Burning Desires Sex in America

Part Two

The Right to Party

Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Gore could not believe her ears. He was moaning and groaning, loud alley-cat wails that shook the family stereo and made the little blonde hairs on the back of her neck stick up. But the worst part was the lyrics. Something about an oversexed girl named Darling Nikki who was masturbating with a magazine in a hotel lobby. So this was Prince, the hot young star whose pretty doe-eyed face seemed to be on the cover of every magazine. And to think, she had been the one to bring home his new album, Purple Rain, for her 11-year-old daughter, Karenna.

This is what started it all, the Parents' Music Resource Center (P.M.R.C.), the Senate hearings, the talk-show appearances, the clashes with Frank Zappa and sneering punk stars, the entire business of the "Washington Wives" versus the billion-dollar music industry. Soon after stashing Purple Rain on a shelf high in her bedroom closet, safely out of reach of her kids, Tipper Gore declared war on "porn rock," a crusade, as she saw it, to preserve the fragile innocence of American youth.

The rock-decency crusade got off to a splashy start in the fall of 1985, when Tipper and other members of the P.M.R.C. persuaded their husbands to hold Senate hearings on bump-and-grind music. The committee, which included Albert Gore, heard the Washington Wives and an array of expert witnesses blame porn rock for teen promiscuity, pregnancies, drug addiction, suicides, Devil worship, bad manners--and even the bloody rampages of Son of Sam and the Nightstalker. The Senators heard from their own wives' lips of rock and roll's wilder shores. Of wild-maned stars who strutted about with black-leather codpieces, singing songs about men who fucked like beasts and tigresses who ate men alive.

An unlikely collection of musicians (Zappa, John Denver, Dee Snider of Twisted Sister) defended rockers' artistic freedom. ("Masturbation is not illegal," observed Zappa. "If it is not illegal to do it, why should it be illegal to sing about it?") But the record industry, eager to win Congressional support for an "antipiracy" bill that would compensate companies for the revenue lost through home taping of albums, got the message. After the hearings concluded, 22 major record companies agreed to put warning labels on albums with sexually explicit lyrics--the Washington Wives' main demand.

The following year, Jello Biafra, founder and lead singer of the mordantly witty San Francisco punk band the Dead Kennedys, was arrested and charged with distributing harmful material to minors, because he had included a sexually explicit poster in the band's latest album, Frankenchrist. Ironically, the record was one of the few to carry a warning sticker, but the P.M.R.C. found the wording too tongue in cheek (the inside foldout ... is a work of art by H. R. Giger that some people may find shocking, repulsive or offensive. Life can Sometimes be that way). Adult America was once again declaring war on rock and its forbidden world of teen lust.

Tipper was no religious zealot; she was the epitome of liberal young motherhood, a Big Chill mom who was as devoted to the project of parenting as she had been to marching against the Vietnam war and for civil rights at Boston University in the late Sixties. She prided herself on her tolerance. But, like many young parents, she had begun to have second thoughts about the Sixties and feared that today's teens were trying to match or go beyond the excesses of her generation.

"If you don't try to shield young kids from sadomasochism and all this explicit kind of stuff until they're ready to handle it, then you're robbing them of their innocence, their one time in life to be somewhat carefree," she sighed one day during the 1988 Presidential race while riding the dusty back roads of Iowa in a campaign worker's old Plymouth. "It's not that I want a clean, sterile world. But why commercialize sex and violence and shove it down kids' throats at a younger and younger age in the form of songs and videos?"

Rock musicians, who often have a better line on teenagers' deepest desires than do Mom and Dad, mocked this Pollyannish view of adolescents.

"Today's parents want to wrap their families in a cocoon against the outside world," scoffed 29-year-old Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, as he awaited his obscenity trial. (In August 1987, the charges were dismissed.) "Part of this has to do with the amount of escapist drugs these people used in the late Sixties and early Seventies, which allowed them to trip out into this fantasia world. Now that they've become Yuppie parents, they're trying to build a material, real-life fantasia world with all their money. And one of the ways they do that is to come up with these precious artifacts known as their children. They treat their children as artifacts and pets rather than as people."

It was in the Beastie Boys that Tipper found her truest enemy, for beastly boys will forever be locked in mortal combat with Good Moms. The Beastie Boys, three white rappers from New York whose album Licensed to Ill soared to the top of the charts in 1987, won the hearts of a generation of teenagers who were fed up with hearing "Just say no."

Like black rappers, they sang of whores, glue sniffers, crack dealers and stick-up artists. But this street stuff didn't come across as the real thing in the mouths of these middle-class Jewish boys. What struck a chord with their predominantly white audience, what jolted them like the long-awaited school bell at the end of the day, were the songs about popping cans of beer, ditching class and mouthing off to your parents. This was the sound of freedom. The Beasties' anthemic (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!) was the most radical statement of teenage liberation these stuffy days had produced. Delivered at the end of their concerts, it never failed to get the kids on their feet, punching their fists into the air. ("Your mom busted in and said, 'What's that noise?'/'Aw, Mom, you're just jealous, it's the Beastie Boys!'")

The three musicians, in their early 20s, with their ripped jeans, T-shirts and crooked baseball caps, were the essence of Boy. They chugalugged cans of brew on stage, pumped up a giant hydraulic cock, invited girls in the audience to bare their breasts ("Yo, Cleveland--let's see some tits!") and dance in their go-go cages and contractually required concert promoters to provide them with bowls of colored condoms backstage. They were enough to drive parents crazy.

But they really got Tipper worked up. She was at her most scolding when she started talking about them: "They would go over to the girl in the cage and take her blouse off, and she was nude from the waist up, and they put their mouths on her breast.... Sucking breasts, I mean, it's an erotic act. In front of kids at any age. Is that OK? It's not just fun and games, blowing off steam.... It's bringing a strip show to kids of any age without prior notification of parents."

Then there was the matter of the Beasties' dirty mouths. "They say everyone uses foul gutter language in society," continued Tipper. "Well, I don't talk like this. We're living under the tyranny of the explicit, where some people cram it down your throats and act like it's normal. Well, it's not necessarily normal: There are some parts of the country where people don't appreciate that kind of language; they're trying to raise their kids not to do that."

Apparently, however, not where the Beastie Boys come from: "The P.M.R.C. can suck our dicks," announced Adam Yauch (better know as MCA, the Beastie with the unshaven mug and the toughest pose), foul words spat out in his nastiest New Yawk--ese. Other rock celebrities criticized and ridiculed Tipper, but none with the 14-year-old brashness of the Beasties. It was this in-your-face attitude that again and again got the boys in trouble as they toured the country.

As word spread about this "Sodom and Gomorrah on wheels," in the overheated language of Gannett News Service, local authorities began to clamp down on the traveling show. In Seattle, operators of the civic auditorium canceled a scheduled Beastie Boys concert after receiving "intelligence" from the police about "potential [teenage] rumbles."

In Cincinnati, the police chief said his intelligence indicated "that this act is garbage" and vowed that his vice squad would be out in full force to monitor the show, a warning that panicked parents and kept thousands of kids home.

"It is garbage, but it's not violent garbage," retorted the Beasties' Adam "Ad Rock" Horovitz. In Columbus, Georgia, the police chief vowed to arrest the Beasties if they ever showed their snot-nosed faces in his fair town again, and the city council passed a "Beastie Boys ordinance" against lewd rock acts, a law later used against fellow Def Jam artist LL Cool J. In Jacksonville, Florida, city officials slapped an adult subject matter warning on concert tickets until a Federal judge ordered it removed 48 hours before the concert.

It was as if adult authorities throughout the nation had decided the Beastie Boys were a contagion that must be stopped before infecting their young. The Boys' act was raucously sexual, it was smartassed and New York and, perhaps most alarming of all, it brought together white girls and black boys in a highly charged environment--particularly when the band was billed with premiere rap group Run-DMC on their 1987 Together Forever tour. It was obvious that these shrewd New Yorkers knew how to shake up the heartland.

There was no doubt about it: For those who wanted to explore the teenage id, the turbulent underbelly of American adolescence in the subdued Eighties, on the road with the Beastie Boys was the place to be. We hooked up with them, appropriately, in swampy, decadent New Orleans, where the band has always felt right at home. "The whole economy here is built on alcohol and transvestites and nudity and sex and partying," observed Mike Diamond (a.k.a. Mike D.), the sweetest, politest Beastie. "There's everything here, even black magic; that's why I love this city so much. The stuff you see on Bourbon Street is a lot worse than you'll ever see at one of our shows. I mean, how can our show corrupt kids who grew up in this environment?"

But that's precisely that some city officials were warning would happen if the concert at the University of New Orleans Assembly Center went ahead as scheduled. The nationwide campaign to ground the Beastie Boys and the libidinous forces they unleashed had caught up with them even in this city of flesh peddling and mumbo jumbo. In the hours before the performance, the band's lawyer huddled nervously with concert promoters and police officials to work out an agreement that would allow the show to go on. The Beasties had long since been tamed. Gone was the monumental phallus, gone were the topless dancers. But New Orleans city fathers wanted further concessions: They were especially eager to be assured that there would be no simulated masturbation on stage. The band agreed and the show went on.

Backstage before the show, the Beasties are full of spunk. "What these parents are trying to do is make sure their kids never hear anything about what's going on in the world," growls Yauch. "Tipper Gore's kids are going to grow up not knowing about sex and they're going to catch AIDS. Kids are just naturally fucking rebellious--they're going to do whatever they're told not to."

Yauch, his scrawny frame slumped in a dressing-room couch and his eyes already bleary with beer, gets especially revved up when we mention his favorite book, Hammer of the Gods, the tawdry account of Led Zeppelin's rise to fame and fortune. Those were rock's glory days, thinks Yauch, the days when superstardom brought something close to absolute power, and Zeppelin, the progenitors of heavy metal, took full advantage of that power. The British band reveled in the decadence of the road and lurid tales of their American tours achieved mythic proportions: fishing from a seaside hotel balcony in Seattle, catching a red snapper and using it for nefarious purposes with a drunken groupie; trying to rip the clothes off a female Life magazine reporter; practicing black-magic rituals; besotting themselves with drugs and drink.

"That book, Hammer of the Gods, is my favorite shit," announces Yauch. "I remember reading it before we were famous, when we were so sick of everyone like the Thompson Twins and Duran Duran and George Michael and all those faggots ruling the whole fucking rock-and-roll scene like a bunch of pussies. And I remember a quote from Led Zeppelin's manager, something like, 'Led Zeppelin lived at a time when rock stars were treated like gods and they could do anything they wanted, and it'll never be (continued on page 188)Burning Desires(continued from page 100) like that again.' And I just looked at that book and said, 'You've got another think coming, because we're going to fucking do it.' And then our album started taking off."

Sure enough, as the group stormed across America, wild stories of wretched excess circulated about the Beasties. There was the time they puttied up the glass shower in a San Francisco hotel room to create a giant swimming tank in which to cavort with groupies, but when someone opened the door, the room flooded and the floor caved in. And so on. The problem with those stories was that they sounded too contrived, dredged from the imagination of someone who had overdosed on the Porky movies.

It turned out that most of them had been invented. There was something a little wimpish about the real-life Beastie Boys, trying too hard to follow in the footsteps of their merciless rock gods and instead coming across as the sexually frustrated nerds in their songs.

In New Orleans, after the concert, there is no crush of beautiful young women backstage. The bowl of ribbed and colored condoms remains untouched; even the presence of Horovitz' new girlfriend, teen cinema queen Molly Ringwald, provokes little excitement. Serious girlfriends seem like intruders in this world of arrested adolescence. When Horovitz, son of playwright-screenwriter Israel (Author! Author!; The Indian Wants the Bronx) Horovitz, first took up with Ringwald, Yauch blatted him in the press as a traitor: "Ad Rock hangs out with Molly a little while, next thing you know he's watching Pretty in Pink on TV all the time like there's no tomorrow. The fucking dude: We went to New York for two days and he went to L.A. to party with her. He's chinking out on the whole band. He's a pussy! Tell her to come to New York!"

Despite Yauch's hostility, it appeared to be a perfect match, the pairing of two teen icons. The full-lipped young actress with the auburn mop top had come to symbolize female adolescence in the Eighties through her portrayals of smart, sexy, hypersensitive girls in movies such as Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Horovitz, who looks like a young Eddie Fisher, was the ultimate high school wise guy, the kind who'd finally wear down Molly's resistance in the movies. But Molly seems ill at ease backstage in New Orleans tonight, a little embarrassed by her uncouth boyfriend.

When Horovitz, in a moment of restless boredom, snatches a slice of American cheese off a banquet table laden with chicken, cold cuts and bottles of beer and splats it against the wall of the sterile little dressing room, Molly rolls her eyes and sighs, "Oh, Gawd." And when he begins to tell a Sam Kinison gay-bashing joke, the media-savvy actress quickly tries to cut him off ("I really don't think you want to tell this joke....") and, when that fails, she demands that our tape recorder be turned off before allowing him to plunge ahead.

During the concert in New Orleans that summer night, a small army of vice cops keeps a lid on it all. But afterward, in the steamy French Quarter, it comes spilling over. Packs of excited girls, their dresses plastered to their skin by the awesome humidity, roam the hallways of the ornate, antebellum Royal Orleans Hotel, where the Beasties are holed up, scrawling words of devotion in lipstick on the hotel walls. The heavy air outside shakes with the loud thuds of Fight for Your Right (to Party!) booming out of cruising cars. Frat boys with glistening bare chests bellow at the moon, tanked on ice-cold Hurricanes, the sickeningly sweet but potent specialty at Pat O'Brien's. On rue Dauphine, a mulatto girl packed tightly into a pair of red pedal pushers like a hot andouille sausage has jammed a pretty white boy into a doorway and is working her hips against his with shameless abandon.

The fact that Beastie Boys shows should unleash the pent-up energies of male adolescents was no surprise. The real news from the front was the extent to which girls were joining in, and even leading, the celebration. In suburban Detroit the following week, at the Pine Knob Music Theater, the scene is more menacing, more juiced with testosterone. Helmeted police on horseback and in dune buggies patrol the grounds, but chaos reigns on the dusty, teeming hill overlooking the stage. Thunderbolts of sound from Olympian speakers shake the earth. Boys misbehave, girls are groped by strangers. The girls love it. "The guys here are really rude, outrageous and free with their hands," says 18-year-old Gina. "This music causes aggression, it's loud and exciting and these people get crazy. But I love it, I love it to dance to."

Seventeen-year-old Megan, a tall, sturdily built girl with jet-black hair, lipstick and nail polish, wearing a revealing black tank top, black jeans and black boots, takes big swigs from a king-size bottle of cherry soda spiked with vodka and testifies about the aphrodisiac powers of rap music. "I mean, we partied before the Beastie Boys were ever invented. It's just more fun to do it while you're listening to their music. Of course, nowadays," she adds, "you've got to slap a rubber on guys." And what if they refuse to wear one? "They can go to hell. I say, 'Later, dude--no glove, no love.'"

Backstage, after the show, 19-year-old Shawn, a short, pretty blonde with green eye shadow and an abbreviated black skirt, says she felt excited to be one of the girls plucked from the audience to dance in the notorious cage. Didn't she feel kind of humiliated? She and her girlfriends answer in unison, "No way." In their eyes is utter disdain. Look, lighten up, it's all a big joke, and we're in on it.

It was cock energy that powered these shows, but these girls were not in the least intimidated. In fact, it seemed to amuse and excite them; they grabbed hold of it for their own pleasure. The teenage girls down in these rock-and-roll trenches seemed like a hardy new breed, perfectly capable of taking care of themselves without being brought under the protective custody of the P.M.R.C. and other guardians of adolescent welfare.

Teenagers, even all-American ones, are simply faster than the nation's chaperons care to know. After rising sharply in the Seventies, sexual activity among U.S. teenagers began to decline slightly in the early Eighties. But adolescents throughout the nation are still being deflowered in unprecedented numbers. We know this because the mating habits of American teens have been scrutinized more rigorously than the amorous exploits of Rwanda apes. Pollsters, psychologists, family planners, Government researchers, teen magazines and educators are constantly launching expeditions into teenage erogenous zones, trying to penetrate the veil that adolescents desperately, and often futilely, draw around their privacy. If, as the late French philosopher Michel Foucault observed, the attention that contemporary Western society lavishes on sex, the compulsion to tell all, is yet one more way of controlling this primal force, then American teenagers--surveyed and discussed to the point of distraction--are, with the possible exception of gays in the age of AIDS, the most regulated sexual beings in the country.

These are some of the things we know about teenagers and sex as a result of the exhaustive snooping of curious adults: More than half have engaged in sexual intercourse by the age of 17 (a 1986 Harris report). The majority of these boys and girls believe intercourse improved their relationships (a 1985 Rolling Stone survey). The average age for a girl to have intercourse for the first time is 16.2 years, and 15.7 years for a boy (the Center for Population Options in 1987). In some inner-city areas, the average age of first sexual intercourse can be as low as 12 (a 1985 Johns Hopkins study).

Sometimes, even experienced teenagers are astounded by their generation's sexual precociousness. "Kids are fast nowadays," we were told by Maria, an 18-year-old Hispanic mother with big brown eyes and a serious demeanor who is enrolled in a program for teenage parents in San Francisco's Mission District. "I heard a ten-year-old the other day saying, 'Hey, did you get over on that girl?' I said, 'What? That little kid?' You hear boys saying things all the time, like, 'Yeah, we pulled a train [today's slang for "gang bang"] on that girl the other night.' I think it's usually just talk, but once in a while, you'll really see a girl do stuff like that."

Our talks with teenagers around the country--at high schools, teen counseling centers, music clubs and rock concerts--made all the polling data jump to life. While girls often still feel the pressure to act more demurely, there is no doubt that their sexual appetite equals that of boys. "Most kids can't wait to have sex, and it's not just the guys," said Naomi, a 17-year-old who edits the newspaper at her suburban Cleveland high school. "Girls sit around and talk about sex all the time."

"I feel perfectly comfortable exploring and doing anything and everything in bed," stated 15-year-old Debbie, who counsels fellow high school students in suburban Los Angeles about sex. "You know, I just think, Hey, no foreign objects."

So sexually forthright is the new teenage girl that some boys feel hunted. "I've been pushed to have sex too hard by women several times," complained Jason, a 16-year-old baby-faced blond who works as a volunteer in the same counseling program as Debbie. "And a lot of times, it's really hard for men. Because saying no is not a real macho thing to do."

But if teenage girls and boys are more sexually experienced today, they are also surprisingly uninformed and anxiety-ridden. American teenagers get pregnant and give birth and have abortions at much higher rates than do kids anywhere else in the Western world. The Alan Guttmacher Institute estimates that fewer than half of American teenagers use contraception the first time they have intercourse and 15 percent never use it. Teenagers are also disturbingly ignorant about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. A 1986 report published in the American Journal of Public Health found that 40 percent of the students surveyed at ten high schools in San Francisco did not know that using a condom was an effective way of preventing transmission of the AIDS virus.

This country's absurdly high rates of teenage pregnancy, venereal disease and sexual neuroses amount to a savage indictment of sex education in America. Sex instruction of one sort or another has become a regular feature of U.S. school curricula, and public support for it is widespread. But because of the determined, well-organized opposition of a conservative minority, the vast majority of sex-education courses are timid and sketchy, distinguished more by what is missing than by what is taught. The principal classroom taboos are sexual pleasure and technique, masturbation, homosexuality and abortion. Many courses are still taught by embarrassed gym coaches and drivers'-ed instructors with all the depth and feeling one might find in a football playbook or motor-vehicle-code manual. Other schools tag sex instruction "family-life education," a less politically volatile term, and cram it between such unrelated topics as drug abuse and death and dying.

These morbid associations were reinforced when the subject of AIDS was introduced in sex-education classes. Liberal pro-family-planning educators saw the epidemic as an opportunity to begin talking more freely about condoms and nonrisky types of sexual play. But, as taught in most schools, AIDS instruction has become only one more instrument of sexual terror wielded against impressionable kids. The emphasis is not on the joys of safe sex but on the poisonous specter of dread bodily fluids.

Some sex instructors do manage to dispense detailed, useful information in a way that affirms both the glory of physical pleasure and a teenager's right to control his or her own body. So rare are these creatures in today's censorious climate that they assume heroic stature. Hene Kelly, a family-life teacher at San Francisco's Woodrow Wilson High, is one such legend, whose teaching style is so bold and exuberant that she has achieved notoriety even within her relatively tolerant school district. She touches, she squeezes, she works her classroom like Phil Donahue on ecstasy. She is not afraid to make her kids feel sexy. "Ooh, you're so cute, I love your new haircut; I may let you meet my daughter."

While many sex-ed classrooms are draped with more warning signs than a nuclear test site (AIDS alerts, chlamydia alerts, pregnancy alerts) and blunt exhortations to remain chaste, Kelly's classroom features a poster titled good reasons to say yes to sex ("To show love, to make a baby, for pleasure, to release sexual tension"). Kelly does fret, of course, about her young charges ("I worry about them every time the weekend comes around"), but she delivers her admonitions in a decidedly unprissy way: "Hey, don't get any S.T.D.s [sexually transmitted diseases], don't get anyone pregnant and don't get pregnant!" she booms in her bullhorn voice as the kids file out after the bell.

Kelly is a short 46-year-old woman with pretty brown eyes and a fondness for shapeless house dresses that are often adorned with teachers'-union pins and buttons with urgent messages. The daughter of a Jewish rabbi, she graduated from the University of Chicago and began her career as an English teacher but switched to sex ed. ("I never want to teach reading again--you put a dirty picture in front of teenagers and they'll find a way to read the caption.") Kelly and her husband, also a public school teacher, have two children.

Her kids at Woodrow Wilson, a worn-out but clean school near Candlestick Park with a predominantly black, Hispanic and Asian student body, receive an education that is rich in practical details ("I tell them saliva is the best lubricant. They go absolutely nut-fuck: 'Oh, Gawd! Spit?'") and humane values ("I tell the boys, 'This girl is a person, not a vagina. What if she were your sister or daughter?'"). But she is best known for her cucumber lessons. "I bring in the biggest cucumber I can find to show how rubbers can stretch to fit any size, because some boys always say, 'Mine's too big.' One little Chinese girl's eyes got as big as saucers when I held up a really impressive cuke. I said, 'Don't worry, Saundra, they're not all this big.' I show how sexually active you can be with a rubber by blowing it up, swinging it around my head, doing all sorts of things to show how durable it is."

Midway through her condom demonstration one day, the principal unexpectedly walked into Kelly's classroom. Unfazed, she promptly drafted him to serve as a model. "I made him stand there holding the cucumber at groin level while I rolled on the rubber. But as I was putting it on, he got nervous and jerked it away and the tip of it snapped off. One of the kids piped up, 'You've always wanted to do that to someone in administration, Mrs. Kelly!' I said, 'All right, next, let's demonstrate how to insert a foam applicator,' but he made a quick exit."

Despite the tenor of the times, Kelly refuses to expurgate her lessons. "If they fire me for being so outspoken, I don't care," she declares. "I'd give out birth-control devices in class if I could. I don't disagree entirely with the abstinence message, but kids have the right to say yes, too. Most of us are going to at some point, so it's my job to prepare them for that moment."

Part Three will appear next month.