America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  Sex, being a prime human instinct, has always been the weak point of social control. It provides a refuge where people can retreat to carve out a bit of autonomy, forge a bond with other human beings, and in a small way try to fulfill their own desires on their terms. George Orwell knew this, making Julia, Winston’s lover in 1984, an insincere member of the Junior Anti-Sex League who made her living censoring porn to be released to the proles. Phil Harvey knows it, too, and thinks that may be one reason why sex, and depictions of sex, are feared. Conservative religions have always known it.

  More than eleven hundred years ago, Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, a powerful ecclesiastical and political counselor to several kings, described how some women “are reported to use certain instruments of diabolical operation to excite desire. Thus they sin…by committing fornication against their own bodies.” In ninth-century Europe, such a thing was not just a sin, it was a crime. Church and state were siblings and each enforced the laws of the other. Punishments could be severe, including the wearing of sackcloth and ashes, public prostration, fasting, and other deprivations that could go on for years at a time.

  And yet women still used dildos. There wasn’t much of an “adult industry” to sell them, nor any adult stores or a thousand Internet sites promoting them. The media did not inspire them. The combined force of rigid church and state teaching was required to keep sexuality in the shadows, and even then some people, maybe many, defied the edicts.

  Pope Paul VI recognized the necessity of threat to control sex in the face of human nature. “Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control,” he wrote in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. “Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law.”

  The risk of getting your girlfriend pregnant and finding yourself bagging groceries instead of going to college was a very real threat to me, I can tell you, much more incentive than Catholic teaching ever was. It was the hammer over my head accounting for my late sexual start. (I wonder what I would have done if those two girls in the swimming pool had told me they were taking birth control.)

  But Anne, the new convert to Roman Catholicism in Missouri, takes birth control and clearly feels the church’s authority over her sexual life is more advisory than mandate. She has made up her own parallel sexual morality and seized control of her own sexual destiny. Many of us do just that.

  We have never been very good at taking direction when it comes to sex, and we are much less so now. There is just too much information streaming across our computers and televisions and magazines to put sex back in a closet. Every person now makes up his or her own mind, choosing from a cafeteria of possibility.

  The younger the person, the truer this is. My younger Fascinations customers expressed surprise at some of the questions I asked them, as if asking questions about watching porn or buying the Rabbit Pearl vibrator betrayed my own quaintness. Like the teenage girl in Missouri who attended the Passion Party with her mom and sister, school and church are not places to learn about sex. They assume the messages they receive there are unreliable and stilted. Sex is not a moral issue, a religious issue, or a political issue. It is a personal issue.

  I think Joe Beam and the other Christian sex advisers understand this. Joe does not want conservative Christians to have to choose between their churches and sex. He knows sex can be more powerful than church; it was for him. So by telling the faithful that they can have most of the sexual menu items they wish within the boundaries of heterosexual marriage, Beam and the others are attempting to reach a truce in the culture war over sex, even if—in my view—they have to bend the biblical literature to do it.

  If this is so, however, what accounts for the rise of the hypersexual culture even while America is supposedly rediscovering its religiously restricted carnal outlook?

  American sexual hypocrisy is a cliché and an old one at that. Ted Haggard’s fall from grace and Senator David Vitter’s prostitution scandal are just recent examples. But hypocrisy is fading. Every day I worked at Fascinations, we made, or nearly made, our sales goals. Average, taxpaying, solid citizens are shopping there and in the hundreds of other adult stores around the country. Over and over again, I heard how happy they are to have such a store that is so unlike the grungy places of the past. They can finally feel free to walk through the doors.

  So I don’t think the apparent contradiction is hypocrisy. After I began asking people to tell me their political affiliations, the split was close, slightly favoring Republicans and Independents, especially at Fetish Con. Melissa voted for George W. Bush because she liked his views on taxes and national defense. She thoroughly disapproves of his stances on social and sexual issues. I heard the same comments from most other people, liberal and conservative, religious and areligious.

  Throughout my journey, I considered the assertion Susan Montani made to me about being rebellious and supporting “the cause.” I have to confess that though I did not recognize it at the time, and though her comment made me uncomfortable, I suppose I do support “the cause” if the cause is defined as freedom for adults who want to have sex with other consenting adults even if that sex seems unusual to the rest of us.

  But the fact is, people by and large do have that freedom. Make no mistake, there are plenty of hateful expressions, lots of repressive talk, and no doubt some of us would like to re-create the fictional asexuality depicted on early sitcoms, as Dobson suggested with his allusion to Mayberry. But I experienced nary a raised eyebrow. The cop in Rossville, Kansas, was nonchalant when I mentioned Passion Parties, the Hyatt sales manager in Tampa was cheerful and cooperative with the fetish conventioneers, Marty Tucker had never been in a legal fight over his sex products. Peter Acworth operates freely in San Francisco. PHE’s epic battle started nearly a generation ago. When I told desk clerks, cabdrivers, flight attendants, and friends what I was doing, I heard, “Sounds like fun!” “Can’t wait to hear about it,” and a couple of noncommittal “interesting”s.

  Community pressure does exist, just not to the degree one might assume from the rhetoric. What we have, I think, is a dispute about packaging. As far as I can tell, people are not opposed to adult stores as much as they are opposed to a big garish sign with a girl in a nightie looming over their house. According to a 2005 Harris poll, most people don’t believe porn should be banned; they just want it kept away from kids. Most people don’t seem to care how other people have sex either, but they don’t necessarily want to watch them do it.

  There is a self-conscious rebelliousness in the people I have met, however, not just among the fetishists or the denizens of the Wet Spot but even among the sex shop customers, the sex toy party ladies, and Joe Beam’s audience. Like the majority in Lexington, Kentucky, thirty years ago, they believe they are going against the grain and they enjoy doing it. But I wonder if in some cases what looks like rebellion is really escape, a way to make that private realm more tangible and separate from the main current of American life.

  Feeling rebellious accomplishes something important. It helps create a sense of community bonding with other rebellious people, the camaraderie Phil Harvey talks about that exists in his company. The parallels with the Christian revival movement are uncanny and go a long way toward explaining how both trends can exist at the same time.

  Visit Christian websites or listen to Christian radio, and you will hear about how persecuted Christian conservatives are in the United States despite the fact that their man, George W. Bush, occupied the White House for eight years, they had significant representation in Congress and in
statehouses, and politicians of all parties have suddenly started bending over backward to declare how godly they are. Nevertheless, “For 40 years, the anti-God Left has been using America’s courts to impose an anti-religion, anti-family agenda on America,” declares the Traditional Values Coalition.

  This is a statement against the culture. In fact, there is no significant repression of Christians in this country just as there is no significant repression of sexual adventurers as long as they aren’t using a violet wand on your front lawn. I think the true rebellion is against an increasingly atomized, technological, impersonal culture in which people feel crushed and out of control.

  Instead of state or religious oppression of sexuality, there is increasingly a repression of sense of community, of intimacy, family loyalties, cohesiveness, and of self-control by the juggernaut of technological change, consumerism, niche marketing, the global economy. The landscape of Shawnee, Kansas, expresses it, with its strip malls, chain stores, and freeway bypasses. I don’t think it is any accident that many of the people I met in Seattle worked in the area’s high-tech industry where they help create one culture by day and escape into the opposite of that culture by night. Michael, a technical master in his work life, trades that in for skin-to-skin contact with Susan and their playmates. Don, a world-traveling businessman, spends many hours peering through a computer screen, reaching out for a facsimile of human contact.

  Likewise, megachurches are communities unto themselves with their own rules and regulations and common beliefs that serve as a refuge. Your fellow congregation members are your brothers and sisters in Christ. The “war” rhetoric used by the likes of Dobson works just as it does at PHE to forge bonds among people who perceive themselves under attack.

  In the fetish world and the BDSM world, there are many rules and regulations and points of etiquette. At first I was puzzled by them; it seems oxymoronic that sexual libertines would establish elaborate codes and the more radical the sex, the more rigid the codes. Everything is negotiated. Some negotiation recognizes the power of sex and the possible dangers—as Paradox explains, when you play with fire, you need some rules. But after watching the scenes at Fetish Con and the Wet Spot I think there is something else at work.

  Janice said, “My mother said she’d love me forever.” But her mother did not love her forever. So now Janice negotiates love and sex and feels safe in that web of rules. This superstructure of government creates the invisible borders for each person’s custom-made sexual “realm.” Within the realm you can exert control over your penis, vagina, fingers, mouth, toys, ropes, whatever you want. At Fetish Con, I met with two couples who lived dom-sub lifestyles, and as a “lifestyle master” cum real estate agent explained, “What a lot of people in the vanilla world do not understand is that this entails an extreme amount of trust. It is a trust that goes beyond what a lot of people in everyday vanilla relationships have. Left and right they are lying to each other, doing things behind each other’s back. A lot of that does not happen here.”

  Do you notice how many people on my quest have told me they want to feel something? How many say they want to experience intimacy? How many use the word trust? In an unzipped world, they are trying to zip themselves to something they can make real on their own. They could join a church, but sex seems more intense and a lot more fun.

  Susan and Michael, Bob and Melissa, can find each other on the Internet, share explicit pictures, meet, explore their enthusiasm for kink, even fall in love. A woman in Shreveport can learn she is not the only person in the world who wants to be spanked, that the world is full of people like her. Madison Young can explore her own rope fetish, make money, and push the boundaries of sexual “feeling” so far that most any kink you have imagined can seem tame by comparison and therefore more possible. The online world is a giant virtual space of mutual support. And then, once you feel the tangible normalcy of it all, you can, as Michael says, “make it real” and feel the intensity in real life.

  The more radical the exploration, the tighter the bond, the more one can “feel” in a culture gone numb. For many of the people with whom I have spent the last year, their experiences of sex are the most real things in their lives, just as fundamentalist Christians will often say that their experience of Jesus is the most real thing in theirs.

  Sex is true. You can feel a strap-on. You can feel a female ejaculation. You either come or you do not, and when you do it is the most elemental of human pleasures. There is no spin.

  When I took my first steps on this trail, I wanted to know if these people were finding happiness, and now I am sure that some of them are. Joe Beam’s audience is very happy—thrilled, really—now that he has lifted the shroud of guilt from their shoulders. I think many of the women in Missouri are happier than they were, having taken steps toward expanding their sexual lives. Melissa and Bob tell me they are happy, and I believe them. I am keeping my fingers crossed for Susan and Michael. I am not so sure about others I have met. I suppose some are and some are not, about the same answer Phil Harvey gave me, but what I am sure of is that seeking one’s own sexual place is one of the more rational responses to an impoverished culture that often seems more virtual than real and that the search is theirs to make.

  Which is not to say I am sanguine about every attempt to flee the culture we have built. I am haunted by the face of the guy in the Wet Spot, the one who nuzzled into his surrogate mommy as if trying to crawl up into her vagina and stay there for good. On the one hand, I can’t really blame the guy for mewling and cuddling into his domme’s lap any more than I can blame the future teen anal queen for her ambition.

  But I resented him, I suppose, for hiding in “sub space.” I felt humiliated on his behalf. I wanted him to reclaim his dignity. I am betraying my own prejudice here, I know. (BDSMers would say I have not figured out how to let go, that I am blocked.) As I say, I support the freedom of people to make whatever sexual choices they wish. But the sight of him crystallized a nagging thought I have had almost since the beginning, the one I expressed at PHE about what might happen if we killed taboo.

  Phil Harvey argues that he and his fellow adult-industry titans are not creating “consumer slaves.” I think he is correct, and that Kim Airs is correct, too, when she says that even with the marketing power of the sex industry we make our own sexual decisions, as we make sexual decisions in the face of government, religious, or social condemnation.

  Still, we are sold sex the way we are sold giant flat-screen TVs, computers, and beer. Trista did not simply discover squirting out of thin air; she saw it on a DVD. The Sinclair Institute shows the use of sex toys not just because sex toys can enhance a sexual experience, but because it sells sex toys. JimmyJane has turned them into fashion. Anal sex has boomed in popularity in recent years, according to Mark Schoen and other experts, because almost every porn video now has at least one anal sex scene. Same with threesomes, bondage, and fetish. Somebody is having more fun than we are, we learn, and we want it, too.

  This turns the quest to carve one’s own sexual identity out of a banal culture into an ironic statement on the way everything becomes just another part of that banal culture. So Pamela Kruger is right to worry about how widely accepted fetish and alternative sex in general have become. Acceptance dampens the frisson that makes taboo delicious. Looking for Delta of Venus would hardly be any fun if it weren’t forbidden. You can keep moving the boundaries, but just about everything that was once sexually taboo has shot right through mainstream and now landed in kitschy banality.

  Sex, porn, bondage, S&M—none of it is transgressive anymore. There is no danger in it. It feels scripted and oftentimes it is. Sex is like Times Square, filled with Sephora and Disney and Nike and Virgin, and if you fly to Paris and walk down the Champs-Elysées you will find Sephora and Disney and Nike and Virgin. We live in a kitschy world. Sex has now been completely subsumed into it, used as an entertaining distraction the way toned-down porn was used to distract the proles in 1984.

&nbs
p; There is no danger, so of course Selina Raven is bored, and Peter worries about being bored. Kim Airs, the most enthusiastic sexual explorer I have ever met, admits to experiencing boredom. “Sometimes I do get bored,” she says. “I’d be lying if I said I did not. It’s kinda like, well, I don’t want to say, ‘Been there, done that,’ but yeah sometimes.”

  This is why I think the sex explosion is just about over. People will still watch porn, and we will certainly still have sex, and some people will still want to be tied up as some people always have, but the hypersaturation of it all is about to fizzle. “We keep trying to push the envelope and get more outrageous,” Candida Royalle, who is very smart and funny and something of a porn philosopher, told me in North Carolina, referring not to her own productions but to the new generation of pornographers. “But the real art is about pulling back and discovering the nuances. Do we have to swing from the chandeliers to be exciting?”

  This comment reminded me of a photograph I admire greatly because it scares me just a little. Woman in Moroccan Palace, made by Irving Penn in 1951, is an image of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn. She sits on a floor, swaddled in robes, a turban on her head, before a tea service set on a low table. Fonssagrives is beautiful in it. She is always beautiful with her carved face and tulip-stem neck, but in this image she has a slightly subversive look in her eyes, challenging and dangerous, teetering on the edge between heartbreak and ecstasy, both outcomes seemingly just as possible.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing books would be impossible without a set of enablers. I must thank mine.

  My wife, Shelley, deserves an award of some sort. If you have to ask why, you haven’t read this book.