Angry white male seeks woman, any race
The only alternative thing about alternative newspapers these days is their sex ads
By SANDY CLOSE
On my way to Salt Lake City last week to address a convention of alternative newsweeklies, I spent the two-hour plane ride sampling the offerings of these one-time renegades of American media.As a journalist long associated with the alternative press, what struck me was their (read our) overriding preoccupation with the public realm -- politics, corporate America, the civic culture -- and our sense that the best way to attain social change is to keep things the same. As our political nemesis, the so-called Right, gets sweatier, harder, meaner, we "progressives," as we like to call ourselves, retreat into platitudes. "They" want to flog the kid in the bedroom, lock up three strikers for life, execute 14-year-olds. We pontificate about how "It takes a village..."
Worse, there's a predictable -- even defensive -- tone to how we cover grassroots America. The old optimism is gone, replaced by grim visions of an America increasingly threatened by race wars, the rise of the Christian Right and angry white males nursing their grievances. It's as if we've lost our zest for life, our appetite for the outrageous.
Bored by the pieties, I flipped to the back of the newsweeklies and started reading the sex ads. Here at last I rediscovered what the alternatives once knew -- subversion always comes from below. Old Max Scheer, whose Berkeley Barb was The Mother of All Alternatives, would chuckle in his grave at the idea -- but the most alternative thing about alternative papers these days is their sex ads.
While the alternatives' front political sections invariably depict a country polarized by racial tensions, their back pages sizzle with an array of intimate fantasies, a curiosity about "the other," that transgresses every border. (Indeed, almost all of them feature entire sections devoted to "Anything Goes," "Variations" or the like.) My favorite personal was this one, from a Pacific Northwest Inlander (the heart of skinhead and militia territory): "Irish/Polynesian Male, honest, short, fat, ugly, divorced, 39, seeks attractive, monogamous female soul mate, any race."
A front-section story warns ominously of a religious revival in America as if it might put women back into Mother Hubbards. Tell that, I thought, to the "cruel but loving and beautiful SFDDFMS (who) demands legions of slaves" in the Austin Chronicle. What Ralph Reed may not realize -- but SFDDFMS clearly does -- is that once you take the genie of sexual liberation out of the bottle, there's no way to bottle it up again.
While political commentators focus on the white male backlash against feminism and all the other good things wrought by '60s activists, the sex ads illuminate a more profound truth: In a culture which has lost its capacity for intimate life, the angry white male yearns for intimacy. In an informal survey carried out over the last year and a half of over 40 alternative newsweeklies, I've found that the number of men seeking women and men seeking men exceeds the number of women seeking men or women seeking women by about three to one.
Then there's the coded language the writers of the sex ads use to identify themselves -- DDF (drug and disease free), NS (non-smoker), MS (marijuana smoker), HWP (height, weight proportional). I even found C, J and I -- for Christian, Jewish and Islamic -- indicating the reassertion of religious preferences in this boundary-crossing arena of love-making.
It occurs to me now that Max Scheer -- eventually disinvited from the Network of Alternative Newsweeklies because of his kookie sex ads -- was more prophetic than he imagined. The alternative weeklies come closer to the ache, the pain, the throb of American culture in the back of the book than in the front of the book.
The danger for the alternatives is that, increasingly fearful of where the cultural energies of the country are moving, we will forget to read our own sex ads, much less take our political cues from them.
Copyright © PNS.
Sandy Close is the executive editor of Pacific News Service. She received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award in 1995.