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Leave it to the Big Media—the
Sam Sawyers and Diane Donaldsons
of the press—to completely
miss the hard-core lesson of
Clinton's porno presidency.
Eight years into a decade that
has resolutely refused to define
itself with a good pick-up line
– we remember the '80s as the
Decade of Greed, and the '70s
earned the moniker the Me Decade
– l'affaire Lewinsky has finally
delivered us from the evil of
the nameless 1990s. Wrap your
lips around the Decade of the
Penis. Never before—and
perhaps never again, so enjoy it
while it you can—has the male
organ been so prominently
discussed, dissected, and
displayed as over the past few
years. While there have been
occasional Iggy Pop-ish flashes
of brilliance and Richard
Gere-esque moments of Breathless
exposure, the '90s have shown
more dick than a John Holmes
film festival.
It hasn't all been easy come,
easy go. Indeed, for the first
half of the decade, the penis
took a beating, first popping
into public consciousness during
the 1991 Senate hearings for
Clarence Thomas, an inquiry
ultimately focused on whether
the Supreme Court hopeful had
filed an amicus brief in the
matter of Anita Hill v. Long
Dong Silver. That spectacle
inspired the feminist rallying
cry "Men Just Don't Get It" and
the much-heralded Year of the
Woman in politics. But, in fact,
the male organ moved to center
stage faster than Wayne and
Garth could say "schwing." To
wit, the Sophoclean irony of
basketball great Earvin Johnson,
who appeared on The Arsenio Hall
Show and copped to being
HIV-positive, pointed to his own
less-than-magic Johnson and
mumbled the limp laugh line,
"Please put your thinking cap
and your cap on down there." (In
yet another validation of the
iron law that history presents
itself first as tragedy and then
as sketch comedy, Johnson
apparently hired the same
writing team for his own
one-night stand with late-night
TV.)
In 1993, the travails of another
all-too aptly named character,
John Wayne Bobbitt, helped kick
start one of the greatest
national debates since Lincoln
met Douglass and Harry met
Sally. As men and women pondered
the ethics and mechanics of
castration, Bobbitt—soon to be
a major motion porn star—was
grateful not only to his doctors
but to the jury that eventually
acquitted him of sexually
assaulting the missus. "I just
want to get on with my life,"
quipped the self-admitted
foreplay failure, who later
emerged triumphant as the
eponymous hero of the adult
movie Frankenpenis.
More or less concurrently, the
self-crowned King of Pop,
Michael Jackson, took a break
from merely grabbing his crotch
on stage to drop trou and have
his family jewels photographed
as part of a molestation case.
Never one to pass up a photo op,
he also reportedly posed for
shots of his buttocks, lower
torso, and thighs. With visions
of Jacko's genitalia still
dancing in the national psyche
like the ersatz gang members in
the Beat It video, Howard
Stern's radio show and memoirs –
Private Parts and Miss America –
helped thrust yet another
schlong—thankfully an
apparently diminutive one—into
the face of Joe Sixpack and
Sally Baglunch. Stern's recent
on-air measuring of his erect
pecker at a full 6 inches raises
perhaps more troubling perjury
issues than anything mentioned
in the Starr Report.
The presidential putz made its
first public appearance in '94,
and, in keeping with the first
half of the Decade of the Penis,
it was put through a grinder.
Paula Jones charged Bill Clinton
not simply with sexual
harassment—a serious charge,
yet easy enough to avoid mental
imaging—but, perhaps more to
the point, of having a crooked,
albeit erect, penis. As the
nation that once turned its
lonely eyes to the blessedly
baggy-pants-wearing Joe DiMaggio
grappling with that bit of M. C.
Escher imagery, prostate-cancer
sufferers—such as Squirmin'
Norman Schwartzkopf—wandered
the media landscape like so many
overzealous "greeters" at
Wal-Mart.
The later years of the '90s have
seen the penis get a fairer
shake, though no less exposure.
Two years ago, everybody's All
American Michael Jordan
explained why he endorsed every
currently available consumer
product except for condoms.
"They're too small," explained
the Space Jam star, no doubt
firing up the imaginations of
Trojan Plus ad execs with a
whole new "Be Like Mike"
campaign. Box office colossi
like Boogie Nights have
featured the biggest and
best movie prosthetics
produced during the
entire period from Doctor Zaius'
first tribunal to Roddy McDowall's
journey to the eternal sound stage.
Similarly, The Full Monty, en
route to documenting the depths
to which British men would sink
rather than work, built its plot
climax around manly full-frontal
nudity.
And this year saw Viagra, the
first purely recreational
substance to win FDA approval
since model-airplane glue,
become the latest drug craze.
Amidst reports of death and
hyperaggresive users,
septuagenarian presidential
loser Bob Dole proclaimed –
while wife Libby remained
strangely silent—that it
worked "great," thereby
fulfilling the prophecy in the
Stones' tune "Start Me Up":
Someday science would make a
dead man come. And, of course,
there's the presidential winner,
whose recent travails have
established that his penis,
crooked or not (hmm, that might
explain the semen-stained
dress), nonetheless works like a
charm.
As the Decade of the Penis
finishes up, one is left
wondering only what might come
next. As the literary critic and
prominent Kinsey Report reviewer
Lionel Trilling suggested back
in the 1940s, American culture
is nothing if not dialectical.
If the Year of the Woman helped
beget the Decade of the Penis,
then it's an even-money bet that
the Decade of the Penis may well
usher in a Century of Vagina.
And sure, while there have
always been occasional Muffys
from Family Affair available for
public consumption and there
were four years of an actual
Bush administration, the next
100 years may well show more
pussy than the average issue of
Cat Fancy.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.