SEXIS WRONG

erotic motion picture Emmanuelle (1974). Fashion designer
Alexander McQueen modeled his recent clothing line on his
reading of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, a
classic of pornography. 2
Celebrity prostitutes appear on afternoon talk shows. The
Jerry Springer Show generated a London play. The satellite radio
service Sirius hired Howard Stern for $500 million. Cable
In imitation of porn performers,
college girls are depilating their
pubic regions, piercing their nipples,
and getting their buttocks tattooed.
Cosmetics firms are selling nipple
blush.
networks offering sexy shows are stealing male audiences
from broadcast television. When Janet Jackson’s wardrobe
“malfunctioned” during the telecast of the Super Bowl, the
furor in an aroused Congress doomed the FCC’s proposed
relaxation of rules governing media ownership. Jackson single-breastedly
forestalled a growing monopoly and became
a Joan of Arc for consumer forces. Mainstream artists are
rushing to photograph porn stars. Jenna Jameson’s autobiography
was a bestseller. Paris Hilton’s “secret” videotape
jumpstarted her career.
The Atlantic Monthly published “Conservative Men in Conservative
Dresses,” an extensive survey of mostly Republican
heterosexual male crossdressers that concluded that the
real problem, sexual fetishism aside, was that they looked
pretty frumpy. 3 Upscale magazines such as Talk and the New
Yorker have run articles on porn performers. The Talk piece,
by novelist Martin Amis, was accurately entitled, “To Millions
of American Men and Women, These Women Are Movie
Stars.” 4 Clive Barnes, the distinguished drama critic, wrote a
similar article for the New York Times. Elegant erotic novels
are commonplace; think of Susan Minot’s Rapture (Knopf,
2000), whose narrative is a single act of oral sex, or of other
bestsellers, such as Nicholson Baker’s Vox (Random House,
1992) a few years back. The Book of the Month Club routinely
offers erotic fiction.
Recently audiences could attend the stage version of The
Graduate, in which the fifty-plus Kathleen Turner stripped
completely naked. Other startling Broadway productions
have included Lysistrata, The Vagina Monologues, Puppetry
of the Penis, Menopause: The Musical, and Urinetown, and
still raunchier fare frequently appears Off Broadway. Chloë
Sevigny fellates her lover—the director—onscreen in the
mainstream film Brown Bunny (2003). In Michael Winterbottom’s
film Nine Songs (2004), stars Kieran O’Brien and
Margo Stilley engage frequently in actual intercourse.
Museums and art galleries in Manhattan are exposing sexual
explicitness in modern painting, sculpture, photography, and
fashion. “Surrealism: Desire Unbound” at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art quite deliberately included unmistakably
pornographic works by famous Surrealists. 5 The Whitney
mounted a successful exhibit of G-strings and thongs. 6 “Erotica
and the Like,” a show at the CDS Gallery
(79th Street), featured graphic works by artists
such as Goya, Bellmer, Bonnard, Bourgeois,
Balthus, Wesselman, Lucian Freud, De Kooning,
and Picasso. The Deitch Projects gallery
in Soho displayed the photographs of Vanessa
Beecroft, who strips and depilates models,
and photographs them in nude battalions in order
to comment on modern eroticism. 7
Because practice as well as ideas are involved, the dynamic
that legitimizes pornography is far from precise, and definitive
tipping points—clear-cut examples of acceptance of previously
anathematized expression—are hard to establish. Explanations
nonetheless abound.
Pornography as Political Expression
First, according to historians, pornography has been linked
for over 300 years with politics and identity—even, if you
like, with the politics of identity. The essays in The Invention
of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity,
1500-1800 (Zone Books, 1993), edited by Lynn Hunt, point
out that from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries,
pornography promoted democracy, urbanization, secularism,
scientific method, equitable legal systems, technology,
and modernity itself. Beginning with the nineteenth century,
middle-class males striving for respectability and fearful of
sexual license tried to prevent sexual information from reaching
women and the lower classes, says Walter Kendrick’s
The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (Viking,
1987). Forbidding sexual expression shored up a sense of privacy
in a society increasingly convinced that democracy and
literacy had led to open, public vulgarity. According to Lauren
Berlant in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City:
Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1997),
pornography strengthened democracy by reminding Americans
that a culture can become authoritarian by trivializing the
sexuality of its members.
Another argument that pornography is essential to democracy
is Joss Marsh’s Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture,
and Literature in Nineteenth Century England (University of
Chicago Press, 1998), which maintains that “lower-class,”
blasphemous, and obscene speech challenged established
142 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG