In fact, for many of the performers on stage, putting an academic spin on pornography and “sex work” is relatively old hat. As “people with brains who happen to like sex” (“liking sex” being the preferred euphemism here for making porn), these industry veterans — articulate, subdued and clad in neat little suits — have been a hot ticket on the lucrative campus lecture circuit for years. Acting as ambassadors of “sex-positive” feminist theory, they were careful to stress the kinder, gentler, downright uplifting side of the porn industry.

On the opening night of the conference, Candida Royalle, Femme Productions president, “couples market” pioneer and former actress, showed home movies of her Catholic childhood (Brownies, Girl Scouts, First Communion) and largely estranged family. Botero-esque stripper-cum-vocalist Candye Kane made affirming statements like, “Growing up, I never saw pictures of women who looked like me on the cover of Vogue, Elle or Cosmo. But I did see them on the cover of Juggs” (the porn industry apparently being a paragon of size acceptance). Sprinkle presented her “training video,” a softly lit, mermaid-themed, Smashing Pumpkins-video of a porn movie (which starred a University of California student who had written asking for the opportunity to work with her) and freely dispensed tips for the novice director: “Now I want the cum shot. You can use condensed milk. It tastes really sweet when you lick it off.” Later, in one of the panels, a “sex educator” who “works in the industry” enthused over Sprinkle’s spermatic stage magic: “Now that’s innovative!” and Sprinkle’s already tremulous voice broke as she announced that her mother was in the house. “Do you want to come up here, mom?”

“Oh, no,” came a thin voice from the audience. A fragile, gray-haired lady held up a piece of fabric like a white flag. “I’ve got my needlework.”

By the end of the night I was so floored by the cheerful “sex-positivity,” the galloping family values and the panoply of accomplishments on display (these were not just porn stars and strippers, don’t you know, they were “nurse-educators,” authors, directors, labor organizers, AIDS activists and youth counselors) that, having never considered a career in “the industry” or really ever bought pornography myself, I began to wonder if I was some kind of a pervert.

Toward the end of the evening, Carol Queen (author, peep show dancer and the Cesar Chavez of sex workers) burst my bubble with an anecdote about a young couple who came into her booth one night. When the boy rudely attempted to persuade Queen to introduce her largest dildo into her rectal cavity, she replied that insufficient lubrication (only a smidgen left) would make this endeavor time-consuming and therefore prohibitively expensive. While the boy persisted, his horrified girlfriend averted her eyes. Frustrated, Queen deftly switched into “sex-educator” mode and proceeded, in a frighteningly schoolmarmish tone, to lecture the girl on the boy’s anal fixation and on her responsibility, as his girlfriend, in the matter. Then she called security. (I felt sorry for the girl in the story. It was her 18th birthday, after all. She had probably just wanted to see a band.)

The anecdote encapsulated the recurrent themes of the conference as they would unfurl over the next four days. First, that it was the girlfriend who had the problem (her fear of witnessing Queen in the act of love with a latex billy club being decidedly unhealthy). Second, that her problem could have been easily remedied by accepting porn into her life (its rejection having caused the problem in the first place). And third, that the porn industry is really only here to help.

Film and gender theory has taken some tortuous turns in the past decade, but judging from the WPC academic contingent’s hearty endorsement of Queen et. al.’s porn puritanism, it may have finally hit a wall. Since feminist film theorists such as Linda Williams and Laura Mulvey (whose seminal 1973 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” launched a thousand dissertations on “fetishistic scopophilia”) first postulated the idea of the personal as political, films of every stripe have been dismantled and scrutinized until every last trace of “woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men” (as Williams wrote in “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions”) was revealed and duly denounced on campuses nationwide.

In many ways, the ideas presented at the WPC were the ironic but logical extension of an academic trend that has increasingly taken the once-subversive notion of the personal as political as dogma. The study of sexual identity as politics has influenced other disciplines, and has profoundly altered the way in which the humanities are taught. As anyone who has received a liberal arts education in the past 15 years can attest, academics have become increasingly influenced by the edges of pop culture, while pop culture has continued to plumb the fringes of counterculture. This has resulted in an obsession with keeping up with the underground within a certain sector of academia, which no longer seems to distinguish between scholarly inquiry and enthusiastic endorsement.

Williams, perhaps the only noted theorist at the WPC, has long since changed her stance on the matter. In the introduction of her 1989 book, “Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible,” she writes, “I assumed that film pornography would (illustrate) a total objectification of the female ‘film body’ as object of male desire. I was wrong.”

As sex-positive feminist Susie Bright and proto-feminist bjte noire Camille Paglia (who was quite popular among the porn stars and grad-student-cum-porn-starlets I met at the WPC) grew in notoriety, outraged lectures on the fetishized portrayal of Marlene Dietrich in the films of Joseph Von Sternberg (discussions of Dietrich’s on-screen “oppression”) gradually gave way to discussions of Sprinkle et. al.’s on-screen “empowerment.” The old guard all but went underground as its hip and trendy status was revoked by the cultural intelligentsia-in-training. But just as Mulvey and pre-conversion Williams eschewed a dialectical approach in favor of an unyielding, generalized political stance, so have many current theorists thrown the baby out with the bath water. As Jean Baudrillard writes in “Fatal Strategies”: “The widely accepted obviousness of a generalization of this order — political, cultural, social, sexual, psychological — marks its death sentence.”

By noon of the first day of the conference, it had become clear that the academics at the WPC were in the throes of a widely accepted obviousness of another, opposite generalization — one just as narrow and hostile to dissent.

“I don’t even know what a victim is!” snorted Betty Dodson, Ph.D., and author of the 1974 self-published classic “Liberating Masturbation.”

The panel I was attending, “Women and Pornography: Victims or Visionaries?” was hosted by an impressive bevy of sex-positive feminist porn producers, each with a line of New Age, “visionary porn” products to promote. Sprinkle and Royalle were joined by fellow visionaries Veronica Hart, Nina Hartley and Juli Ashton, all at the forefront of the “watch my video, it’s good for you” school of porn. Speaking of pornography’s role in spicing up the sex life of middle-aged couples, Hartley has said, “It’s no different than [sic] Hamburger Helper.”

Very little credence was given to sex unaided by technology (the hamburger without the helper) in the alternative universe of the WPC — where enlightened porn star and devoted wanker were unanimously voted cutest couple. In this world, it’s sex without the mediating factor of porn (with bodyguards, condensed milk and monthly HIV tests) that’s dangerous.

“The answer to bad pornography is not no pornography, it’s better pornography!” chirped Sprinkle. “If you don’t like the stuff that’s out there, make your own!” urged Royalle. “Porn been beddy, beddy good to me!” quipped Hart. All but one of them venerated ’70s icons, they claim that the industry has provided them a “safe place” in which to “explore and own” their sexuality. But if at first this looks like a new brand of feel-good female solidarity, it’s not. Some panelists imply that it is women outside the industry, not within it, who not only suffer but perpetuate hostility between the sexes.

“You’ve got them so scared sexually that they’re mad!” says Nina Hartley, apparently directing herself at the non-pro females in the audience. “They can’t get laid! They can’t get blow jobs! They can’t cum! That’s why you’re seeing more of these videos of women getting dragged on their faces, and spit on, and having their heads dunked in the toilet. Men are mad!” A male fan in the audience nodded his head in vigorous agreement (the middle-aged fans had come out in droves). “Men love and care about their favorite porn stars, because the women they know hate sex!”

- – - – - – - – - -

This outburst aside, most panelists emphasized the positive, painting a vision of a porn-friendly utopia. If sex in our culture were not so “steeped in shame and guilt,” they argued, and if the sex and pornography industries were not marginalized and demonized by the mainstream, then pornography would cease to reflect harmful attitudes, rear its head out of the gutter and provide, as one of the panelists put it, “masturbatory catharsis for the masses.”

“That stuff is bullshit,” retorts Glasgow Phillips, an author and critic who has written extensively about the industry, after I describe to him the rosy, sex-positive, feminist image of pornography presented at the WPC. “To make money in this business you have to exploit,” he says, “and it’s so easy to do. I mean, you are aware of how many dumb sluts there are in this town? You just cast them.

“This is my own personal theory, but I think it’s true,” he continues. “With the advent of porn being ‘cool’ and ‘OK’ it’s getting easier and easier to get girls to do it.”

Judging by the number of student-slash-adult film actresses I met at the WPC, it’s clearly becoming easier to get college students to do it. Some gender studies departments have added school credit to the list of incentives for participating in porn films. Annabel Chong, a USC fine art and gender studies major, who attended the WPC, had sex with two women and two dildos in class for credit. Chong entered the industry “in part out of personal curiosity, and in part as a reaction to the anti-porn feminist theory she was reading at school.” In 1995, her field studies reached a climax, when she broke the record for having sex with the most men — 251 — in the first installment of the World’s Biggest Anal Gang Bang series. “I was in class the next day!” she told me. Her record has been broken twice since, but she has been offered her own line of videos and is now seriously considering a career in the industry.

As self-aware and “empowered” as a performer like Chong may be, it’s hard to imagine her ideology having a profound effect on the industry at large. Ironically, ideological incentives may be helping to draft fresh talent into an industry in which it has become increasingly difficult to become a star in the full economic sense of the word, and in which even the stars feel cheated.

“I’m on TV twice a month live, and I can’t get a Hollywood agent,” complains adult film star and Playboy call-in show host Juli Ashton. “I need a Hollywood agent and I can’t get one!” Nina Hartley joins in. “Absolutely. They jack off to us on Saturday and don’t know our names on Monday. I have lots of famous people who are fans of mine. I’ve met some of them face to face, absolutely, and I’ve even fucked a couple of them. But they don’t take me out in public.”

According to Phillips, porn’s current trendy status helps keep the adult entertainment industry from sharing the wealth with its talent. “Instead of it being, ‘you’ll make money, you’ll be a star,’ it’s just, ‘you’ll be cool,’” Phillips says. “But they’re just meat, they’re interchangeable.”

While 20 years ago, only a few hundred adult entertainment titles were released each year, Adult Video News estimates that 8,000 videos were released last year alone. Whereas in her acting heyday Candida Royalle made perhaps five films a year, a girl acting in porn today can make up to 15 videos a month, schedule permitting. In a market dominated by barely legal “fresh faces,” overexposure is a problem and career longevity is rare.

Yet performers like Chong feel confident that this doesn’t have to be the case, “as evidenced by the success of Candida Royalle and Veronica Hart.” Besides, she adds, “People burn out and disappear in every industry.”

Matt, an employee of Leisure Time Entertainment (one of the biggest distributors of adult entertainment in the world), disagrees. He believes drugs are more prevalent in the industry now than they ever were, because “how can a girl justify doing this stuff all the time without being high?”

“In the ’70s, people didn’t do a lot of anal sex, and D.P. [double penetration] is a relatively new thing,” he says. “Gangbang films are very popular now. It’s all about objectification.”

Although Sprinkle et. al. admit to some ambivalence about their experiences (two out of three claim to have retired as actresses upon becoming angry, bitter or depressed,) and concede that some of the material that’s out there “offends” them, they continue to defend pornography as a viable career choice. Royalle estimates the “alternative” or “visionary” genre makes up about 3 percent of the pornographic material on the market but also declares, “A larger percentage want what we do.”

“If the majority of the people wanted it, they’d have it,” Matt retorts upon hearing this assertion. “You can always tell what people want by the stuff they make themselves.”

The stuff people make themselves, also known as “pro-am” (professional guy, amateur girl), or “Gonzo” porn, is immensely popular. As engendered by such luminaries as Max Hardcore (director Paul Little, aka Max Steiner), John (“Buttman”) Stagliano, Ed Powers and Seymour Butts, the genre dispenses with narrative altogether and features the director having sex with a young, unknown amateur.

Max [Hardcore] and Rob Black [another of the industry's most notorious and infamous directors] sell phenomenally,” Matt explains. When asked if by amateur he means the girls don’t get paid, he adds, “Oh they get paid, but they’d probably make more working at Denny’s. They just don’t want to put in the 40 hours.”

“Max’s stuff is little girls who look about 14,” says Phillips. “He makes them eat cum out of each other’s assholes. He’s really big on the clear plastic speculum in asshole cranked wide open — super unsafe, super gnarly stuff.”

Matt concurs. “And he’s incredibly verbally abusive, and he always finishes with an aberrant sexual act. I mean, Max uses stuff that has no place being in anyone’s body. A lot of people copy Max now.”

Max Hardcore’s formula rarely varies. In the video I rented, the first girl, giggling, pony-tailed and with a mouth full of braces, is repeatedly asked to “say hi to mom,” while Max perpetrates several highly distasteful acts. (As Adult Video News publisher Paul Fishbein put it, “When she says ‘Ouch,’ he says, ‘Good.’”) Of a girl he picks up at an arcade and takes to a hotel room, Max remarks, “Look at this stupid slut. No morals whatsoever. If she’s dumb enough to let this happen to her, then I’m gonna do it.” Max begins and ends each video with a disclaimer, urging viewers “not to try this at home,” and to use condoms (which he does not). He also warns us to “be careful out there,” because “women rule the world.”

“The idea that we would sponsor a conference on, say, serial killers, doesn’t mean that we are endorsing serial killers. It means our job is to gain insight and understanding into the phenomena that affect human behavior,” Dr. James Elias, conference organizer and director of the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge, told the Associated Press.

By the second day of the conference, I was beginning to wonder about “the phenomena” affecting the behavior of the participants at the WPC. In the press release, Dr. Elias (who failed to appear for an interview and later ignored repeated calls) had stated that “the industry will talk about [pornography] in terms of freedom of expression, and academics will talk about it in terms of effects.” But debate was conspicuously absent from the conference, as were opposing viewpoints and diverse opinions.

Reed Lee, a First Amendment rights lawyer who I met at the panel “Effects: Pornography and the Individual Response,” agreed. Describing another conference he had attended at the University of Chicago that supported the MacKinnon-Dworkin anti-porn perspective, he said:

“In a lot of ways, that conference was an interesting mirror of this one. There’d be the academics talking about the correlations they got out of somebody’s study, and then there’d be the activist who stood up and denounced Calvin Klein ads as pornography. We see some of the same things at this conference. One-sidedness, and a hostility to some dissenting opinions.”

The WPC program stated that “efforts to secure participants from the anti-pornography side was met with refusal and prior commitments [sic].” But if the conference had the feel of a PR event concocted by the adult entertainment industry, perhaps that’s because, in many ways, it was. The articulate, feminist little sister of the porn industry held court, while her huge, retarded older brother masturbated poolside somewhere in the Valley.

At the heart of the conference seemed to be an effort to redefine porn according to a newer, prudified standard (or to redefine academia according to a low-brow, propagandist standard, I wasn’t sure which). The panels seemed designed and chosen to diffuse controversy, not address it. “Ancient Greek Pornography: The Erotic Vases,” “French Libertine Engravings from the Eighteenth Century,” “Victorian Pornography,” “Cum Shots: History, Theory and Research” and “My Buddha, My Love Guide: Kundalini Handballing in the New Age Sex Underground” were among the papers presented.

The few WPC panels that focused on the effects of pornography refrained from presenting any negative studies, but devoted considerable attention to discrediting any such studies. One panel, “Effects: The Question of Pornography and Sex Offenders,” featured a paper rather emphatically titled, “There Is No Relationship Between Pornography and Violence Against Anyone or Anything.” (It was indirectly implied, however, that there may be one between violence and books by famous English novelists. As it turns out, many sex offenders keep a copy of John Fowles’ “The Collector” on their shelves. “It’s in all the police manuals,” one of the panelists explained. “All the warrants use it.”)

A second panel on the effects of pornography featured Nina Hartley talking about “Using Pornography to Heal the Mind/Body Split”; and sex surrogate Vena Blanchard discussing the role it can play in the lives of sexually dysfunctional men. (The fact that the adult entertainment industry generates an estimated 5 to 8 billion dollars annually may help dispel the notion that its uses and effects are limited to the clinical. Unless, of course, a disproportionate number of porn consumers are suffering from a painful and serious-sounding “mind-body split.”)

The final panel on effects advertised three papers, “Pornography as a Research Tool: Exploring Fundamental Issues in Human Sexuality,” by William Griffitt, Ph.D.; “The Effects of Exposure to Erotic Videos on Sexual Behavior: Frequency Estimates and Judgments About Sexual Scenarios,” by Johnny Dossett, Ph.D.; and “The Effects of Violent Pornography and Male Attractiveness on Females’ Hostility, Depression and Anxiety,” by Shirley Elan.

I was followed into this lecture by a self-described sex therapist who had earlier approached me with a cute “Did you hear? The stuff on Monica’s dress was clam chowder, but we’re gonna find that clam!” As the first speaker began his lecture, the therapist leaned in to me and whispered: “Listen, if this thing goes through,” I had no idea what he was talking about, “I want to get some archival photos of who met who where. So why don’t you write your name and number right here.” I declined, politely. “Paranoid!” he hissed, and spent the next 10 minutes fidgeting and snorting in my ear. The first speaker dashed through a presentation on how there “appeared to be differences in the responses of men and women to explicit material.” The other two scheduled speakers failed to appear.

I managed to track down Shirley Elan a few weeks after the conference. Currently an undergraduate at Cal State Northridge, her study had sought to determine whether the level of attractiveness of male actors in violent rape scenes had any effect on female viewers. Invited by Dr. Elias to present her unpublished paper, Elan accepted and e-mailed him requesting further information on the conference, including dates and location, but he failed to respond. She was disappointed until she saw the local news coverage on the WPC. “I’m a research person. I don’t drink martinis,” she said.

Given that unsafe sex and drug abuse are common in the industry, one of the WPC’s more striking omissions was that, out of 58 panels, only one of them featured a paper on AIDS (curtly titled “HIV Testing”). Of only two panels on gay porn, none focused on AIDS. Instead, the subjects chosen for discussion ranged from “Australian Gay Porn Videos and the National Identity of Culturally Despised Objects” to “Gay Porn for a Specific Audience: Mature and Uncut Men.”

Allenina, a 24-year-old transgender porn actress and art student who attended the panel on Gonzo Porn, described John Stagliano’s popular “Buttman Series” as “cinema vérité: no plot, all sex.” Stagliano’s academic pursuits (“He’s very interested in the female butt”) overshadowed other issues of possible concern. His recently disclosed HIV positive status was not mentioned.

“The way that pornography has been represented in the press has been consistently negative, and the conference offered a different perspective on that. But I think at the same time, that they went too far,” said Chong. (Incidentally, one of the actresses who broke Chong’s 251 record, Brooke Ashley, recently went public with the claim that she contracted the HIV virus while on the set of World’s Biggest Anal Gang Bang 3. She also claims to have received incomplete payment for her work, and may be suing the video’s producers.)

“The issue of AIDS,” Chong said, “was side stepped and glossed over. Geoffrey Karen Dior mentioned her HIV status. But I was disappointed that John Stagliano didn’t.”

Her overall opinion of the conference was that it was “like a high school reunion, just a chance for a bunch of academics to get drunk and get laid.”

Allenina concluded that “the purpose of the conference was to somehow make the porn industry sound intelligent, or to present it in an academic way. I think it achieved that quite adequately.” But to gain insight on the issue, or hear diverse perspectives? “I think I would read a book, or attend a less social event.”

As academics have increasingly taken their cues from the culture of celebrity, the academic environment has spawned its own “stars,” complete with entourages, fans, “bad behavior” and sold-out performances. Yet pop stars are in the clearly defined and lucrative business of promoting a hip image and “subversive” persona designed to separate them from the glut of “individuals” in their pre-fab constellations. This begs the question, what business are today’s cultural scholars in?

Luke Ford, whom Feed Magazine has called the “Matt Drudge of Porn,” describes a scene from one of the closing panels in his Web site:

In “Fatal Strategies” Jean Baudrillard writes, “When everything is political, it is the end of the political as destiny; it is the beginning of the political as culture, and means the immediate impoverishment of this political culture. When everything becomes cultural, it is the end of culture as destiny; it is the beginning of culture as politics, and means the immediate impoverishment of this cultural politics. The same is true for the social, for history, economy, and sex. We thought we discovered something subversive when we affirmed that the body, sports and fashion were political. We have only precipitated their indifferentiation into an analytical and ideological fog.”

Traditional scholarship can’t flourish in a political environment, because politics are, by nature and necessity, partisan and driven by agenda. But scholarship in the ’90s has increasingly given way to “consciousness-raising” and “celebration” — and thus we arrive at the World Porn Conference, where actor/producer Mike Horner felt moved to gratitude by the hearty bear hug given the industry by academia. “Thank you,” he emoted to the assembled academics at the closing session, “for helping us become more of the mainstream.”

What we’re seeing here is an odd continuation of the
Michael Kennedy case with the baby sitter. I think the baby
sitter became more attractive to Michael Kennedy because she was part
of the domestic unit. She was just another egg in the maternal nest! It’s
almost an incestuous pattern. Similarly here: I just don’t
understand it when you have a man who is the leader of the free world,
who has access to so many women — they’re in the tens of thousands out
there! –
who’d be delighted to have an affair with him, why he’d have to create a
situation where there’s a potential charge of sexual harassment. Why
couldn’t Clinton adopt the European standard of sophistication — as with
Prince Charles and the French prime ministers — where you have discreet
liaisons with women who know how to keep their mouths shut? And Clinton is
someone who has always been on the right side in feminist issues. The point
is this girl was available, she was there, she was an adjunct to the domestic
nest! The Oval Office, after all, is one big egg, isn’t it?

Here’s the thing: Clinton’s a workaholic. He does
deserve credit for the fact that he’s nothing but business and has
performed indefatigably day after day, month after month. This is the excuse
he was trying to make yesterday — “I have to get back to the mission for
which
the American people elected me.” He’s trying to use this as a
kind of shield. His workaholism really became a problem for his sex
life. He rarely takes a vacation. He hardly visits Camp David. He
never gets out of the White House in Washington, even to go to parties on the
Georgetown scene — we all know the Clintons’ shunning of that scene, to Sally
Quinn’s ire! There was never opportunity for the kind of spontaneous, fun
liaison
that can occur in an upstairs bedroom on top of a pile of mink coats on a bed
in the middle of a party — where you’re not bringing sexual pressure to bear
in your
own hierarchical office environment. It’s really Clinton’s workaholism that
has
led to this lapse in judgment.

Look at the Kennedys, for heaven’s sake! We’ve got Ted Kennedy
allegedly able to have liaisons with women in cigarette boats off the coast of
Monte Carlo, on the floor of Washington restaurants, any place, any time! You
get a Kennedy near a warm body, and it’s a sexual opportunity! But while
Clinton has always been desperately trying to model himself on JFK, he lacked
JFK’s savoir faire and worldliness. Basically Clinton’s a homeboy. He wants
to make everything into Little Rock again where there’s one big clan of good
ol’ boys hanging
around, shooting the breeze.

Clinton seems to favor a certain type of woman.

It’s pretty clear that Gennifer Flowers was a sensualized version of
Hillary. Or perhaps we should put it in reverse: Hillary slowly
remodeled herself on the blond archetype of Gennifer Flowers. If you look
at pictures of the early dowdy Hillary, when she first arrived in Little Rock,
she sure didn’t look at all like Gennifer Flowers! So Hillary’s really
transformed herself.

I’ve gotten in a lot of trouble in my career talking about Hillary
Clinton’s frigidity as a personality and how our generation of career women
(she and I are the exact same age) have had trouble reconciling
our ambitious side with our sexual side. I think that she’s a kind of
refrigerator at home, and that for warm, tender, accepting embraces Clinton has
really had to go outside his marriage. In no way is Hillary an all-forgiving
mother figure. She’s really his severest critic, and he’s needed her every step
of the way in his career. She provides the discipline.

One reason I believed the Paula Jones story right from the start was because
of the allegation that he demanded oral sex from her. Based on my long
study of pornographic pictures and videos, I can easily
see why Paula Jones would instantly produce a fantasy of oral sex.
People kept saying, very ignorantly, “Oh, she’s not very attractive — what
would he have seen in her?” Well, I can see very clearly she has this big
wide mouth, and a lot of teeth, and there’s a sort of slackness about her
jaw — which is what women porn stars develop when they learn how to relax
their jaw muscles to perform great oral sex. I think that Paula Jones
was at every stage a walking, talking advertisement for oral sex!
So I was stunned when I first saw the pictures of Monica Lewinsky on
every TV program — the big wide smile, the nicely relaxed lips
with all those teeth — and I thought, Oh my God, here we go again! We heard
years ago that Clinton seemed to believe that he was never unfaithful to
his wife as long as he just having oral sex. I think that’s what he wanted
from Paula Jones and that’s what was going on here. In his
own mind, he really believes, “I’m not doing anything wrong. All we were doing
was having a little fun.” He was being sexually serviced during his busy day.

Do you think Clinton will recover from this crisis?

I think the Clintons have shown monumental inability to handle
crises. It’s really Hillary who’s been pushing this strategy of stonewalling
right from the start. On every issue, every controversy,
it might have been Clinton’s impulse just to give in — he wants so much to be
liked. This Paula Jones situation should have
been settled out of court a long time ago. But from what one has heard, it was
Hillary who rigidly refused any kind of compromise. That terrible misjudgment
has led directly to
this scandal. Because if Clinton hadn’t walked into his lawyer’s office
last weekend and apparently denied under oath all these many allegations of
sexual misconduct, we wouldn’t be talking today about impeachable
offenses. You could impugn his judgment, but there was nothing indictable
about it.

I find very interesting the terminology being used this past week by Hillary
and now by Clinton himself. When Hillary was asked how she was handling all
this controversy over the Paula Jones case, she said, “I just put
it in a little box. That’s how I deal with it. I put it in a box in my
mind and I just don’t think about it.” And then yesterday
Clinton picked that image up. I was struck by it. Of course the word box is
a slang word for vagina! The first time I became aware of that was
when I was in college listening to the great Doors song, “20th Century Fox”:
“She’s got the world locked up inside her plastic box.” There it is:
Hillary’s steel-vault box is her steel-trap mind! She also views the White
House
like a fortress, like a citadel, and she locks out everyone outside of
it.

If the Clintons simply had a more rational, more cordial social life with
the greater world, if Clinton had followed his natural gregariousness
as opposed to her suspiciousness — which of course he needs in many ways –
then I think
that these scandals wouldn’t be happening. He’s been starved for sensual
companionship. He would have loved to carry on like JFK in
the White House: Remember “Fiddle and Faddle” — the secretaries on call
to service JFK? But JFK could carry it off. It was also a different
period as well. JFK had all kinds of sophisticated contacts in the greater
world — in Hollywood and so on.

By the way, when the scandal with the Lincoln Bedroom broke, I
immediately became suspicious about what Clinton was doing with his
time. Up to that point, I’d been publicly saying, “Oh, Clinton is clearly
following the straight and narrow, he’s really cleaned up his act.” But
the moment I heard that the Lincoln Bedroom had become a
revolving door for power brokers and people from Hollywood, I said, I’ll bet
Clinton has been having flings with women in the Lincoln
Bedroom! And I was amazed that the media never brought it up. No one
in the major media seemed to make the connection with sexual use of the
Lincoln Bedroom. They just said, “Oh, he just likes to have a
lot of guests in the house.” Well for
heaven’s sake, it’s pretty obvious Hillary would go to sleep at a decent
hour, and there’s all those stories about Clinton wandering into people’s
rooms and
sitting and talking till 2 or 3 in the morning. People just laughed it off.

So I don’t think his problem is sex addiction but just a
normal, rather immature man’s desire to be petted.
He sure doesn’t get the petting he needs from Hillary.
Hillary got him to the White House, but she doesn’t pet him. The
moment his daughter is gone — and here’s one of his most shameless
appeals for popular approval — out comes the dog! He even walked out with the
dog yesterday. That’s the most pathetic part of this. He’s desperate
for a woman who will pet him and instead he gets a dog!

You’ve commented in a Salon column that Clinton shouldn’t be judged by conventional moral standards. Do you still think so?

My attitude is, I don’t care what men or women in public office do in
their private life. As a strict libertarian, I believe that’s entirely
their own business. But what we don’t want is a kind of mixing up of the
private with the public. Therefore if you’re in a position of
leadership, you shouldn’t be having affairs with your subordinates. If
you’re in a position of public trust, you should respect the dignity of
the White House. JFK certainly did not do that. We’re learning that he
did not behave in a dignified manner. You can say a lot of bad things
about Nixon — he was a cold fish and certainly wasn’t having affairs
with anyone — but he always dressed formally with his tie and jacket on in the
White House. He’d never take his jacket off at work — the same with Reagan –
out
of great respect for the building and its history and its high standing as a
symbol of American democracy.

All these allegations about Clinton bring the White House
down to the level of a frat house — there’s an “Animal House” quality here.
Even the Secret Service men were apparently put off by the Clinton crowd’s
behavior in the White House. It’s been alleged that Hillary’s
foul-mouthed cursing at Clinton in the hallways of the White House was
not taken well either by the Secret Service. I think there’s been a kind
of disrespect from the Clintons right from the start.

In general I subscribe to the European model of life. I believe it is in our
best
interest to be realistic about sexuality. This American insistence that
we must always have a good “family man” in leadership positions is not
realistic. A man of power is going to be a man of very high sexual
energy. I want that kind of a man. I want a Clinton more than I want a
Nixon. I don’t want a cold fish! I want someone in the White House who would
love to have sex with 10 different people in three days. That doesn’t bother
me in the least!

What does bother me is lying. I cannot stand lying. To me it’s not that
he’s a sex addict. It’s that he’s a liar! I don’t want to be lied to. I
think there’s got to be a better way to handle tacky crises. If
you’ve made a mistake, admit it! Take the consequences and move on. But it’s
infuriating that he seems to live in this fantasy world. He thinks he’s the
aw-shucks naughty boy that women will always forgive because he’s
so charming.

If Clinton falls as a result of this scandal, how will he be remembered?

People often wonder why the American public constantly forgives Clinton.
I believe that he’s a genuinely telegenic politician who is a very
gifted personality. I believe he really does feel people’s pain! I think
he has genuine compassion, even though he’s also a very shrewd political
strategist too. But if he’s addicted to anything, it really is to
instant gratification, to the life of the senses. His identity is almost too porous — it’s as if he suffers a weird emotional
leakage toward women. And it’s genuinely tragic, because I think with a little better judgment, his legacy — particularly
in
reconciling the polarized extremes of liberalism and conservatism — is a
very substantial one. But now these peccadilloes may overshadow it. I still
think that he will be remembered fondly even by those of us who are most
critical of his uncontrolled sex life.

Something violent would happen; Joe would have a ‘Nam flashback, or something
would make him pull a gun or compel him to rip the clothes off Barbie, who
liked it, even though she fought back.

“Let’s have it, Tiger,” Joe would growl.

“Oh, Joe,” she’d hiss.

Then we’d clack their plastic bodies together for a hot round of inanimate
scrogging. This is the only thing you can do with a Barbie, besides dress
her, and if you weren’t rich, chances are she only had a couple of outfits
anyway. We learned a lot from Barbie, in the vein of all that scurrilous
man-woman drama as-seen-on-TV. Even at 7, we knew she was a wanton,
submissive bimbo. After Joe left, she’d hang around naked for days, with her
hair all mussed and one of her toeshoes floating in the dog dish. She had no
self-respect.

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P O R N O G R A P H I C A L L Y__A N D R O I D__B A R B I E

BY CAMILLE PAGLIA | Barbie’s arrival on the scene was well after my own childhood (when I loathed
dolls and loved swords and other Amazonian regalia). However, I have
followed her rise to power with interest, since her streamlined,
pornographically android body type was so different from that of the pudgy,
cuddly, Shirley Temple-like moppets that came before her. As someone who
worked for a college summer in the toy department at Woolworth’s, I
definitely believe that toy sales are a key to the Zeitgeist. Barbie not
only became a major sexual persona influencing celebrity style from Farrah
Fawcett to Ivana Trump, but she ominously prefigured the destabilization of
sexual identity that would lead, among other things, to an epidemic of
anorexia and bulimia among white middle-class girls. She’s no pushover: Barbie to me has the glittering, militant panache of
Raquel Welch in her cavewoman bikini. Adored and reviled, Barbie is a fetish and an objet de culte, eerily reminiscent of the sleek, faceless Greek Cycladic idols
that predate Christ by a millennium.

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N O – N A M E__B A R B I E__K N O C K – O F F

BY JOYCE
MILLMAN | I don’t have any happy Barbie Moments. In fact, I don’t have any
Barbie Moments, never having had a Barbie. Oh, I remember asking my mother
for one, preferably with long blond hair and a fishtail evening gown. But
instead, I received a succession of no-name Barbie knock-offs. My mother,
you see, couldn’t resist a bargain. Once, when I was 6, I asked her for a
Beatles album. What I got was an album of Beatles songs as sung by those
mop-topped sensations the Liverpools. As if a kid wouldn’t know the
difference! To spite her, I grew up to be a rock critic.

Anyway, back to my Barbie Moment, such as it is. One day, my mother told my younger sister and me that she was taking us to the beach. A happy bus
ride ensued. However, she did not take us to the beach. She took us to the
doctor, whose office was near the beach, for booster shots. Afterwards,
apparently feeling guilty (as she damn well should have), my mother took us
to a nearby odds and ends store to buy toys. She was feeling so guilty, in
fact, that she magnanimously offered to buy me a Barbie. Of course, the
only Barbies in the store had red hair and short bubble hairdos — all the
good Barbies got sent to real toy stores. Although this was far from the
flowing-haired blond doll of my dreams, I accepted my mother’s peace
offering. Some time later, I learned that the doll she had bought me wasn’t
even a Barbie, it was a Midge. So there you have it, the Barbie Moment that
made me the neurotic, suspicious, beach-phobic person I am today.

Is it any wonder I prefer Jane West?

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V E R B O T E N__B A R B I E

BY KATE MOSES | The “Verbotens” were from Kansas, which was as exotic as anything I’d
ever known in the small, rural California town where I grew up. They moved
to the back end of our cul-de-sac right after I completed second grade, and
I spent that summer lugging my Barbie Dream House up the sidewalk to their
house.

We played at their house because mine was too frightening. My parents’
marriage was unhappy and it made me an anxious child. I wore undershirts
and shorts under my dresses and rubber-banded my knee socks so they’d stay
up. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t like to play with my Barbies: Something
about Barbie’s gratuitously female body made me deeply uncomfortable, as
did Ken’s undifferentiated pubic lump. If I
had to play Barbie, I played with Skipper, the flat-chested little
girl doll with long blond hair who was supposed to be Barbie’s kid sister.

The opposite was true of the Verboten girls, who practically vibrated
with premature hormonal energy. I believe it was one of Ursula’s accounts
of babymaking that led to our stripping all of the dolls, including
Skipper, of their fascinatingly cunning clothing for the purposes of
examination and discussion. “Barbie and Ken are married, so let’s put them
in bed together,” Ursula suggested, but the bed that came with my Dream
House was only a hard plastic single with a pillow molded onto it, so the
dolls kept falling off. “We’ll pretend,” said Heidi, salvaging our play by
running to the bathroom for a face cloth.

When she returned, she handed it to me. “You put them in bed together,
Kathleen,” she said, and though Heidi’s urging had the ring of genuine
playtime to it, Ursula’s seconding did not. “Yeah, you do it, Kathleen,”
she said darkly, “but make sure Ken is on top.”

My knees were sweating under the rubber bands by this time.
I leaned over the dolls, picked up the face cloth and took Ken in my
hand. I was just draping the face cloth back over Barbie and Ken
like a one-man tent when all the air got suddenly sucked out of the
room as Mrs. Verboten yelled, “What the hell is going on in here?” Her
mouth had tightened like a sphincter around her cigarette and she ratcheted
my arm up and out of its socket and launched me toward the front door.
After kicking the screen door open she handed me the Dream House.

“You’re a bad influence, Kathleen Moses,” she hissed into my stunned
face. “You’re not a nice girl, and I won’t let you play with my children
anymore.”

It was all right if I was banished from the Verbotens’, I thought on the
way home; in fact, I was sort of relieved. But the not-nice girl and the
bad influence part bothered me. I thought I was a not-nice girl and a bad
influence, too. I had just been hoping nobody else would notice for a
while.

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M A L E__I D E A L__O F__A__W H O R E__B A R B I E

BY COURTNEY WEAVER | Like most little girls, I was fascinated by Barbie’s breasts. Whenever I
got a new Barbie, I would immediately take off her little top and stare at
those giant, unproportionate mammary glands. They looked as odd to me as if
she had three legs, or horns growing out of her head. Would I have breasts
like that? I hoped so.

Then when Growing Up Skipper was introduced, the charm with Barbie’s
breasts ended for me. I didn’t like to see them sprouting up gradually, I
didn’t like to think that something similar was going to happen to me. I
just liked Barbie’s breasts the way they were: fixed, huge, pert, immovable.

I guess another thing I wanted to say about Barbie is how sexualized she
was. Even as a kid I knew the doll reeked of sex! What
were those Mattel people thinking? They surely must have known
that this female icon they were pushing on little girls was in actuality the male ideal of a whore.

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D A M N__T H E__T O R P E D O E S__B A R B I E

BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK |Some people might say that Barbie did a very bad thing to me at a
very young age. It had nothing to do with body image per se: In fact,
my older sisters and I used to ridicule Barbie’s body, her torpedo breasts
and her chevron waist. “Who looks like this?” we’d say, pointing and
laughing, because even at 4, I realized she didn’t look like any woman
I knew. Now I look at her body and I think of her as if she were a
car: streamlined, like a Cadillac with fins — a marvel of industrial
design, not the devil’s tool to keep me submissive and confused.

But anyway, Barbie did work her voodoo on me, and she continues to
work it to this day, because her wardrobe and her accessories inspired
in me a wild and unruly love for clothes. The store-bought Barbie outfits
– they had names like “Midi Magic!” and “Fab City” — cost a small
fortune, and I prized them; the little plastic shoes you could get in
packages of five or 10 pair, and I hoarded them. But most of my Barbie’s
clothes were homemade, either by myself, my sisters or someone else. There
was always a table at the local farmer’s market — I grew up in upstate New
York — with dozens of homemade Barbie shift dresses for sale, fanned out
like peacock feathers. And once you figured out how to finesse the
darts — damn the torpedoes! — Barbie clothes were easy to make. Polka
dots, far-out paisleys, fake Pucci prints — Barbie could have it all. And
before I knew it, my Barbie case was bursting with magnificent little
outfits that Barbie could never have enough dates to wear. Kind of like my
closets today. She’s an evil influence, that Barbie. Damn her and God love
her.
Stephanie Zacharek writes about movies and books for
Salon.

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N U D E__B A R B I E__I N__A__V I S E

BY LISA PALAC |I had all the Barbies: Barbie, Ken and Skipper, regular and Malibu; Stacy, Barbie’s British friend who said things like, “Smashing!” when you pulled the string that came out of her neck; Francine and P.J., and Christie and Brad, the Black Barbies. I even had some kind of Hippie Barbie who wore a tie-dye midriff and bell bottoms along with a fake suede headband and fringe vest. The best part about Hippie was that she was this crazy, multi-jointed doll that came with a 45 called “I’m Happy, I’m Barbie” and a battery-operated platform — when you stuck her feet in the slots and turned it on, she did a frenzied, Woodstock-style dance. I had almost every Barbie accessory, too — the two-story house, the dune buggy, the camper, the swimming pool — and a huge trunk of Barbie clothes, which cost my parents a small fortune.

Despite this paradise there was, however, a Barbie problem. I kept breaking their legs off. The first time it happened, I was making P.J. do the Chinese splits and CRACK! Her leg came off at the hip. Next, Barbie was doing a hi-karate side kick and CRACK! Same thing. A different day, another Barbie accident. My father tried to fix the dolls by gluing their legs back on and then clamping them in a bench vise until the glue dried. It didn’t work. Now their broken legs were completely immobile from the knee up. While I was disappointed about their legs, I was extremely inspired by the sight of a nude Barbie in a vise. Why, these Barbies didn’t want to be cheerleaders or black belts — they wanted to be punished! They wanted to be tied up, bossed around and then blackmailed by Ken and Stacy. They wanted an evil baby sitter. And I, of course, gave them exactly what they asked for.

Lisa Palac is the author of the “The Edge of the Bed” a personal history
about sex and pop culture, due out this Spring, and the producer of the
erotic Virtual Audio series Cyborgasm.