125
People are still having sex.
Despite the pitchfork-and-bible brigade’s crusade against gay marriage, sex ed, and that Mother of Harlots and Abominations, the smutty soap opera Desperate Housewives, America’s low-slung undercarriage is still well-lubricated with salacious soaps, erotic novels, X-rated confessionals, and books of haute-porn photography calculated to steam the veneer off your coffee table.
Exhibit A: In the fall 2004 season, Desperate Housewives was the second highest-rated show on US television, averaging nearly 22 million viewers a week — stats that give proof through the night that the American appetite for sex (vicarious sex, at least) is undimin-
ished.2 For the high-forehead set, there’s T. C. Boyle’s novel, The Inner Circle, about the
sex researcher Alfred Kinsey; the biopic Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson; and the com- mercial photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, which following the time-tested Playboy formula, pairs nude photos with brow-furrowing essays by Gore Vidal, Salman Rushdie, and other heavy-hitters. For the Howard Stern demo- graphic, there’s adult-movie queen Jenna Jameson’s New York Times bestseller, How to
Make Love Like a Porn Star — yet more evidence, if any is needed, that the Boogie Nights
culture of the porn-movie industry is slowly but surely going mainstream.
Judith Regan, whose ReganBooks published the Jameson mammoir, sees dollar signs in what she calls the “porno-ization” of American culture. “What that means,” she told a CBS reporter, “is that if you watch [what’s] going on out there in the popular culture, you will see females scantily clad, implanted, dressed up like hookers, porn stars and so on. PARADISE LUST:
PORNOTOPIA MEETS THE CULTURE WARS1
And that this is very acceptable.”3 Further up the lowbrow-middlebrow-highbrow index,
the design critic Rick Poynor notes “the normalization of porn” in his book Designing
Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture:
The casting aside of inhibitions has been under way since the 1960s. It was given a boost by the arrival of home video and with the coming of the World Wide Web in the 1990s the urge to strip away the final shreds of decorum became unstoppable. In the last few years, sexual images have thrust their way into the everyday public sphere. […] [W]e are in the process of designing a pornotopia in which sex, or at least our dreams of sex, are allowed to permeate areas of life they should never have been permitted to enter until recently.4
A striking example of the normalization of porn is the publishing-world trendlet repre- sented by Story of O-flavored true confessions such as The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir by Toni Bentley and The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet and allegedly autobiographical novels such as The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Wom-
an by Nedjma and 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa P. Until recently, a
sexual memoir like The Surrender, a foul-mouthed paean to the joys of anal sex (sample quote: “My ass is my very own back door to heaven”) and The Sexual Life of Catherine
M., an exhaustive chronicle of the author’s serial swinging in sex clubs and gang bangs,
would have been career suicide for the authors, a former dancer for The New york City Ballet and editor of the respected art magazine Art Press, respectively. Now, it’s a shrewd marketing move: The Surrender has sold over two million copies worldwide and earned a scolding from the pope (every publicist’s dearest dream); as of early 2006, the global sales of The Sexual Life stood at more than a million.
Even the neocon fop Tom Wolfe has sex on the brain these days (a thought that in- spires a thrill of terror in those of us who would rather not contemplate the sexual side of a cultural conservative whose signature get-up is a white suit, white lisle socks with polka dots, and two-toned shoes — with spats, no less.) In his novella I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), Wolfe satirizes the keg-party debaucheries of today’s collegiate youth with suspi- cious relish, rhapsodizing about “loamy loins” and “iliac crests” and “winking navels” in fully engorged prose:
Slither, slither, slither, slither went the tongue, but the hand — that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it had the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns — oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest — no, the hand was cupping her entire right — Now! She must say ‘No, Hoyt’ and talk to him like a dog...5
(yes, well, we’ve all been there. By the way, nothing says hot and sloppy like “otorhino- laryngological.” Insert navel wink here.)
SECTION 2: DIGITAL DESIRE BEyOND PORNOGRAPHy 127
into the mainstream.6 Whether that’s symptomatic of the Decline of the West or the
Opening of the Public Mind depends, at least in part, on which side of the culture wars you’re on.
America, in the early days of the 21st century, is a house divided.
According to Dr. Barnaby Barratt, president of the American Association of Sex Edu- cators, Counselors, and Therapists, “The media are becoming more sensationalist and more titillating” even as the religious right is becoming “far more conservative and Pu-
ritanical, sexually.”7
The historical tension, in the United States, between Old Testament morality and the moral agnosticism of capitalism is giving Americans a nasty case of cognitive disso- nance. The Faith of Our Protestant Fathers admonishes Americans to keep their eyes on God and their noses to the grindstone. Meanwhile, the lesser angels of consumer cul- ture whisper in the other ear, urging Americans to indulge in the instant McGratifica- tion of their every infantile whim. Time and again, the Bible inveighs against greed and materialism — “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,” Jesus counsels (Matthew 19:21) — yet capitalism preaches the gospel of Get Rich Quick and He Who Dies With Most Toys Wins. In a
context unimagined by Hobbes, corporate wars over market dominance realize the 17th
century philosopher’s grim vision of a struggle for survival that pits “every man against every man,” emphasizing individual gain over the collective good. It’s winner take all, in the gladiatorial chariot race to market supremacy and Profit Maximization At Any Cost; turn the other cheek, and your competitors’ wheel-scythes will cut you to ribbons.
Marx saw this coming. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), he notes the truly radical nature of capitalism. Almost posthuman in its tendency to pursue its own profit-driven, technologically determined course (a course that often runs roughshod over the social and environmental interests of the humans it supposedly serves), capitalism doesn’t need social ties or family networks, let alone Puritan morality, Marx implied. The bourgeois epoch, he wrote, is characterized by the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social condi-
tions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation.”8
Which brings us, in roundabout fashion, back to the culture wars: From his vantage point as an educator, sex therapist, and psychoanalyst, Dr. Barratt looks out on an Amer- ica wracked by what he calls a sexual “civil war.” On one side, sex-positive straights and gays, civil libertarians, crusaders for sexual freedom, and random rutters — you know, the guy who just has to have that Make your Own Dildo kit (“Thousands sold worldwide! Just add water! Amazing detail!”), the girl who won’t leave home without her Ultravio- let Jelly Rubber Butt Beads, the clammy-handed geek who actually owns one of those creepy-funny Fleshlights hawked on every porn site (a male masturbation aid consisting
“The seductive, inviting Pink Mouth FleshLight™ [with] soft, pliable, non-vibrating Real Feel Super Skin® sleeve…made from a patented, high-quality material designed to repli- cate the unmistakable sensations of penetrative sex.” Text and image from the Fleshlight website, http://www.fleshlight.com/main/product_info.php?products_id=54. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
On the other side of this kulturkampf are Christian soldiers marching as to war against frank, factual talk about sex in the classroom, school libraries, or student newspapers. According to the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Sex & Censorship Commit- tee, fundamentalist groups are clamoring for censorship of medically accurate sex infor-
mation.10 In its place, they champion a faith-based ideology that urges America’s youth
to gird up its loins against Satan’s temptations by foreswearing masturbation, contracep- tion, abortion, and homosexuality, and arming themselves with abstinence (some faith- based curricula urge kids to bring Jesus along on that hot date, as a “chaperone”).
By their fruits ye shall know them: According to a Planned Parenthood factsheet, the fruits of abstinence-only sex ed include public schools forced to host “chastity” rallies in which stu- dents pledge to God that they will remain chaste until marriage; chapters on AIDS and con- traception purged from a ninth-grade health textbook in North Carolina because it violated state law requiring abstinence-only education; a seventh grade health teacher in Belton, Mis- souri suspended when a parent complained that she had discussed “inappropriate” subject
matter in class.11 (The hapless instructor answered a student’s question about oral sex).
If a little learning is a dangerous thing, faith-based cluelessness is suicidal at a mo- ment when, according to Planned Parenthood, the United States “has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, and American adolescents are contracting HIV
faster than almost any other demographic group.”12 Experts cite a dearth of comprehen-
SECTION 2: DIGITAL DESIRE BEyOND PORNOGRAPHy 129 as condoms, as the root of such evils. “By contrast, the ‘European approach to teenage sexual activity, expressed in the form of widespread provision of confidential and acces- sible contraceptive services to adolescents, is…a central factor in explaining the more rapid declines in teenage childbearing in northern and western European countries,’”
Planned Parenthood notes.13
Meanwhile, in America, the sleep of reason is breeding monsters: In Granite Bay, California, a student asked where his cervix was; another student wanted to know if oral
sex could make her pregnant.14 No, Virginia, only Our Heavenly Father can break na-
ture’s laws. This we know, for the bible tells us so in Saint Luke, where the Holy Ghost, er, came upon the Virgin Mary, as scripture puts it. (One uses the verb advisedly.)
According to Dr. Barratt, “there is more opposition to sexual expression than ever” because “sexual values” are a flashpoint in the culture wars. “We now have the govern- ment attacking scientific research,” he says. “The NIH [National Institutes of Health] has a blacklist of researchers who will not get funds because they are seen as being on the wrong side of the government’s agenda…of abstinence-only [sex] education.”
America is gagged and bound by the “moral values” of neo-Puritans and paleoconser- vatives such as Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma and co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS who preaches abstinence as a mighty bulwark against the virus, worries that lesbianism is “so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom” at a time, and believes that “the gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every
area across this country.”15 In 1997, Coburn castigated NBC for encouraging “irrespon-
sible sexual behavior” by flaunting “full frontal nudity” during prime time The nudity in
question? Death-camp inmates in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.16
But, mirabile dictu, at the very moment that self-appointed morals czars are making schools, network TV, and SuperBowl half-time shows safe for theocracy (if not for de- mocracy), the Web often feels like one big petri dish, culturing mutant strains of por- nography and bizarre new paraphilias. (“Paraphilias” is the psychiatric term for a class of psychosexual disorders characterized by extreme or dangerous desires, specifically those involving suffering, humiliation, and/or nonhuman objects or nonconsenting partners. Pedophilia, necrophilia, scatologia, bestiality, S/M, transvestism, voyeurism, exhibition- ism, and frotteurism — sexual gratification by rubbing against strangers in crowded pub-
lic places — are all paraphilias.17)
In truth, adult-oriented sites make up less than two percent of all web content, ac-
cording to the journal Nature.18 Nonetheless, as a 2002 study by the National Academy
of Sciences notes:
While sexually explicit material comprises only a small fraction of online content, that fraction is highly visible and…accounts for a significant amount of Web traffic.19 […]
enue from adults who pay to view content. […] There are also a plethora of noncom- mercial sources of pornography on the Internet, such as peer-to-peer file exchanges, unsolicited e-mail, Web cameras, and chat rooms.20
By this, I don’t mean that we’re witnessing a runaway proliferation of alternative sexuali- ties; the truth, I suspect (again, based on purely anecdotal evidence), is that the inter- connected nature of the link-driven Web, together with the frenzy of online advertising, has simply made “highly visible” what was once kept far from public view, under plain brown wrappers or behind the locked boudoir doors of adventuresome sybarites.
Back in the day, the lone “invert” luckless enough to find himself marooned in, say, Nebraska, could only bite his pillow and curse the heavens for making him cursed among men, the only homosexual on Earth. In Glenn Holsten’s documentary movie,
Gay Pioneers (2000), veterans of the struggle for gay liberation reminisce movingly about
the mind-shattering moment when they stumbled on newsletters published by early gay- pride organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis---trans- missions from another galaxy that told them They Were Not Alone.
Today, anyone with an Internet connection is only a click away from a parallel uni- verse of sexual solar systems whose porn sites, toy shops, networking sites, and support groups orbit around obscure obsessions. The Web not only connects geographically far- flung devotees into close-knit communities, it also assaults unsuspecting “normals” with porn spam and X-rated search results for sites and products that cater to every imaginable (and unimaginable) proclivity.
From the late 19th century, when Krafft-Ebing mapped the geography of the “degen-
erate” imagination in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), until 1973, when the American Psy- chiatric Association deleted homosexuality from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, official culture pathologized virtually everything but missionary-po- sition heterosex; “moral degenerates” were stigmatized, criminalized, institutionalized. Now, the loves that dared not speak their names trumpet them from the rooftops, online. It’s the Revenge of the Repressed.
This is partly about the Newtonian physics of contemporary society: For every repres- sive action from the dominant culture, there is an equal and opposite transgressive reac- tion from subcultures, who as deviancy is defined up have to ratchet up their iconoclasm in order to earn the bourgeois seal of disapproval that is the badge of true transgression. It’s about punching through the cultural clutter, to borrow a term from advertising---get- ting your message across.
Of course, online porn peddlers need to make themselves heard, too, and taking fetishes to gut-lurching extremes is a proven means of grabbing pornsurfers by the eye- balls. Thus the proliferation of “object-insertion” sites like BrutalDildos.com, Extreme- Hole.com, and ButtCam.com, which feature women inserting impossibly humongous dildos and anything else within reach — baseball bats, Barbie dolls, zucchinis, cooking whisks — into their orifices. As a post by a writer on the pornoblog Jaxon Jaganov suggests, object-insertion sites and other Web-porn tropisms toward the extreme have more to do
From SwimmingFullyClothed.com, http://www.swimmingfullyclothed.com/. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
Neck-Brace Fetishist (http://www.nbak.tierranet.com/pixs/Nwoods01.jpg), from NBAK. tierranet.com. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
Photo by Shinji Yamazaki, from Secret Magazine, Belgium. Image taken from the “Art Gallery” archived on the Neck Brace Art Appreciation Klub website, http://www.nbak. tierranet.com/art.htm. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
All images from the now-defunct Big-Gulp website. Reproduced under the Fair Use provi- sion of US copyright law.
Breast-expansion morph by Holly Witt. URL unknown. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
Breast-expansion morph, uploaded by Estradiol to the Breast Expansion Archive,
http://www.bearchive.com/menu.html. Title: LongHorns. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
SECTION 2: DIGITAL DESIRE BEyOND PORNOGRAPHy 135 with the endlessly revolutionary nature of capitalism mentioned earlier, as well as the persistence of virulent sexual stereotypes, than they do subcultural rituals of resistance:
Somewhere at some point someone decided that the fun need not be limited to dildos and other sex toys. Why not try and get chicks to stick all sorts of stuff into their puss- ies? And so ‘Object Insertion’ porn was born, so to speak. First and foremost, this niche is about novelty — it’s about grabbing you by the eyeballs and getting you to say, ‘Did that chick really just stick a cellphone in her crotch?’ Once they’ve got your attention, different pornographers go off in different directions. For some, it’s all done in the spirit of wacky sexual escapades, kind of like a pornographic variation on Jackass-type stunts. For others, it’s a more mean-spirited, degrading-chicks sort of thing that might have to do with an unconscious anxiety about death, birth, maybe their mothers, or more likely, a deep-seated fear of an empty bank account.21
Then, too, the fragmentation of the mass audience into a zillion microniches has in- spired online advertisers to go after the alt.sexualities demographic. As a result, even a websurfer who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night has probably been spammed with a come-on from a sexual subculture whose deviant desires would have given Freud anaphylactic shock. Spam and search engines have made the invisible visible, a god- send to sexological researchers and connoisseurs of Xtreme kink who engage in what the sexpert Susie Bright calls “pornographic rubbernecking.”
We’re living in the Golden Age of the Golden Shower, a heyday of unabashed de- pravity (at least, in terms of online voyeurism and virtual sex) that makes de Sade’s 120
Days of Sodom look like VeggieTales. The Divine Marquis never imagined aquaphiliacs,
a catchall category that includes breath-holding fetishists, fans of simulated drowning, and guys whose hearts leap at the sight of babes in bathing caps or who delight in un-