T A B L E_.T A L K Reunion concerts and TV movies: Will we ever escape the '60s? Discuss these nostalgic tendencies and others in Table Talk's Media area   Extra! Extra! Find the media books you want to read at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y The little N-word By James Poniewozik So we're all cool with "niggardly" now. Uh ... aren't we? (02/02/99) Wills to Sheehy: Your Clinton-incest psychobabble grows tiresome By Susan Lehman Plus: Gazoongas raise Maxim, Mother Jones searches in vain and other tales of media madness (01/28/99) Revolt of the elitists By James Poniewozik Two new media studies amplify the death cries of the literate overclass (01/27/99) The man without principles By James Poniewozik The career of the great German cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a case study in the virtues of intellectual inconsistency (01/27/99) Truth in advertising By James Poniewozik The downfalls of Miller Lite's "Dick" and Spin's Michael Hirschorn show marketing can still explode when you defuse it (01/26/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE UNSPUN ARCHIVE		______{ U N S P U N_.B Y_.S T E V E_.E R I C K S O N } Mammary dreams Behind men's moral outrage at Clinton's behavior seethes the fear that his compulsion is just one step beyond our own. I have been informed by the national media that breasts are back. I assume my sources on this are reliable. Esquire says it's so, and even more impressively, Newsweek says that Esquire says it. In investigating this phenomenon I thought it sufficient to simply scope out the covers of Esquire, GQ, Details, Maxim, Bikini and Gear at the local newsstand, with Pamela Anderson, Heidi Klum, Elizabeth Hurley and Bridget Fonda among others making the case. But the Newsweek writer reporting this development was apparently conscientious enough to actually buy these magazines and read them. There you go. From Newsweek you get such thoughtful analysis and from Salon you get me. There aren't many crucial nuances to be noted in men's attraction to naked or semi-naked women except for what I assume is obvious. I would only suggest that if, after all, male devotion to breasts was really completely uncomplicated, all men would be slavishly devoted to Pamela Anderson as all roosters are slavishly devoted to the sun. But the fact is that, for whatever reason, Pamela has never quite done it for me, and you'll just have to take my word for it that it's not because I'm above such things. I thought Pam's "Baywatch" predecessor, Erika Eleniak, was a goddess, and if that isn't tacky enough for you, Anna Nicole Smith was quite the tomato too, before things got out of hand. In any event, it's testament to the fact that, even at its most basic, men's attraction to breasts is still subject to the elusive intangibles of personality and chemistry that the other, more highly evolved gender factors into such considerations all the time. Yes, you ask, but what does this have to do with President Clinton? Well, I didn't say it had anything to do with President Clinton; you did. But now that you've brought it up, whether due to random chance or some depraved aspect of Chaos Theory, the mass media's final deconstruction of liberated man has coincided with a president who more than any other embodies the "modern," "enlightened" male's great schizophrenia. That is to say, a president who is at once the most progressive ever in terms of feminism's social agenda -- and the most compulsive womanizer in at least a third of a century. I assume women are smart enough to understand that men have been bullshitting each other about the Monica Lewinsky scandal ever since it began. It's no accident that all the expressions of great moral outrage and dismay have come from men -- an army of shocked Claude Rainses in the carnal Casablanca of life, operating under the watchful eye of wives, mistresses and female constituents. Virtually all the serious women I know are more genuinely unsettled by the legal and constitutional implications of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal; when it comes to the sexual part they just narrow their eyes knowingly as little "What else is new?" thought-balloons pop above their heads. Clinton is the result of both feminism's triumph and most abject failure. The triumph is that after 30 years virtually all reasonable men have long since succumbed to feminist arguments about women's social and economic and political equality, not to mention private-behavior arguments that should have always gone without saying in the first place, having to do with rape, assault, harassment and sexual terrorism. At the same time, none of this has succeeded in rewriting biology so as to edit out of the male DNA the gene stamped SLEAZEBALL that makes Elizabeth Hurley's chest so stupefying. N E X T+P A G E | The Clinton conundrum