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2007-01-12 Home Front: Culture Wars
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Scenes From the Exhibitionists
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BY KAY S. HYMOWITZ
 Some of my best friends are women--heck, I am a woman--
I don't know Kay, but I suspect we'd get along well. I happen to think women in general - despite the obvious exceptions - are delightful creatures.
but I've come to the conclusion that we've seen too much of the fairer sex. For me, the final straw came last month when Britney Spears jauntily revealed her waxed nether-regions to waiting photographers as she exited her limo.
Britney has a pretty smile, and a typically ugly fairly fresh caesarian scar. I'll admit I looked, even though I shouldn't have...
Britney's stunt made her the Internet smash of the season. But in providing America's workers with this cubicle distraction, Britney was doing a lot more than making her own privates public.
I'm not certain what it did for her career. She was wildly successful before she took up with no-talent dancing boys and moved into a Beverly Hills trailer house to pop out a couple babies. All she needed to do to reclaim her wild success was to ditch the no-talent dancing boy and move out of the trailer house. She's a pretty enough young woman, especially when she keeps her mouth shut.
In fact, Britney was following to its logical end what has become the first rule of contemporary American girlhood: to show that you are liberated, take it off.
Kind of a blow to "equal rights," isn't it? If I flashed my gennies getting out of a car I'd be arrested for indecent exposure. I'll admit that hers are prettier than mine, however, even with the scar.
Liberty means responsibility . . . to disrobe. Paris Hilton, Britney's BFF (Best Friend Forever), taped her sexual escapades with an ex-boyfriend, though even she was tactful enough to pretend that she hadn't meant for the video to go public.
Likely she didn't. If we'da had the technology way back when that we do today, I'd have probably taped several of what are today mere fond memories. She was probably going to save a collection of them to watch when she's old enough for Social Security.
Courtney Love, Lindsay Lohan and Tara Reid have also staged their own wardrobe malfunctions. But flashing is hardly limited to celebrities. The girls-next-door who migrate to Florida during spring break happily lift their blouses and snap their thongs for the producers of "Girls Gone Wild," who sell their DVDs to an eager public.
I think I may have remarked on an occasion or two that 50 percent of everyone is below average and 80 percent of everyone is middlin'. The lusty peasant wenches of a couple hundred years ago are the lusty spring break babes of today. The difference is that today we don't enforce rectitude. It's the difference between our society and Islamic society, where the girlies in question could be flogged for flashing their honkers, stoned to death for having sex on the beach. Probably we've gone as much too far in one direction as Islam goes in the other.
Nor is it just young female flashers who are driven to expose themselves to the masses. Older women, whether because of lingering traces of reticence or doubts about the camera-readiness of their intimate anatomy, use the written word to bare all. There are legions of women bloggers who write about last night's bed tricks, their underwear preferences and their menstrual cycles (yes, Virginia, there is a tamponblog.com).
The difference is that we used to hide porn away, either hypocritically or politely - pick one, they're both free - pretending it didn't exist.
More sophisticated exhibitionists turn to tasteful erotic memoirs. In "A Round Heeled Woman," Jane Juksa gives us a detailed description of her varied sexual adventures after, at age 66, she advertised for sex in the personals of the New York Review of Books.
Jane being 66, I probably don't have quite as much interest as I'd have had if she'd been 30, or even 40.
In "Surrender," the ex-Balanchine dancer Toni Bentley tells of the spiritual transcendence she experienced during the 298 times she had anal sex with a former lover--making this the first transcendent sex ever to involve a calculator.
Butts - they're not just for pooping anymore. Nor, surprisingly enough to some, have they ever been. On the other hand, it's only in our "liberated" age that we discuss such things in excruciating detail. And while indulging in the sins of my youth, it never occurred to me to actually keep count of the number of times I did this or that.
Now, this is the point at which the enlightened always begin grumbling: What's wrong with women showing that they are "sexual beings"?
Women are sexual beings whether they go out of their way to show it or not. Islamists obsess on that fact. But if women were only sexual beings, if there was nothing else there, then the Islamists would be right, wouldn't they? We men would never be able to concentrate on anything because the temptresses would be swarming all over us, distracting us from manly things like science and technology and intellectual pursuits by making us continually concentrate on bosoms and thighs and buttocks and the exchange of bodily fluids.
In this vein, the show-or-tell-all is an act of bravery, demonstrating a woman's determination to throw off society's taboos against full expression of her sexuality. "Female exhibitionism is . . . an act of female power," Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice has written. "We should redeem the slut in ourselves and rejoice in being bad girls," Naomi Wolf once urged (but has since modified now that she has an adolescent daughter).
Amazing, how what feels good to you might not be good for your offspring.
It follows that reservations about self-exposure are a sign of anti-sex, anti-woman prudery. They may just be the first step in a long-planned, mandated return to the missionary position, female frigidity and meatloaf dinners, cooked and served by apron-clad wives.
This being a family publication, I'm not going to point out that the missionary position does in fact have its virtues and that meatloaf dinners and female frigidity don't have to be mutually inclusive, assuming neither party overdoes it on the meatloaf. (Having one or both parties come down with the vapors when nekkid can induce frigidity in either sex, especially when bumping bloated bellies in the missionary position.)
But this Puritans-are-coming! stance, validating, as it does, someone as cracked as Paris Hilton, finally implodes.
I'm not sure it does, since society's always had room for both the lady and the doxy. I often fear we're seeing the triumph of the doxy, but that's because the doxies go out of their way to draw more attention to themselves. And the doxies have always outnumbered the genuine ladies.
The problem with a Britney or a Bentley is not that they are floozies.
The tradition of floozies is a long one, if not particularly honorable...
It is rather that they are, paradoxical as it might seem, naive. They underestimate the magnetic force field created by intimate sexual information and violate the logic of privacy that should be all the more compelling in a media-driven age. People in the public eye always risk becoming objectified; they are watched by hordes of strangers who have only fragmentary information about them. When that information includes details that only their Brazilian waxers should know for sure, it's inevitable that, humans being the perverse creatures that they are, all other facts of identity will fall away. Instead of becoming freer, the exhibitionist becomes an object defined primarily by a narrow sexual datum.
Kay kinda loses me here, though maybe I'm just missing her point. Britney, Paris, and all the Trixies and Molls and even the Phrynes of this world have always defined themselves primarily by a narrow sexual datum. Because 50 percent of everybody is below average, that would imply that maybe a majority of that 50 percent of women are in fact limited to what we could impolitely call "breeding stock." From the bacterium level on up, the urge to reproduce is the way the species keeps on speciating. Cows eat grass and they produce milk and veal. That's all they do. The advantage of humanity over the bovine is that we can fit a few other activities into our busy schedule - but we're actually not required to do so.
The writer Daphne Merkin offers the perfect cautionary tale about the dangers of giving the public Too Much Information. In 1996 Merkin published an essay in The New Yorker describing the erotic pleasure she found in spanking. Her sensational article hardly stalled her career; if anything it increased her name recognition.
Daphne Merkin? She's named after a pubic wig? I thought I recognized the name...
Understandably Ms. Merkin doesn't regret her essay, which she continues to believe to be "both intellectually and emotionally daring." But she kids herself when she says "I'm known more for the rigor of my thinking . . . than I am for revelations about my erotic preferences." Her article is still the major fact of her public identity; she will forever and always be Daphne Likes-to-Be-Spanked Merkin. This is not because the shocked public wants Ms. Merkin to cover herself up. It is because Ms. Merkin has invited us to know her by information that has far more power than her insights into Virginia Woolf.
We got news for youse, Daphne: People who've heard of you think of you with red heinie cheeks first and foremost. Then they think of pubic wigs. Then they might give a passing thought to your intellectual rigor.
It was doubtless for this reason that Susan Sontag hesitated to write about her romantic relationship with the photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Actually, the thought of the late Susie Creamcheese nekkid is kinda counter-sexual to me...
Some people believe that it is lingering misogyny rather than naive exhibitionism that leads the public to define women by their sexual anatomy and proclivities. Perhaps there is something to that. But the exhibitionism surely doesn't help. It seems that men, despite their reputation as braggarts, actually don't find self-exposure all that appealing. Where are the male counterparts to Britney Spears and "Girls Gone Wild"?
Kay goes on for a little while longer, but she brushes by the what should be the central point, despite having led into it with the story of Pink-cheeked Daphne.
There are 24 hours in the day, each and every day. The sex act takes anywhere from five to twenty minutes when performed routinely. If you really buckle down, you can stretch it to an hour or so, not counting the time you spend sleeping like a rock when you're done. That leaves the question: What do you do with the remaining 23 hours in the day? If you're a cow, you spend the time eating grass. If you're human breeding stock, I suppose you can spend the time shopping for erotic outfits, having your nipples pierced, and getting your pubes waxed.
If you've somehow crawled out of the lower 50th percentile of the population, or even into the higher end of it, you actually find yourself with non-sexual things to do. Maslow smiles upon you and reproduction ceases to be the be-all and end-all of your life. You don't have to invent agriculture, since it's already been done and we now have grocery stores. Probably you've got someplace to live, if only a trailer house in Beverly Hills, so you don't have to worry about that. The elusive concept of self-actualization begins to beckon. You may decide to invent things, to write poetry, to gaze longingly upon the stars, or even to go bowling. 
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Posted by Fred 2007-01-12 13:42||
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