by Ben Shapiro
A 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that sexual dysfunction affected 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men. Over 25 percent of women 18–29 said they didn’t find sex pleasurable and younger women (18–31) were more likely to have sexual problems than older women.57 More sexual visibility hasn’t made people more happy—it’s made them more critical of themselves, more unfulfilled, more unhappy. When our culture transforms a beautiful act between man and woman into a public act catering to individuals, you undermine the fundamental value of sex.
Debbie does billboards
Paris Hilton is famous for one reason, and one reason only: She’s a fabulously rich slut. Hilton starred in the “sex [tape] seen around the world” with her then-boyfriend Rick Solomon;58 she was nineteen at the time, while Solomon was thirty.59 At least nine other sex tapes were said to be in existence as well, including a lesbian sex tape with Playboy playmate Nicole Lenz.60 The sexually uninhibited Hilton became a target for Larry Flynt of Hustler fame, who released pictures of Hilton sharing some lesbian tongue at a nightclub.61 As Conan O’Brien observed, “Hustler magazine announced that it will feature photos of Paris Hilton making out with another woman, while the woman fondles Paris’s breasts. So the search continues for a photo of Paris Hilton not having sex.”62
Hilton has parlayed her tramp reputation into a number of major advertising gigs. She was chosen as the Guess? jeans girl for Guess, Inc.’s 2004 “sexy fall ad campaign.”63 Although Hilton is bonier than past Guess? girls, according to the New York Observer, “her bad-girl image jibes with the clothing company’s porn-lite ad campaigns.”64 The ads helped prompt a 13.6 percent same-store sales jump in September 2004.65 Unfortunately for her, she was actually dumped from a planned Burger King ad campaign over her porny past.66
Professional porn star Jenna Jameson has made an advertising mark of her own. Jameson, who will quite literally sleep with anything that moves, posed for a billboard in Times Square in New York, promoting her website, clubjenna.com, and her filmmaker’s site, vivid.com (both hardcore porn sites). Jameson stands in a mesh top, covering her nipples with her hands; the caption reads, “WHO SAYS THEY CLEANED UP TIMES SQUARE?” Vivid.com advertises on billboards along the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, as well. One ad shows several of Vivid’s porn stars, with the caption: “Look, we can even erect a billboard.” Jameson has her own billboard on Sunset Boulevard for her lesbian porn flick, Krystal Method.
Aside from advertising her own porn videos and pictures, Jameson also represents the face of Pony sneakers, which placed her on billboards across America, as well as in the pages of Vanity Fair and Vibe magazines.67 She does ads for Jackson Guitars as well.68 Come Chantrel (yes, that’s her actual name), vice president and general manager for Pony at the Firm, elucidated the attraction of porn in advertising: “When I grew up in the ’80s in Paris, models were the ultimate feminine ideal... For the twenty-year-old kid, porn stars have kind of replaced what models used to represent.”69
Youngsters across the country are catching on to the “porn as pop culture wave.” “Porn Star” T-shirts for young girls are flying off shelves.70 “Porn Star” stickers now adorn skateboards and backpacks across the nation. And that’s aside from the millions of dollars in products these whores are pushing.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that the porn community doesn’t understand what’s happening. Adult Video News editor in chief Tim Connelly touts the new cross-generational marketing, averring, “There’s been a glamorization, coupled with a relaxation of society’s mores . . . It’s permeating the culture now, particularly with young people. There’s a whole new generation that’s grown up with MTV and video porn and girls cavorting around with musicians.”71
Buying into a fantasy
“Today, consumers don’t buy products, they buy brands. They buy a lifestyle that they can wear,” says Nancy Haley, co-founder and CEO of Tehama, a clothing company.72 According to the National Catholic Reporter, advertising guru Leo Burnett’s philosophy of advertising is “People no longer buy products; they buy lifestyles”; his clients included McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Nintendo.73 And there is no easier lifestyle to sell than a sexy one.
“[A]ll these sexual images aren’t intended to sell us on sex—they are intended to sell us on shopping,” writes Jean Kilbourne. “The desire they want to inculcate is not for orgasm but for more gismos. This is the intent of the advertisers—but an unintended consequence is the effect these images have on real sexual desire and real lives . . . The wreckage that ensues when people try to emulate the kind of sexuality glorified in the ads and the popular culture is everywhere, from my house to the White House. And many who choose not to act on these impulsive sexual mandates nonetheless end up worrying that something is wrong with them, with their flawed and ordinary and all-too-human relationships.”74
We live in a consumer culture. Advertising caters to what we want. As human beings, we want sex. It’s as simple as that. But by taking advantage of sex to sell us products, advertising demeans sex to the level of any other basic physical activity. It removes sex from the realm of the spiritual or the valuable. Advertisers prostitute themselves for our money, and as consumers, we play the part of the willing johns. At a certain point, it’s difficult to morally differentiate between paying for sex on the street and buying a pair of jeans—the commercials have guaranteed you that in return for your purchase, you’ll receive sexual attention. And that should be our goal—shouldn’t it?75
CHAPTER EIGHT
TV VS. VIRGINITY
“The people were cool. I wanted to try what they were doing on the show.”
THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD MANHATTAN BOY1
We’ve been called the MTV Generation. Considering that MTV claims that 73 percent of boys and 78 percent of girls aged twelve to nineteen watch their programming, it’s an accurate name.2 A 2000 poll of college seniors at the top fifty-five U.S. universities showed that while only 23 percent could name James Madison as the father of the Constitution, 99 percent knew who the MTV cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead were.3
MTV sets standards in dress and in behavior, and even in thought. When Beavis and Butthead were at their peak in the 1990s, Beavis’s snorting laugh was imitated ad infinitum (and absurdum) at junior high schools around the country. The show, which primarily consisted of two teenage idiots blowing snot into their sodas and lighting pets on fire, among other inane activities, became a cultural icon.4 Why was it popular? Because these primitively drawn, headbanging, acne-ridden morons were representatives of an increasingly aimless generation. “Beavis and Butthead are regressive and proud of it; mindless role models for lethargic teens who don’t want the bother of growing up,” writes John Lyttle of the Independent (UK).5 If Beavis and Butthead were losers with nothing better to do than sniff paint and torture frogs, what kind of losers did that make their viewers? The Beavis and Butthead audience was the constituency of the degraded, and Beavis and Butthead were their elected representatives.
Even years after Beavis and Butthead went off the air, they remain representative of typical MTV programming: vulgar, stupid, repulsive. MTV is morally relativist in every conceivable way. Even aside from its music videos, MTV’s programming is oversexed cultural excrement targeted at kids. As media critic L. Brent Bozell states, “It’s still the Temptation channel, a 24-hour hangout selling easy sex, swagger, and swearing—all aimed, directly and deliberately, at children.”6
The Parents Television Council, run by Bozell, conducted a study of MTV during the channel’s spring break raunch-fest. They found that in 171 hours of programming, there were 1,548 sexual scenes “containing 3,056 depictions of sexual dancing, gesturing, or various forms of nudity, and another 2,881 verbal sexual references. That averages out to about 18 physical and 17 verbal references to sex per hour.”7
One of the shows that has a specifically sexual focus is The Real World, the famed reality TV show with a simple premise: Throw to
gether a group of young “adults,” put them in a big city, and watch the raunch develop.8 MTV bills the show this way: “This is the true story of seven strangers, picked to live in a house and have their lives taped, and find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting REAL.”9 The show is cast for sex appeal, chemistry, and more sex appeal. Applicants are asked questions like “How do you feel about cheating?” and “What did you do last night?”10
Pick an episode at random from the most recent season of The Real World—any episode—and you’re guaranteed several instances of soft-core porn—or worse. For example, The Real World: Philadelphia Episode 20, “Romantic Getaway,” featured two of the female roommates, Shavonda and Sarah, losing their tops on the beach; Shavonda oiling male roommate Landon’s “nice ass”; Shavonda and Sarah French-kissing each other during a game of Truth or Dare; Landon losing his shorts during Truth or Dare; Sarah asking male roommate Keramo “how many inches” he is; Shavonda making out with Landon on a bed; Shavonda and Landon going to bed together.11 The show’s producers arrange for the cast members to be surrounded by alcohol constantly to encourage hookups—in The Real World: Las Vegas, both a bar and a hot tub were purposefully placed in the living room. And the casting directors do their job well: Real World housemates have no shame, and the few who react uncomfortably to the constant sexual activity are denounced as prudes or Puritans.
MTV’s goal is to get everyone laid. That’s the stated premise behind their show Wanna Come In? “Two geeks bump greasy heads with one another to win money for a hot date with two beautiful girls,” the MTV.com website eagerly explains. Wanna Come In? is the new show where nerds sweat through several challenges in an effort to get invited up to a babe’s pad. The geeks are not alone, though, they’ll each have their own personal ‘stud’ coach to help them hear those coveted words: ‘Wanna come in?’”12 After all, geeks need some lovin’ too.
There’s nothing transcendent about the MTV mindset. But why should there be, when their audience scorns transcendence in favor of materialism and physicality? MTV covers the physicality angle with The Real World and Co., and they push materialism in several of their other series, like Pimp My Ride, My Super Sweet 16 and MTV Cribs. In Pimp My Ride, the eminently talented Xzibit, “Pimp Master of Ceremonies himself,” makes over ugly cars.13 MTV Cribs centers on the houses of the rich and famous. “Don’t miss the only show that hooks you up with exclusive insight into your heroes’ cribs,” MTV.com breathlessly exclaims.14
MTV also glorifies the lives of the wealthy and shallow with shows like Newlyweds, Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, and Sweet 16. The latter revolves around spoiled fifteen-year-olds planning their Sweet Sixteen parties.15 The show is really a survey in bad parenting. Natalie’s “birthday wish” comes true in the form of a $900 dress and an $800 nail job.16 Ava’s becomes reality when her divorced parents buy her a Road Ranger and a custom-made beige gown that looks as though she is “wearing nothing but rhinestones.” The most hilarious moment of the episode comes when Ava whines that her mother won’t get her the beige dress: “If you stop whining, I’ll get it for you,” her father shouts. Way to impose your will, there, Dad. Ava makes her grand Sweet Sixteen entrance being carried by four members of the Loyola polo team who are “cute, sexy, and have good bodies.”17
But the oversexed worldview of MTV doesn’t stop at that channel—the same people control MTV 2, Comedy Central, TV Land, VH1, Spike TV, and Nickelodeon, among others.
Spike TV, the so-called “First Network for Men,” panders to the animalistic, ridiculously idiotic side of the male mind with a veritable flood of soft-core porn and violence. “We have a phrase here: ‘This channel is PG-25,’” explains Albie Hecht, Spike’s president, a former exec at Nickelodeon and other MTV networks. “It’s somewhere between PG-13 and R . . . We use the word ‘raw’ a lot around here . . . The eighteen- to thirty-four male is okay with the way life really is. They don’t have a problem with words like bulls—.” In a classic example of defining deviancy down, Hecht calls these viewers “the new normal.”18
MTV also controls Nickelodeon, a channel aimed directly at children. Nick’s programming has always been more edgy than its kiddie competitors. In the early 1990s, Nickelodeon aired The Ren and Stimpy Show, a gross-out cartoon show that targeted eight- to twelve-year-olds. While maintaining its spot on Nickelodeon, Ren and Stimpy became so popular that it eventually found its way to the mothership, MTV, where it aired on Saturday nights.19
Nick’s modern programming is no better, including shows like Zoey 101, starring Britney Spears’s little sister Jamie Lynn;20 Unfabulous, a “coming-of-age” show starring Julia Roberts’s niece, Emma;21 and All That, the pre-teen answer to Saturday Night Live, former stars of which include Amanda Bynes and Jamie Lynn. Each of the shows is a kid version of something that can be found on Comedy Central or MTV, and each features a kid MTV would like to make into a cultural icon, a la Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera.
MTV’s network of programming shows us what happens absent any moral grounding. Mired in nihilism, it opens a sex-obsessed world for teens who aren’t interested in doing anything productive in their spare time. Killing time has become an aim unto itself. In an age of growing convenience and falling academic standards, there’s more and more spare time to be had. And that means more and more time in front of the TV. As of 1999, the average seventh grader watched four hours of television per day.22
This boredom helps explain rapper P. Diddy’s ludicrous “VOTE OR DIE” campaign, pushed heavily by MTV.23 How else are you going to get through to teenagers who couldn’t care less about life, let alone politics? The only way to get their attention is to threaten loss of life. Even nihilists are afraid of death. P. Diddy didn’t have go that far over the top—he could have just threatened the loss of Xboxes and cable access—but somehow, “VOTE OR GO AMISH” didn’t have the same ring to it.
Hollywoodites insist that they have to make their programming more edgy, since today’s kids are more edgy. In the words of American Pie producer Warren Zide, “People need to respect the fact that kids are smarter than they get credit for. We like to speak up to kids rather than down to them.”24 American kids are not smarter than they used to be—they’re more jaded than they used to be. Are kids truly “smarter” because by age twelve, they describe themselves as “flirtatious, sexy, trendy, cool”?25 Or are they striving to imitate the “adult,” “smart” behavior modeled for them by pop culture? The loss of innocence and the rise of jadedness is a direct result of negligent parenting and immersion of children into an ever-deepening pool of pop culture materialism—a trend that MTV thrives on.
Paying for sex
The only channels more extreme than MTV are the premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. The shows aired on the pay channels are just as trendsetting among the porn generation as anything on network television.
The show that has shaped more young single females than anything else on television is Sex and the City, which aired exclusively on HBO and revolved around the sex lives of four young single women in Manhattan: Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon). These women act like men with regard to sex, willing to sleep with anyone at any time—and the series shows every minute of the steamy sex. They discuss sex with all the panache of a drunken sailor. They obsess over shopping, they glamorize drinking and one-night stands, and they shun all aspects that make femininity attractive—all while whining about the inability to find a nice single man with whom to have a relationship.
The glamorization of slut activity is without limit. Over the first three years of the series, Samantha has sex with forty different partners.26 Here’s Miranda on male genitalia: “Women don’t care. We care about nice arms, great eyes, big dick. I have never once heard a woman say, he had such a big, full scrotum.”27 Samantha on dating strategy: “Wait a minute, you’ve been dating this guy for three wee
ks and you haven’t seen his balls yet? Oh come on! Get with the program!”28 Charlotte and Samantha discuss ejaculation:CHARLOTTE: “My father gave me the most beautiful pearl necklace for my sweet sixteen.”
SAMANTHA: “Actually we’re talking about the other kind of pearl necklace. You know, the kind where the guy decorates your neck?”29
It should come as no surprise that Michael Patrick King, the executive producer for Sex and the City, also wrote for Murphy Brown and was a consulting producer for Will & Grace.30 Predictably, King is a gay lapsed Catholic.31 King describes the men on the series as “the revolving door.”32 The creators of the show decided to make Miranda a single mother because “We thought, ‘Okay, what’s the worst thing we could do to Miranda?’”33 That’s the kind of moral perspective the writers bring to the series.
The show is a cultural phenomenon. “We watch it every Sunday night—we have dinner parties,” explains Amber Campisi, twenty-one, of Southern Methodist University. “We sit and drink and watch the show.” “We’ll watch the whole DVD of the first season in one day,” agrees Chevon Villaneuva, twenty-two, of SMU.34 “Even if ‘sex this good can’t last forever,’ at least it can be remembered that long.... Fashion trends, sexual vocabulary and dating rules established on Sex and the City soon found their way into mainstream fashion, sex and dating rituals,” sighs Sarah Portlock of the Washington Square News.35
The Sex and the City phenomenon has deep societal effects. As Riley Mendoza, a twenty-two-year-old woman from Virginia and one of my classmates at Harvard Law, explained to me: “I really don’t like the Sex and the City idea of women thinking of sex like men have thought about it for a long time. Definitely at Harvard, and I think at other colleges as well, there’s this idea that feminism is about women being allowed to do whatever they want and being able to act like men. Talk about sex like it’s not a big deal, talk about how to enjoy it, have one-night stands. It becomes a chatty thing to talk about. I was a part of a female social club at Harvard, and that was the topic du jour—sex. It made people feel empowered, cool. I was not used to that at all, coming from a small town, and coming from a family that didn’t talk like that at all. I always thought that it was a little hollow. That in the end, women don’t think about sex the way that men do, and that people get hurt a lot. But you were supposed to act like you don’t care. I think that women biologically do care. And that women can’t maintain these no-commitment relationships without getting hurt.”36
