Or, why American sexuality is sick
I had occasion to go to the dentist recently, and while there I found myself confronted by what can only be described as child porn, laid out along with Red Book, and Woman's Weekly, and all the other innocuous crap you find in doctors and dentists offices. This pornographic publication is called Just Seventeen, or something like that, and its supposed audience is that of teenage girls between the ages of seventeen and nineteen.
Apparently every teenage girl in America between those ages is fucking like a bunny on speed and their sole interests revolve around how thin they are, how popular they are, and how to deal with boys. When I lived in Ohio and regularly attended a church I met several young women of that age group and they seemed singularly unlike the depiction presented in Just Seventeen. But that isn't really the point.
Bear in mind that not so long ago the accidental appearance of one small brown breast sent the whole of the country into a fit of hysterics. Bear in mind too the prevalence and popularity of TV shows that expose the evil intentions of so-called 'sexual predators'. Bear in mind, too, the degree to which sex is used as a lure in advertising. And then contemplate the photographs of young women in publications such as Just Seventeen. While the models keep their clothes on, just about, they are photographed in such a way as to accentuate their sex and their sexuality to an extraordinary degree.
Photographs advertising cosmetics pose their models with near orgasmic expressions on their faces. Their eyelids hood their eyes, their lips, glossily painted, are parted in an expression of breathy readiness that unavoidably makes any male think of oral sex. Skimpy tshirts drawn tight over tiny breasts; bikini bottoms so form fitting that they are clearly meant to excite by almost concealing; girls posed with their breasts thrust forward, their hips thrust back, their mouths partly open and pouting.
And the curious thing is that, although the supposed audience of this publication is teenage girls, the photographs are all posed and styled in ways clearly reminiscent of softcore porn mags intended for males. Which indicates quite clearly who the real audience of such magazines is.
Suppose that for some reason the police raid my house and take away my computer. If some of the images contained in this perfectly legal publication were found on my harddrive I've no doubt that I would be prosecuted for possessing child pornography, so straightforwardly sexual are they. So a question arises. Why is it not only legal, but unquestionably right, that images explicitly sexualising teenage girls should be free from any kind of question when they are used to sell commodities, but are unquestionably criminal and wrong when taken out of that context?
An example. One section of the magazine I looked at was a shoot at a lakeside location, involving girls who appeared to be sixteen or seventeen. They were photographed water skiing. Naturally the swimsuits they wore were wet - and at the very center of each image, delineated with mathematical precision, are the outlines of the girls' labia.
Since paedophilia is currently the subject of a moral panic among the population at large it occurs to me to wonder why such readily available incitements to lust directed at children are so easily tolerated. And there really is only one answer: any kind of sexual predilection can and will be tolerated in America if it can be subordinated to the impulse to make a profit. But if it cannot, if it falls within some sphere of human value that is, supposedly, immune to the impulse toward profit, such as 'family life', then sex is to be censored, and wherever possible portrayed as at once something anodyne, comprehensible, normal, and safe.
Americans are fascinated by sex. Fascinated, and terrified by it. Otherwise it would not be subject to such rigorous social control; there would not be the attempt to confine 'marriage' (which is nothing other than socially legitimate sex) to a relationship between an adult male and an adult female; there would not be the plethora of shows on TV that deal with sex and its different permutations (the 'L Word', 'Queer eye for the Straight Guy', and any number of others); there would not be the incredible number of TV ads that, in one way or another, say 'buy this and you'll get more sex'.
Only the other night, in the middle of a movie, I was confronted by an ad for a couple of creams that claimed to both increase the size of the male erection and maintain it for longer. You can't show a breast (in the normal course of public events), but you can advertise longer dicks and increased sexual performance on prime time TV.
One small brown breast, appearing for only a moment, reduces the country to hysteria. An ad explicitly saying that, if you buy this product, you'll fuck longer and better (complete with women in skimpy dresses crossing and uncrossing their legs a la Sharon Stone) passes completely unnoticed. There is something deeply unhealthy in the general American attitude to sex. It's either something to be censored, or something to be sold. And everything that doesn't fit within the sexual stererotype first created by 'Leave it to Beaver' is demonized as ungodly, unhealthy, and unwholesome.
America's religious heritage is broadly Puritan in nature. And the greatest sin in the Puritan canon of sins is sex. You can see it in typically American artistic productions such as 'The Scarlet Letter'; 'Lolita' (the movie, not the book); the endless number of teen slasher flicks in which the sexually active girl(s) always die first. Sex is a sin until sanctified by marriage - and any form of sex that deviates from the heterosexual standard is automatically repudiated, condemned, and vilified.
One of the things that struck me most strongly when I first came here was the difference between the behaviour of real American women and the depiction of their behaviour in, for example, movies. American women are portrayed as sex-obsessed sluts. But in public at least they behave like vestal virgins. The merest mention of sex is construed as an assualt upon their integrity as human beings, and the man fool enough to bring up the topic is portrayed as, and accused of being, some sort of primeval beast. At the same time, American men fantasise endlessly about sex, particularly oral sex, and any man not engaged in an endless round of sexual conquests is no kind of man at all.
There are three great engines of American culture. Sex. Religion. Politics. All of them are meant to be 'pure'. Sex is meant to be pure of anything not conducive to the ideal of the heterosexual couple and the children they've brought into the world. Sex is meant to be, ideally, the secret foundation of happy family life. Religion is meant to be pure of any motive of personal profit or aggrandizement. It's supposed to be simple, humble, and personal. Politics is meant to be pure of personal ambition, and of any hint of religious motivation except at the personal level, where its welcomed as a sign of virtue - as is the happy heterosexual family life of the politician.
The reason Clinton and his adventures with that tedious bimbo became such a scandal in America, and such a laughing-stock in the rest of the world, is that he transgressed these conditions of purity. He combined his politics with illicit sex, sex outside marriage, and compounded his sin by doing what every right thinking American expected him to do - lie about it, and then plead for forgiveness, like the pussy-whipped sexual inadequate he undoubtedly is. Whereas Europeans positively expect their leaders to engage in affairs, and think rather less of them when they do not.
On Mitterand's death, both his mistress and the illegitimate (but publically acknowledged) child he had by her were present at the State funeral, without the merest hint of scandal developing as a result. Men of power, as Europeans know, break the rules - in particular, they break sexual rules, just as JFK did. This obsession with purity deforms the American sexual psyche. Sex is in no sense pure. At its best, it's utterly filthy, animal, base. And while it's always been for sale, in the form of prostitution, it's never before been a commodity in the way it is here. In fact, here sex is less than a commodity, because it's treated as something that has no existence in its own right but only as an adjunct to something else. As the foundation of an impossible relationship; as the means to achieve profit; as a statement about social and economic position; as something young girls (very young girls) represent but which they cannot participate in without becoming sluts, whores, the proper victims of homicidal maniacs.
The ideal American Girl is at once stupendously sexually attractive, promiscuous, and a virgin. She possesses the sex drive of a famished nymphomaniac - but never has sex until she marries. The ideal American Boy fornicates at every opportunity (with sluts, of course) but loves only one woman (his mother). His wife is at once a sex-toy, and a perfect derivative of his mother, differing from her only in the fact that she is available for sex. Once she becomes the mother of his children she enters a state somewhere between idealized sexual neuter and a labor-saving domestic device. Sex with her becomes a service to be performed in return for domestic work, child-care, and economic contributions. Sex itself is relegated to the realm of fantasy, porno-mags, and the titillation provided by the likes of Just Seventeen.
Why? Because the American sexual psyche depends primarily on two things for its libido: guilt, and fear. Fear of desire, because any kind of desire is sinful - unless it can be shown to yield a profit. Fear of being discovered, which explains its hidden presence in magazines and TV ads. And guilt because desire is natural and unavoidable, and therefore to be condemned - because in the last analysis the Puritan religious impulse is at war with 'the natural' in all its forms, seeing it as a form of chaos. Precisely because a human being can no more live without desire than he can without drawing breath, the sexual impulse must be, for the Puritan religious sensibility, the source of all corruption that can only be tolerated under two conditions - a) when it brings in a profit; and 
when it's confined and regulated to the point where it's barely recognizable as sex.
In short, and to be as succinct as possible: y'all are ate up. I've no doubt that, in the privacy of your bedrooms, you all reach accommodations with your guilt and your fear and your desire - just as the rest of the human race does. And I've no doubt that the rest of the human race would be able to recognise itself in those accommodations if they ever became known. But in public, the face of American sexuality is twisted and made ugly by a paranoia, a schizophrenia, a hysteria, that is funny to non-Americans precisely to the degree that it's alien and tragic.
Sex. Religion. Politics. In relation to all three there is something deeply sick at the bottom of the American soul. But American sex is the acme of that sickness because whereas religion and politics are endlessly debated, sex remains the province of talk-shows, advertising hoardings, and the plastic relationships that pertain to the world of Hollywood and its productions.
Sex is the silence at the heart of America's conversation with herself.