The Dukes of Hazard

The January/February issue of The Atlantic ran a piece by Caitlin Flanagan called “The Hazards of Duke,” about Karen Owen, a Duke student who produced a PowerPoint thesis detailing her promiscuous sexual activity with 13 of the university’s athletes. The allusion to the popular ’80s television series is more than incidental. The Dukes of Hazzard made light comedy out of a pair of moonshiners, while Karen Owen’s story involves blackout drinking that results in anonymous and sometimes painful sex. The subject of brutal sex was reprised in the same issue of The Atlantic in an article on Internet porn called “Hard Core” by Natasha Vargas-Cooper. In the piece, Vargas-Cooper describes a one-night-stand of her own that didn’t go well: “…in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, ‘Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.’” Needless to say, the old adage “if it’s been done, it’s been said, and if it’s been said, it’s been done” still holds true. There are parts of The Canterbury Tales that will still shock if you read Chaucer carefully enough, to say nothing of Rabelais, the Marquis de Sade, Montaigne (who was quite candid on the subject of sexual dysfunction), Pauline Réage (aka Anne Desclos) and Pasolini (whose Salo is the ne plus ultra of boundary-breaking). But Vargas-Cooper points out that, in the past, acquiring graphic depictions of violent sexuality often involved a quest. At the least, you had to sneak into the house with your VHS cassette and succeed in not being discovered watching it on TV. But the advent of the Internet has made the most forbidden subject matter (coprophilia, water sports, asphyxiation, even necrophilia) available at the click of a mouse. Was the subject of the first article (the increasing casualness of rough sex) in some way the result of the phenomenon (the increasing presence of sex online) broached in the second article? Does the Internet give license to and even validate some of our more more aggressive urges, or were they always just well kept secrets? Did the horse precede the cart, or vice versa? Is the medium ultimately the message?

The Origin of the World

Prolepsis is the attempt to anticipate a question or an objection. So even though the question hasn’t been asked, the answer is yes. Yes, it is true that people think about sex all the time. A cursory review of the magazine rack at your local newsstand will reveal this—and this does not refer to Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler or any of the porn magazines that have had ignominious deaths at the hands of Internet sites that have usurped their sleaziness. Take, for instance, the current issue of People, with a bikini clad babe on the cover and the headline, “My New Body,” or the headline on a neighboring celebrity mag: “Ashton Cheats Again.” The question is not whether sex is on everybody’s mind, but whether there are any minds in which some form of sexuality is not present. One is hard put to find glossy magazines whose front pages are devoid of the mention of sex. One might have thought that elderly people, with their dying libidos, would have other things on their mind, but dementia has a disinhibiting effect that has made STD’s a major problem in nursing homes. Now, what about that category of people who disagree with the notion that sex is always on their minds, and still finds offense in Freud’s notion of infantile sexuality? No one can tell them what they are thinking, though an fMRI might easily show the brain lighting up in those areas dealing with sexual stimulation at precisely the moments when “the lady doth protest too much.” Sublimation is the process by which sexual energy is turned into art. So, if you claim you couldn’t possibly have been thinking about sex when you were looking at Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde,” since you were interested only in the beauty of the artist’s spread-legged rendering, then you were thinking about sex anyway.

Little Death in Venice

Now it’s time to return to a painful subject: the decline of furtive browsing. Back in l992, John Gross wrote The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800. But no one has yet produced a history of the decline of the X-rated section at newspaper kiosks, nor has anyone attempted to document the stinging feeling of shame inflicted by the withering glances of prudish news agents, whose forbidden merchandise served as an incubator of male desire. Playboy, Penthouse and even Hustler are still sold in independent drugstores and in most newsstands, but they have become lifestyle magazines that are an accepted feature of mass culture. Back in the heyday of newsstand sex, magazines like Gent and Sir were printed on cheap paper stock, which actually blurred the images of the models, whose lurid poses were rendered with shabby photography. The layout of the shots in the old editions of Gent and Sir had an extemporaneous quality, as if they were taken on the run, in the kind of scruffy motel rooms to which the reader might retreat after being chased away from the newsstand for stealing free looks. The Internet, with its free and easily accessible pornography, has killed one of the great coming-of-age experiences that defined adolescence for the American male. Fallen women in lacey lingerie have been replaced by emboldened vixens whose high-definition sexuality has denuded fantasy of both its privacy and its mystique. Where will the male libido find the guilt and transgression that had previously been the hallmark of tortured adolescence, and incidentally of great works like Lolita and Death in Venice? There was a brief period before the death of porn magazines when a whole new bevy of publications, Cheri, Club and Club International, emerged to carry on the tradition of fetishistic objectification. The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary Harron’s 2005 film about the famed bondage model who later became a devout Christian (and her Henry Higgins, Irving Klaw), was a swansong for the great age when the fumes of the tobacconist were the madeleine of illicit desire. When Ronald Reagan was a television announcer, he  declared, “At General Electric, progress is our most important product.”  In the case of pornography, progress hasn’t improved anything.