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Talking Sex: Landmarks in Free Expression

 

Saturday Night Live has always parodied television news.  On one Weekend Update, aired during the 70s, Jane Curtin and Bill Murray had this exchange:

Jane Curtin:  The drive against pornography districts in major cities continued to gain momentum this week, as more demonstrations were held in New York.  Bill Murray was on the scene at one of them in Manhattan, and has an eyewitness report.  Bill?

Bill Murray:  Thank you, Jane.  The citizens’ committee to clean up New York’s porn infested areas continued its series of rallies today, as a huge throbbing pulsating crowd sprang erect from nowhere and forced its way into the steaming nether region surrounding the glistening, sweaty intersection of Eighth Avenue and Forty-Second Street.  Thrusting, driving, pushing its way into the usually receptive neighborhood, the excited throng, now grown to five times its original size, rammed itself again and again into the quivering, perspiring, musty darkness, fluctuating between eager anticipation and trembling revulsion.  Now suddenly, the tumescent crowd and the irresistible area were one heaving alternately melting and thawing entity, ascending to heights heretofore inexperienced.  Then with a gigantic, soul-searching, heart-stopping series of eruptions it was over.  Afterwards the crowd had a cigarette and went home.  Jane?

Television was an easy target.  Those were the days when talk shows pre-interviewed guests and ran answers past a network censor.  One sex expert recalls an appearance on the Merv Griffin show in the mid-80s.  The topic obviously was going to be about sex.  The network told him that he couldn’t say the words “oral sex” or “masturbation.”

“Fine,” he recalls answering.  “Blow job and jerking off okay?”

Prime time, it seemed, would never be ready for sex, except in the most coded references.

But all that has changed.  I never thought I’d see the day when Mike Wallace would be offering the word “pussy” to the world of serious television news, but there it was.

It was Sunday, February 15, the day after Valentine’s Day, and Sixty Minutes was doing a background report on Vernon Jordan, Bill Clinton’s close friend and go-between to Monica Lewinsky.  The report included extended back-and-forth verbal duels between Wallace, representing the inquiring press, and ex-Presidential Counsel Lloyd Cutler and former Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss, representing the cautious and calculating White House.

Cutler and Strauss, it seems, are also Jordan’s close friends, or at least close enough to have the inside dope on who Jordan really is.  Wallace kept reiterating how strange it was that no one inside the Beltway could be coaxed into saying anything negative about Jordan.  Cutler and Strauss were carefully explaining why that was, all the while dutifully saying nothing about Jordan that Jordan wouldn’t say himself.

It was an elegant chess game, with all three men playing their designated media roles.  It was the full, standard drill — thrust and parry, thrust and parry.

At one point Wallace asked Cutler to comment on a Newsweek report on what Jordan and Clinton talked about when the two of them were out playing golf together, good old heart-to-heart buddies that they were.  Jordan, it seems, had been very direct.

“Jordan said, quote ‘We talk pussy,’” Wallace reported.  Actually he said, “We talk pu____,” because the network bleeped half the word “pussy.”  But pussy is one of those words that you don’t have to be a professional lip reader to know when someone is saying, so Wallace and Cutler and CBS News all knew that all we viewers knew that pussy is very much what grandfatherly Mike Wallace had said.

Cutler didn’t lose his composure in the least, but you could tell that Wallace had surprised him, how this wasn’t a word he was expecting to travel from Wallace’s mouth to his ears during a national television interview.  He shrugged it off with a little smile, saying only that Jordan and Clinton could talk about whatever they wanted to while playing golf.  “If they have a certain amount of locker room banter, or tell jokes to one another, who among us can cast the first stone?  You and I will tell one another jokes.  That’s talking pussy.”  (Bleeped again.)  The message was fundamental and clear:  Regular sexy guys talk about pussy.  Jordan and Clinton are regular sexy guys.  Therefore it’s not the least surprising or improper for Jordan and Clinton to talk pussy when they’re together.

“What could be more natural?” Cutler was implicitly asking, and of course he’s right.  But being natural about sex is hardly the established American way, so it felt decidedly unnatural, or at least unusual, to hear Mike Wallace and Lloyd Cutler talking pussy so supposedly naturally right there in the middle of Sixty Minutes.

Wallace, knowing he’s onto something, didn’t leave it there.  Next thing we know he’s talking pussy again with Washington commentator Sally Quinn.  He repeated the Newsweek story, including the line about talking pussy.  There was that (bleeped) word again, spoken to a woman no less, on primetime tv.  The story had shifted from how amazing it was that Clinton and Jordan talk [bleep] to how amazing it is that Wallace and Cutler talked [bleep] on Sixty Minutes, to how amazing it was for Wallace and Quinn to be talking about talking [bleep] all over again.

Wallace was into it, a little like a two-year-old who’s discovered the power of shocking his parents by saying the word “no.”

Quinn was into it too.  Since she wasn’t representing the White House she wasn’t required to be as professionally deadpan as Cutler and maybe, even among sophisticated Washington reporters and commentators, being a woman still cuts a person a little slack to be a human being.  She allowed herself some surprise, laughed a little, and said quite directly, “I’m nearly falling out of my chair right now that you’re saying it.”

“It’s astonishing,” Wallace commented about himself.

“Nobody even flinches when you say it anymore,” Quinn noticed without repeating the word herself.  The whole Lewinsky incident, she commented, has “certainly changed the rules of discourse,” changed how sex is talked about in political circles and among the national press corps.  Sitting together in CBS’s studio, Quinn and Wallace shared a chuckle, enjoying the opportunity to have broken some new ground in sexual honesty, minuscule as it might be.

Bill and Jane couldn’t have done it better.

Under what circumstances have such victories for normalized talk of sexual matters been achieved?  The word masturbation became popular on talk shows when Joycelyn Elders was fired for proposing at a medical conference on AIDS that sex ed classes discuss masturbation as a safe alternative to intercourse.

“Pubic hair” joined the national televised vocabulary during the confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas, when Anita Hill alleged that Thomas joked about finding that particular piece of sexual anatomy on a can of Coke.

Ted Koppel nearly shocked on the words oral sex, warning his audience that the topic by its very nature was offensive.  But the President’s alleged belief that a blowjob is not cheating had people discussing the boundaries of adultery.

This seems to be the way sexual territory expands in American culture:  through the back doors that come along with the various ridiculous sexual scandals, outrages, and social panics of an infantile national sexual outlook.  The Lord, as they say, works in mysterious ways.  It was when Lorena Bobbitt took a kitchen knife to hubby John Wayne that the word “penis” made its way onto the national airwaves, without even getting bleeped.  Get used to it, kids, it’s just a word, a part of the body, a kind of nice one at that.  After the first hundred times on network news, it won’t even sound strange any more.

Just like pussy.

Scandal is pornography for prudes.  Associating sex, sin and sensationalism is as American as mom and cherry pie.  It allows the speaker to describe in detail perfectly normal acts and body parts, while at the same time clucking one’s tongue in solemn disapproval.

But we have discovered in the past few months, for all the disapproval and condemnation, that something different has occurred.  The Clinton debate has returned sexual talk to the water cooler.  It feels like, all of a sudden, everybody wants to loosen up the stuffy old strictures about sex.  It seems like, all of a sudden, everybody wants to stop pretending to be non-sexual automatons and to acknowledge that sexual feeling, and even so-called sexual indiscretion, are everyday parts of everyday life — from the basement to the board room, from the bunk house to the White House.  We’re all human.  Now let’s grow up and get on with life and the real things that cause misery in the world.

 

Playboy, July, 1998

Copyright © 1998 David Steinberg

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