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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
It was a flaccid, unhot year in sex, but how about that election! Spitzer and Edwards may have gotten laid, but Barack and Hillary scored.
By Rebecca Traister
Read more: Hollywood, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sex, Politics, John Edwards, Rebecca Traister, 2008 election, Life, Sarah Palin
Christopher Walsh/Salon
Jan. 4, 2009 | You want to know how sexy this year was? So sexy that it might as well have been subtitled, "Not tonight, honey, I've got an election to obsess over." So sexy that if you did manage to get it on, I'm going to guess it was only after your partner pulled the plug on your MSNBC feed, and that you might have screamed Nate Silver's name in bed.
That's right, folks. This was the year that sex died -- and a presidency was born.
Oh, calm down, Obama-Tiger, don't get defensive. I'm sure your personal hope-lubed romps were hot, youthful and potent, just like your electoral power! (Your tantric use of will.i.am's "Yes We Can" was especially ... special. "Si se puede!" Rowr!)
No, I'm talking about America's sex, the year in sex. It was a year that was strangely, anemically bereft of nip slips, in which a bare minimum of celebrity cooter was exposed, in which the only sex tape that seemed to get much play was this pallid spectacle in which two sad advertising rabbits performed a halfhearted hump and pump on the floor of a cubicle.
Seriously. There was no sex, or sex scandal, to be found in America in 2008 that did not somehow affect the Superdelegate count. If you were a woman, the news was blaring from every corner: You don't even want to have sex. As the New York Times reported in December, you would rather haz cheezburger on webnets.
Boys were having trouble, too. Social networking overtook porn as the biggest online draw, and the cold hard flat screen monitor was where most American dads were getting their rocks off. Gentlemen, if you weren't already having a rough year, a look at a bookshelf would likely have undone you: Somewhere between Kathleen Parker's "Save the Males," Gary Cross's "Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity," Michael Kimmel's "Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men," Guy Garcia's "The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future," and Simon Dumenco's asinine Details blog post about how feminist women have turned men into unhappy pansies, the American male was being stripped of his pride, his identity and, I'm guessing, his hard-on.
No, this year there was not much to turn us on, besides the hypnotic draw of the presidential stump. Biggest crush object of the year? Rachel Maddow. You know, the smart lady who read you the news every night. The favorite subjects of the gossip rags? Candidates for president and vice-president. Thought people would get excited about the movie"Zack and Miri Make a Porno"? Nope. The porn industry was more excited about the Hustler-produced "Nailin' Paylin"."
The hard, pulsing, policy-heavy truth of the matter is that in 2008, no other area of our culture or consciousness could compete with the political arena. And in some ways, that was OK. After weeks of sweaty-browed exertion, tensed jaws, clenched fists and scrunched eyes, most of you probably enjoyed one of the most profound releases of your lives: You screamed, you cried, you embraced and held hands as a feeling of well-being and joy flooded through you. It was electric, it was emotional; the earth shifted on its axis. Face it, every other sex story pales in comparison to the monumental group climax of Nov. 4.
And yet, the Year in Sex must persevere. So here, divided into random categories, is your year in sex.
The Year in Sucks
One of the bigger Year in Sex bummers was a white-hot vogue amongst teenage girls. No, not just flashin' boob or hookin' up or posin' nekkid and all sexed up in a bedsheet for Vanity Fair in order to make everyone forget that you're a God-fearing, daddy-loving, sex-abstaining star on the Disney network. This was far more worrisome. It seems that some of America's famous youngsters have taken their post-feminist enthusiasm for self-objectification to its next biological step: motherhood!
Yeah, it's been happening since birds were birds and bees were bees and birth control and sex ed were harder to come by, but 2008 shone a particularly glum spotlight on several instances of teen pregnancy, beginning with the birth of a daughter to 17-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears. Jamie Lynn had appeared, from an admittedly wide-lensed distance, to have a good head on her shoulders, every opportunity for success and a looming example of how not to ruin your life. And yet, this member of the Britney-founded, Miley-shepherded culture of erotically packaged, underage abstinence role models got pregnant, made the decision to keep the baby and was rewarded by a celebrity press that paid $1 million for pictures of little Maddie Briann.
So now pretty young Jamie Lynn is back in Louisiana, completing the class- and Christianity-fueled American circle of celebrity whereby we pluck pretty, too-young things from red-state, working-class obscurity, teach them to look hot, make them promise to remain virtuous and then dump them back where they came from once they sin (not to mention when they turn 18, become mothers or get fat).
Something eerily similar took place in the small town of Wasilla, Alaska, late this summer, when a vice-presidential candidate all too willing to preach virtue was plucked from obscurity and, if not exactly "sexed up," then at least given a hefty budget for outfits tighter than those historically seen at a vice-presidential podium. This lady was all about the beauty of life -- especially children's lives. Sarah Palin had five kids and believed that women all around the country should have them, too, under every circumstance, even if those women were raped or made pregnant by incest. She also supported abstinence-only education, a program that was not sufficiently absorbed by her 17-year-old daughter Bristol, who, a week after Palin's candidacy for vice-presidency was announced, was revealed to be pregnant by her "fuckin' redneck," hockey-player boyfriend, a fellow high school student whom Bristol was hastily directed to marry, inspiring one of Tina Fey-as-Sarah-Palin's most inspired lines: "Marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers."
In July, the National Institutes of Health announced that the pregnancy rate in the United States had crept up for the first time in 15 years. And there could be no sadder embodiment of that trend than in the economically depressed fishing town of Gloucester, Mass., where it was reported that 17 teenage girls made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. As one of their classmates heartbreakingly told Time Magazine in June, "No one's offered them a better option."
Meanwhile, in India, the opposite: Two 70-year-old women were reported to have given birth in 2008, both through in vitro fertilization.
Next page: That's right. You just pictured George Bush's penis
Sex tapes and outings and schlubs, oh my!
So long, sugar tits!
