What the hell happened to feminism?
It’s the question that was almost — but not quite — addressed at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Wednesday night, when a bevy of broads, including writers Erica Jong, Susan Cheever, Wendy Wasserstein, and actress Sarah Jessica Parker gathered for a panel discussion. The event, billed as a discussion of “Sex: Then and Now,” was being held in honor of the 30th anniversary of the publication of “Fear of Flying,” Jong’s seminal celebration of dirty talk.
Jong, 61, dressed in a conservative black suit, her pouf of hair now silvery, served as moderator for the evening, and began by introducing her compatriots to the auditorium, which was packed with women of all ages.
The 38-year-old Parker, who, according to Jong, “has galvanized the world” with her portrayal of passion-addled columnist Carrie Bradshaw on HBO’s “Sex and the City” and is “one of the great actresses of our time,” emerged in a silky pale purple dress and lacy jacket that looked pricey. Compounding the fact that her long, springy hair looked like Jennifer Aniston circa last year, Parker further confused fans by holding a book in her right hand in place of a Dolce and Gabbana clutch.
Next, Jong introduced “Heidi Chronicles” playwright Wendy Wasserstein, calling her the kind of person “one feels happy to be on the same planet with.” Wasserstein, 53, is currently blond. Clad in a red cowl-neck sweater and a black skirt and boots, she did look sort of cheerful as she ambled to her seat.
Finally Jong introduced Susan Cheever, the fourth panelist, a role recently vacated by Tina Brown, who had shown remarkable perspicacity by deciding to bail at the last minute. Jong said that Cheever’s work, including “Note Found in a Bottle” and “As Good As I Could Be,” “had absolutely galvanized” her, and that one of the author’s chief talents was supporting and appreciating the work of other women.
“That’s what we’re all learning in this period of history,” said a thoroughly galvanized Jong, as the white-haired Cheever, 60, took her seat, “how to support each other and love each other.”
It was then that a young woman in my row hissed, “These women are going to tell us about sex?”
Once the panel was assembled, Jong got down to the business of appreciating her own work by reading the “zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals” paragraph from “Fear of Flying.”
“I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote that paragraph,” said Jong, her voice rich with experience and apparent self-assurance. “But it did change the world.”
Talking about the way her book had helped to show a nation that women were capable of desire and sexual fantasy, she turned to her companions and asked, “Thirty years later — is it better for women?”
There was a pause.
“Yes?” squeaked Parker tentatively before catching her own tone and joking robotically, “That’s what they told us to say.
“Women my age reaped the benefits of you being bold. We feel entitled to be free,” said Parker. The musculature in her celery-stalk-thin calves, poured into a pair of pretty stiletto heels, was perfect. She turned to her left and quoted Wasserstein: “We live with the assumption that we can have love and literature.”
“That’s right,” said Jong, nodding her head emphatically. “Because for women writers in the past — they always had to give up one or the other.”
Wasserstein, whose voice recalls every nut-case Jewish aunt you’ve ever had, marveled at the changed options for women, recalling that when she was choosing colleges, her mother told her that “Smith was to bed, Mt. Holyoke was to wed.” Wasserstein went to Mt. Holyoke, though she added, “I ultimately got an honorary degree from Smith, so things worked out.”
Jong, who seemed intent on keeping things moving at a steady — not to say choppy — clip, next asked Parker whether she thought that her show, “Sex and the City,” could have continued to follow the lives of its four lead characters after their 40th birthdays, or whether aging would necessitate that the show go off the air.
“Well, we’re goin’ off the air, so you tell me,” said Parker, though she held out the hope that someday the show’s team might decide to revisit the women in their later years, when presumably they would meet their inevitable end as Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, Betty White and Rue McClanahan.
Cheever soon piped up, describing her memory of reading “Fear of Flying” for the first time, and how it turned her staid, married, Pembroke College-educated world upside down.
“You can’t change a pickle back into a cucumber,” Cheever proclaimed enigmatically to roars of laughter from an audience that really seemed to like the pickle reference.
Cheever spoke about the way that the book also changed men’s lives, specifically that of her then-husband, who was “ecstatic” to read a book that made it possible to imagine that women — gasp — enjoyed sex and had desires that were not directly tied to dishwashers and vacuum cleaners.
But then it was time for Jong to ask her next question: What did the panelists think of the possible effects of a “flood of pornography” and had they read Naomi Wolf’s recent New York magazine piece about the effect of pornography on women’s sexual freedoms?
A prolonged silence suggested they had not.
But Wasserstein forged ahead, talking about the pornographic spam e-mails that flood her mailbox.
“Whoever they are at the hot titties club …” began Wasserstein.
“They’ve got our numbers!” said Jong. Parker quietly mentioned that she tends to receive Viagra ads.
Soon Wasserstein was wallowing in memories of her first time with “Fear of Flying.” She was a graduate student at the Yale Drama School, working in the costume shop.
“I just felt this gush of liberation,” she said, perhaps unaware of her own distressing talent for imagery. “I was sewing costumes for William Ivey Long and she [Jong's protagonist Isadora Wing] was having zipless fucks!” said Wasserstein with her self-deprecating giggle. “I was doing something wrong!”
It was time to ask Sarah Jessica Parker another question about “Sex and the City.”
“The girls talking on ‘Sex and the City,’” began Jong.
“Mmmm,” said Parker, deeply.
“Here are four women, sharing their lives …”
“Mmmm-hmmmm,” said Parker.
“Their questionings about life …”
“Hmmmm,” said Parker, more seriously.
“I am wondering if it opens the door for new kinds of television,” said Jong. She turned to Parker. “Do you think so?”
“Um … I hope so,” said the actress, perhaps taken aback at the ridiculousness of the query.
Jong observed that what was interesting about the “SATC” women was “the self-questioning, not the dirty talk,” and Cheever chimed in that “Charlotte is what I was meant to be. Samantha is how I turned out.” This got a big laugh.
“Are we anywhere near having true equality?” said Jong, still in “Crossfire” mode. “On TV? Onstage? In life?”
A noise that sounded like “nononononono” rippled through the auditorium audience.
Parker jumped in. “In fiction, as we write it and see it, yes. But not in day-to-day life. In my experience, I don’t see it yet.”
“This is what scares me,” said Wasserstein, referring to Bush’s signing a bill that day that would ban late-term abortions. “I have a 4-year-old daughter. And when I think about the rights I had when I was reading ‘Fear of Flying’ in that costume shop. I mean, not that anything was happening, but I had the right.” She stopped briefly. “Attention must be paid!” she said, fiercely.
Jong turned to Parker. “You have a little boy,” she said.
“It’s just as bad!” said the actress, showing a little backbone. “I don’t want him to grow up in a world where he thinks that men can tell women what choices they can make. You can be raised in a house with all good intentions, but if you live in a world that tells you something different, with an administration that thinks differently about women and their choices … It is just unfathomable to me. It’s something I was born with. It’s my right. It’s what I was taught.”
Jong wondered aloud about whether writing a novel about a woman about to turn 60 can be done. Cheever responded that Jong should stop worrying about her work as political and do what she claimed to have done in her 20s with “Fear of Flying”: Just write the story and don’t think about polemic.
“This is so interesting,” said Parker about the revelation that “Fear of Flying” was about a woman in her 20s. “Because I only read the book extremely recently” — Jong looked momentarily surprised — “and it didn’t occur to me that this was a book about a woman who was only in her 20s. I thought of it as about women — 20, 40, 50, 60.”
Parker was talking fast now, her brows knit. “Of course you can write a book about a woman turning 60,” she said to Jong, “because she’s a woman and women are fascinating!”
Jong spoke of her daughter, 25-year-old writer Molly Jong-Fast, who was married last Saturday. Ma Jong said, “She takes for granted that the world is hers, so she starts at a higher level than I did. It’s as if I’d given her courage with my mother’s milk.
“I have found that I have become more invested with child rearing as my daughter gets older,” Jong continued, noting that Molly “is 25, and married, and pregnant, yet my whole being has shifted to being her mother,” thus confirming a long-held suspicion that it is indeed easier to invest in child rearing when the child being reared is more likely to buy you a glass of wine than spit up on you.
“I am just learning how complicated it is,” said Parker. “It’s funny that everyone who thought I could juggle were men.” Parker said that the decisions about her son, James, who was born a year ago, “have gotten harder as he’s become a person who wants to interact more … And I have to figure out how to make it work and to be a good mother, because that is what’s most important to me.”
Cheever pointed out that the “choice” between family and work is really no choice at all. “Every molecule in your body wants to stay with your child,” she said, recalling her own decision to turn her attention to a book when her child was young. “Leaving my daughter to write a book I really cared about was the worst pain of my life.”
“It is very hard for women to say that they don’t want to have a professional life outside of the home,” said Parker, who was going great guns, now. “It takes a lot of courage, as if there’s something not heroic there.”
Jong nodded emphatically.
“God, we have gone deep here!” she said, breathlessly.
Anyone looking for signs of a return of 1980s-era culture wars probably couldn’t dream up a better one. At the center of it — again — are the Reagans. Only this time, it’s “The Reagans,” a fictionalized biographical miniseries that was set to air on Nov. 16 and 18, but was dumped by CBS on Tuesday after heated political pressure from the right. And while it was immediately announced that the movie would eventually air “sometime in 2004″ on Showtime (a cable channel also owned by CBS parent Viacom), its future still seems shaky, at best.
The decision came after weeks of debate — fueled by the right-leaning Fox News Network and conservative watchdog group Media Research Center — about the movie, which stars James Brolin as the former actor, California governor and president, and Judy Davis as his second wife, Nancy. The biopic reportedly focused on the couple’s relationship, with special attention paid to Mrs. Reagan’s controlling personality and astrological fixations.
Controversy about the project has centered largely around a line that screenwriter Elizabeth Egloff has said she invented, in which the fictionalized Reagan says of the growing AIDS epidemic, “They that live in sin shall die in sin.”
CBS, in an effort to quell the rising controversy, had already agreed to make edits in the film, prompting director Robert Allan Ackerman to quit in protest. Now the network has passed the hot potato to its much smaller cable sister. The Showtime press release concluded with the line, “Showtime will collaborate with the filmmaker to create a final film that will be the kind of quality programming its subscribers have come to expect from the network,” a statement that seems to leave open the possibility that even when aired, the film will be changed from its original, sure-to-be-campy and probably-sort-of-crappy format.
But television industry insiders, journalists and even politicians were not worried on Tuesday about the quality of “The Reagans.” They were shocked by the unprecedented decision by CBS to give in to political pressure. The decision, many critics said, is even more alarming considering that CBS is a television network with an august history of creative risk-taking in the face of social and political pressure — a history it celebrated on Sunday in a televised 75th anniversary bash.
“I think it is the lowest day in the history of CBS,” said Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment at the University of Southern California. “If they didn’t want to make this film to begin with, that’s one thing. But to pull something off the air based on the protests of a minuscule number of people? They should have put this thing on once it was made come hell or high water.”
But that “minuscule number of people” happens to have a lot of clout. Pundits on the right have been stirring up the faithful ever since reports of the script broke in the Oct. 21 New York Times. That night, Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” featured conservative talk show host — and famous adopted son — Michael Reagan who, after being egged on by host Sean Hannity (“You know, Michael, I love your dad, you know that”), blasted the movie, saying it “just proves the point that Hollywood has always hated Ronald Reagan.” The same night, over on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough darkly postulated that “CBS could never bring down Ronald Reagan when he was president. So now they’re getting their revenge on one of our greatest presidents in his final days.”
And they were just getting started.
The next night, Matt Drudge turned up on “Hannity” to make his own claims about the movie (“This is ‘Mommy Dearest.’ This is Nancy Reagan shown beating her kids, pill popping”), and suggesting that Brolin’s wife, Barbra Streisand, orchestrated the AIDS slur on Reagan. “It doesn’t help that Streisand’s own son is suffering from HIV,” Drudge said. (The HIV status of Jason Gould, Streisand’s son with Elliot Gould, had been a rumor limited to gossip and tabloid reports — until Fox and Drudge blasted it to millions.)
A few nights later, Hannity went to bizarre lengths to work the CBS controversy back into his show. During an interview with Ed Smart, the father of kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart, Hannity asked whether the family’s close involvement in a made-for-TV movie about the kidnapping was due to the treatment of the Reagans: “Maybe you thought what happened in the case of the Reagans, that that would happen to you?” Hannity asked. Smart didn’t seem to understand the reference and moved on.
Hannity’s Fox stablemate Bill O’Reilly — after featuring the controversy for the better part of a week on his show — went on an extended tear Monday night after viewing what he called “a seven-minute highlight reel.” “The dialogue between the Reagans makes Beavis and Butthead look like Ph.D.s.” He also ominously predicted: “If CBS goes ahead with the film, I believe any company that sponsors it will take a huge hit, as will the network.”
The success of the Fox-led crusade against CBS underlines the growing power of Rupert Murdoch’s “fair and balanced” network. “It is quite unprecedented that a major network got browbeaten out of presenting a programmed story about a president of the United States,” said Rep. John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, who posted an open letter to CBS president Les Moonves on his Web site arguing for the airing of “The Reagans.” “I think this is a new experience for the country.”
Jeff Wald, a spokesman for James Brolin, said he blamed the “far right wing” for the cancellation of the show. “I feel bad for CBS, after their big anniversary special,” said Wald. “Les Moonves is an inherently good man, but the pressure put on them by the right wing was pretty tough.”
Wald insisted that Streisand was not the mastermind behind the Reagan drama. “Barbra Streisand had nothing to do with the production of the movie,” he said. “The politics of the movie were never discussed with her. She visited the set once to see her husband.”
Some critics of CBS’s decision pointed to the irony that just this week, on their 75th anniversary special, the network had issued a very belated mea culpa to the Smothers Brothers comedy team, whose show was taken off the air in 1969 because of the brothers’ satirical barbs against President Nixon and the Vietnam War.
“I’m glad to know that CBS now realizes what a mistake it made by canceling the Smothers Brothers in the early ’70s,” said Columbia University journalism professor Stephen Silverman. “There is great irony here — that they are celebrating themselves when they’ve just done something that’s disgraceful.”
James H. Rosenfield, who was president of the network from 1977-81 and executive vice president of the CBS Broadcast Group from 1981-85, expressed surprise over his former network’s decision, because in the past CBS “never ever, ever knuckled under to any kind of political pressure under any circumstances.” Rosenfield (who is a Salon board member) said he was puzzled by the timing of the decision, “because that script had to be vetted before it got to this point.”
Rosenfield’s tenure at CBS coincided with some of the TV industry’s most socially turbulent times. He recalled working in the network’s sales division when the first episode of Norman Lear’s “All in the Family” was about to air without a single advertiser.
“I couldn’t give it away,” he said of the program, which addressed issues of race, class and plain old human vulgarity with more frankness than had ever been seen on television and has rarely been seen since.
“Most of the problems we had were social,” said Rosenfield of the controversies he was asked to manage. He mentioned “M.A.S.H.,” a show about the Korean War that touched political nerves by chronicling the harsh reality of combat during the Vietnam debacle, and “Maude,” which featured television’s first abortion, as moments when CBS faced extreme criticism from political and religious groups.
Then, recalled Rosenfield, there was the outcry from Jewish organizations over the casting of vocal Palestinian supporter Vanessa Redgrave as a concentration camp prisoner in 1980′s television film “Playing for Time.”
“There was just tremendous pressure,” remembered Rosenfield. “But then of course it played and the pressure was immediately relieved because she did such a tremendous job.”
Writer Larry Gelbart, another veteran of CBS’s golden age, had a more hard-bitten response to CBS’s dive on “The Reagans”: “My reaction was disgust that I wasn’t shocked.” Gelbart brought “M.A.S.H.” to CBS, where it aired for 11 years; his relationship with the network extends back to 1944, when he wrote for the “Maxwell House Coffee Times” radio show starring Fanny Bryce as Baby Snooks.
Gelbart had warm memories of his own political past with CBS, particularly on “M.A.S.H.” “The case that I made was that if Walter Cronkite could be against the war on the news at 6, then why couldn’t we at 8 or 8:30?” he recalled. “And CBS was very, very brave. They were politically permissive. They encouraged us and they were not afraid.”
Gelbart credited CBS’s legendary mogul William Paley, as well as its president Frank Stanton and news chief Edward R. Murrow, with creating a network that did not flinch from controversy. “This was the network and Edward R. Murrow was the man who brought McCarthy down,” said Gelbart. “CBS stepped up.”
The difference today, according to these sources, is that the political parties are so busy chewing each other’s faces off that the networks are worried about getting in the way. “Clearly, CBS is concerned about financial retribution and maybe worse,” says Gelbart. “Maybe legislation. Maybe just being hit back [by the right].”
Rep. Dingell said that he wrote his open letter to CBS’s Moonves because he believes that people deserve to hear the truth about President Reagan’s years in office. Dingell, a congressman since 1955, remembered that truth as encompassing, among other things, “ketchup as a vegetable,” the Iran-Contra affair, voodoo economics, Oliver North, the savings and loan fiasco, and farm bankruptcies. “If they can come up with something good that can be said about him, then by all means they should say that too,” Dingell said. “All I want to do is see to it that the media is allowed to function in a free, responsible, decent and truthful fashion.”
Dingell said that he could “name at least two networks where they lean actively to the right and do so without any shame or sense of concern.” The congressman said he was referring to Fox and “perhaps MSNBC.”
Though he hasn’t seen it, Gabler, who wrote “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” speculates that “The Reagans” is “a lousy movie. But that is immaterial.”
The bigger issue, says Gabler, is cultural censorship. “In a free society what we generally do is we allow people to put things on the air that we may even find offensive and then we let people discuss and debate. And if we believe the historical record needs to be corrected, we correct it.”
The ugliest celebrity spectacle of the year — the sexual assault prosecution of NBA star Kobe Bryant — took a notable turn Thursday, when the supermarket tabloid the Globe published a salacious high school photograph of the accuser on its cover. In it, the woman is lifting up her prom dress to reveal a garter belt. The headline reads: “Kobe Bryant’s Accuser: Did She Really Say No?” Next to the photo, in half-inch type, is the 19-year-old woman’s name.
The world — particularly the journalism world — does not usually pay close attention to the scandal sheets. But there is good reason to this time. For one: the Globe’s behavior has been followed in the past by the mainstream media. Back in 1991, it was the Globe that broke with the journalistic tradition of protecting the identity of possible rape victims and revealed the name of the woman accusing Kennedy scion William Kennedy Smith of raping her. NBC and the New York Times eventually followed suit.
The other reason, though, is because the influence of the tabloid press has undeniably increased in recent years. And a main reason for that is the woman — and lightning rod — editorially in charge of the Globe: Bonnie Fuller.
Fuller, a veteran editor (Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and YM), spent the past two years revamping the weekly celebrity gossip magazine Us Weekly with enormous success. At a time when circulation and advertising sales were on the skids for magazines, Fuller raised Us’ newsstand sales a whopping 55 percent. This summer, she left Us to take on the editorial directorship of American Media, the company that publishes the Sun, the Globe and the National Enquirer, for a package reported to be worth more than $1 million. Though she has focused most directly on the rejuvenation of the company’s flagship magazine, the Star, Fuller technically presides over the editorial decisions for each of American Media’s titles, including the Globe.
Fuller told the New York Post that she knew of the Globe’s plans to publish the name and photo of the woman but said that she “would not have interjected” herself into the magazine’s editorial structure by killing the story. “The Globe did what was within their mission,” she told the Post.
“Bonnie did not make the decision to put that [image, name, and headline] on the cover. Candace Trunzo, the editor of the Globe, did,” said Richard Valvo, vice president of corporate communications for American Media, adding, “Bonnie made the decision not to pull it.” (Fuller was out of town and unavailable for comment; Trunzo did not return calls.)
One, however, could easily argue that deciding “not to pull” a story is the same thing as deciding to run with one.
“She’s the editorial director of the company,” said Barbara O’Dair, editor at large at Time Inc., and the former editor in chief of Teen People and Us Weekly. “She obviously gave her tacit approval.”
And if the Globe’s big reveal on the identity of Bryant’s accuser gets picked up by other publications reporting stories like this one, the arm of the tabloid press will have extended even further into the legitimate press.
“The tabloidization of the American media is horrid and unstoppable,” said Stephen Isaacs, a professor of journalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, who teaches a class on ethics. Mr. Isaacs, who is somewhat unorthodox in his view that journalists should publish the names of accusers in rape cases, went on, “I think naming her is cool, but running a picture of her with a garter belt — that’s mawkish and obviously meant to sell papers. That is the tabloidization of the American press.”
For many people, the line between the tabloid press and the legitimate press is already indistinguishable, said Geneva Overholser, a professor of journalism at the Washington bureau of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the former ombudsman of the Washington Post. Overholser had not seen the cover of the Globe, but after hearing a description of the layout, she called it “the worst kind of journalistic voyeurism.” She, like Isaacs, believes that situations like the Kobe Bryant case serve as an argument for making the identification of alleged rape victims standard.
“If we named them in the mainstream media, it wouldn’t be such a catch for the tabloids,” she said. “There wouldn’t be such a forbidden, look-at-me thing.”
But to magazine editors in New York, particularly women editors, the ethics involved in naming a possible rape victim took a back seat to the look-at-me nature of the Globe’s cover.
“I think every female editor who woke up this morning and saw that in the paper probably had their breath taken away,” said Us Weekly’s editor in chief Janice Min. “I just looked at it and thought, Oh my God, that’s so wrong.”
Min was not critical of Fuller, her predecessor, saying only, “I think it probably got additional attention because Bonnie is there and she came from the mainstream press and that is why it came across as an unusual decision.”
But Min did not hold her fire when it came to the Globe’s editorial decisions.
“It is misogynistic and truly exploitative to try to get big sales off of identifying an alleged rape victim,” said Min. “Was a woman dressed inappropriately? Did she ask for it? Is a sexy woman more likely to get raped than a non-sexy woman? These are the anachronistic, horrible ideas that come up because of a cover like that. Morally, it’s wrong.”
Min’s objections were strongest when it came to the cover-photo choice.
“I would imagine that they probably have plenty of photos to choose from,” she said. “I don’t think any of them would have been right to run. The fact that they chose to run one of her in lingerie is galling.
“It is clearly implied on the cover that maybe she deserved it,” Min continued. “This is someone’s worst nightmare. This is why a lot of sexual assault victims don’t come forward.”
“I think it’s one thing to show a face, and we can all debate that for a really long time,” said Lucky editor in chief Kim France, trailing off momentarily. “Personally I’m against it, but I think it’s a valid debate. But taking a photograph of a girl at her prom, having fun with her femininity, at a moment when everybody’s allowed to feel free and sexual, and using it with the headline ‘Did she really say no?’ in the context of a rape case? I think that’s horrifying.”
While the photos sent shock waves through some corner offices in Manhattan, some female editors, while troubled by the photos, were not at all surprised by them.
“As a journalist I just can’t say, ‘Man, am I surprised to see that in the Globe!’ said Ellen Levine, the editor in chief of Good Housekeeping. “It’s the Globe.”
And Roberta Myers, editor in chief of Elle, said, “I am personally of the school that out of deference to the victim you do not publish an image of her face. You just don’t do it, unless the victim is willing to identify herself.”
But, Myers continued, “The fact that it is damaging to that particular woman or that it is something that a lot of journalists wouldn’t do doesn’t mean that it’s a total surprise on the cover of the Globe. It’s not like the Times did it.”
O’Dair agreed. “They’re doing what they’re trained to do. These are attack dogs, they go for the jugular. And they are just going to go for whatever will rake in as much money as possible.”
“What’s the hot market right now?” asked Lesley Jane Seymour, editor of Marie Claire. “Celebrity journalism, tabloid journalism. Tabloid journalism has really been absorbed into the mainstream media and ironically you have the bottom of the barrel — the Globes and the Stars — going upscale [by hiring editors from legitimate media organizations], which is completely crazy and hilarious. Because usually people find the biggest audiences by going downscale.”
A big part of the tabloids’ trip up-market has to do with Fuller, who is currently engaged in remaking the Star as a celebrity-gossip-must-read in the spirit of Us and In Touch.
She worked miracles at Us, transforming the snoozy movie rag into the guiltiest journalistic pleasure of the last decade. Her move to American Media surprised many of her former colleagues, and the controversy over the Globe cover on her watch may illustrate exactly why her decision to officially abandon “respectable” journalism was so risky.
As O’Dair pointed out, Fuller’s statement to the Post that running a story like this was within the publication’s mission was fair: “She’s absolutely right. That’s what she signed on for.”
“Sure, she did come from the legitimate press,” said France. “But she left the legitimate press, too. And I don’t think that anything that happens at the Globe is going to impact the legitimate press. Or so I’d like to think.”
But France may be dreaming. In a conversation with Marie Claire’s Lesley Jane Seymour she casually used the alleged victim’s first name — which she had learned from the Globe — three times on the record. When I pointed this out to her she laughed mirthlessly.
“Yes, I know I said her name,” said Seymour. “Once it’s in the Globe, it doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, the taboo’s broken and the name is now part of the lexicon. They have a huge circulation. It’s not like it was revealed in Mother Jones.”
As for the Fuller issue, Seymour said, “She says she didn’t have anything to do with it, but there’s a lot of pressure for everybody in journalism to make a buck today and that’s the bottom line.
“I certainly don’t know what she had in her mind, but unfortunately with media today you have two bosses: your bosses who care about ethics and readers, and your bosses in the marketplace of media conglomerates.”
Ellen Levine, of Good Housekeeping, did not quite damn the publication. Though she said that she doubted a case like this would stir any legitimate debate of these issues, she expressed her own confusion about whether journalists should shy away from naming victims.
Declaring that she was not referring to the Bryant rape case specifically, Levine said that she thought a lot about what happens to men who are accused of rape, publicly identified, and then found innocent.
“Why does the man get drawn and quartered while the woman is garbed in a journalistic burka?” she asked. “I’m not saying that I know the answer. Just that I think it’s a timely question. And of course the Globe’s going to choose a picture that’s racy. And if it sells very well they’ll be doing a lot more of it.”
O’Dair pointed out that the mainstream media’s handling of the Bryant case hadn’t been exactly heroic. She noted that Bryant was honored at the Teen Choice Awards, which were held in Los Angeles a month after he turned himself in to the police. Bryant and his wife, Vanessa, appeared at the ceremony, which was broadcast on the Fox network. He accepted the award for favorite male athlete, and was greeted with a standing ovation.
“I thought it was interesting that Fox saw fit to honor Kobe Bryant after charges were filed against him,” said O’Dair, whose former title, Teen People, hosts the Teen Choice Awards. “It was certainly a bad move on their part. And it perpetuated a really complicated view of heroism for kids to try to understand.”
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
Hath not a groom taste? Hath not a groom senses, preferences, passions? Tasting the same food, hearing the same bands, subject to the same crazy family as a bride is?
So writes Doug Gordon, a television writer, in the Oct. 27 entry for his weblog PlanetGordon.com: What Happened to Him After She Said Yes. Gordon, 29, is in the midst of planning his August 2004 wedding to Rabbi Leora Kaye at a summer camp in Wisconsin.
Over at The Mighty Geek, a 33-year-old graphic designer from Brooklyn who will marry an MTV online producer named Jessica in January, titled one of his wedding blog entries “Groomzilla: Part 1.”
“I’ve become a monster,” writes the Mighty Geek, who more simply goes by the name “G.” “At what point does an otherwise normal man, with the typical dismissive male attitude towards his own wedding, suddenly become so infatuated with a stupid and trivial wedding decision, the invitation font choice and color for example, that he is willing to throttle his own mother rather than back down from his font of choice?”
Groom blogs written by Gordon, G and their technologically nimble affianced brethren are becoming an increasingly popular way for engaged men to communicate wedding details, vent frustrations, and chronicle engagements. They are also poking holes in one of the longest-standing assumptions about the multibillion-dollar wedding industry: that grooms are passive, stoic creatures who have no feelings about their impending nuptials.
“You don’t get a groom’s perspective anywhere,” said Gordon, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. “It’s like the groom is another accessory along with the bridal gown, along with the cake and the flowers.”
The call of the wild bride should be familiar to anyone who has ever watched a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts or has had a friend between the ages of 26 and 32. High-pitched and tremulous, it traditionally involves endless diatribes about uncooperative bridesmaids and debates over the virtues of salmon vs. chicken.
Perhaps you’ve heard it.
What you may not have heard — ever — is a peep out of her mate.
The ideal modern groom — as imagined by Hollywood executives — is essentially mute. Attractive but not too pretty, he will appear on time and shave when told. Patient and empathic, he will step in when his intended becomes overwhelmed by her ardor for lilies of the valley and Spode, but he will certainly not spend more than 30 seconds contemplating either. Under no circumstances will he have sex with the strippers at his bachelor party.
In short, the desirable groom behaves like a particularly obedient potbellied pig — a supporting player and pet for the overworked and overzealous bride, who has probably already been slapped with the Bridezilla label.
But troll the Internet, and you may find a passage like this, from National Public Radio editor J.J. Sutherland’s wedding blog: “The flowers will be cool, fall colors, no carnations, roses. Neat stuff. One thing we are including are ‘coffee beans’ which are these reddish berries that look like, well, coffee beans. But they seemed to have ended up the one unifying factor in all the flowers.” Sutherland married media planner Veronica Ruiz in October 2002.
As his “throttle his own mother” entry suggests, G experienced intense feelings about his wedding invitations.
“I’m used to having things done a certain way so it all looks like a cohesive whole,” he said. “I designed the invitations and the save-the-date cards, so I was very meticulous with that.”
G also confessed that together, the couple physically visited 88 potential reception sites before agreeing to do the deed “in Jersey at a place we can afford.”
Diane Forden, the editor in chief of Bridal Guide magazine, which recently published a list of 50 things a bride can do to get her groom more involved in planning, said that a recent survey conducted by the magazine showed that 50 percent of the responding couples were paying for their own weddings.
“That means that grooms are signing the checks and becoming more interested in where their money is going,” said Forden, who added, “I think there are areas that the groom won’t really get interested in, like the bridal party colors. And I can’t really see him getting involved in the flowers.” (Clearly, she’s never met J.J. Sutherland.) “But there is certainly a growing interest from grooms in things like the music selection, the reception venue, the food, the wine, the registry. Couples are now registering together, and the registries are changing. You’re seeing a lot more sports equipment, electronics, bar ware… things that men like to have in their homes.”
What, no mounted grizzly bears or machine guns?
Registries, dresses, finger food — these high-priced nuptial trappings have been aggressively marketed to women for so long that it is almost unthinkable that a man might have as much enthusiasm for flowers as his bride. That he might even have more enthusiasm for flowers. And china patterns and crystal and party planning.
Graphic design student Andrea Hyde Owen, who married blogger Will Owen on Oct. 11 in Minneapolis, says her husband was “a lot more stressed out in the end than I was.”
No kidding. In a Sept. 30 blog entry Owen wrote, “Fears mounting over ‘official’ number of guests expected and actual number of guests expected. Seems that we modeled our reception contract on the assumption of about 90 people and from the RSVP it looks more like 40 people, but from the information that comes through non-official channels (a la NOT via RSVP) it feels more like 60ish people. So, could be anywhere from 60-90 people? Well, apparently that’s an entired [sic] extra person (staff) at the reception. Ugh … We’re still making out final preparations for the rehearsal/grooms dinner, and of course we’re super sper [sic] nervous and stressed about all of the final details that we can’t really do anything about until THE WEEK … Am I going a little nuts here? Yeah, I think so.”
“I know that writing the blog made him more aware of what was going on,” said Hyde Owen, “but I don’t know if he kept the blog because he was already more invested and interested in the wedding or whether the blog made him more interested and invested.”
“To my groomsmen, I actually became a kind of Groomzilla,” Owen said, remembering his agitation with his attendants when they had not all sent him their measurements on time.
Getting tetchy about suit fittings is one thing. Copping to one’s own metrosexuality on a Web site is another. American pop cultural iconography has so permanently linked the notion of wedding kvetching to the image of a Xanax-popping bride that grooms’ reasonable complaints and concerns come off as slightly … well … maybe just a bit emasculating.
J.J. Sutherland — he of the cool fall colors and coffee bean bouquets — went so far as to drop a mention of the fabled “women’s sports pages,” the weekly wedding announcements in the New York Times Sunday Fashion and Style section. “No one really good to hate this week,” wrote Sutherland of one particular crop of blissful marrieds. Later he wrote of the New York Observer’s Engagements column, which includes longer anecdotes about couples, that it “gives you a glimpse into people’s lives and you get to hate them based on some actual information.”
Sutherland’s observation cuts straight to the pleasurable core of ritually reading these box scores of age, profession, education and wealth. But it also makes him sound more like a character in a Nicole Holofcener film about girlfriends than a self-respecting groom.
G said that the way he represents himself in his blog is as “an emasculated nerd,” but that his wedding blogging “hasn’t ruined my masculinity. I actually feel good helping out.”
Raven Brooks, a San Francisco consultant who married Mona Tedjarahardja Brooks in May 2003, said: “Every guy in college, every friend I have who is getting married, every story you hear in movies, the men are never involved because that’s the masculine deal. It’s one of those boundaries. But I’ve never paid much attention to those. I enjoy a lot of things that most guys wouldn’t think are very masculine — going to musicals, cooking — and the truth is, the wedding really is just more enjoyable if you’re involved in planning it!”
Brooks, whose new wife had asked him to start his wedding blog precisely because he was “notoriously bad at communicating feelings,” said that he grew to enjoy his freedom to vent. “It’s a good way to get things off your chest if there’s something bothering you,” he said. Brooks got good at it, at one point breaking down and writing about the “relationship brinkmanship” that the wedding planning was inspiring. “We are both trying really hard to make this wedding happen … But along the way we have this knack for pushing each other’s buttons and that has made for a rough past few weeks … We have had some of the biggest blowups in our relationship.”
If it’s a good way to express frustration, blogging is also a way to express joy. And grooms who do not have built-in “Oh my god can I see the ring” conversations are relieved to have a platform where they can tell the world just how thrilled they are to be getting hitched.
Peter Boulay, a 34-year-old ISP technician from Rochester, N.Y., who blogs as the Blurf and got married last Saturday, was happy to talk about why he blogs — “because it’s uncensored,” “because I get to vent and rant sometimes” — but he was really pumped to talk about his wedding ceremony.
“I had the most beautiful wedding ever,” said Boulay, launching immediately into a description of his first dance, to Elton John’s “The One.” “I am in a wheelchair,” explained the happy husband, whose new wife, Suzette, is not. “So it was hard to figure out how to do the first dance.” But the couple worked it out. And, said Boulay rapturously, “it was just amazing.”
Some grooms also use their blog space to muse about some of marriage’s more surreal rituals. Take this tale of a strip club bachelor party from Raven Brooks:
“I had a good time just drinking and talking with everyone. Some of the people there I hadn’t seen in months or years. Of course they bought me some really nasty shots. My dad bought me something called a smurf and it was freakin disgusting.”
Brooks’ bachelor party did not, apparently, get much crazier than the smurf shots. His entry continues: “I’m not sure what to think about this whole idea of a ‘bachelor party’. To me it means celebrating what you are giving up one last time. I don’t look at it that way because I don’t think that I am losing anything, I’m gaining everything. Women in strip clubs are fake in every sense … How am I supposed to be saddened by giving that up exactly? I’m going home to an extremely sexy woman with real breasts that loves me unconditionally. What the hell would I want with a stripper?
Brooks is 25 years old and met Mona through Match.com when he was just out of college. His blog chronicles his feelings about his engagement in detail, right down to the fun of registering.
“Playing with that scan gun in [Macy's and Crate and Barrel] is just so much fun,” writes Brooks. “It is like being a kid in a candy store.” Then, more wistfully, “I wish every weekend could be like this. I suppose we just have to start taking time out for each other and not get caught up” in the wedding meshugas.
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We want to make you a part of this series. What is the state of your union? Did you find the one and never look back, or has finding lasting love been a marathon of trial and error? Did you have a fairy-tale wedding only to watch things crumble once the reception was over, or have you glided along in marital bliss since Day One? We want to hear your stories of joy, romance, heartbreak and pain. After all, partnership, as we all know, is a complex concoction of all of those things. (Please remember: Any writing submitted becomes the property of Salon if we publish it. We reserve the right to edit submissions, and cannot reply to every writer. Interested contributors should send their stories to marriage@salon.com.)
Those who have nursed dirty Meg Ryan fantasies ever since she told Anthony “Goose” Edwards to take her to bed or lose her forever in “Top Gun” probably already have their tickets for “In the Cut,” Jane Campion’s choppy, erotic thriller that opened on Wednesday. In it, a mustachioed and criminally attractive Mark Ruffalo takes recovering-moppet Ryan to bed, plants her on her stomach, spreads her legs, and performs oral sex on her from behind in a scene that lasts a breathtaking two minutes. A steady master shot with no quick cuts and no “Is that what I think it is?” moments, the scene depicts exactly what you think it does, and even the most jaded filmgoers will feel their pulses quicken.
There is nothing like the visceral jolt of seeing Mark Ruffalo’s face delicately ensconced in Meg Ryan’s hindquarters to hammer home exactly how rare it is to see oral sex depicted on multiplex screens — especially when the relevant roving lips reside on the faces of bona fide movie stars. But Ryan and Ruffalo are about to get lots of company on their travels below the belt, as Hollywood experiences early tremors of a graphic oral-sexual revolution. The results may be titillating, but the cumulative impact speaks less to shock value than to the way the film industry’s portrayal of realistic sexuality is beginning to evolve.
“The Cooler,” which will be released by Lion’s Gate on Nov. 26, chronicles the life of a rusted-out Vegas loser (William H. Macy) who hits the erotic jackpot in a relationship with younger, blonder Maria Bello. After a rushed and awkward first encounter, Macy’s character makes amends by paying Bello lip service. The cut of the film that screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January shows Bello’s face grimacing in a quiet, almost pained orgasm. The camera then moves lower, where Bello’s own hand and Macy’s face rest in the actress’s thatch of brunet pubic hair, earning the film a dreaded NC-17 rating.
In July, the director of “The Cooler,” Wayne Kramer, and Bello appeared before the Motion Picture Association of America’s parental guideline ratings board to secure the film an R. In exchange for that rating, the brief glimpse of pubic fuzz is history, though audiences will still see Macy nuzzling some serious lower abdomen.
“Apparently, you cannot show pubic hair in a sexual situation,” said Bello, rolling her eyes ever so slightly during a recent breakfast. “Our ratings system is so screwed up.”
Rich Taylor, the vice president of public affairs for the MPAA, insisted that there is no act-by-act code for rating movies. Rather, he said, a rating is decided in a vote by a board of adults “with parenting experience.”
“There is no such thing as one breast is this rating, two breasts is that rating,” said Taylor. “The reason the ratings system exists as it does is to get away from the do’s and don’ts that was the Hays Code of long ago.”
But Bello said she thinks that the objections to the scene were about something else entirely.
“I agree with my director that the reason that scene had to get cut was not about the pubic hair,” said the actress. Dressed in pretty pink silk and a gray felt jacket, she was extremely good-natured for someone who was being quizzed about her bush over coffee and some nova.
“The men I know who’ve seen it and who are not artists,” she said, “are terrified of it, of that scene. And I think it’s seeing my face having an orgasm — a real one, a complicated one — a woman deriving pleasure from [cunnilingus] is very scary for a lot of people.”
Equally scary — surprisingly — is the sight of a phallus: While the Ryan-Ruffalo coupling survived the ratings board with an R rating, another scene from “In the Cut” depicting fellatio did not. In the version of the film that was shown to the press as recently as a month ago, the scene — in which an unidentified man’s face is obscured in shadow and a woman’s head is shown mostly from behind — included clear shots of a very wet and very erect penis. That penis, like Bello’s pubic hair, got cut from the film like so much foreskin. A toned-down version of the act remains. (As, we hope, does a brief glimpse of Little Ruffalo that comes later in the movie.)
Then there’s “The Brown Bunny,” Vincent Gallo’s controversial opus that screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May. “The Brown Bunny” may never get a release, but its director and star, Vincent Gallo, reportedly received his own: The film features an extended blow job administered by Gallo’s ex-girlfriend Chloë Sevigny. Sevigny has said that the act was not simulated.
“Men take their penises very seriously,” said 36-year-old Bello to me later, in reference to a line she came up with for “The Cooler” in which she palms Macy’s bits and says, “You have a really great cock.”
“I mean,” she licked some cream cheese off her thumb, “they take them very seriously.”
Well, sure they do. Which is one of the reasons that showing them (the penises) or showing a woman pleasured without the benefit of one has been so rare.
So what has prompted this new wave of Hollywood head?
“It was actually Bill [Macy]‘s idea,” said Bello with a grin. She explained that during the filming of the low-budget movie, she, Macy and Kramer improvised the intense love scenes as they went along, asking each other, “What does it look like?” when two people have sex for the first time, and then for a second time.
It was for this second scene that, according to Bello, Macy proclaimed, “I think it’s such an intimate thing for a man to go down on a woman.” “That scared me,” she said, pushing back from the table. “To be that open and exposed.” Bello said it was the psychology that frightened her more than the prospect of actually filming. She and Macy were close, she said, careful to point out that they have children the same age — he with actress wife Felicity Huffman, she with screenwriter Dan McDermott, her “man” of six years.
Even so, the fact that it’s tough to fake an oral-sex scene is probably one of the things that has contributed to the paucity of them on-screen.
Where even the most graphic genital sex can be simulated — with a body double if need be, oral sex by definition requires the most recognizable part of a performer’s anatomy — his or her face — to be in the shot, lending every such scene the dangerous They-Totally-Did-It! frisson of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in “Don’t Look Now.”
Not that there haven’t been other films that featured dirty mouthfuls. “Monster’s Ball,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Two Girls and a Guy,” and Campion’s “Holy Smoke” all gave nods to the muff dive. There’s Julie Christie again, giving Warren Beatty a hummer under a table in “Shampoo.” Even “Pretty Woman” includes a scene in which Julia Roberts unzips a seated Richard Gere’s pants and hunkers down for some quality time between his legs. But then, she was a hooker. And the other films feature convicts, transsexuals, cult members, threesome-enthusiasts, Warren Beatty, and other creatures of supposedly voracious and perversely fervid appetites. Disabled Vietnam veteran Jon Voight’s oral attention to Jane Fonda in 1978′s “Coming Home” is practically patriotic.
“Regular” people — like Ryan’s writing teacher, Ruffalo’s cop, Bello’s cocktail waitress, and Macy’s casino employee — have not traditionally partaken of anything resembling realistic oral pleasure in the movies.
“It has to do with our lingering Victorian attitudes about sex,” said Dan Weiner, sex therapist and assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. “There are still a lot of things we do that we don’t talk about and that we don’t feel comfortable seeing in a public place like a movie theater.”
Past oral-sex scenes have also followed a fairly routine model: one head moves downward from a shared kiss, leaving the frame. The camera lingers on the other partner’s face. There is panting, groaning, glistening, and a conveniently speedy paroxysm of eye-rolling pleasure.
“That’s the standard scene — the man’s head goes down, cut to the woman’s face and then she goes into ecstasy,” said Betty Dodson, the sex therapist, masturbation advocate, and inventor of something called the Vaginal Barbell. “It sounds like Jane [Campion] did better. Three cheers for Jane.”
“Usually what you see is the huh-huh heavy breathing,” said Bello, wetting her lips, throwing her head back for a moment, and slapping the table of our booth for a climax imitation that immediately recalls Meg Ryan’s orgasmic theatrics in Katz’s deli in “When Harry Met Sally.” She took another bite of her bagel.
“What it looks like in real life can include that” — Bello nodded her head to the side, indicating her own passion-flushed face of 20 seconds ago — “but that is not the only thing that sex and intimacy is about.” Bello reminds me that her on-screen cunnilingual climax follows directly on the heels of a painful conversation that her character has with Macy’s character. She said that she conceived of his ministrations as healing as much as stimulating.
“Orgasm isn’t always a joyful release,” said the actress. “Sometimes it can be the release of old wounds, of a desperation to experience real feeling again, of pain. I mean, sexuality is just so much more complicated than what we have experienced in the American cinema so far. Thank god there are some films that are starting to be more open to real kinds of sexuality.”
Weiner agreed. “If there are more films that are featuring oral sex,” he said, confessing that he has barely set foot in a movie theater since the birth of his first child three and a half years ago, “then that’s a positive development. I agree that there should be more non-penis-centered sex on the screen. The broader the range of sexual experiences depicted, the better. It removes some of the taboo feeling from some of these acts.”
Weiner said that as a clinician, he frequently encounters problems with people whose ideas of what sex is supposed to be have been influenced negatively by the media.
“Most people — except under rare circumstances — do not get to actually witness other people having sex,” except on movie and television screens, said Weiner. The glorified Hollywood couplings they’re left with give them “unrealistic expectations of what sex is supposed to be, and then they set terribly high standards for themselves.”
Which is not to say that this spate of munchy erotica portrays the amorous embrace with the stark realism of, say, your life.
Maria Bello is hotter and William H. Macy more talented than anyone any of us is likely to take home anytime soon. And have I already mentioned Mark Ruffalo? Meg Ryan — despite a distressing new look that suggests she has had a small trout implanted in each of her lips — is Meg Ryan. And the lighting, music and cleanish sheets of these films suggest scenes that already trump reality.
But one of the pleasures of kinkier mainstream movies is that they jump-start our imaginations in a way that the familiar sweat-damp sexual wrestling of beautiful people has long since ceased to do. When I told Bello about the oral sex episode in “In the Cut,” she paused for a moment and fixed her eyes in the middle distance.
“It sounds amazing,” she said dreamily, snapping out of it only when I asked her if she was trying to picture the scene.
