\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
Saturday Night Live<\/em> has always parodied television news.\u00a0 On one Weekend Update, aired during the 70s, Jane Curtin and Bill Murray had this exchange:<\/p>\n Jane Curtin:\u00a0 The drive against pornography districts in major cities continued to gain momentum this week, as more demonstrations were held in New York.\u00a0 Bill Murray was on the scene at one of them in Manhattan, and has an eyewitness report.\u00a0 Bill?<\/p>\n Bill Murray:\u00a0 Thank you, Jane.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now suddenly, the tumescent crowd and the irresistible area were one heaving alternately melting and thawing entity, ascending to heights heretofore inexperienced.\u00a0 Then with a gigantic, soul-searching, heart-stopping series of eruptions it was over.\u00a0 Afterwards the crowd had a cigarette and went home.\u00a0 Jane?<\/p>\n Television was an easy target.\u00a0 Those were the days when talk shows pre-interviewed guests and ran answers past a network censor.\u00a0 One sex expert recalls an appearance on the Merv Griffin show in the mid-80s.\u00a0 The topic obviously was going to be about sex.\u00a0 The network told him that he couldn’t say the words “oral sex” or “masturbation.”<\/p>\n “Fine,” he recalls answering.\u00a0 “Blow job and jerking off okay?”<\/p>\n Prime time, it seemed, would never be ready for sex, except in the most coded references.<\/p>\n But all that has changed.\u00a0 I never thought I\u2019d see the day when Mike Wallace would be offering the word \u201cpussy\u201d to the world of serious television news, but there it was.<\/p>\n It was Sunday, February 15, the day after Valentine\u2019s Day, and Sixty Minutes<\/em> was doing a background report on Vernon Jordan, Bill Clinton\u2019s close friend and go-between to Monica Lewinsky.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Cutler and Strauss, it seems, are also Jordan\u2019s close friends, or at least close enough to have the inside dope on who Jordan really is.\u00a0 Wallace kept reiterating how strange it was that no one inside the Beltway could be coaxed into saying anything negative about Jordan.\u00a0 Cutler and Strauss were carefully explaining why that was, all the while dutifully saying nothing about Jordan that Jordan wouldn\u2019t say himself.<\/p>\n It was an elegant chess game, with all three men playing their designated media roles.\u00a0 It was the full, standard drill — thrust and parry, thrust and parry.<\/p>\n At one point Wallace asked Cutler to comment on a Newsweek<\/em> 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.\u00a0 Jordan, it seems, had been very direct.<\/p>\n \u201cJordan said, quote \u2018We talk pussy,\u2019\u201d Wallace reported.\u00a0 Actually he said, \u201cWe talk pu____,\u201d because the network bleeped half the word \u201cpussy.\u201d\u00a0 But pussy is one of those words that you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Cutler didn\u2019t lose his composure in the least, but you could tell that Wallace had surprised him, how this wasn\u2019t a word he was expecting to travel from Wallace\u2019s mouth to his ears during a national television interview.\u00a0 He shrugged it off with a little smile, saying only that Jordan and Clinton could talk about whatever they wanted to while playing golf.\u00a0 \u201cIf they have a certain amount of locker room banter, or tell jokes to one another, who among us can cast the first stone?\u00a0 You and I will tell one another jokes.\u00a0 That\u2019s talking pussy.\u201d\u00a0 (Bleeped again.)\u00a0 The message was fundamental and clear:\u00a0 Regular sexy guys talk about pussy.\u00a0 Jordan and Clinton are regular sexy guys.\u00a0 Therefore it\u2019s not the least surprising or improper for Jordan and Clinton to talk pussy when they\u2019re together.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat could be more natural?\u201d Cutler was implicitly asking, and of course he\u2019s right.\u00a0 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n Wallace, knowing he\u2019s onto something, didn\u2019t leave it there.\u00a0 Next thing we know he\u2019s talking pussy again with Washington commentator Sally Quinn.\u00a0 He repeated the Newsweek<\/em> story, including the line about talking pussy.\u00a0 There was that (bleeped) word again, spoken to a woman no less, on primetime tv.\u00a0 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<\/em>, to how amazing it was for Wallace and Quinn to be talking about talking [bleep] all over again.<\/p>\n Wallace was into it, a little like a two-year-old who\u2019s discovered the power of shocking his parents by saying the word \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n Quinn was into it too.\u00a0 Since she wasn\u2019t representing the White House she wasn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 She allowed herself some surprise, laughed a little, and said quite directly, \u201cI\u2019m nearly falling out of my chair right now that you\u2019re saying it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s astonishing,\u201d Wallace commented about himself.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody even flinches when you say it anymore,\u201d Quinn noticed without repeating the word herself.\u00a0 The whole Lewinsky incident, she commented, has \u201ccertainly changed the rules of discourse,\u201d changed how sex is talked about in political circles and among the national press corps.\u00a0 Sitting together in CBS\u2019s studio, Quinn and Wallace shared a chuckle, enjoying the opportunity to have broken some new ground in sexual honesty, minuscule as it might be.<\/p>\n Bill and Jane couldn’t have done it better.<\/p>\n Under what circumstances have such victories for normalized talk of sexual matters been achieved?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n Ted Koppel nearly shocked on the words oral sex, warning his audience that the topic by its very nature was offensive.\u00a0 But the President’s alleged belief that a blowjob is not cheating had people discussing the boundaries of adultery.<\/p>\n This seems to be the way sexual territory expands in American culture:\u00a0 through the back doors that come along with the various ridiculous sexual scandals, outrages, and social panics of an infantile national sexual outlook.\u00a0 The Lord, as they say, works in mysterious ways.\u00a0 It was when Lorena Bobbitt took a kitchen knife to hubby John Wayne that the word \u201cpenis\u201d made its way onto the national airwaves, without even getting bleeped.\u00a0 Get used to it, kids, it\u2019s just a word, a part of the body, a kind of nice one at that.\u00a0 After the first hundred times on network news, it won\u2019t even sound strange any more.<\/p>\n Just like pussy.<\/p>\n Scandal is pornography for prudes.\u00a0 Associating sex, sin and sensationalism is as American as mom and cherry pie.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n But we have discovered in the past few months, for all the disapproval and condemnation, that something different has occurred.\u00a0 The Clinton debate has returned sexual talk to the water cooler.\u00a0 It feels like, all of a sudden, everybody wants to loosen up the stuffy old strictures about sex.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We\u2019re all human.\u00a0 Now let\u2019s grow up and get on with life and the real things that cause misery in the world.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Playboy<\/em>, July, 1998<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1998 David Steinberg<\/p>\n Saturday Night Live has always parodied television news. On one Weekend Update, aired during the 70s, Jane Curtin and Bill Murray had this exchange:<\/p>\n Jane Curtin: The drive against pornography districts in major cities continued to gain momentum this week, as more demonstrations were held in New York. 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