America Unzipped (36 page)

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.

 

W
hich 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.

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.

Julia Pastore, who edited this volume, believed in it from the beginning and kept that faith. She got me, got the idea, and then called me out if I got lazy to make sure I didn't forget it.

The debonair Joe Regal, an agent out of the old school, believed in it, and in me, even before Julia. I am grateful for his continuing trust and faith.

I dragooned Francesca Hayslett into the unenviable job of reading and critiquing early drafts of most chapters. Yet she worked like an enthusiastic volunteer.

It was Jacqueline Stenson who called me that day as I sat in the Atlanta airport. Over the next several years, Jackie provided an obscene amount of support not only for the MSNBC column, but for this book. I also appreciate the support of Julia Sommerfeld, Jane Weaver, Danny Defreitas, and Jennifer Sizemore of MSNBC, who let me delve much deeper into America's sexual heart than I had any right to expect.

The editors at
Glamour
magazine, especially Jill Herzig—who has been a longtime patron of mine for reasons known only to her—Wendy Naugle, Genevieve Field, and Cindi Leive, displayed enormous patience and tolerance. I owe them.

Alex Heard, part colleague, part mentor, part inspiration, continues to give me valuable encouragement and advice.

Jane Hahn demanded I write a book about sex. I wish she were here to see it.

Two volumes provided important context for my own journey:
The Social Organization of Sexuality,
by Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels; and
Handbook of Medieval Sexuality,
edited by Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, from which I took the quote from Hincmar.

This book depends utterly on the willingness of those people who appear in it to allow me entry into the most intimate parts of their lives. I am humbled by their openness, honesty, and graciousness.

And finally, thank you Montana Wildhack.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B
RIAN
A
LEXANDER
hails from a small town in central Ohio where he served as both a Catholic altar boy and president of the county's Teenage Republicans. He was once voted “most likely to become president of the United States” in junior high school, but opted for the prodigal life of writer and journalist. Now a contributing editor at
Glamour
magazine and a columnist for MSNBC.com, he has written for the
New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Esquire, Outside, Wired, Details,
and many other publications. He has made appearances on
Charlie Rose, Today, The Early Show,
CNN, ESPN, and other television and radio programs.

 

www.AmericaUnzipped.com

ALSO BY BRIAN ALEXANDER

Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion

Copyright © 2008 by Brian Alexander

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alexander, Brian, 1959–

America unzipped: in search of sex and satisfaction /

Brian Alexander.—1st ed.

1. Sex customs—United States. I. Title.

HQ18.U5A35 2008

306.770973—dc22           2007031710

eISBN: 978-0-307-40738-2

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