad reputation" is not a product of how many men you sleep with, how public you are about it, or how much skin you show -- Madonna hasn't got one, nor Li'l Kim. A reputation is by definition unsolicited, something you cannot acquire by design.

It's reserved for girls who are about nothing but sex, women who get themselves into situations they can't control. "No one would believe a girl like you."

The other face of the lies men tell about women and sex is the lies they tell to women about sex -- first and foremost, that it mattered. The Monica tapes let on that she believed this one; the gift trail indicates she was encouraged to do so. Now, on television, she goes up a notch on the dignity scale, from "that woman" to "Miss Lewinsky"-- but only to be entirely obliterated.

The relationship itself, once marked by late-night calls and "Leaves of Grass," is emptied of content, reduced to "not appropriate. In fact it was wrong." To be "legally correct" about it, even the sex wasn't "real" sex.

Looking the country square in the eye, Clinton offers no apology to Miss Lewinsky -- for the "inappropriateness," the "wrongness," not to mention his silence as she faced the threat of criminal prosecution. The matter now is between the man, his family and their God.

A family man once again, and fiercely so, the president vows to protect his privacy even as Lewinsky's has been irrevocably shattered.

Just as he admits not only the relationship but the fact of the lie, Clinton retains a prerogative that is not even presidential but universally male -- to control the story, define it, say what it didn't mean.

On the morning-after talk shows, in coffee shops, the talk is of leaders and their wives. What will this do to Hillary? What are we going to do with Bill? The girl, that woman, may as well never have existed.

The lie the president told about Monica Lewinsky may have been a variation on the standard theme, but it leaves her in the same place as any woman conquered and dismissed. She is at once branded and erased.