Salacious lechery good only for leering
by Jack Mauro
About six years ago—at the rate pop culture zips along, anyway—Madonna kissed Britney Spears on the MTV something or other. I didn't see it. A friend told me about it days after the Material Tongue was back in place.
"You've go to be kidding. The new, dismissive of cheap fame, new Madonna?"
"Yeah," my friend said. "How about that?"
"Christ," I said. "So I guess in 30 years we can look forward to that woman leaning out of her Lark Stroller and tossing her panties into yet another MTV crowd. Nothing changes."
But some things do change, and this isn't about Madonna. It's about sex in the media. Specifically, TV. And it's not about how awful we're becoming, how addicted to more flesh and more sex on even basic cable we are. It's about how awful we are because we keep backing away.
At the risk of serious old-fogeyism—hell, yes, far more now is televised in the way of tits and ass, and pecs and bulges, than there was five years ago. I know this because Turner Classic Movies sometimes goes Western, and I have to surf. And because Fox got The Simpsons franchise. So I sometimes see what we all see, and it's one bizarre landscape.
The afternoon "dating" shows are utterly amazing, if only by virtue of the tissue-thin layer of relationship blatherings over the softcore pornography. Young people garble Oprah-esque phraseology about connecting, while the boys hoist up their boxers and carry drinks to the twins in the hot tub. The bachelor series defy satire; Dark Shadows was never this cheesy. But there is a cluster of rapacious females, little in the way of underwear, a big dumb stud and a bigger audience. This is promoted, for all the world, as a heart-wrenching exercise in searching for true love.
Not to be outdone, network programming has entered the market in an ingeniously repulsive fashion. It has morphed homosexuality into a fetish so enticing to straight guys, no skin need be exposed. The word "queer" alone provides them with the hitherto unexplored and dizzying eroticism: the thought of anonymous mouths on the foundation of their unassailably straight superiority. It's zipped up—and thusly completely safe—mind porn for the average Joe. (No single culture in our history has so embraced its own mockery for the sake of mainstreaming, but that's another column.) Meantime, Spike TV and Comedy Central devote whole half-hours to Pamela Anderson and cartoon characters that tent their trousers at the mention of her.
All right. TV is raunchy garbage. It always was garbage, and it's just gotten raunchier. Soon all channels will air intercourse and variations thereof. End of copy.
Not quite. Because here's the thing: save for PayPerView, we don't ever see actual sex on television. We just keep seeing increasingly crude hinting at it. It's a blue line of sorts, and our not crossing it says something distinctly more odious about us than the highest ratings for the sleaziest Fox broadcast could. The programs I've mentioned go to great pains to present a laughable veneer of societal experimentation over the tits and ass. That, and not the flesh, is the sin. We're not getting bolder. We're not more free about sexual imagery on our home screens. We're just nastier about it all. We don't lust, which is fairly healthy, if indecorous, activity. We leer.
The difference between viewing straightforward sex and the lechery of much modern television is, not surprisingly, linked to maturity. A relatively sane grown-up may at times want the former; the latter is for those locked in adolescence. Teens can only get so close to sex and intimacy because fear holds them back. But when the teen grows up, and the same prurient content remains the sought-after vicarious thrill, when nothing is overtly blurred visuals, a dreaded little co-dependency crops up. The viewer is further bricked in with his fear, and what is viewed becomes more teasing and salacious. Not sexy. Just dirty.
I remember watching television in Italy some years ago. The jokes are true; housewives are forever removing their blouses before the approving grins of delivery men. But this is what it is. There's no absurd pretext of romantic spirituality to it. No one's rolling around on the floor and bitching about esteem issues. I dislike Americans who exalt all cultural things Euro over our own country's offerings, yet the fact seems to remain: In this instance, for whatever reasons, they are less afraid over there. Here? Let's put it this way: Madonna knows what she's doing.
December 11, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 50
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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