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The year in sex
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Dec. 18, 1999 |
Many of this year's trends, events and commentary in the media and arts shored up and exaggerated the old mores typified by the Clinton-Lewinsky liaison. The most cartoonish was 73-year-old Hugh Hefner pumped up on Viagra, dating Mandy, Brandy, Sandy and Jessica. What better way to prove that a woman is still as much a lifestyle accessory as a hi-fi or a martini shaker than to keep four of them around the house? The best of 1999 Men young enough to be Hef's grandkids also let the dance begin. Viagra guaranteed successful hook-ups for party animals who drink and drug all night, bodybuilders whose steroids pump them up in all the wrong places, porn stars and others who weren't strictly erectile-dysfunctional. Since the drug hit the market last year, doctors in the U.S. have written more than 14 million prescriptions for over 6 million men, and uncounted others are getting the drug via the Internet. This year several hundred European men died in Thailand, the international hot spot of the sex industry. Viagra, available over the counter there for $27, was found in the bloodstream of a sizeable percentage; most died from cardiac strain. Women found that Viagra engorges the clitoris, so adventurous ladies tuned in and turned on as well. In Hefworld, the distaff equivalent to drug-assisted priapism isn't Viagra-happy clits but volleyball breasts -- which, in addition to other ills, decrease nipple sensation. Though Jenny McCarthy and Pamela Anderson betrayed the cause by plucking out their implants, poison chestballs remained a popular accessory on starlets and models. Possible presidential candidate Donald Trump reportedly ushered a handful of his imperfect friends -- even some he wasn't fucking! -- to the plastic surgeon, in what could be an early bid for the flat-chested vote. If this is indeed candidate Donald's version of a chicken in every pot, I challenge Ralph Nader to counter with a safer, possibly airbag-based implant. A man deserves all the on-the-side robo-babes he can get, but the wife at home is, of course, loyal. That one-sided sanctity of marriage found an unexpected advocate in Stanley Kubrick's supposed-to-be-hot "Eyes Wide Shut," which actually shrank from both sex and (female) fantasy. A wife who merely imagines adultery sends her husband into a fevered dream of sexual dread. The premise was as wistfully out of touch as the orgy scene, which could have been a Halloween party at the Playboy mansion except that nobody had fun. Joining Kubrick in the call to keep sex within marriage was Wendy Shalit, whose bestseller "Return to Modesty" advocates more shame among women and more "honor" among men. If the prize of feminism is the right to be a slut, Shalit declares, she'd rather go back to the good old economics, where women create demand for their sex by withholding supply, as advocated in "The Rules." Shalit's platform reverberated with her peers. A recent study found that only 40 percent of college freshman believe "if two people really like each other, it's all right for them to have sex even if they've known each other for a very short time," down from 52 percent in 1987. And more than one in four 18- to 24-year-olds call premarital sex "always" or "almost always" wrong -- a 50 percent jump since 1972. The modesty movement makes sense in light of AIDS and the persistent reality of campus sex for girls -- drunken hook-ups with boys who won't look at you in class the next day. College boys and men in their 20s have grown up accepting women as equals -- and as sexually active -- but macho attitudes about sex linger. The young men seem nervous about playing on a rule-less field against women who could laugh at their penis size or claim date rape or both. Their anxiety rumbles beneath the bravado of magazines like Details and (because Details was too highbrow?) Maxim. Like Playboy, the new manliness guides tell you what to buy, but they've also lifted the self-loathing lists that tell you what to be -- "10 Signs She Thinks You're Pathetic"; "37 Tricks for Flat Abs" -- from Cosmo and Glamour.
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