SEX SELLS

Susannah Breslin | Detour Magazine | August 1998

Say you’re lying on a bed naked. You’re a man or you’re a woman. You’re with someone or you’re by yourself. You’re turned on or you’re not. You’re having sex or you’re planning to get laid or you’re wondering if you’ll ever score again. It’s 1998 now but soon it will be 1999 and then it will be the year 2000, and you’ll still be lying naked on that bed with sex on your brain. Forever. So what do you want? You’re a man who wants to have sex with a feminist who will let you spank her. You’re a woman who calls herself a girl who likes to power trip off fellatio. You’re a human being who wants one thing in life and that is a three-way orgy with a diverse population. Because you understand how things work with sex. You take a pill to get an erection. You take a pill to not get knocked up. You buy pornography, consume natural aphrodisiacs, undergo plastic surgery, exude a politically incorrect, postmodern eroticism. This is everything sexual you are, everything sexual you will become, everything sexual that will happen as you bang your way into the new millennium. But will you ever come?

If you were a 10-year-old boy standing on a Los Angeles beach during Memorial Day weekend of 1998 and you looked toward the sky, you would see a plane pulling a sign that read: “SEX AND THE CITY.” If you were that boy you would read that sign, turn, and go back to the game you were playing with paddle in hand. That’s how it is now. Because the history of sex goes like this: In the beginning there was Adam and Eve and sex was about the lustful coupling of two physical bodies. No clothes, no furniture, no dating. Just the garden and some sin. Sex was spare. This is the way it was for a long, long time. Until one day the sexual revolution arrived and suddenly screwing begot a brat that was a political act. A vagina turned into a feminist statement. A penis was transformed into a patriarchal tool. For the next four decades this newly politicized sexuality dominated, changing only in terms of what agenda it chose to party with. Sex adopted feminism, lay down with sexual harassment, made ugly friends with Andrew Dworkin, got together with Christians and Pat Buchanan at the same time. Sex slept around like a slutty civil servant. Now as the pre-millennial fever spreads across the country faster than the clap on a porn-movie set, sex is tired of being a politician. It has realized, like its baby-boomer buddies, that what it really wants more than anything else in the world is to turn a buck. So sex has laid itself out, spread-eagled in the street, and replaced the dollar bill as the next great medium of exchange to become the world’s most available commodity.

Because if you think about it the Free World is run by the next Iceberg Slim, a presidential player in the starring role of profitable pimp. It’s not that much of a leap, is it? The political pundettes run the publicity whore track from MSNBC to Politically Incorrect in their best attempt to become Bill’s bottom bitch. Is it sexual harassment yet? Let’s hope so. Because a woman’s got to get ahead somehow and it’s a great day when all a girl’s got to do is give head to get ahead. Because a man’s got to get off somewhere when new strip-club laws limit is ability to fully pet. Bryn Pryor, managing editor of Adult Video News (so he ought to know, right?), says Gen-Xers (and he’s one of them so he can say it, right?) who grew up during the Reagan/Bush years (like you and me, right?) and are now realizing that having a Democrat in office (lucky for us, right?) means “the ‘50s are over and the ‘60s are here again” (praise the Lord, right?). Be thankful for sex commodified in the red glow of a lava lamp’s retro light.

So buy sex is what we do. Check the box marked “forced feminization.” Put a yes by candle wax, clamps, and/or clothespins. Would you prefer flogging? Caning? Or just the belt? Be a human pony or puppy. Just don’t mark the square for Sissy/Slut unless you’re sure it’s what you really want. Pay first, please, the girl waiting at the front desk. “I don’t do this because I like it,” the buxom brunette at the Eros Station playhouse in Van Nuys, California, will inform you, “I do this because I have an $11,000 college debt.” She will lead you into the red Firehouse Room with its cage, table, and rack. She will lock you in the black Jail Room with its bowl, collar, and leash. It’s all in the orgasmic spirit of consensual payment for services sexually rendered. Although the ideal position in this free-market economy is actually located in the boss’s office, where you can see into every separate room from each hidden-camera’s angle. Watch the man cock his head at the girl while she dances. See the girl get naked as she stalks him. View it all rendered hazy in the lines of a black-and-white monitor’s video light. The perfect profit is a voyeuristic stance with no expenses.

There are still private sex places where we go and do private sex things, except now everybody’s watching. You’ve been touching your lover’s behind with suspicious regularity, the sexperts observe. “It’s a great thing for the next millennium,” Tristan Taormino shouts over your shoulder as you and your partner pant away at each other’s posteriors. When you have a spare second, she’ll hand you her book (“Thank you,” you’ll manage to say), The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, and she’ll point out reassuringly, “We have to take a leap to the next orifice.” Or maybe you are lonely and single, spending addictive amounts of time trying to meet that someone special on-line. That’s OK, Lisa Palac says, because she wrote The Edge of the Bed, and she believes it’s the ‘Net that is the current center of our collective sexuality. Don’t call it future sex, though, or she’ll slap the cyber right out of your mouth: “It’s very old-fashioned, like writing love letters and developing long courtships.” Or maybe you prefer missionary-style on the bed with your lover. The boob tube will flip itself on while you do it. “There’s a trend in Sweden now,” you’ll hear Loveline’s Dr. Drew say (did you really have it on MTV?), “where their attitude toward sex is, ‘Ho-hum,’ because they’re much more interested in relationships.” You hear co-host Adam Carolla chime in, “There’s a definite rise in candor in this country but whether grandma was getting buttfucked or never dreamed of it, who knows?” They discuss a general lack of sexual accountability from their armchair positions. It pretty much kills the mood.

Everything sexual must now be inspected from all sides, points, and borders to meet the demands of customer approval. We look more than once at sex nowadays, not necessarily with eyes wide shut at the meat market. Nouveau-riche sex seeps into the economy no matter how frantically old money dams the gaps under the doors. At the Jack Tilton Gallery in Manhattan the buxom, blond beauty that is artist Heilman-C sells porn-star sex to gallery runners who want to watch them get it on live and in person. With free reign to direct the performers and participate in the action, the 3,000 art fucks fairly pack the place. This is ART, is what the context says. This is PORN, is what the orgy says. I’m MASTURBATING, some attendees are physically asserting. Everybody, clearly, is buying, even though it’s free. When the all-girl version comes to Los Angeles and lulls for a brief moment, the ordained minister of this marriage between porn’s white-trash bride and art’s culturally elite groom gets up on the pedestal and gyrates around. “I’m like the naive person who walked in the door to see what would happen,” Heilman-C will tell you. This is an accessible relief to everyone there with a poseur’s high expectations. No more waiting in line to see Annie Sprinkle’s cervix in San Francisco. No more alternative-culture slumming. “It’s the orgasm of art,” she says, and it’s true, it’s what you want to hear, it’s all in the mainstreaming of marketing.

The competition is predestined to only get worse. We must learn to measure up to the demands of an intellectual sexuality. How many inches on the brain ruler have you got? What kind of sex do you get if you add 36-24-36 and 10? Would you describe your erotic point of view as more tailored in shape or just a sample size 8? “We’re trying to destroy the cultural illusion that there’s no sustained overlap between sex and intelligence,” says Genevieve Field, from the safe haven of the literary smut site Nerve, in the Web’s net. You make a mental note to use your brain more when getting laid. “Traditional people have had to chose between erotica and porn,” she says. You will rethink your cranial pursuits to discover which ones are erotically related. “We are interested in trying to create something less blockheady than porn and less gauzy than erotica.” Hopefully, a vow to go back and reread Joyce will suffice so one doesn’t have to give up Hustler. That college degree may be worth something because being able to have one’s sex cake and eat it too is entitlement, after all, when it comes down to it. In the perfect future world, thinking people’s orgasms will all coincide.

No matter how you film it, this latest X-rated flick is still called Coming to America and, as always, in the quest for American identity he with the most wins and he who lays the best scores. Sex is fast food and you’re in the drive-thru. The sexual immigrant who comes to the land of the free realizes the real model for the Statue of Liberty was a French whore and the American dream means having to strip and start over again. Sexually, will you assimilate? In the face of new challenges and a foreign tongue, it is unclear if boys and girls will go from rags to riches as they pull themselves up by their fetish bootstraps. We may have escaped conservative oppression but will we have an orgasm while we do it? It’s a global market and we’re so far behind we still think of our sexual selves as one of the tired, poor, and huddled members of the masses. It’s difficult to envision the forest for the trees when the mayor of New York City wants to turn Times Square into Disneyland. Tickets will cost too much and no one will ever get laid. Go to Butte, Montana, right away. There, Norma Jean Almodovar, whores’-rights most outstanding advocate, is in the process of buying America’s oldest whorehouse, the Dumas Brothel. “It will be our cultural center,” she reports of the 43-room building that in the ‘80s was shut up like a time capsule with a steel plate. Do your part and volunteer—there’s Whore Camp ‘99—and help remodel. You can’t blame Giuliani as easily from Butte if you fail.

Because we’re only just kids in the erotic candy shop that just opened on Main Street, and we’re mostly sugar-high sexual schizophrenics. Consumerism threatens the length of our enjoyment, but hope lies in the fact that there’s something innately intangible about sexuality. It will change—swinging back and forth like a pendulum, waxing and waning like the moon, coming and going like brainwaves in an orgasm. Sex can only become a commodified dinosaur if we translate it to mean un petit mort. “Sex is funny,” says Ann Randolph, star of the racy sex play in L.A. theaters, Ann Randolph’s Miss America. In her world a man dates a blow-up doll and a Kinko’s employee wears staple removers on her nipples. This surrealist vision of sex bodes optimistically well for the survival of pleasure in the next millennium’s erotic climate. In the end, will you come?