It is one hour to showtime, the lips have not arrived, and Michael Christian is starting to pace. “We need couples!” he keeps saying, his voice getting ever more insistent, almost threatening. What he really needs is a group of college students willing to kiss each other onstage — or rather, willing to demonstrate 30 different kisses with perfect strangers in an hour-long comedic performance. Instead, he only has three willing participants, and they’re all from the student group that brought him here, to the University of Connecticut at Storrs. They are two girls and a guy — and the guy will be kissing his girlfriend, who will be arriving late. Therefore, as far as Christian is concerned, he has nothing. The students are getting nervous.
One suggests that the entourage go down to the cafeteria to recruit people, and Christian thinks this is a fine idea. So off they go, stampeding down the stairs, rushing through the cafeteria doors as the cashier asks them to pay, and approaching random students with a hopelessly sketchy request. Christian takes the lead, but he is no salesman. “We need one boy and one girl to be in a show,” he says to nobody in particular, his arms flailing. Students treat him as they would a homeless person, averting their eyes and walking around him. Eventually, he starts going table by table, where he is greeted skeptically.
This is what kissing has done to Michael Christian. Once an English professor at Boston College, he has devoted his life to teaching college students the science of spit-swapping. “It has taken over my life,” he says later, and he’s not joking. In 1991, he wrote “The Art of Kissing,” which has since been translated into 19 languages and sold 250,000 copies. When it first came out, some B.C. students asked him to give a lecture about the book. He was afraid it would be too boring, so he asked the students to find people willing to demonstrate the kisses he wrote about. The show, which was seen by a small group of B.C. students, was a hit, and he soon took it on the road.
Years later, his English students talked him into performing it in lieu of the day’s regular curriculum, and they volunteered themselves for the demonstration. Apparently, though, simulated oral sex and the “spanking kiss” — a kiss whose description does it full justice — was a bit too much for some of the students, and they complained to the administration. Christian was put on a tight leash after that. Two years ago, he quit to do the presentation full-time.
Christian’s life is dictated by impulse. He has no casual interests, but only deep, wholly consuming curiosity, and so he heaves himself at everything he likes. Before teaching, he spent years in law school — but after he passed the bar, he practiced law for six weeks and then quit. Just recently, he read a book about legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, and is now preparing to tour the country doing a one-man Shackleton show. When Christian redefines himself, he does it completely. In his 50 years of life, he’s legally changed his name five times, although he can’t really offer a plausible explanation for it.
“I must be a very confused person. On some level, I don’t know who I am. That’s a problem,” he says. He wrote “The Art of Kissing” as William Cane, and now goes by Michael Christian. When he was introduced at the beginning of the UConn show, the student at the microphone called him “Michael Christianson.” Christian said he didn’t mind. He’ll probably be changing his name again soon anyway.
Christian is perhaps the least likely figure to give sex advice. He looks a bit like a grown-up Harry Potter, complete with a bowl haircut and black-rimmed circular glasses, and he talks like Woody Allen. When he says the word “crazy” — and he says it often, about his life, his profession, the kissing show in general — the similarity with Allen is startling. On the night at UConn, he was dressed in oversize khaki pants and a giant long-sleeved shirt, and it seemed as if he had lost 80 pounds but hadn’t had time to buy a new wardrobe.
When Christian checked in to the on-campus Nathan Hale Inn, he asked the desk clerk about the Revolutionary War figure’s famous quotes, and soon became the first person in the hotel’s history to actually accept its printout biography of Hale. Twice when we were talking in the hotel lobby, he picked up a promotional magazine and flipped the pages under his nose. When I asked what he was doing, he laughed as if he wasn’t consciously aware of his actions, and told me he loves the smell of ink. In fact, he says, he can usually identify the publisher of a book by the smell of its ink. He quotes philosophers and psychologists. He analyzes people by their birth order. He is an academic overwhelmed by his idiosyncrasies, a genius savant.
But get him talking about kissing, and it’s clear that he’s done his homework. For the book, he had thousands of people take an online survey, and learned from the trends. As a quiz, I ask him what men want from women, and he rattles off a list: “They want French kisses, they want to open mouth more, they want them to be more aggressive with the tongue, they want them to bite them gently on the mouth, the earlobe, and they want them to be aggressive by pulling their hair when they’re excited.” What do women want from men? “They want less invasive French kisses, they want more in the front of the mouth with the tongue, they want more romantic kisses, they want kisses for the sake of kissing, they also love the neck and ears. It will pay you rich dividends to remember that if you’re a guy.”
A few minutes pass in the cafeteria, and the group has found a volunteer. Amanda James, one of the students that brought Christian here, called her friend Hector and talked him into it. She wasn’t one of the girls initially in the show, but she’s decided to take one for the team, so to speak.
“Have you ever kissed Hector before?” I ask her.
“No!” she says, clearly already nervous about it.
“Do you want to kiss him?”
“No!”
But the show must go on.
By the time the group gets back upstairs, Hector has arrived, as has a guy named Jay. Christian quickly ushers everybody into a nearby dining hall, carrying a purple notebook on which he’s written the words “Closed Rehearsal.” He has about 45 minutes to teach the students his 30 kisses, each of which is peppered with cheesy gags and the occasional punch line. He runs through the segments at a ferocious speed, barely stopping to explain their meaning, and the students giggle as they awkwardly press their faces together. He wants them to kiss to the beat of music, to act like dentists, to wiggle and writhe, to faux-French-kiss (this is, after all, a no-tongue show).
Christian spends a lot of time telling them what will be funny, and at one point instructs them on how to wait for the audience’s laughter to die down before delivering the next punch line. The gags are so corny that I almost cringe, and I wonder what the kissers are thinking. During the vacuum kiss, in which the guys are sucking the breath from the girl in mid-kiss — the gag being that the girls act like they’re being deflated in the chair — Christian is enthused. “Keep doing it!” he says as he jabs his pointer finger at them. “It’s hysterical if you keep doing it.”
There are supposed to be four couples rehearsing, but Felix, the guy waiting for his girlfriend, is sitting by himself, miming kisses and looking only slightly sillier than the guys actually kissing girls. Then, unbelievably, a girl from the cafeteria shows up. Christian welcomes her and sits her down next to Felix, who begins to squirm. “She’s not my partner!” he says, but Christian doesn’t hear him. Amanda does, however, and quickly takes the opportunity to leave her friend Hector and switch with the cafeteria girl.
There are risks involved in putting on a live show based around kissing strangers, and Christian has seen almost everything go wrong. He’s seen students freak out, gay and feminist protests, couples get paired up but refuse to kiss, claiming the other is unworthy of their lips. But strangely, the only lawsuit to arise from all this has come from Christian’s former girlfriend, with whom he practiced the most bizarre kiss of the presentation: the Trobriand Islands kiss.
This kiss, which is performed during sex, is animalistic, involving a flurry of biting, blood drawing and hair pulling. He found it in an old book about the Pacific islands, and believes it can teach Americans something — not necessarily due to the violence, but because he says Americans don’t kiss during sex as much as many cultures, and therefore people aren’t achieving the level of intimacy that they could. After he tried the kiss on his ex-girlfriend, though, she sued him, claiming that her eardrum had been permanently damaged. “I swear to God, my life is a tragedy, and I’ve turned it into a joke in ‘The Art of Kissing,’” Christian says.
Mercifully, Christian has also seen things go right. Audience members regularly ask his advice after the show, and he gets dozens of e-mails every day from people seeking kissing assistance. They’re always asking the same few questions, he says: how to French-kiss, how to lean in for a first kiss, how to get rid of hickeys. Some of the people who met on his stage have pursued relationships, and a few even got married. During the rehearsal at UConn, in fact, some sparks seemed to be flying. Three out of the four couples went through the motions with their arms limp and puppetlike, but Nina and Jay, two total strangers, kept their arms tenderly around each other.
I normally hate couples that kiss in public, because I feel as if they’re dragging me into their bedroom, imposing their intimacy by creating a private space in a public arena. But here, the couples are so rigid, so completely not in the mood, that they are genuinely funny. This, of course, is what Christian is banking on. It’s why he always prefers strangers to real couples, and why he says the best shows are done on the fly. Indeed, when Felix’s girlfriend finally shows up, and she joins him in the rehearsal, their bodies are so familiar with each other that I feel dirty watching them.
With the rehearsal over, the group walks toward the ballroom as Christian mutters nervously to himself. They arrive to find 250 students eagerly waiting, and Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel” is blasting from a stereo Christian set up so the audience “feels like they’re at a party.” The whole thing sort of feels like a train wreck waiting to happen. There’s no way those students will remember an hour’s worth of rushed cues, and Christian’s jokes are simply too childish for a sexually experienced college audience.
But when he gets up onstage, Christian redefines himself once again. He’s still goofy and flamboyant, but he’s managed to regress the audience, to undercut all their knowledge about sex and talk about something so basic that it brings them back to a time before clothes ever came off. He is suddenly the perfect man for this job: unassuming, unintimidating, so simultaneously unpredictable and on-message that it’s not just endearing, it’s captivating. At one point, he jumps up on the stage and declares that after this show, “You’re going to have a lifelong advantage over any partner you’re with!” The crowd cheers, and two girls in the front row high-five each other.
During the show, Christian rides what is essentially an hour of nervous energy. The crowd knows these volunteers are unprepared. They can sense it. And when it becomes evident that these students are going to be kissing each other for the benefit of the audience, everyone is enthralled. During the first scene, in which the girls pretend to be barbers by faux-cutting the guys’ hair and leaning in seductively, mouths in the audience are literally agape.
Later, people applaud as two volunteers put red pillowcases over their heads to represent tongues, and Christian moves them around to illustrate the three proper French-kiss tongue maneuvers: flicker, rotate and chase back-and-forth. These college students have seen kissing before, but they’ve, well, never seen it like this. It catches them off-guard, and even Christian’s jokes work perfectly. At one point, with the volunteers ready for another smooch, he points to them and says, “When you’re this close, don’t worry about if you’re unattractive. You’re out of focus!” The crowd howls.
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“It’s just something about my mind that I’m interested in romance,” he tells me after the show. “I always wanted to know what my girlfriend was thinking when I was kissing her, and I never found out. So, in response to that desire, I surveyed 100,000 people, and I found out.” It turns out, they’re thinking a lot of things. They’re thinking about how it’s too slobbery or there’s too much tongue. If they’re one of the 8 percent of men that responded to his survey in this way, they’re thinking about how good a woman’s lipstick tastes.
Christian’s interest in kissing was spawned by a 1936 pamphlet called “The Art of Kissing,” which he became enamored of because, he says, “It was romantic, it had nice drawings and it was unique.” He started passing it around to friends, but soon felt it lacked depth and detail, and so he resolved to fill in the blanks himself. That project led to the book, which led to the presentation, which led to tapes and DVDs and an all-encompassing career.
Now, he says, he gets paid to sleep in nice hotel rooms and make people laugh, and that makes it pretty difficult to regret ever leaving Boston College. At this point, he’s even completely immune to the sight of people kissing. “I have a dual feeling about it. You want to give people privacy, but on the other hand, you want to pick up tips, so it’s OK.” Still, he’s hesitant to tell people what he does for a living, and often feels like “a pervert.” So, to make himself feel better, he’s put into his performance contract that he will, in no way, make lip contact with the student volunteers.
After the show ends, a girl from the crowd approaches Christian and asks why her kissing method influences boys in such a predictable way. When she French-kisses a guy, she says, he wants to sleep with her. When she keeps her mouth closed, he’s content to just kiss. Christian tells her that French-kissing often signals an interest in more intimacy. If she can, she should try to talk her kissing partners into a night of nothing more than kissing. He says people often overlook the pleasures of kissing by rushing toward sex, and that unless they consciously take a step back, they’ll miss a lot. As he talks, he falls into professor mode, fostering a professor-student discussion on a topic his former career could have never supported. Christian may trade interests and goals at whim, but he is undeniably a sum of his experiences.
The success of his book, he says, means that people always carry some self-doubt about their ability to kiss. I ask him if a detailed book such as his might make the act of kissing too complicated or overwhelming for people, and he says he prefers to think of it as a list of suggestions, not guidelines. There is no right or wrong way to kiss, but there is documentation of what most people like and dislike. He hopes that’s helpful.
Christian does 40 shows a year, and spends the rest of his time researching and pursuing new projects. He’s stuck with the kissing program for 12 years — a monumental amount of time, considering his life’s short attention span. And even with the Ernest Shackleton shows starting, he expects this is something he’ll stick with. Even if he changes his name again, even if he finds a new career, he’ll be lip-locked with kissing because it’s an inexhaustible topic, he says. People never stop being curious. They want answers, and regardless of what his name is, he’ll always have them. “Even if I do retire from this, I’ll still get calls,” he says. “I could never retire from it. It’s caught me up. I could never retire from it. Never.”
When a heterosexual woman, without warning, finds another woman attractive, it seems like a mistake. She looks up and sees this other woman — this dear friend, this casual acquaintance, or this marvelous cleavage on the silver screen — and she is curiously aroused. She’s at a loss. So it was for Geri, a heterosexual 19-year-old who, for one brief moment, wanted to kiss her best friend.
“I don’t know why I would want to do that,” says Geri, a college student in New Jersey who asked that her last name not be used. “I know I’m straight and I like my men, and it would just be too weird. I guess I was confused by it.” She was 16 at the time, talking loudly at a party, her breath stained with alcohol. A boy at the party jokingly suggested that she kiss her friend, a girl she lived next door to for years. And suddenly, it seemed like a good idea. No, it was a great idea. Not just a peck, but a real kiss, the kind of genuine thing Clark Gable would applaud. As if on autopilot, Geri says, she told her friend of this new desire — and then quickly pulled back. This wasn’t her. She didn’t know what she wanted.
Geri and her friend still laugh about that night, although she hasn’t settled on what caused such an impulsive, erratic desire. Sometimes she blames the booze, but she’s not convinced. Whatever it was, she says, she knows one thing for sure: if she were a guy, this probably wouldn’t have happened. “Guys are programmed to fuck, and girls aren’t like that,” she says. “Girls are more sensual, and the mood has to be right. It doesn’t matter who’s doing it, it just has to be right.” And on that night, somehow, the mood was right.
But if a study recently released from Northwestern University is correct, Geri’s desire was almost more natural than her heterosexuality. In her case, and the cases of countless other women, her biological impulses spontaneously bubbled up. As the study shows, women may be naturally aroused by both sexes, and what turns them on may have little to do with their sexual orientation.
For the study, more than 90 gay and straight men, women and male-to-female transsexuals were shown erotic film scenes with a probe attached to their genitals to indicate when they were aroused. Both the men and the transsexuals were only aroused by scenes that featured members of their preferred sex, while women were aroused by all the films — whether they featured lesbian scenes, gay male scenes or mixed-sexes scenes.
The results, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, seem almost counterintuitive. Men have eagerly embodied their reputation as the sexually enthusiastic half of the population, and yet this study seems to suggest that women, deep down, are really thirsting for more. But, according to one of the study’s coauthors, Northwestern psychology department chairman J. Michael Bailey, the study really just reinforces what we already know: Men are sexually simple, and women are not. “I think it really shows us how much we don’t know about women more than it shows us what we do know,” he says.
For one, he says, there appears to be a significant disconnect between what sexually and mentally arouses a woman. Many of the women in the study did not even recognize they were being aroused by some of the tapes, which leads Bailey to believe that women are somehow disconnected from their genitals — and are perhaps fully aroused more by circumstance, such as an emotional bond or a sexy scenario, as something that engages their brains and emotions. When men get an erection, Bailey says, “it makes men motivated to have sex with whatever’s causing the genital arousal. I don’t think women have the same connection.”
That may be because women don’t package their sexual orientation the same way that men do, according to Lisa Diamond, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah. Unlike some other cultures, Americans tend to lump many different experiences into one category called “sexual orientation” — including distinct desires such as who we love, who we want to marry, who we are attracted to and who we fantasize about. However, this comes more naturally to men than it does for women, Diamond says. Some women unconsciously dissect what defines their sexual interests, and find that they may want different things from different sexes. “You have a lot of cases of totally heterosexual women who may not be aroused by women, but their deepest emotional bond is with other women,” she says. “They feel they fall in love with other women, without the sex.”
In fact, a woman may get fully aroused in the opposite way that a man does, Diamond says. She likens arousal to a pathway: For most men, their interests start with a sexual attraction, and then lead to an emotional attachment. But for women, she said, the interest can go through the pathway in the opposite direction, with a deep emotional bond spawning a sudden sexual interest.
And that, she says, is how some women develop sexual desires for their friends. She says most people are sexually attracted to both sexes, even if the attraction is as lopsided as 95 percent for one sex and 5 percent for the other. “I do think that there’s a lot more wiggle room with regard to desire and love than most people are usually comfortable acknowledging.” She says she has studied cases of women who fall hopelessly in love with a female friend, and even though both women are heterosexual, they will date and have sex and feel fully satisfied. But yet, they are not lesbians, she says. Their interest is only in each other, spurred by an emotional bond that turned sexual — and if the relationship ends, as she has seen happen, the women both go back to happily dating men.
One woman she studied had lived with a female friend for over a year, and the woman would spend hours walking along streets, trying to decide if she was attracted to other women or not. It turns out, she never was. “People can experience strong sexual attractions that are totally unusual to the rest of their experience,” Diamond says. “They’re situational. In one setting and one circumstance, it may seem possible.”
So if this is true, why are straight women turned on by lesbian porn? Bailey has a number of theories, and he feels he’ll get closer to the answer once his research team repeats the study — but this time, they’ll monitor brain waves instead of genitals. He said there’s a chance the women aren’t actually being turned on by the porn, but that their stimulation is a hard-wired biological defense. Much like a woman who becomes genitally aroused while being raped, Bailey said, women may only be creating lubricant so that they are not damaged by something penetrating them — something his probes had registered as a sexual stimulation. “Genital arousal in women is not the same thing as being in the mood,” he says.
Or, he says, it could be something quite different: All women may be naturally bisexual, and society shapes most of them into heterosexuals. He says this could be an evolutionary trait, because women didn’t have to develop a sexual orientation when men, as the historically dominant species, were the ones always seeking out mates.
But as some skeptics of the study suggest, women may not be guided by their biology at all, but only by the sexual images and stereotypes around them. American culture, for what it’s worth, is a drooling teenage boy. It is obsessed with the female body, sprinkling a busty silhouette or a seductive midriff on any object that needs extra pizzazz. The country will tolerate a male sexual figure every so often, with his remarkably hairless torso and abs like a plate of chicken nuggets, but the penis is categorically off-limits. Where Americans see sex, they see only breasts — at the movies, in magazine ads, through the perky shreds of fabric that pass as bikinis. And therefore, both American men and women have come to associate the very essence of sex with the female form, according to sex therapist Wendy Maltz, coauthor of “Private Thoughts: Exploring the Power of Women’s Sexual Fantasies.” So, she says, when the straight women in the study were becoming aroused by watching lesbian porn, they were only responding to a culturally programmed symbol of sex. “Let’s take both men and women who had never been exposed to any visual imagery of sex, and then let’s hook them up and see what goes on, and I think you’d find different reactions.”
But while society is never short on ingrained sexual suggestion, a growing collection of writing claims that women are more susceptible to cultural influences than men. In “Gender Differences in Erotic Plasticity: The Female Sex-Drive as Socially Flexible and Responsive,” psychologist Roy F. Baumeister argues that women’s sexual behavior is less consistent than men’s, because women’s sexuality is more strongly linked to changing variables such as education and religion. For instance, the feminist movement of the 1970s is often cited as influencing the sexual orientation of the women most closely involved, turning straight women into lesbians because of what writer Sarah Pearlman called a “choice as much on politics as on sexual interest in other women.”
Maltz says that men are also a slave to society, and their response to the porn in the study proves it. Just as straight women were turned on by women because of the female body’s cultural implications, straight men were turned off by other men because of America’s severe homophobia. Men are taught to avoid the male body, to be borderline repulsed by it, and the straight men in the study did just that, she said. Meanwhile, since women are open to seeing another woman’s body, they’re free to identify with that woman — to see her orgasm on screen and physically feel it for themselves, just as they might cry upon seeing people enrapt in sorrow. On a surface level, they are being aroused by the woman on the screen, but Maltz says the real response is deeper than that. “It’s not necessarily a desire to be with that woman. It’s probably a celebration of their own female sexuality. It’s an identification with the woman rather than a lusting after her.”
That’s not to say that women respond to sexual situations the same way that men do, though. While Maltz contests that the porn study reveals anything about a woman’s biology, she does concede that women are inherently different in their sexual interests. Where men want sex, women want relationships — even in their deepest fantasies. “Women’s hearts are very connected with their sexual response,” she says. In the marketplace, this manifests itself most in romance novels, a forum where the sex may be hot but the emotions are heavy. And while men may scoff, these books capture so many women because they portray men at their sexiest: devoted, adoring and there in the morning. Men are anchored to the flesh, it seems, but women need their lovers in context. “A lot of women are aroused by the ideal of a man being very faithful and drawn to a particular woman, and that they have found each other, that she maybe has been the answer he was looking for in life.”
But to one porn industry veteran, the study really only captures how women respond to porn, not to sexual situations. Annie Sprinkle, a porn star turned sexual performance artist, has seen a lot of changes since she entered the industry 30 years ago and one of those changes was the growth of a female audience. For decades, centuries even, men were the prominent consumers of porn, and so they’ve learned to filter and nit-pick the bits of pornography that turn them on, she says. For women, though, porn is something relatively new and generally untamed. Since women haven’t become as selective yet, she says, they’re being turned on by, well, just about anything.
Sprinkle has seen the porn industry drag American culture along, redefining what people think is sexy by blindly guessing its market value. She remembers porn in the 1970s, when the industry assumed women wanted to be loved in a soft, pink and fuzzy sort of way. Films were made to reflect that, and in due time, women’s sexual preferences followed along. “People are very impressionable,” she says. “In my experience, watching what’s been made, I think people have a gut reaction to what they like and don’t like, but they also are very conditioned by what’s out there. The porn industry thinks it knows sometimes, and they don’t necessarily always know. They think they know, and that’s what they make, and then people start to like what they make.”
If there really is a difference between what arouses men and women, she says, it’s probably based on hormones. Most women she meets are aroused more from the head and heart, but her transsexual friends are unpredictable, she says. One friend in particular exhibited a stunning transformation when she started taking testosterone pills. Now, Sprinkle says, the former cuddle-loving woman is “a lot more about fucking than romance.”
So then, what is it about female sexuality that seems so elusive? Why are men so predictable, so pathetically easy to forecast and satisfy, when women are being aroused by the unexpected and falling in love with the previously unthinkable? Why does light seem to travel slower than the development of a man’s erection, and yet women, according to Florida-based sex therapist Miriam Davis, can take up to 45 minutes of stroking and kissing to become fully aroused? (The time delay is for multiple reasons, Davis says, be they reservations due to poor body image or unresolved anger or anxiety that are easy distractions from sexual pleasure.)
Whatever it is, Sprinkle says we’ll never know. And while she appreciates the scientific inquiries into such questions, she says the conclusions will never be concrete explanations, but only tiny snapshots of our sexuality today. Tomorrow, though, everything could change. The past 50 years have been nothing short of a sexual revolution, she says, and she expects nothing less of the next 50. “It’s nice to generalize, but it’s important to remember, with human sexuality, it’s so multifaceted. It’s like trying to say ‘What is life?’ What’s the difference between men and women in life in general? You can’t really pinpoint it. Sex, there’s so many levels to it. That’s the beauty of it.”
And that’s the message Katie likes to hear. A college student in Chicago who asked that her real name not be used, Katie stopped looking for answers years ago. She says she always thought girls were beautiful, even if she once considered herself straight. Then, in her sophomore year of high school, she developed a crush on a girl. And then another. And now, years later, even as she’s been dating her boyfriend for a year and a half, she has a hopeless crush on his sister. She still hasn’t actually touched another girl, but she expects to one day, and none of this ever confuses her. Even when she developed her first crush on a girl, she merely shrugged it off. “She was gorgeous, had this awesome body, awesome funny personality. I really liked her,” she says. “I just figured, if this is the stuff I like in a person, so what if she’s not a guy? What does it matter?”
These days, Katie actively rejects any label. She’s not straight, but she’s not bisexual, and she believes that, at their very core, women don’t even have a sexual preference. “We like what we like, and we’ll do what we need to get it,” she says. She’s told her boyfriend this, and he said that as long as she doesn’t cheat on him, he doesn’t care who she gets turned on by. That’s good to know, she says, because the people on her radar are many and multicolored, and she doesn’t want them to stop coming. “A woman’s body is an extremely sexual thing that can arouse anyone,” she says. “I don’t think I’d ever limit myself to one gender. I don’t think it matters.”
Those yellow ribbons, gestures tied to mailboxes, splotches of color along dull streets like the body of a bruised boxer — this is not what Eric is looking for. He’s risking his life out there, he says, and spending years on a military base in the heart of nowhere. This is all very real and dangerous, so symbolism, genuine or not, doesn’t quite cut it for him. He needs something sacrificial, some concrete sign of appreciation from those he serves, from those he protects. A free beer would do, he says. So would free sex.
“I think the country needs to realize that these people are out here, they’re working their asses off and they’re risking their lives,” says Eric, a Navy officer who recently returned from Iraq and asked that his real name not be used. He keeps track of who’s naughty and who’s nice, because he believes military discounts are a litmus test for troop support. The Holiday Inn and the fast-food restaurant near his base both serve him well, he says, but he’s upset that his military I.D. means nothing in the surrounding bars and clubs.
When possible, Eric will gladly take a discount. So, when he heard that a legendary Nevada brothel was offering free sex to military personnel who had fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, he and a buddy hopped in a car and drove straight there. Eric had never visited a prostitute, an impressive display of restraint for a man who has been stationed overseas. There, far from the yellow ribbons and hand-held polyester flags, lies a world of cheap gratification, just begging to be tapped. Bolstered by “too much pride,” Eric says he outright refuses to pay for sex, even if it’s wildly cheap. But a freebie, he says, is totally different.
“Why not? It’s free sex,” he says. “Hey, free sex with a porn star. You can’t pass that up. That’s like every boy’s dream.”
The Moonlite Bunny Ranch, best known as the subject of the HBO documentary “Cathouse,” has won international attention for its coital offer. Starting June 5, the first 50 military people back from Afghanistan or Iraq who showed up got free sex. (And active military personnel who weren’t overseas get 50 percent off). It costs owner Dennis Hof between $200 and $1,000 per military customer, depending on the service and the woman requested, but that doesn’t faze him. The radio stations are calling, the television cameras are showing up at his door, and military personnel are writing by the thousands. When he talks with his new military customers, he says, they tell him how relieved they are to be rewarded for fighting abroad. For Hof, this has given meaning to what could easily be just a public-relations stunt. “Is it a promotion? Absolutely. I’m the Colonel Sanders of pussy,” he said. “But is it the right thing to do? You’re fucking right it is.”
But underneath the glitz and glamour of a brothel that employs porn stars and boasts a four-page menu, Hof’s offer has created a strange homecoming of one well-ignored military tradition. From the Vietnamese girls who robotically stammered “Me love you long time” in the movie “Full Metal Jacket” to the seedy night life of Thailand’s Pattaya Beach, prostitution has been the military man’s escape from chaos, the cheap imitation of a pleasure he left behind. It has been a presence in American fighting and peacekeeping since the days of muskets and cannons, and its linguistic influence from the Civil War may still be felt today. Legend has it that Union Gen. Joe Hooker often brought a group of ladies along to raise the spirits of his men, and they soon became known as “Hooker’s women” — and that, of course, was soon shortened. The story is popular in some historical circles, although its legitimacy is doubtful and hard to verify, according to Clemson University military history professor Ed Moise.
Prostitution is such an unwavering staple of the overseas military experience that the armed forces have been bipolar in their response to it, Moise says. In past wars, officers have tried discouraging brothel visits with grade-school tactics, such as screening ghastly films of the horrors of venereal disease or simply prohibiting their men from going at all. (However, he says there is no truth to the widely known tale of potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, being slipped into the mess-hall food to diminish men’s libidos.)
Sometimes, though, the military will embrace prostitution in the interests of regulating it, employing an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” philosophy. Officers would gather a group of prostitutes, approve them for use, and then have medics check them weekly. Moise says he knows of this happening during the Vietnam War and World War II, although he says he wouldn’t be surprised if the practice were more widespread than that. “Where you have a bunch of young men who are mostly away from their families and away from the moral pressures of home and family life,” he explains, “you will often get a lot of prostitution, sometimes organized by the higher command, which wants to make it available in a controlled fashion to keep it from happening in an uncontrolled fashion.”
These days, though, a soldier just needs to know where to look. Steve Csicsatka, a former Marine currently in the Air Force Reserves, spent years overseas in Thailand and Japan. The hot spots there were sometimes ramshackle — makeshift strip clubs and brothels with women lined up and numbered — but cheap and easily accessible, he says. And while the men were not supposed to visit these places, the rules were rarely followed, and everyone knew it. “They literally handed you condoms before you went out on leave,” Csicsatka said.
One time, he walked into a brothel and found eight other Marines inside. Other times, he ran across some of his officers. “Thailand was kind of scandalous, a lot of married people doing crazy stuff,” he says. But he would not elaborate, nor would he even hazard a guess at the percentage of married men who stray to the dim lights of a cheap brothel. “They say what happens in the field stays in the field.”
In the Philippines, the field is even hairier. Eric, who was once stationed there, says the place is a veritable bargain bin of sex. A special forces friend of his rented a bungalow for a month and hired two women to service him in bed and in the kitchen, and the final bill came to $50. Another friend told him of a night at a Philippines strip club, where a woman went onstage, put a beer bottle in her vagina, flipped upside down until the beer had been poured inside her, then went back on her feet and waited until the beer refilled the bottle. Then, she gave the bottle to a Marine in the crowd, who drank it down. “It’s quite fucked up,” Eric says. “There’s a lot of weird stuff going on.”
And so, when the Bunny Ranch opens its doors to the armed forces, it is only doing what so many brothels have done before it. The main difference is that this is happening in America, and it comes with America’s safety checks. There are no horrible diseases or fatherless babies coming out of the ranch as so often happened in Vietnam. In May, a 10-person delegation of East Asian academics, government officials and private relief workers researching ways to end global sex trafficking showed up, unannounced, at the ranch. The visit was quickly condemned by the U.S. State Department, but the symbolism was clear: Americans have visited brothels overseas, and now the overseas representatives were visiting the American counterpart.
For servicemen with no overseas brothel to visit, the Bunny Ranch was also the destination of choice. Soldiers waiting in Kuwait only a few months ago — cooped up under an unforgiving layer of sand, surrounded by only anxiety and the bare necessities — found their lifeline to sex was through the postal service. They began writing letters to the ranch, some addressed to specific women they might have seen on the HBO special (which ran in December 2002) and others just to the ranch itself. They wrote of sitting by their tanks, hoping to make it out of Iraq alive, pledging to come to the ranch to enjoy their own bodies in one piece. “Imagine how much testosterone these guys got in them, sitting around all wound up,” ranch owner Hof says. “They’re wound up, these guys, and sex is all these guys care about. It’s all young guys care about.”
Sunset Thomas, a Bunny Ranch girl and the star of more than 200 adult films, was a frequent recipient of the letters. Of all the people in the world to write to — mothers, old friends, ex-girlfriends — some nervous men on the brink of war chose to write Sunset. “I don’t know if I’m going to be around tomorrow. I’m going to kick some ass and come back and see you, Sunset,” she recalls one of the letters saying. For Thomas, the letters were flattering. In the face of adversity, men often think of freedom. In the face of death, they were thinking of Sunset. “They’re over there fighting for my freedom, so I have the freedom to be in porno movies or work in brothels,” she says. “I think it’s so wonderful. It makes me feel good sometimes. I’ve been in the business for 11 years, and, hey, it’s nice to know there are a lot of guys out there who really appreciate my work.”
Hof had his girls write back to the guys, and shipped them a bag of goodies, including vibrating rubber vaginas. When even more guys started writing, the ranch designed the free-sex-for-military promotion, and it quickly snowballed in the media. As of Tuesday, 41 military men and women had come for their prize, including two women who had never been intimate with another woman before. They both took turns with Thomas and then joined in a three-way. Thomas says she never asked the girls why the offer of free sex drove them to such a radical experiment, but she assumes the bombs and bullets had shaken them loose. “Sometimes when you’re over there fighting, a lot of crazy shit goes through your head,” she says. “I don’t know. Maybe they just said, ‘I always wanted to be with a chick.’”
No stranger to brothels, Csicsatka also jumped at the chance to visit the ranch. He didn’t fight in Iraq or Afghanistan, but he took advantage of the ranch’s secondary military offer: 50 percent off for any active military personnel. In all, he dropped nearly $6,000 at the ranch. “I’ll just have to save up a little bit more for college,” he says with a laugh, but considers it money well spent. He got to experience a brothel in his home country, and was overwhelmed by the amount of options available, like “a kid in a candy store,” he says. Plus, he fulfilled a longtime fantasy of his: sex with three girls at once, each of a different ethnicity. That’s a “Neapolitan” on the Bunny Ranch menu, and the vanilla in his trio actually goes by the name Vanilla. “I always say to myself, and I believe it, too: ‘You only live once,’” he says. “Someday I’ll be 80 years old, and I’ll be able to tell my grandkids, ‘When I was your age, I went to the Bunny Ranch and I had myself a Neapolitan, just like you will, you little kid.’”
Csicsatka has no regrets about his international escapades, and casually tells his friends back home about them all. He’s out there for life experience, he says, and there’s far more to see than what’s on the base. But still, after paying for anonymous women in exotic lands, he says the beauty of American women hasn’t faded. When he visited the Bunny Ranch, he spent his downtime just sitting and talking with some of them, asking what their parents think or know of their chosen profession. He says he’ll never tell his mother about the day at the ranch.
The military was far from his mind during his visit, but he’s delighted by the collusion of the armed services and sultry services. Overseas, it’s always about the sex. But here, he says, it’s about something more. Something different.
“They’re kind of like supporting our military and we support them overseas,” he says. “It’s good to see that Americans do love us.”
