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Specials

Barbara Walters: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 1999 (10 p.m., ABC) includes interviews with Gov. Jesse Ventura, Ricky Martin, Susan Lucci , Monica Lewinsky and other fascinating people, and unveils Baba’s top-secret pick for No. 1.

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Sports

Basketball:

Knicks at 76ers (8 p.m., TNT)

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Talk

Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) William Baldwin, Marc Anthony

David Letterman (CBS) Jenny McCarthy, Martha Stewart, Foo Fighters

Jay Leno (NBC) Sigourney Weaver, Sean Hayes

Politically Incorrect (ABC) Sen. Joseph Lieberman, William Baldwin

Conan O’Brien (NBC) Kevin Pollak. John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards

“The Lycos 50 with Fritz Holznagel,” which launched last Wednesday, surveys the search engine’s lists of most-searched terms, compiling charts and commentary on the popularity of various items. The result is an amusing — and occasionally surprising — barometer of pop culture, trends, hot news and seasonal quirks. Or, as Holznagel himself explains, “We are interested in the rising and falling of the public consciousness.”

Take last week’s Top 50 list as an example: Maybe it makes sense that Pokemon and Britney Spears (popular trading card game and teen chanteuse, respectively) would dominate the top two positions, but who would have guessed that Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova would have rocketed up to No. 29? And why are more people searching for “frogs” than “the Bible”? (Could it have something to do with dissection season beginning in high school biology classes around the world?)

The Lycos 50 is sponsored by Lycos and compiled from daily numbers provided by Lycos’ internal data mining group. Holznagel and his team then scour the list for misspellings (“There must be at least eight ways to spell Britney Spears,” says Holznagel) and related concepts, and purge it of popular generic terms like weather, sex and mp3. Besides the weekly top 50, Holznagel provides daily commentary on news events (such as how the weekend’s championship boxing match drove Net traffic) and a section called Mystery Terms — “These terms are getting heavy traffic lately and we have no idea why” — which includes such mysterious hits as Somerset, Juliet and laundry. Readers are invited to posit reasons for the popularity of these terms (“The money laundering going on in Russia perhaps?”)

The list is an homage to the mainstream and lowbrow — hence the overwhelming presence of video games, boy bands and pneumatic-breasted starlets — but those who care will be heartened to know that poetry, while trailing the WWF, is still hanging strong at No. 18. Still, don’t expect Ludwig Wittgenstein to make a surprise appearance on the Lycos 50 anytime soon — unless there’s a made-for-TV movie about mad philosophers, since, as Holznagel points out, much of the traffic seems driven by television appearances and media hype.

Is this a bleak indication of the devolving interests and education of American society? Holznagel pauses. “I wouldn’t call it bleak; I think it’s an indication that the Net is still widely used as an entertainment medium,” he explains. “The Net is really a pop culture medium; the demographics are still people under 30. It’s partly a reflection of the audience and, more, a reflection of the age.”

Salon recently spoke with Elizabeth Haiken, author of “Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery” (Johns Hopkins University Press) about surgery junkies, feminism and — hold your breath — labiaplasty.

Are there any areas of the body where people have not elected to have plastic surgery?

There really is nothing, as far as I know, that hasn’t been done. I came across an article during my research about a labiaplasty! Before crotch shots were published nobody was interested in this, but now everyone knows what labia are supposed to look like. Even though this is not something that millions of women are doing, the fact that it exists was proof to me that nothing has been left untouched.

There are ads for plastic surgery on subways, in the back of magazines, on late night TV. How has the marketing of plastic surgery changed over time?

People who advertised in newspapers before the late 1970s were just not accepted by their peers — they were seen as quacks. Now, you see ads all over the place. Part of it is simply self-defense — if one doctor is doing it, you’ve got to keep up. Some of it has do with the nature of plastic surgery itself. Because it’s elective, and because it doesn’t usually involve irritating things like insurance companies, it’s simple in terms of payment. You decide you want a nose job, you go in and plunk down your $5,000 or whatever and that’s it.

In 1992, 30 percent of plastic surgery patients came from families with incomes under $25,000 a year. That suggests that plenty of people who elect to have cosmetic surgery are regular folks without wads of cash.

I found records from the 1930s of single secretaries who would have cosmetic surgery and arrange to pay the surgeon over time. But the people who get multiple procedures are very wealthy.

Is that a growing phenomenon, plastic surgery junkies?

There have been a few Oprah-type exposis on these people. In a sense, we’re all plastic surgery junkies. It’s become so much a part of our culture. Even if you don’t read articles about it, you can’t help but see the ads. You look at the list of conditions that can be corrected and it’s very difficult not to think of yourself in those terms of “what can I correct?” or “should I take care of these thighs?” We are all so aware that solutions are available. I’m almost 35, and I don’t know any woman around my age who hasn’t thought about it or made a joke about it. A lot of people might choose not to do it, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t aware of it and that they don’t wonder if they might be losing out on something if they chose not to do it.

It seems women are getting plastic surgery at a younger age, before the effects of age have even set in.

Teenagers have always gotten nose jobs. But this idea that you can not only fix the effects of age once you’ve experienced them, but prevent them, is a fairly new phenomenon and partly has to do with technology.

While your writing is certainly not preachy, it is clear that you are ambivalent about, even critical of, the proliferation of plastic surgery. But can anyone — you, me or a surgeon — argue against it when it is such a personal, individual decision? Many people who undergo plastic surgery say it is a question of self-esteem.

When I was looking at the notes and correspondences of surgeons, I found that they often struggled with this question. Someone would come to them and say, “I hate my life, I’m miserable.” But to the surgeon this person looked fine. The surgeon then asks themself, who am I to draw the line? Who am I to tell this woman that she can’t have a safe surgery if that’s what she really wants? It is difficult to draw the line at an individual level. But to me that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about this at a macro level as well. Why do so many people feel uncomfortable in their own skin?

If cosmetic surgery is so widespread, why does it remain a taboo conversation topic?

What this says to me is how conflicted we are about this. Even though we think it’s so important that we cut our bodies up, we also think it’s so terrible and shameful that we don’t want to admit that we are doing it. To talk about it means that you acknowledge that you care about externals, which everyone is reluctant to do. I think more people are talking about it — look at Cher. But I think that people who do talk about it: A) have to have had good results, and B) have to have balls.

Is plastic surgery anti-feminist?

There has actually been a lot of debate in feminist circles about whether plastic surgery can be feminist. In the book I talked about how Ms. magazine gave Cher an award for being an authentic feminist hero because she’s someone who decided what she wanted to be and went out and created herself. I’ve been called a hard-line feminist and an anti-feminist for taking the position that I do. People call me hard-line because I’m critical of plastic surgery and anti-feminist because of that criticism — people say women should be able to do whatever the hell they want, and isn’t that what the battle was all about? My feeling is that feminism tried to create a world where no woman would feel the need to get liposuction. But I think that more feminists than we would ever conceive of have probably had different surgeries — they just haven’t told us.

It’s certainly true that the magazine could use a bit of a face lift. But the new guard at the National Geographic Society, transfixed by new ideas and new technologies, doesn’t seem to recognize that its greatest hope for revitalizing the magazine — whose circulation has slipped nearly 2 million from its high of 10.9 million in 1989 — lies not in abandoning but in embracing its past, in resurrecting one of the magazine’s most fondly remembered features.

I’m talking, of course, about the naked ladies.

For generations of young men venturing, like Thor Heyerdahl in his Kon Tiki, into the stormy seas of adolescence, the National Geographic was a source of great knowledge and wisdom. For 12-year-old boys of my generation it was — unless we had ready access to the Playboy collections of our friends’ divorced fathers — the only place in the world we could regularly glimpse real naked ladies.

You won’t find many of them in the Geographic today. It’s all “geo” and no “graphic.” But in its heyday, they were everywhere. The National Geographic photographers found them slaughtering cattle in Bangladesh, eating bugs in the jungles of Mindanao, jumping for joy in Java. I nearly jumped for joy myself when I discovered, one sordid summer afternoon in the mid-’70s, that the enterprising photographers had even found a few semi-naked ladies in Spain, sunning themselves at a topless beach. (Alas, they were facing away from the camera.)

Getting these shots, I knew, was not easy. Potential (and actual) naked ladies did not always make themselves readily available to the photographers’ hungry lenses. But the National Geographic photographers were legendary for their patience — some jungle photographers, the Times noted, would boast that they’d waited up to three weeks for a certain gorilla to take a bath. How long did it take for ordinary savages to become naked savages? Only the photographers know for sure. But they were willing to wait as long as it took. Nowadays, the only photographers with that kind of patience work for the Sun and the Star — and all they’ve gotten from it have been a few blurry shots of topless royals.

The Geographic photographers fared somewhat better. On one early-’70s excursion into the “green heart of Brazil,” the local jungle folk approached the outsiders with extreme wariness, and it was many days until any women showed themselves at all. But they were, photographic evidence suggests, worth the wait. Accompanied by a large group of men, three young women (wearing “necklaces of dyed nutshells and almost nothing else”) finally approached the camp of the intruders. “Impressed by their poise,” a photo caption explains, “the author named them the ‘Three Graces.’” The camp cook was not so quite so impressed. “Though demure, the ['Three Graces'] were unabashed and headed directly for our kitchen,” our intrepid guide informs us. “The cook was delighted and showed them around. But his smile faded when the ladies departed with all the pots and pans they could carry.”

Ah, but who can say no to a naked lady?

The current editors of the National Geographic, apparently. Looking through the magazine today, you’d think the world had run out of topless savages. I can’t believe that’s the case. And even if it is true, can’t the photographers improvise a little? They did in the old days. Indeed, a recent investigation of the real “stone age cavemen of Mindanao” (profiled in the magazine in 1972) suggests that the topless cuties I took such an interest in back then were in reality partial to T-shirts and many other accouterments of clothed societies throughout the world.

But the National Geographic photographers — like all great naked-lady photographers — didn’t let the cold facts get in the way of their art. We wanted topless savages; they gave us topless savages. Is that so wrong? I mean, does anyone really believe that Jenny McCarthy really relaxes at home with a cigar, wearing nothing but white gloves and a choker? Or that Pamela Anderson Lee spends her afternoons idly strumming at a guitar, oblivious to the fact that one of her artificially enhanced boobs is swinging free from her too-loose dress? Of course not. But that didn’t stop Hef from running pictures of both of these improbabilities in the latest Playboy.

When it comes to naked ladies, in other words, we’re willing to suspend a lot of disbelief.

Sure, the Geographic will take some heat from cultural anthropologists and feminists. But the loss of those 617 readers will be made up for by the addition of 600,000 or so adolescent boys to the subscription lists.

And think of the promotional possibilities:

Reg, can we talk?