America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  Contraception, erotica, sex outside marriage—Harvey’s reasons for being in business—challenge this authority, and the authority of the state, too, because the family unit is the keystone of the state. “Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men’s baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities.”

  Richard Nixon put it another way. “If an attitude of permissiveness were to be adopted regarding pornography, this would contribute to an atmosphere condoning anarchy in every other field—and would increase the threat to our social order as well as to our moral principles.”

  Interpreting “natural law” to make it a bedrock of human behavior is a core effort of neoconservatism just as it is for the Catholic church and other religions. Adherence to natural law (nobody really seems able to prove it exists) ensures social stability. Defiance of it invites chaos.

  This is how Harvey explains the seeming contradiction that has sent me on the road, the question of how we can be an increasingly hypersexual culture even in the face of the supposed power of “moral values” crusades.

  “So you have on one hand an increasing interest in sexual stimulation, whether it is pornography or vibrators and dildos, and on the other hand an increasing fear on the part of people who are really frightened by sex and their own sexuality who want to stop all that.”

  “Do you suppose,” I ask him, “that the increased fear makes for louder protests?” Since people who watch porn or buy sexual devices for use in their own sex lives don’t typically march with signs or petition the government, the field is left to those who oppose, no?

  “I think it is possible. It is true, certainly possible, that what you call hypersexual, the increasing sexual stuff in our culture, is related to this issue of the far right, that Paris Hilton washing a car makes people who are afraid of sex more determined and more afraid and therefore more vocal. That seems to be a reasonable hypothesis: More sexual content in American lives makes some people more afraid and determined and energetic.”

  Perhaps, I think, they see a great unzipping. We are unzipping ourselves from restrictions imposed by society or religion or family, and we let loose: with practically an infinite number of ways to express desire, we are dashing toward some indeterminate future looking for an equally indeterminate happiness. But is sex doing the unzipping, or is something else unzipping sex?

  I still can’t help wondering about the influence of salesmanship. Could it be that all this “permission giving” is really driving the sexual culture, that we want more sex in our lives because Harvey’s industry has sold us like Professor Harold Hill sold River City?

  He gets his back up at “the idea that corporate America is somehow creating consumer slaves. That’s nonsense.” I haven’t really suggested that corporate America is creating slaves to sex, necessarily, but I wonder if our sexual desires are anything like my own jones for a huge flat-screen TV with a Bose home-theater system even though I don’t watch all that much TV and my old set works fine. I am also taken aback by his use of the phrase corporate America. I have never really thought of the sex industry the way I have thought of General Electric or Hewlett-Packard or the Union-Pacific Railroad. But of course it is part of corporate America and has been for some time now, woven into the fabric of business in ways that go unacknowledged.

  Obvious examples are easy to come by. Now that most travelers own cell phones and avoid the minibar, in-room hotel spending at the nation’s largest lodging companies is powered by adult movie fees. Almost 40 percent of DIRECTV, one of the nation’s largest satellite television services, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s giant media group, News Corp. It offers Hustler TV, Playboy TV, and four other adult services. Competitor Dish Network also carries adult channels. Cable companies like Cox, Time-Warner, and Comcast offer X-rated shows, too. Cerberus Capital Management, which bought Chrysler from Daimler-Benz in 2007, invested in the publisher of Penthouse magazine and helped keep it afloat in 2003 while former vice president Dan Quayle, a champion of “basic American values,” now chairman of Cerberus, was a board member.

  Supposing Harvey is correct, and that he simply opens doors by giving us permission, and that we can walk through the doors or not, I ask if he thinks we are any happier for doing so.

  “Are we happier with this stuff than without it? Some people are and some people are not.” Well, perhaps I have asked an obvious question so he has given me an obvious answer. “This is not the most important thing that defines happiness,” he continues. His business is about fantasy. It is escape, a temporary thing.

  “One of the reasons we almost always see large dicks in porn flicks is because people accept this as fantasy. If you wanted to make men feel good, you would have small dicks. I have suggested to some of our people here from time to time that there must be a niche market for small dicks, and they all say, ‘Come on! They gotta be big!’”

  We only achieve happiness when we have sense of accomplishment, Harvey says. “Only in overcoming obstacles of various kinds do we get any sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in life. A chess player does not get much satisfaction out of checkers.”

  Masturbation has always seemed a lot like checkers to me—fun but not very challenging.

  Sexuality, Phil tells me, when it’s good, can be a way of asserting or a “way of submitting oneself to the power of another person. That has strong psychological components, not just enhancing intimacy but ratifying a love between two people. The bond is important in life. Sex ratifies the bond.”

  When Harvey says this, I am struck by something Susan Montani and Candida Royalle said as we were talking in Montani’s living room. Taboo is good, they said. “Doing something slightly taboo—don’t you think when you do it, when you share that with a partner, it is like a special new link, a secretly shared thing?”

  “Porn is not a huge taboo anymore,” Candida said, “but it is still a taboo and that helps it retain its sexiness.”

  “So what happens,” I asked, “when nothing is taboo?”

  CHAPTER 2

  What Would Jesus Do?

  I SAY HALLELUJAH AS CHRISTIANS KISS THE MISSIONARY POSITION GOOD-BYE

  The new moralism in this country has been growing for the past two decades. The awakening is manifesting itself in the change in the national life-style.

  —Jerry Falwell, 1986

  Like a lot of good Christian men, Joe Beam has wrestled with sex and been pinned to the mat. That was a while ago, when Joe was younger, but he still feels the pain of his defeat every day. So he has had the staff of the Four Points Sheraton in San Diego remove the TV from his hotel room. Joe likes TV. He’ll catch Boston Legal anytime he can. But he’d rather miss a favorite program than expose himself to the seduction of the Adult Desires channel.

  Joe Beam is a Christian preacher. He prefers terms like teacher or educator, but he’s a preacher by training and inclination. Once his ministry was in an actual church, a Church of Christ, a group so conservative it seriously debates the propriety of music accompanying hymns and insists that Christians who join the Methodists or the Baptists, say, aren’t really Christians at all because the Bible is the literal word of God and in the Bible there are no sects and those poor, misguided apostates are going to hell for sure.

  Now, though, Beam runs an outfit based in Franklin, Tennessee, called Family Dynamics, part business, part personal mission, aiming to “build stronger marriages” through “interactive, highly effective faith-based marriage and family seminars.” He spent his Friday night here presenting the first part of his Love, Sex, and Marriage lesson to a group organi
zed by a local United Church of Christ congregation, an evangelical bunch who are not the same as the Church of Christ, though the distinction doesn’t really matter to Joe. He says the same things to any conservative evangelical group who will have him. And last night, when he finished the talk on love, he did what he usually does when he’s on the road. He went back to his room, called his wife, Alice, at home in Tennessee, read a little, went to bed.

  No TV.

  I have come to see Joe because he aims to help his fellow conservative Christians cope with the culture made possible—or capitalized on—by the likes of PHE and because he represents the other side of the contradiction I have been trying to explain to myself, the way we seem to be ever more lusty even while we are supposed to be ever more puritanical. The problem of how to cope with lust has tortured Christians for two thousand years, so I wonder if the estimated hundred million or so mostly conservative evangelical Christians in this country have come to grips with what Joe himself calls our “hypersexual” culture, and what strategy Joe will give them aside from condemning it. After all, if 50 percent of preachers are visiting porn sites, and 20 percent say they have been “addicted” to them, it stands to reason the congregants are struggling to navigate, too. Finally, I hear Joe Beam can make the Bible sexy. That’s something I have to see.

  This morning Joe is taking his time. He hasn’t yet arrived in the large white tentlike structure the hotel has attached to the rear of its building to accommodate a large group. But about two hundred church members have, and they are singing an old-timey hymn.

  There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,

  No, not one! No, not one!

  None else could heal all our soul’s diseases,

  No, not one! No, not one!

  Jesus knows all about our struggles,

  He will guide till the day is done;

  There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,

  No, not one! No, not one!

  No friend like Him is so high and holy,

  No, not one! No, not one!

  And yet no friend is so meek and lowly,

  No, not one! No, not one!

  Jesus knows all about our struggles,

  He will guide till the day is done.

  And smiling. They are all smiling.

  The song ends and Jeff Wadstrom, a local church poobah, walks up to the elevated platform and stands behind a lectern. He greets us and says he hopes we enjoyed Beam’s talk on love last night. “Now,” he tells us, “the first talk today is going to be about sex.”

  “Wooo! Woo hooo!”

  Men raise their arms. Wives laugh. Applause, applause. Wadstrom introduces a younger man, a newly married fellow, and asks him to give an invocation. The newlywed bows his head, as do we all, and addresses God, saying, “We are so grateful to be able to talk about something that is so much a part of your plan and that’s the sex.”

  Ahh, yes. The sex. Joe always stresses that his seminar has three elements: the love, the sex, the marriage. They are indivisible. But nobody’s kidding themselves. The congregation didn’t pay Joe Beam’s fee of about $1,500 and his expenses to fly out to California to talk about love. Joe knows, and they know, that the sex is the main attraction.

  We applaud again and Joe Beam walks onto the floor with a low, deliberate rumble. Joe is fifty-seven years old, a well-fed, silver-haired man with a schnoz and a couple of small handbags under his eyes that give his face a friendly elasticity. This morning he is dressed in khaki slacks, a red sweater vest, and brown tassled loafers. He looks like a retired country club golf pro who’s spent some time in the clubhouse bar.

  But his voice is straight out of the fundamentalist radio programs I used to catch as a kid in Ohio, late at night on AM radio stations, voices carried up north of the Mason-Dixon line by fickle astral projection. I thought they were very exotic back then, and now Joe’s bourbon-rich basso profundo, the way he can make his voice ride the register up and down to evoke sadness, pity, shame, repentance, joy, and his gift of turning one-syllable words like God into three syllables make me nostalgic. But unlike those old-time preachers, Joe is not a fire-and-brimstone guy.

  “Okay. Let’s see how you follow directions. How many of you did not have sex last night like I told you to?”

  Just a few people raise their hands and everybody laughs, except me because I’m feeling a little squirrelly about the idea of horny fundamentalists. This reveals my own prejudice to myself, the first hint that I am going to have to adjust my thinking about “Christian sex.”

  When the laughter begins to die, Joe stands up straight, squares his shoulders, and makes a pronouncement:

  “Sex is the most wonderful gift God ever gave Christians.”

  He proclaims this like a thesis statement meant to banish any doubts in our minds that what we are about to hear is a legitimate topic for the virtuous. He’s going to use real terms and talk about real life, he tells us, and we’re all adults here, so nobody ought to be embarrassed by the words penis and vagina and clitoris. Frankness is vital. “I believe the devil works better in the darkness and God works better in the light.”

  Then, as if to strengthen his biblical authority to talk about the sex, he quotes the first letter of St. Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians:

  But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

  Joe presents this little excerpt as an affirmation of God’s desire for his people to lead rich sexual lives. “Sexual fulfillment is part of the marriage contract, biblically speaking,” he declares. But the church has long ignored sex and that has led to great unhappiness. How can we expect a young woman who is told over and over, “Sex is bad, sex is bad,” and then she gets married and hears, “Oh, you’re married? Sex is good, sex is good,” to adjust to her new status? “I feel like I’m sinning when I make love to my husband,” he recalls women saying to him, and they want help.

  Morris Gregg, a beefy sailor in the U.S. Navy, who’s sitting next to me, is nodding furiously in agreement. He leans over to his wife, Deidra, with an “I told you so” grin on his face. Deidra puts the palm of her hand against his cheek and shoves it away, leaving him grinning and glancing sidelong at her.

  Joe begins the sex portion of his seminars with this flurry of apologetics to inoculate himself against the charge of being lascivious. He believes he is tiptoeing along a fragile divide. He wants to tell us hot sex is God’s will, but this hasn’t exactly been the impression left by his fellow fundamentalists.

  Former House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom Delay summed up the feeling of many fundamentalists when he declared that Christians in the United States were being assaulted by “our government, by the media, and throughout popular culture…For the last forty years, the anti-Christian Left in America has waged a sustained attack against faith in God, traditional moral norms, the rule of law, and the traditional marriage-based family.”

  James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful religious right lobbying groups in America, once told a conservative crowd that he wanted to turn America into the old Andy Griffith Show. “I want to go back to the days of Mayberry, with Sheriff Taylor and Opie and all of those good folks,” he said.

  So Dobson and many others have made sex a potent political issue. You wouldn’t see Andy Taylor as the wise, kind Jesus figure shepherding his Mayberry flock of oddballs while advocating perversion. But perversion is everywhere in America. So Dobson has declared a “Great Civil War of Values,” and you better pick sides because things aren’t going so well
for the good guys. “The traditionalists are being mauled,” Dobson has said.

  “Unfortunately, there are predators around your house that want to gain access to your sons and daughters. They will, if given an opportunity, twist, warp, and molest them. Indeed, they are tinkering with your locks today and seeking to break open the windows. Focus on the Family also stands ready to assist with the defense of your family. This is why our motto reads ‘nurturing and defending families worldwide.’ We care about both the inside and the outside of your home. All we need is your invitation to help. Let’s work together to save the next generation.

  “I’ll leave you with this request for your financial participation…”

  I mention Dobson because Joe has been a regular guest on Dobson’s radio program, and I’m trying to reconcile the man I see now with the Dobson rhetoric of war and the scary image of Ron Jeremy sneaking around the outside of my house. Joe Beam just doesn’t seem like a cultural warrior. He has a personal philosophy that sounds pretty live-and-let-live. “I am quite convinced that when Jesus said, ‘Love God and you love yourself,’ and ‘Love your fellow man as you love yourself,’ on these two hang all. They might be the only two questions on judgment day. ‘Did you love me? Did you love people?’ Well, come on in.’” His AA meeting, he likes to say, is the best church he ever goes to. In fact, he wants no part of the politics of sex. He won’t climb onto some red state barricade. He has his beliefs and they generally track Dobson’s, but for Joe, sex is a personal issue, not a political one.

  Joe Beam never imagined he would someday become a fundamentalist sex guru. Nothing about his life gave him even a hint. He was born in southern Alabama and raised in Augusta, Georgia. He attended Bible college, married Alice, had two daughters, and for fifteen years preached the gospel to Church of Christ congregations, a neat and tidy life blessed by God.