Part X: 1990-1999 Real Sex

Are we having sex now or what? The question seems to float on the tongue. Greta Christina, a columnist for On Our Backs, first raises it in an essay in a volume called The Erotic Impulse: Honoring the Sensual Self. "What," she asks, "counts as having sex with someone?"

When she slept only with men the criterion was simple. Sex begins when the man enters a woman's body. You could keep count.

"Len was number one," she writes. "Chris was number two, that slimy awful little heavy-metal barbiturate addict whose name I can't remember was number three."

But what about the fondling, the groping, rubbing, grabbing, smooching, pushing and pressing with other men? Sex? Not sex?

And since the author has a classic San Francisco résumé, what about the women? "With women, well, first of all there's no penis, so right from the start the tracking system is defective," she writes. "And then there are so many ways women can have sex with each other, touching and licking and grinding and fingering and fisting—with dildos or vibrators or vegetables or whatever happens to be lying around the house or with nothing at all except human bodies. Between women, no one method has a centuries-old tradition of being the one that counts."

Christina struggles with definitions, trying to find the line. Is sex what happens when you feel sexual?

"I know when I'm feeling sexual," she writes. "I'm feeling sexual if my pussy's wet, my nipples are hard, my palms are clammy, my brain is fogged, my skin is tingly and supersensitive, my butt muscles clench, my heartbeat speeds up, I have an orgasm (that's the real giveaway) and so on."

A friend suggests a simple rule: "If you thought of it as sex when you were doing it, then it was."

Christina confronts the array of sexual options open to a resident of San Francisco. She hosts an all-girl orgy with 12 Other women. "The experience, which was hot and sweet and silly and very, very special, had been created by all of us, and although I really got down only with a few, I felt I had been sexual with all of the women there. Now when I meet one of the women from that party, I always ask myself: Have we had sex?"

She worked as a nude dancer in a peep show. When a customer watches her and masturbates, and she masturbated, right back, is that sex?

Nicholson Baker, another West Coast explorer, writes Vox, a 165-page novel about phone sex. Two strangers, one lying on a chenille bedspread, the other in a darkened room, tease each other's imaginations, finding things in common. Both share a voyeur's delight in a lingerie catalog called Deliques Intimates. The woman tells of becoming so aroused she stains a silk chemise. But a private act can have more participants than intended (in this case, an employee of a dry cleaning service). When the chemise came back from the cleaners "there were these five dot stains on it," she says, "little ovals, not down where I'd been wet, but higher up, on the front."

Excitement is a shared experience. The phone lovers fantasize about shipping boys at Deliques wrapping a pair of tights around flagstaff-size erections, indulging themselves before putting the apparel into a mailing carton.

Phone sex is as seductive as the confessional. She shares sexual details with her unseen lover, telling him that when she masturbates she pulls her bra down so that it catches under her nipples. He tells her about strumming orgasms, of watching X-rated videos, "fast-forwarding through the numbing parts, trying to find some image that was good or at least good enough to come to." There are times, he says, when you just want a fixed image. "I felt at that moment that I wanted to talk to a real woman, no more images of any kind, no fast-forward, no pause, no magazine pictures." After a night of shared sexual history, they describe in detail what they would do in person. They climax. But is it real sex?

Sexual energy leaks across boundaries. Dean Kuipers, writing for Playboy, recalls watching two people having sex from the Chelsea Hotel: "I sat in the dark, a short but uncrossable distance from the couple working on each other in their own well-lit erotic theater. It was clear they wished to be watched: The entire back of the hotel was their grandstand. And yet, they didn't acknowledge the lights or look out the window. Their reward was my response. I did what they wanted me to do: have sex with them, without ever meeting them, without touching them, without intruding into their lives in any messy way and without being able to recapture the moment except in memory."

Would he count them on his list of lovers? Is it real sex?

Kuipers' anecdote sets up an article on amateur pornography. The journalist finds that sex can exist beyond the moment. Lovers record and play back their own sexual encounters to prolong arousal, or to create layers of ecstasy. They time-shift orgasms. Are they having sex with themselves?

Some trade videos in a new sexual black market. How many Americans share the wedding night of Olympic skater Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly? To whom does she offer that open palm?

An artist named Sunshine explains to Kuipers the role of the camera: "It's like an interesting sort of robotic voyeur. You are aware of its presence. It's just this gentle statue of excitement, right over there. This weird kind of eye. It's sort of like your own eye. It's wonderful."

In cyberspace there are no boundaries. You log on to an Internet relay chat or a multiuser dungeon for what some call "speed writing interactive erotica."

You describe a scene in a hot tub to a crowd of silent watchers whose names appear across the bottom of the screen: "Furry Clam, Babyface, Madcap and Falc are here."

Who is Furry Clam? She says she is 21, is built like Venus and wants your body. She creates a character who climbs into the hot tub and performs outrageous acts on your noncorporeal body. Is she real? Does it matter? On the Internet everyone is beautiful. But it is also as likely that your correspondent is a 14-year-old guy.

Is it sex? How can it be if you don't exchange bodily fluids? If you can't taste the sweat or feel the slippery sensations of arousal?

The desire to create a border between sex and not-sex, to contain the great god Lust in a cage without consequences, sweeps the country. We seem to look for loopholes. Where once young girls looked at promiscuity as "building a police blotter" against themselves, now girls find permission in making distinctions. The teenagers in the 1994 film Clerks discuss past lovers. The boy is relieved to hear that his girlfriend has had only three lovers. But she destroys his equanimity when she admits she has given blow jobs to 37 guys. Her defense: Oral sex isn't real sex.

The confusion swirls through the world of consensual sex. When the debate moves to the question of unwanted sex, the whole nation will change.

The Morality Play

On October 11, 1991 the nation attended a national teach-in on sexual harassment. Anita Hill, a quiet-spoken, conservatively dressed woman, faced the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, members of the committee, my name is Anita F. Hill, and I am a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma."

She told of being born on a farm, the youngest of 13 children, of going from Oklahoma State University to Yale Law School, to a job with Clarence Thomas, first when he was an Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights, then when he served as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She wrote an article for Thomas, she said, that went out under his signature. They had a positive working relationship.

"After approximately three months of working there, he asked me to go out socially with him. What happened next and telling the world about it are the two most difficult experiences of my life. It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration and a number of sleepless nights that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my close friends."

She told the Senators she had declined Thomas' invitation, saying it would jeopardize a good working relationship, that it was ill-advised to date one's supervisor.

He continued to ask her out, pressing her to justify her refusal. Then, she said, the talk turned sexual.

"He spoke about acts he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals, and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises, or large breasts, individuals in various sex acts. On several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess. Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all, and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about these subjects."

She offered an example of their discussions. "One of the oddest episodes I remember was an occasion in which Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office. He got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, 'Who has put a pubic hair on my Coke?'

"On other occasions he referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal and he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to women with oral sex."

She had suffered harm, she said. In late 1982, she "began to feel severe stress on the job. I began to be concerned that Clarence Thomas might take out his anger with me by degrading me or by not giving me important assignments. I also thought that he might find an excuse for dismissing me."

She said that when she finally left, Thomas asked her to dinner one last time. She accepted. He admitted that what he had done could ruin his career.

The circus was under way. When President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, liberals had been alarmed. Thomas, like Hill, a (continued on page 92)Real Sex(continued from page 74) bootstrap-raised product of the Yale Law School, was a conservative black who was opposed to affirmative action and a cipher on the issue of abortion rights. Republican supporters had ushered him through the confirmation hearings. They were ill-prepared for the media frenzy that followed the disclosure that their candidate had, ten years earlier, sexually harassed a subordinate. The same subordinate had followed her alleged harasser when he changed jobs and had said nothing when Thomas was appointed to a circuit court judgeship. Now she was willing to come forward to challenge the character of the nominee.

Sexual Harassment

For three days, Americans watched the events in the Senate Caucus room on television. Apparently outraged politicians pushed for details. Hill said that during one exchange Thomas had alluded to a well-endowed porn actor, calling him by name. "Long Dong Silver" became part of the Congressional Record and penis size part of dinner conversation across America.

Senators made asses of themselves, first posturing about the monstrous nature of Thomas' remarks. Said Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch: These are "gross, awful, sexually harassing things which, if you take them in combination, would have to gag anyone."

He continued: "That anybody could be that perverted—I'm sure there are people like that, but they're generally in insane asylums."

Other Republicans saw a different kind of monster. Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) sensed a liberal conspiracy. "It is my legal judgment that the testimony of Professor Hill was flat-out perjury."

Hatch accused Hill of concocting her story, borrowing the detail of the pubic hair from a scene in The Exorcist, the comment about Long Dong Silver from a 1988 Wichita, Kansas federal district court case in which a woman charged her employer with flashing a picture of the man with a 19-inch penis. They brought forward a former co-worker who suggested Hill suffered from erotomania, that she built elaborate fantasies around people she barely knew.

Thomas claimed the charges against him were untrue. He had never "attempted to date" Hill. He called the hearing a "high-tech lynching." He was confirmed by a 52-48 vote of the full Senate.

Polls showed that almost twice as many people believed Thomas (40 percent) as Hill (24 percent). One year later, the credibility of the participants had changed, with 34 percent believing Thomas and 44 percent believing Hill. Americans seemed to believe that something had happened, but not the way either had described it.

What was this thing called sexual harassment? Lin Farley, a professor at Cornell University, invented the term sexual harassment in 1975. She was teaching a course called Women and Work and, as an activist, was looking for a universal issue. At a speak-out, women complained about male co-workers who wouldn't leave them alone. "We have to have a name for it," Farley told Peter Wyden, a reporter for Good Housekeeping. The group considered "sexual coercion" and "sexual blackmail" before settling on the more elusive "sexual harassment." It would take decades to fully define the term.

Catharine MacKinnon wrote the definitive text, Sexual Harassment of Working Women, in 1979. In it she argued that sexual harassment was a form of intimate violation that included coerced sex, unwanted sexual advances and retaliation. She claimed the behavior extended along a continuum of severity and unwantedness, from "verbal sexual suggestions or jokes, constant leering or ogling, brushing against your body 'accidentally,' a friendly pat, squeeze, pinch or arm against you, catching you alone for a quick kiss, an indecent proposition backed by the threat of losing your job and forced sexual relations."

A study by the Center for Women Policy Studies reported that as many as 18 million American females were harassed sexually while at work during 1979 and 1980. Antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly told a Senate committee that those 18 million were asking for it: "Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women," she said, "except in the rarest of cases. Men hardly ever ask sexual favors of women from whom the certain answer is no. Virtuous women are seldom accosted."

Throughout the Eighties the crusade had languished, as MacKinnon spent her energy trying to turn pornography into a civil rights action. In 1980 the EEOC issued guidelines on sexual harassment, making it part of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It forbade outright coercion—the quid pro quo of a supervisor's saying, "Sleep with me or you lose your job."

In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that sexual harassment is a form of discrimination. Mechelle Vinson, a teller at the Meritor Savings Bank in Washington, D.C., had filed suit against her employer, charging that her manager had made sexual demands. She had submitted to him 40 or 50 times, in the bank vault, in the ladies' room, at motels. Lower courts had looked at the case and declared that Vinson's actions were voluntary. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court ruling, which held that her boss' sexual demands created a hostile environment, that the workplace should be free from "discrimination, ridicule and insult."

In 1988 the EEOC adjusted its guidelines, saying that harassment could occur when "unwelcome sexual conduct unreasonably interferes with an individual's job performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment."

In the Eighties, magazines still ran articles on how to run an office affair. Michael Korda told Playboy readers: "Two things will happen as more women join the executive ranks—the politics will get tougher and the sex will get terrific."

The EEOC granted that sex was alive and well in the workplace, carefully crafting the following: "Because sexual attraction may often play a role in the day-to-day social exchange between employees, the distinction between invited, uninvited but welcome, offensive but tolerated and flatly rejected sexual advances may well be difficult to discern. But this distinction is essential because sexual conduct becomes unlawful only when it is unwelcome in the sense that the employee did not solicit or incite it, and in the sense that the employee regarded the conduct as undesirable or offensive."

Perhaps sensing the danger of allowing Mrs. Grundy or an equivalent blue-nose to dictate what was offensive, the EEOC advised that harassment should be judged from the standpoint of a reasonable person: "Title VII does not serve as a vehicle for vindicating the petty slights suffered by the hypersensitive."

From 1980 to 1990, 38,500 sexual harassment cases were filed with the EEOC. Some were clear-cut examples of coercion, women fired because they would not submit to their bosses' advances. Some were examples of hostility, bosses who would say women had "shit for brains" and belonged not in the workplace but at home, "barefoot and pregnant."

But other cases were not so clear. Lois Robinson, a welder at Jacksonville Shipyards, filed suit along with other women welders in 1986, claiming that her workplace was a virtual obstacle course of pornography, sexually demeaning cartoons and graffiti. (After conferring with the New York-based Women Against Pornography, she had kept a list of every pin-up and lewd remark she encountered. When her co-workers became aware of her cru-(continued on page 147)Real Sexcontinued from page 92) sade, they retaliated by putting pin-ups on her toolbox. Whether their hostility was directed toward Robinson as a woman or as a prude provocateur is hard to say.) A judge ordered the locker rooms cleaned out. He fined the shipyard nominal damages.

In another case, five women employees sued the Stroh Cos., claiming the company's television commercials (featuring the Swedish Bikini Team) contributed to a hostile work environment. The commercials depict manly men out fishing or hiking, drinking beer and commenting, "It doesn't get any better than this." At which point a cascade of blondes arrives by parachute or raft.

In January 1991 Kerry Ellison, a female agent for the Internal Revenue Service, received unwanted attention and love letters from Sterling Gray, a colleague (not a supervisor). The letters were not what most people would call hostile: "I know that you are worth knowing with or without sex. I have enjoyed you so much, watching you. Experiencing you. Some people seek the woman, I seek the child inside. With gentleness and deepest respect. Sterling."

Ellison complained. Gray was transferred, but he filed a union grievance and sent her another letter. Then Ellison filed suit.

The first judge who heard the case dismissed it, but appeals judge Robert Beezer had a different opinion. While Gray might see his own conduct as a "modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac" wishing only to woo Ellison with his words, conduct that many men consider unobjectionable may offend many women.

Judge Beezer concluded that the case should be decided from the viewpoint of "a reasonable woman." His rationale was right out of a radical feminist Take Back the Night rally: "Because women are disproportionately victims of rape and sexual assault, women have a stronger incentive to be concerned with sexual behavior," Beezer wrote. "Women who are victims of mild forms of sexual harassment may understandably worry whether a harasser's conduct is merely a prelude to a violent sexual assault."

John Leo, in U.S. News & World Report, saw the dangerous shift toward Big Sister sex police: "Driven by feminist ideology, we have constantly extended the definition of what constitutes illicit male behavior," he wrote. "Very ambiguous incidents are now routinely flattened out into male predation."

This mind-set, Leo went on, "is a rich compost of antisex messages: Males are predatory, sex is so dangerous that chitchat about it can get you brought up on charges, hormone-driven gazing at girls will bring the adult world down on your neck. The most harmful message, perhaps, is that women are victims, incapable of dismissing creeps with a simple 'Buzz off, Bozo.'"

The feminist chorus chanted, "Men don't get it." Anita Hill's story struck a chord. Between October 1990 and September 1991 the EEOC received 6883 complaints. In the year following the hearing, sexual harassment suits filed with the EEOC jumped to a record 9920.

A few weeks after the Anita and Clarence show, The New York Times interviewed Michelle Paludi, a psychologist at Hunter College who coordinated a campus committee on sexual harassment. She told about a hypothetical scenario that was presented to men and women in the college and asked the students when sexual harassment occurred.

"In one scenario, a woman gets a job teaching at a university and her department chairman, a man, invites her to lunch to discuss her research. At lunch he never mentions her research, but instead delves into her personal life. After a few such lunches, he invites her to dinner and then for drinks. While they are having drinks, he tries to fondle her.

"Most of the women said that sexual harassment started at the first lunch when he talked about her private life instead of her work," said Paludi. "Most of the men said that sexual harassment began at the point he fondled her."

A Playboy editorial challenged the account: "There is a gulf here, but not between men and women. It is between the bold and the brainwashed. The rush to judgment is as suspect as it is incendiary. Legally, sexual harassment has not occurred. There is no quid pro quo (she already has her job) and no hostile sexual environment (nothing in the scenario indicates that the attention is unwanted). What you have here is the standard American mating ritual. Lunches lead to dinner. Dinner leads to drinks. At some point, the participants move from talking to touching (or in this case, attempted touching). The man expresses interest. In the absence of a clearly expressed lack of interest, he proceeds. In the absence of a clearly stated rejection, what happens is not harassment. It is, quite simply, none of our business."

Writing in The New York Times,, Lloyd Cohen saw sexual harassment as a final campaign in the Sexual Revolution: "In our open, dynamic and multicultural society, there is no discreet set of accepted ways in which men and women make known their availability, to say nothing of their attraction to a particular person. And one can no longer read people's sexual standards from their dress, occupation, the places they frequent or their activities. The prudish and the promiscuous are forced to rub shoulders, but often fail to recognize each other's sexual values."

Surveys found that huge percentages of women had experienced sexual harassment, but a Playboy writer questioned the term. "Substitute 'sexual interest' for 'sexual harassment' and the hysteria dissipates." He asked us to consider the following rewritten statements:

• "Anywhere from 40 to 80 percent of all working women will find themselves subjected to sexual interest at some point in their careers."

• "Although nearly half said they had been the object of sexual interest, none had sought legal recourse and only 22 percent said that they had told anyone else about the incident."

• "Sexual interest is the single most widespread occupational hazard."

Congress tried to demonstrate a new sensitivity to women's issues. Lawmakers passed a bill that put a price on harassment. Where once an aggrieved woman could sue only for lost wages, now her lawyers could seek punitive damages. Peggy Kimzey, a clerk at Wal-Mart whose supervisor snickered when she bent over to pick up a package, sued. The oaf had muttered something to the effect that "I just found someplace to put my screwdriver." A jury awarded Kimzey $50 million, which was later cut to $5 million.

Sexual harassment suits promised big bucks, a huge redistribution of wealth. In 1997 the EEOC fielded 15,889 charges, with monetary settlements totaling nearly $50 million. Men were getting it, and getting it big.

Politically Correct Sex

As they had in the Twenties and Sixties, college campuses in the Nineties led the culture in sexual change, only this time the trend was toward repression.

Administrators formed committees to review issues of harassment and sex. Groups with titles such as the Committee on Women's Concerns applied power politics to sex, drafting codes that proclaimed: "A faculty member may not make romantic or sexual overtures to, or engage in sexual relations with, any undergraduate student."

Doug Hornig, in a Playboy article titled The Big Chill on Campus Sex, reported that Harvard's code included a spy system. "Whoever witnesses an illicit liaison is required to report it. If you aid and abet one, you share liability with the guilty parties. If you merely fail to turn in miscreants, you may be subject to sanctions."

When University of Virginia officials moved to consider a code, the whole nation watched. Student council president Anne Bailey told CNN, "It's an invasion of the private lives of consenting adults. It reeks of paternalism. We're old enough to go to war and to have abortions, so I think we're old enough to decide who to go to bed with."

Ann Lane, the director of Virginia's women's studies program and one of the proponents of the code, had a different view. "We're trying to create a set of guidelines for ethical behavior in the university faculty," she explained. "We're not trying to curtail students' sexual freedom. Ultimately they have that authority. What we are saying is, 'Don't fuck your students.' "

Lane also concluded that "free sex is not a right. Society is an agreement of the part of people to give up some of their privileges in exchange for community control. In any case, there are certain cultural benchmarks of maturity, and 18 isn't one of them."

Tom Hutchinson, a professor who opposed the code, had married a woman he met when she was an undergraduate and he was a faculty member. "A tawdry little affair," he told Playboy, "that's lasted, oh, about 35 years now."

He pointed out that the hysteria exceeded the problem. In 1992 the school had received 47 complaints: 26 from students, 15 from faculty and six from nonuniversity personnel. Out of a community of 18,000, said Hutchinson, "this seems to me an extraordinarily small number."

At a debate on the code, a man received a standing ovation for remarking: "We cannot consider any proposal that has the potential to limit, restrict or preclude quality intercourse at this university."

Date Rape

Where the woman's face would be, a blue dot hovered. One hand played with a string of pearls as she answered questions from the prosecutor.

More than three million Americans watched as the 30-year-old single mother accused William Kennedy Smith of rape.

On Good Friday in 1991, the woman met Smith at the Au Bar in Palm Beach. He accepted her offer of a ride home. She said he seemed like a nice man, a medical student she trusted because he could talk about the problems she had experienced with her prematurely born daughter.

In the car they kissed and fondled. They took a walk along the beach at 3:30 A.M. Then, she said, he threw her to the ground, pulled up her skirt, pulled aside her panties and raped her. She struggled and tried to protest. She said he told her, "Stop it, bitch."

"I thought he was going to kill me," she said to the court.

When she'd confronted him, told him that what had just happened was rape, he said, "No one will believe you." But police and prosecutors did. Wrote Time, "Perhaps it was the bruises on her legs, or the instincts of the investigators who found her, panicked and shaking, curled up in the fetal position on a couch; or the lie-detector tests she passed."

J'accuse. During her last minutes on the stand, the woman pointed at Smith: "What he did to me was wrong."

She told Smith's lawyer, "Sir, your client raped me."

Smith did not deny that sexual intercourse had taken place on the lawn. Smith and his accuser had met, then kissed in her car, where she had removed her shoes and pantyhose. They had had sex twice. When he ejaculated, her mood had changed, as she suddenly feared pregnancy. She had asked if she could come in the house. Smith told her it was late, explaining, "I'm tired, I'm going to bed."

Rebuffed, she confronted him in the house. They argued over the meaning of the sexual encounter that had taken place.

She said, "Michael, you raped me."

He said, "I didn't rape you, and my name's not Michael."

The prosecutor scoffed at Smith's description. "Well, Mr. Smith, what are you? Some kind of sex machine?"

The prosecutor lined up three of Smith's female acquaintances who had undergone similar experiences, moments of trust that turned into wrestling matches. Smith had forced himself on one of them, holding her down with his full weight, releasing her only after she struggled and protested. The judge ruled the testimony inadmissible, because the jury would not hear about the victim's past (which included three abortions and childhood sexual abuse).

The jury deliberated for 77 minutes. William Kennedy Smith, they said, was not guilty of rape.

Harry Stein, writing in Playboy, noted: "The central question was not whether the sex on the Kennedy lawn had been strictly consensual, but what the hell was Bowman doing there at 3:30 in the morning if she didn't expect something to happen."

The Epidemic

The confusion about real sex was mirrored in the debate about unwanted sex. A Time story asked, "When is it rape?" According to Time, women consider date rape to be "the hidden crime; men complain it is hard to prevent a crime they can't define. Women say it isn't taken seriously; men say it is a concept invented by women who like to tease but not take the consequences. Women say the date rape debate is the first time the nation has talked frankly about sex; men say it is women's unconscious reaction to the excesses of the Sexual Revolution. Meanwhile, men and women argue among themselves about the gray area that surrounds the whole murky arena of sexual relations, and there is no consensus in sight."

At colleges across America posters covered walls: Date Rape is Violence, not a Difference of Opinion.

When does a Date Become a Crime? asked a poster put out by the Santa Monica Hospital Rape Treatment Center. "It happens when a man forces a woman to have sex against her will. And even when it involves college students, it's still considered a criminal offense. A felony. Punishable by prison. So if you want to keep a good time from turning into a bad one, try to keep this in mind. When does a date become a crime? When she says 'No' and he refuses to listen. Against her will is against the law."

In 1985 Ms. magazine published the Project on Campus Sexual Assault. Researcher Mary Koss found that "one in four women had reported having been the victim of rape or attempted rape, usually by an acquaintance." Koss appeared to have a figure for every sexual outrage:

• 53.7 percent of women revealed some form of sexual victimization.

• 11.9 percent had experienced sexual coercion.

• 12.1 percent had experienced attempted rape.

• 15.4 percent had experienced rape. Koss' claim of "one in four" became a rallying cry for Take Back the Night marches. The last statistic became a poster: "Think of the six women closest to you. Now guess which one will be raped this year."

Men were predators; women, victims. At Brown University, feminist students printed a list of names of students accused of rape. Guerrilla graffiti squads created castration hit lists—students deemed too aggressive on dates. If Susan Brownmiller had said in her 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, that rape is "nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation, by which all men keep all women in a state of fear," then the date rape propaganda was the reverse, the attempt to intimidate all men.

Schools created rape crisis centers and conducted date rape awareness seminars for incoming students. Stephanie Gutmann, writing in Reason and in Playboy, was one of the first journalists to question the wave of hysteria. Noting that there had been 70 mentions of date rape or acquaintance rape in The New York Times, in the previous ten years, she charted how the most toxic word in the language had been stretched to cover all male behavior.

The training guide for Swarthmore College's Acquaintance Rape Prevention Workshop stated: "Acquaintance rape spans a spectrum of incidents and behaviors, ranging from crimes legally defined as rape to verbal harassment and inappropriate innuendo."

Dr. Andrea Parrot of Cornell University had an equally broad definition: "Any sexual intercourse without mutual desire is a form of rape."

The mainstream media spread the slander. Newsweek wrote of colleges working "to solve—and stop•a shockingly frequent, often hidden outrage." The Chicago Tribune announced: "Fear makes women campus prisoners." A rape counselor told Newsweek in 1986 that acquaintance rape "is the single largest problem on college campuses today."

Gutmann did some sleuthing and discovered that during the five years prior to 1990, Columbia University's security department reported zero rapes. A year later, Peter Hellman, a writer for New York magazine, rechecked the figures. At Barnard College, not one of the school's 2200 students had reported a rape in 1991. At Columbia, there were just two rape accusations for a student body of almost 20,000. Neither of the charges held up under investigation. One of the victims said her attacker had just pushed her onto a bed. The rape crisis centers stood empty. Hellman found one center that had treated just 79 clients, only 10 percent of whom were the victims of recent assaults.

And yet the rallies continued, with date rape martyrs recounting their sexual abuse. One victim claimed, "I counted the times I had a penis in me that I haven't wanted and had to stop at 594." Say what?

The date rape pamphlets painted a grim and absurd picture of fractured courtship. "Remember," warned the sex ed pamphlet from the Santa Monica Hospital's Rape Treatment Center, "that some men think that drinking heavily, dressing provocatively and going to a man's room indicates a willingness to have sex."

Well, yes. And the advice to men was equally befuddling: "Don't assume that just because a woman has had sex with you previously she is willing to have sex with you again. Also don't assume that just because a woman consents to kissing or other sexual intimacies she is willing to have sexual intercourse."

The codes seemed bent on breaking the momentum of courtship, on hobbling desire. When Antioch University created a code that required students to have explicit verbal permission for each "escalating sexual act," howls of laughter could be heard as far as Washington. "If you want to take her blouse off, you have to ask. If you want to touch her breasts, you have to ask." Columnist George Will described it as the legislation of sexual style by committee.

The Antioch code sounded like a cross between the adolescent game Mother May I and the script for a dominance and submission fantasy: Mistress May I. It assumed that the man always makes the first move, that a woman never reaches a hand down the front of a man's jeans, or ties him to a bed and reads him poems by Emily Dickinson.

Besides, there was plenty of evidence that the so-called victims of date rape didn't view themselves as victims. Some 43 percent of the women classified as rape victims in the Ms. study hadn't realized they had been raped. A similar study by Sarah Murnen, Annette Perot and Donn Byrne questioned 130 women about "their most recent encounter with unwanted sexual activity." The researchers said 55.3 percent of the women felt that they had been subjected to unwanted sex. Although the study had a bias (the authors' report of the survey called males "coercers," sexual initiative an "attack" and any act of unwanted intercourse "rape"), the students held a different view. The vast majority said they had had moderate to total control of the situation. Half had subsequent contact with the so-called attacker. None had reported the "attack," said the authors, "due to a belief that the event was not important."

Katie Roiphe, a graduate student at Princeton, looked at the controversy and concluded, in The New York Times, "These pamphlets are clearly intended to protect innocent college women from the insatiable force of male desire. We have been hearing about this for centuries. He is still nearly uncontrollable; she is still the one drawing the line. This so-called feminist movement peddles an image of gender relations that denies female desire and infantilizes women. Once again, our bodies seem to be sacred vessels. We've come a long way, and now, it seems, we are going back."

She continued, "The date rape pamphlets begin to sound like Victorian guides to conduct. The most common date rape guide, published by the American College Health Association, advises its delicate readers to 'communicate your limits clearly. If someone starts to offend you, tell him firmly and early.'

"Sharing these assumptions about female sensibilities, a manners guide from 1853 advises young women, 'Do not suffer your body to be held or squeezed without showing that it displeases you by instantly withdrawing it. These and many other little points of refinement will operate as an almost invisible though a very impenetrable fence, keeping off vulgar familiarity and that desecration of the person which has so often led to vice.' And so ideals of female virtue and repression resonate through time."

Cry Victim

Rush Limbaugh, a conservative talk radio host, began to call the radical sisterhood "feminazis." The antimale politics of activists on campus and in the workplace drove a wedge between men and women, and even divided feminists. The philosophy that all men are rapists justified increasingly bizarre political dramas.

In the early hours of June 23, 1993 Lorena Bobbitt took an eight-inch carving knife and cut off her sleeping husband's penis. As she drove away from their home, she tossed the severed organ into a field. She told police that her husband had raped her, adding, "He always has an orgasm and he doesn't wait for me to have an orgasm. He's selfish."

Police launched a search for the missing organ, found it and dropped it into a plastic bag. Nine hours later, John Wayne Bobbitt was almost whole again.

The story made The New York Times, initially as a medical miracle. The article detailed how surgeons had successfully reattached a severed penis, tagging individual blood vessels, arteries and nerves with sutures.

But the real story soon became a rallying cry for radical feminists. Lorena was photographed waiflike in a swimming pool for the November 1993 Vanity Fair. A new heroine? A role model? Lorena was a woman pushed to the edge: "I remember many things," she told Vanity Fair. "I was thinking many things. I was thinking the first time he hit me. I was thinking when he raped me. I just wanted him to disappear. I just wanted him to leave me alone, to leave my life alone. I don't want to see him anymore."

Some women told the surgeon's wife they were upset that Lorena had not tossed the male organ down the garbage disposal. Lorena was acquitted of the charge of "malicious wounding."

John Wayne Bobbin took his story on the road, appearing as a guest on Howard Stern's 1994 New Year's Eve pay-per-view special and selling T-shirts depicting a knife-wielding woman and the words love hurts. He marketed a line of penis protectors and starred in the porn film John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut—which had all the morbid appeal of a driver's ed film showing accident victims.

Fatal Femmes

Hollywood capitalized on the decade's antimale theme with a series of movies such as Sleeping With the Enemy (1991) and La Femme Nikita (1990), which suggested that women would find equality in the Second Amendment through the judicious use of weaponry. Women were armed and dangerous.

Thelma and Louise were the ultimate male-bashers. When Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon decide to take a weekend away from an oafish husband and noncommittal boyfriend, a girls' night out turns into a murderous escapade. The pivotal scene occurs early in the film. A cowboy follows an intoxicated Thelma into a parking lot and forces himself on her. Louise pulls a gun from her purse. When he suggests, "Suck my dick," she shoots him.

When a redneck trucker ogles the pair, the assertive femmes blow up his gasoline tanker. Facing arrest, the two choose death, sending their car over the edge of a cliff. The movie sparked a firestorm of debate. Ellen Goodman called it a "PMS movie, plain and simple."

The braggadocio of the antimale feminists would surface at a University of Chicago Law School conference attended by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Buttons declaimed: dead menDon't use Porn. The Best Way to a Man's heart is through his chest. Another button: so many men, so little ammunition. Over a drawing of a bloodstained .45, the words feminine protection.

Grrls

A nervous media went looking for women who liked men. A February 1994 Esquire article titled simply "Yes" presented a lineup of young ladies who embraced lust.

Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, said: "What's going on is not your mother's feminism. The young women who grew up in Ms. households feel the need to assert that they're not antimale, not anti-sex, that they don't believe all sex is rape. But they're also nobody's victim. There are two parts to these young women's view: One, they're going to enjoy sex; two, on their terms."

Esquire dubbed the new generation Do Me Feminists—an odd term for women who advocated sexual independence. These were women just as willing to strap on dildos and do you.

Lisa Palac, the editor of Future Sex, a San Francisco-based magazine, explained her politics after discovering she liked porn: "Even though I got liberated, it's still very complicated. I say to men, 'OK, pretend you're a burglar and you've broken in here and you throw me down on the bed and make me suck your cock!' And they're horrified—it goes against all they've recently been taught. 'No, no, it would degrade you!' Exactly. Degrade me when I ask you to."

Bell Hooks, then a professor of women's studies at Oberlin College, gave her guidelines for the new male. "If all we have to choose from is the limp dick or the superhard dick, we're in trouble. We need a versatile dick who admits that intercourse isn't all there is to sexuality, who can negotiate rough sex on Monday, eating pussy on Tuesday and cuddling on Wednesday."

In the same issue, the editors of Esquire threw in the towel. In an article listed under the category "Savoir Faire," Susie Bright told men "How to Make Love to a Woman: Hands-On Advice From a Woman Who Does."

As Susie Sexpert, Bright had written the advice column for On Our Backs. Now, she proposed a quickie book on How to Pick Up Girls Using the Real-Live Dyke Method. Among her suggestions was the Look.

"Because, for humans, it all begins with seeing. Look at her. All over. Linger anywhere you like. When she notices (and she will if you're really looking), hold her eyes with yours. Hold them close. Every second will feel like a minute. You'll be tempted to avert your gaze, but don't. This is the essence of cruising, the experience that all the virtual reality and phone sex in the world will never replace. It is also the moment of truth: You'll know then and there whether she wants you or not.

"If she doesn't, she'll complain to her friends about how you objectified and degraded her, but ignore all that crap. Calling a man a sexist interloper is just a trendy way of expressing an old-fashioned sentiment: 'He's not my type.' "

She warned men not to confuse girl watching (checking out every passing chick) with looking ("to exercise the power of vision").

Bright also revealed the secret of the Touch: "Lesbians too have probing, yearning, insistent sex organs. We call them hands. And if you have not had the pleasure of taking a woman in your hands—your thumb parting her mouth, your fingers tracing her ears, your hand curled up inside her—you are missing some of the finer points of ecstasy." At the turn of the century, Ida Craddock had insisted, in a suppressed sex manual, that the proper finger of love was the male organ. Now we learned that the proper finger of love was, well, the finger—if not the whole hand.

Bright edited a series of feminist porn stories called Herotica and Herotica II. Male authors such as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and John Updike had liberated sexual language in the Sixties; now it was time for female writers to develop a sexual voice. The factor that distinguishes feminist porn from male erotica was simple, Bright said: "The woman comes." In male-centered stories, "we read about how he sees her responding to him, but we don't see inside her explosion."

Ms. feminists would have us believe that women needed protection from sex. Women authors suggested otherwise. A Playboy review, Clit Lit 101, gave this assessment: "The heroines make love in oceans, lakes, rivers and swimming pools, in the back of pickups, on trains, in buses, bent over tires in gas stations, handcuffed to beds, on top of tables and desks, on beaches, in cliffside tents, in backcountry stores, on living room couches and, oh yes, occasionally in bed. They have out-of-body sexual experiences with the ghosts of dead lovers and enjoy the attention of extraterrestrials in off-planet brothels. They mate with beams of sunshine and with shapes of glowing light that rise from the depths of summer ponds. They use feathers and nightsticks, lotions and leather. They fuck potters, cowboys, motorcycle cops, young boys, ocean waves, strangers, dildos, dykes, vibrators and their own fingers." Women in the Nineties delighted in transgressing boundaries, real and imagined.

Women charted their own arousal. A character in Susanna Moore's In the Cut complained, "I can remember every man I ever fucked by the way he liked to do it, not the way I liked to do it." If reading is thinking with another man's brain, reading feminist porn was feeling with another gender's body.

Female rebels rocked America. Girls who had grown up watching Madonna grab her crotch in concerts now listened to Liz Phair sing about things unpure and unchaste, about wanting to fuck her boyfriend like a dog, to fuck him till his dick turns blue, to be his blow job queen. Alanis Morissette topped the charts by taunting a former boyfriend about his new lover: "Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theater?"

Madonna published her own collection of erotica—a portfolio of nudes and S&M shots stitched together with short fantasies—bound in aluminum and sealed in mylar. Called Sex, it was a world event—mocked in monologs on late-night television, but a major success. At a Chicago conference of radical feminists, antiporn activist Nikki Craft led a mob action, tearing to shreds the pages of Sex.

Lesbian Chic

Decades of propaganda had tarred and feathered male sexuality and, indeed, most heterosexuality. The only sexual activity that was not villainous was lesbian love.

Looking for something to celebrate, the national media focused on fabulous femmes. Madonna and Sandra Bernhard flaunted their relationship at the end of the Eighties. Singer K.D. Lang appeared on the cover of the August 1993 Vanity Fair—getting a close shave from supermodel Cindy Crawford.

Lesbians had their own clubs, their own conferences. (Some 500 lesbians turned out for LUST [Lesbians Undoing Sexual Taboos] at the NYU Law School in 1992. Included was a workshop titled "Toys R Us: Ropes, Whips and Dicks.")

Gay characters appeared in movies (Go Fish and Boys on the Side) and on television—Roseanne, Married With Children and Friends. When Ellen DeGeneres, star of Ellen, told the world she was gay, Reverend Jerry Falwell called her "Ellen DeGenerate." Singer Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher appeared on the cover of Newsweek to announce to the world: "We're Having a Baby."

Bisexual Chic

The boundaries between sexual roles continued to dissolve. In 1995 a Harvard professor released a 600-page celebration of Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. Marjorie Garber argued that most people would be bisexual if not for "repression, religion, repugnance, denial [and] premature specialization."

Heterosexuality and monogamy—reduced to the "premature specialization." What's your sexual major? I haven't decided yet. Garber wondered if bisexuality was merely the badge of the nonconformist: "Is sexuality a fashion—like platform shoes, bell-bottom trousers or double-breasted suits—that appears and then disappears, goes underground only to be revived with a difference? Do we need to keep forgetting bisexuality in order to remember and rediscover it?"

She resurrected the century's sexual celebrities (Jagger, Bowie, Marlene Dietrich, Oscar Wilde, James Dean, Madonna) and concluded that sex was a performance art. "Celebrities do constantly reinvent themselves," she wrote. "One of the ways in which they have done this is by renegotiating and reconfiguring not only their clothes, their bodies and their hair, but also their sexualities." She spoke of a sex star's ability "to shock and give pleasure" as an art.

Newsweek described bisexuality as "the wild card of our erotic life" and profiled young couples who proclaimed, "Sexuality is fluid. There is no such thing as normal."

Michael Stipe, lead singer for R.E.M., confessed, "I've always been sexually ambiguous in terms of my proclivities. I think labels are for food."

Another said simply, "I don't desire a gender. I desire a person."

In 1998 a former porn star named Annie Sprinkle toured the country with an evening of performance art called Annie Sprinkle's Herstory of Porn: From Reel to Real. The veteran of 25 years of X-rated self-expression, she played a visual record of her past, of her skill in the art of shock and pleasure. In the Seventies she had been a child of the counterculture, performing fellatio and group sex in film after film. She had become famous as the woman who would do anything—she had sex with vegetables, sex with amputees, golden showers, bondage, S&M, sex with postop transsexuals. In 1976, she was arrested for sodomy, the infamous crime against nature, but, explained Annie, "Nature didn't mind."

In the Eighties she abandoned heterosexual porn for films that celebrate sluts and goddesses. One clip shows an arm buried almost to the elbow, one woman giving another a G-spot orgasm. Sprinkle had moved into New Age sex, finding the goddess within through extended, vibrator-assisted orgasms. In one era she had turned to live shows in which she inserted a speculum and invited audience members to look at her cervix. By the time of her 1998 tour, she had discovered the Internet. Those of you, she said, "who missed it, don't despair—you can still see my cervix on my website."

Now she produced her own films, concluding the show with a clip devoted to mermaid sex. Attired in fins, Annie and a young woman have a ménage à trois with a male. The scene, which seemed to suggest a return to heterosexuality, climaxed with the removal of the male's penis, revealing it to be a dildo.

In the question-and-answer session following the performance, an audience member asked Annie, "Of all the faces we've seen, which was your true self?"

It was a question that, as we approach the end of the century, many Americans could ask of themselves.

Student Sex

The generation that came of age in the Nineties received mixed messages about pleasure. For them, sex education was AIDS education. They learned not about the birds and the bees, but the stark message: Sex can kill you. When Magic Johnson announced on November 7, 1991 that he had contracted HIV, the message seemed to be: It can happen to anyone. In Last Night in Paradise, Katie Roiphe recounted growing up with the object lesson of Alison Gertz, the girl next door who contracted AIDS from a one-night stand with a bisexual bartender from Studio 54. Gertz had become the poster child for heterosexual transmission, wrote Roiphe, proof that "it takes only one night with the wrong man."

The Religious Right advocated abstinence ed and condemned safe sex campaigns that stressed condom use. When the Free Congress Foundation declared that condoms do not protect one from AIDS, Dr. Ronald Carey at the FDA pointed out that even the worst-quality condom is 10,000 times better in terms of reducing exposure to HIV than unprotected sex. Ira Reiss, co-author of An End to Shame: Shaping Our Next Sexual Revolution, put it bluntly: "We can no more assume that every believer in abstinence invariably abstains from sex any more than we can assume that every condom user will have perfect condoms and be a perfect user. When one makes an unbiased comparison of promoting abstinence versus promoting condom use the results are obvious. Vows of abstinence break far more easily than do condoms."

When a psychologist asked Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders if she would consider promoting masturbation to discourage children from trying all-out sex, she replied, "With regard to masturbation, I think that is something that is a part of human sexuality and a part of something that perhaps should be taught."

An outspoken woman, Elders had favored giving condoms to public school students. ("Well, I'm not going to put them on their lunch trays, but yes.") In earlier years, as a state health official, she had kept condoms as a desk ornament labeled "Ozark Rubber Plant."

Rush Limbaugh labeled her the condom queen. The Traditional Values Coalition, claiming to represent 31,000 churches, condemned her for her "malicious attacks on heterosexuals and Christians" and urged her resignation. On December 9, 1994, she stepped down.

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But a generation that watched its elders bicker about sex had also grown up watching Madonna. Girls bought the lingerie they wore under or over their prom dresses at Victoria's Secret. They'd grown up in a world where sex was not a mystery, but was visible, explicit and sophisticated.

In 1996 Playboy commissioned a survey of a dozen colleges. Two years later, the magazine went back for a second look. The two surveys present a snapshot of a generation that had grown up in the shadow of AIDS and in the dim blue light of MTV. The surveys found that students had incorporated both caution and creativity. In 1996, almost half the men and women had masturbated in front of one another—sometimes because they didn't have condoms, sometimes as a stand-in for intercourse, sometimes as a hot form of hooking up. More than two thirds had performed phone sex.

The learning curve was immediate: Approximately a third of the students had tried bondage and spanking, one in five had used a blindfold during sex or posed nude for a lover. More than half of the males and four out of ten girls had had sex in the presence of other people. The vast majority had watched X-rated videos, many with a partner.

Students had created a new permission, a kind of double-entry bookkeeping. Approximately half said that oral sex was not real sex, three quarters said they hadn't included in their list of lovers those partners with whom they had had only oral sex.

The survey uncovered a haphazard approach to sex: Almost half of the students had not—on the night they lost their virginity—expected to have sex. Sex, sometimes, just happened.

The lesson they had learned was that intercourse was OK—as long as you used a condom. In the first survey more than a third of the students had taken an AIDS test. A few years later the figure dropped to nearly one out of four. The test was a way of admitting they had made a sexual mistake or of assuaging panic. Or it was a ritual of purification with a new partner, one that would allow them to enjoy naked sex.

The survey in 1998 also found that 15 percent of college students chose to remain virgins. Admittedly, the definition of virgin meant only that you had not had intercourse. Even technical virgins experimented with touching, kissing and extreme fondling. But sexual autonomy—defined by the right to say no—became a central issue.

The cult of virginity recruited its ranks from high schools. True Love Waits asked teenagers to take a pledge: "Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship."

In 1996 the movement held a rally in Georgia during which teens took the chastity oath and strung 350,000 pledge cards from the ceiling. Virgins carried picket signs that declared: Do your homework, not your Girlfriend. Save sex, not safe sex.

In an event organized by the Pure Love Alliance, some 500 virgins actually marched on Washington in 1994, staking their pledges on the Mall and urging passersby to "honk for purity." The media created the concept of Virginity Chic, rolling out such celebrity virgins as singer Juliana Hatfield, actresses Tori Spelling and Cassidy Rae and MTV veejay Kennedy.

Censorship

How to protect all these virgins, that was the question. The answer was more than a century old. The Religious Right continued its crusade against indecency. Their first target was As Nasty as They Wanna Be, a rap album by 2 Live Crew. James Dobson's Focus on the Family alerted followers that "there has never been an album recorded in our nation's history for sale to the public with this level of explicit sex and degradation. There are 87 descriptions of oral sex, 116 mentions of male and female genitalia and other lyrical passages referring to male ejaculation."

In Florida a born-again lawyer named Jack Thompson copied the lyrics to As Nasty as They Wanna Be and sent them to lawmakers and sheriffs' departments around the state. Parroting radical feminist rhetoric, he claimed, "These guys are out promoting the idea that women are there for nothing but to satisfy men's desires. This stuff makes it more likely that women will be abused."

U.S. District Judge Jose Gonzalez listened to the album and declared the opus obscene. Songs like Me So Horny appealed "to dirty thoughts and the loins, not to the intellect and the mind."

Sheriff's deputies in Broward County tape-recorded a 2 Live Crew concert at a nightclub in Hollywood, Florida and arrested rappers Luther Campbell, Mark "Brother Marquis" Ross and Chris "Fresh Kid Ice" Wongwon for obscenity.

Moving on a second front, police also arrested Charles Freeman, a record store owner, for selling As Nasty as They Wanna Be.

The 2 Live Crew trial was a farce; the jury laughed out loud at the tapes of the performance and acquitted the rappers. A second jury found Freeman guilty of selling obscenity. Freeman was fined $1000 plus court costs and his lawyer said Freeman would appeal. The album sold more than two million copies.

State legislators introduced labeling bills that would require record companies to issue parental advisories for explicit lyrics that describe or advocate "suicide, incest, bestiality, sadomasochism, sexual activity in a violent context, murder, morbid violence or illegal use of drugs or alcohol."

Fundamentalists and feminists began to launch attacks against shock jock Howard Stern. Stern was the bad boy of radio, whose shows included segments called "The Adventures of Fart-man," "Lesbian Dial-a-Date," "Bestiality Dial-a-Date" and "Sexual Innuendo Wednesday."

Stern had a menagerie of guests, from a guy named Vinnie (who volunteered to put his penis in a mousetrap) to a guy who played piano with his penis (that last bit earned Stern a $6000 FCC fine). Stern talked about diminutive testicles and having sex with Lamb Chop. In 1991 a series of bits that involved gerbils, Pee-wee Herman's legal problems and Aunt Jemima resulted in a record $600,000 fine. A sample of the offending remarks: "The closest I ever came to making love to a black woman was masturbating to a picture of Aunt Jemima on a pancake box." Stern called the FCC "thought police" and continued. Bits on television celebrity Kathie Lee Gifford, toilet habits and church scandal heroine Jessica Hahn earned a $500,000 fine. An on-air analysis of lubricants, buttocks, sexual aids and panties brought a $400,000 fine.

The Reverend Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, led a crusade against Stern, and the National Organization for Women threatened a boycott when Stern moved to cable television.

In 1995 Stern faced almost $2 million in fines. It was not until Wildmon pressured the FCC to deny Infinity Broadcasting's right to acquire new stations that Stern's employers paid the fines, making a "voluntary contribution" to the Treasury Department of $1.7 million. It was simply the cost of doing business. Stern generated $15 million for Infinity in 1993, from which he took $7 million in salary. Infinity earned $8 million a year.

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The most disturbing antisex crusade erupted in Cincinnati, home of Charles Keating's Citizens for Decent Literature. Sheriff Simon Leis had conducted an attack on pornography, closing 11 adult bookstores, five adult movie houses and a massage parlor over six years. Leis had hounded not only peep shows and nude dancing bars, but also kept Vixen, Last Tango in Paris and Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ from corrupting the citizens of Cincinnati.

The Religious Right saw the opportunity to lay siege to the hallowed ground of high culture. Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw, used to defend the newsstands as art museums for the blue-collar crowd. Cleaning up newsstands was not enough—the Religious Right wanted to eliminate sex from the fine arts as well.

In April 1990 Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center put on an exhibit of 175 photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, had documented his sexual subculture. The exhibit included floral still lifes, portraits, male nudes and photos with sadomasochistic and homoerotic themes. One part of the exhibit asked viewers to compare the sex organs of flowers with those of gay males. The exhibit had toured Chicago, Berkeley and Hartford without incident.

Senator Jesse Helms (R–N.C.) condemned the photos on the floor of Congress. In an act of political cowardice, Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled the exhibition.

On opening day, Cincinnati police shut the doors of the CAC, videotaped the photographs and served an indictment to museum director Dennis Barrie for "pandering obscenity" and for "using minors in nudity-related material."

The museum remained open. Some 81,000 citizens lined up to see the now infamous photos—including five shots that detailed fisting, golden showers and anal insertion of different objects, as well as two shots that showed a nude boy on a chair and a little girl whose lifted skirt exposed her genitals.

The prosecution brought in Judith Reisman, the former songwriter for Captain Kangaroo turned antiporn expert. She told the jury to look at how the child's legs come together in a triangle, calling attention to the genitals in a lewd and lascivious manner. She invoked the specter of child molesters. "By placing images of children that are focused on the genitals, that have been sexualized, whose sex organs are clearly visible on the walls of our museums, what we are doing is legitimizing the public display of the photograph. And I think you are then putting at risk additional children."

Lou Sirkin, lawyer for the CAC and for Barrie, challenged the jury. "If you think those pictures are frightening or that they are a lewd exhibition that concentrates on the genitals of those children, that they are anything more than the display of moral innocence, I don't believe the people of this city have that kind of evil eye. If you take things and try to turn them the way the state wants you to do, the way Judith Reisman wants you to do, you turn something human into something dirty and ugly. The human body is not ugly. It is ugly only if you try to make it that way."

On October 5, 1990 a jury took less than two hours to find Barrie and the Contemporary Arts Center not guilty of all charges. On the same day, the Cincinnati Reds were playing game two of the National League Championship. The radio station broadcasting the game interrupted its coverage to announce the verdict. Fans gave a standing ovation.

Conservatives thought they had found a political hot button. In Congress lawmakers tried to impose sanctions on art grants that funded "indecent art." The strategy to purify existing technologies—radio, records and film—was nothing compared with what greeted the newest form of communication.

Cybersex

Boundaries disappeared via technology. Throughout the century, technology had created new avenues for lust. Mr. Bell's telephone let lovers create a sexual space in intimate conversation. A boyfriend's voice could enter the house and be heard on the pillow next to one's ear, without violating community propriety.

Sex drives technology. Ask the swingers who bought Polaroid cameras, who used videocassette recorders to create home porn theaters, who turned their own video cams into time-shifting sex toys. And it was sex that sold the Internet.

Cyberspace was an invisible, intimate realm that allowed free expression—and, even more important, the right to free association. Netheads flocked to chat rooms and newsgroups devoted to every aspect of sex. Like blondes? Try alt.sex.blonde. Reading literary lust? Try alt.sex.erotica. Do you have a taste for whips and chains? Try alt.sex.bondage. The list was endless, from basics such as alt.sex.backrubs and alt.sex.masturbation to fringe activities on alt.sex.fetish. diapers and alt.sex.hello-kitty.

Matthew Childs investigated Lust Online for Playboy in 1994 and found the Nineties version of the zipless fuck, posted by a woman who called herself Sara: "Just as the train is about to pull out of the station, a young woman boards the car you're on. The train moves along the tracks and you can feel the vibrations of the rails. As you begin to feel hot, you feel your cock getting harder and you squirm in your seat trying to get comfortable. You imagine yourself touching the silky fabric of her dress, realizing that it has fallen apart at your touch and that you are touching bare skin—everywhere. Your fingers move down her body, absorbing the wonderful sensations. You hear a slight moan in your ear as you near that part of her that is getting hot and wet."

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Was sharing fantasies a sex act? Chat groups debated the question. Were people online exchanging virtual bodily fluids? Childs concluded that modem sex "allows users to test-drive their fantasies with other people while still preserving their anonymity. With that facelessness comes the freedom to try different sexual personas."

Putting your fantasies on public display was never safer. Imaginary whips don't leave marks. Two individuals half a continent apart meet in cyberspace:

Priapus: My tongue lashes out at your clit, licking furiously.

Nikki: Lick me! Hard, long, from front to back.

Priapus: I taste your mingled juices and my hand runs up and down my cock. Long swipes of my tongue from your clit back over the lips of your pussy.

Nikki: My lips graze your cock, lick its tip, taste the salt.

Priapus: I thrust up my hips seeking to enter your mouth.

And so forth. A few rounds of this, and maybe, just maybe, the woman who typed, "Goddess, give me more" will give you a telephone number.

Chat groups debated whether a participant in one of these fantasies was male or female, as though the imagined male or the imagined female was a Platonic ideal of masculine or feminine. Without physical clues, what determines sexuality? There were no gender-specific characteristics in cyberspace, no five o'clock shadow or high-pitched voice to give one away. The vision of too much freedom, of sex without limits, summoned the monsters.

There was no topic too obscene or too boring that a million geeks couldn't find time to discuss it. The Internet provided support groups for the weird. Stephen Bates, in an editorial for The Wall Street Journal, worried that the cyber right of free association might empower pedophiles.

Instead, the anonymity of the Internet proved a boon to police. The tactics employed by the government were as old as the postal stings conducted by Anthony Comstock. Agents posed as young girls. When potential pedophiles sent pornography to their new friends, they were arrested. When they made dates and flew halfway across the country to do the things they had talked about in e-mail, they, too, were arrested.

Newspapers ran accounts of teens lured to S&M sessions by online stalkers. Henry Hudson, the former Meese Commission star, oversaw a huge investigation that netted two men who were into S&M fantasies and pedophilia. Agents, posing as mobsters interested in making snuff films (the very existence of which has never been documented), met with two men in a motel. The group speculated about kidnapping, torturing and killing someone. An army of agents then placed the two under surveillance. Although no victim was targeted and no kidnapping attempt made, the two men were sentenced to more than 30 years in prison.

The stories were lurid—and rare. The media made the most of ten or so high-profile cases. Those with access to computers went directly for the sexual. The Harvard Crimson looked at activity on the school's computer network and reported that 28 students had downloaded some 500 pornographic pictures in one week. Patrick Groeneveld, the sys. op. who ran the Digital Picture Archive at the University of Delft in the Netherlands, kept a record of the 50 top consumers of erotica. The list included AT&T, Citicorp and Ford.

Every new technology creates its own moral panic. Senator James Exon (D–Neb.) introduced legislation to control the Internet, saying, "I want to keep the information superhighway from resembling a red-light district." The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was intended to punish anyone who "makes, transmits or otherwise makes available any comment, request, proposal, image or communication" that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent." Modem morality.

But was what happened on the Internet real sex? A University of Michigan student named Jake Baker posted a bunch of sordid torture fantasies on alt.sex.stories. Baker used his real name and, like an idiot, gave the victim in a story the name of a woman in one of his classes.

The authorities at Michigan ordered a psychiatric interview, then suspended Baker. The feds arrested the student and had him held without bond "to prevent rape and murder."

Target: Cyberspace, an editorial in the July 1995 Playboy, revealed the irony of the charge. "Jake Baker is author of a grubby little chronicle in which he and a friend hold a woman captive (tying her by her hair to a ceiling fan), then abuse her with clamps, glue, a big spiky hairbrush, a hot curling iron, a spreader bar, a knife and finally fire. He lands in jail. Bret Easton Ellis comes up with a novel, American Pyscho, in which the protagonist holds a woman captive, sprays her with Mace, decapitates her to have sex with her severed head, nails a dildo to her genitals and drills holes in various parts of her body, all while capturing the events on film. Ellis has a table at Elaine's [a fashionable New York watering hole frequented by writers]."

The Internet had its own way of punishing bad behavior: flaming and scorn. "Within days of Baker's arrest, stories began to appear on the Net with characters named Jake Baker. Drag queens in prison rape the fantasy Jake and cut out his tongue. A woman meets the fantasy Jake on the street, tortures and shoots him. The devil asks the fantasy Jake to torture a woman, then masturbate, and when the fantasy Jake is unable to obtain an erection, the devil shoves a curling iron up fantasy Jake's ass."

Senator Exon held a stag party on the floor of Congress, wielding a little blue book with images he said were available "at the click of a button." The Communications Decency Act passed 84 to 16 on its original voyage through the Senate in 1995.

Time devoted a cover story to "Cyber-porn," illustrating the article with the face of a terrified child. On the inside was a picture of a man having sex with his computer. The story presented the findings of a study conducted by a Carnegie Mellon research team, which had appeared in a Georgetown Law Journal article with the daunting title "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Study of 917,410 Images, Descriptions, Short Stories and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in 40 Countries, Provinces and Territories."

It was pure propaganda, a college prank, a bit of political science that recalled Judith Reisman's inept study of images of children and violence in men's magazines. And most magazines fell for the ruse. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, a reporter for Time, boiled it down: "There's an awful lot of porn online."

Meaning 917,410 is an awfully big number.

"It is not just naked women. The adult bulletin board system market seems to be driven largely by a demand for images that can't be found in the average magazine rack ... a grab bag of deviant material that includes images of bondage, sadomasochism, urination, defecation and sex acts with a barnyard full of animals."

Meaning Elmer-DeWitt's cyber address book is better than yours.

"The appearance of material like this on a public network accessible to men, women and children around the world raises issues too important to ignore—or to oversimplify."

But oversimplify they did. Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition, appeared on Nightline to sound the clarion call: "This is bestiality, pedophilia, child molestation. According to the Carnegie Mellon survey, one quarter of all the images involve the torture of women."

Never mind that these statistics were not in the Carnegie Mellon report, nor were they on the Internet. Politicians were batting around a McCarthyesque figure: "Of the images reviewed, 83.5 percent—all on the Internet—are pornographic."

Marty Rimm, the researcher who concocted the survey, looked at data from 68 essentially adult-oriented bulletin board systems. He cataloged how images were described, not the images themselves.

Carlin Meyer, a professor at New York University Law School who actually read the study, noted, "Interestingly, the Carnegie Mellon study never found such descriptions as snuff, kill or murder, and rarely found such others as pain, torture, agony, hurts, suffocates and the like. The term rape appeared fewer than a dozen times in descriptions of more than 900,000 images."

People who didn't know how to program their VCR could not discern the difference between a Usenet group and a private bulletin board, yet they made public policy.

Rimm had sought out the bizarre, actually counseling operators of adult bulletin boards on how to spice up the language in listings. Then he studied the world he helped create. Mike Godwin, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, saw the bias. Rimm's study was "as if you did a study of bookstores in Times Square and used it to generalize about what was in Barnes & Noble stores nationwide."

Of course there were bulletin boards devoted to sex, but they weren't a click away. To get onto Pleasuredome, Throb-net, Swingnet, Studnet or Kinknet usually involved access codes, passwords and credit cards, not exactly the tools of childhood. Rimm, when pressed, admitted that pornographic content represented a mere 0.35 percent of traffic on the Net.

Parents sought out so-called George Carlin software that would block out not only the original seven dirty words (shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits) but also words such as genitalia, prick and asexual.

The ACLU successfully challenged the Communications Decency Act. In 1997 the Supreme Court voted unanimously to overturn the law. Justice John Paul Stevens noted a lower court ruling that said: "Content on the Internet is as diverse as human thought." Overzealous policing of the Net would eliminate information on AIDS, safe sex, birth control and homosexuality—all topics of vital interest in the Nineties. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that trying to restrict the Internet was "akin to a law that makes it a crime for a bookstore owner to sell pornographic magazines to anyone once a minor enters his store."

Sex in the Military

As America struggled to impose codes of sexual behavior on campuses and in workplaces, one arena repeatedly commanded attention.

At different times in the century, the military had been the target of sex crusaders. In World War I, progressives created the equivalent of an Army Corps of Moral Engineers, instructing recruits to keep fit to fight. The nation's sex education came in the form of military pamphlets and films warning about the dangers of venereal disease. In World War II, the government again took an active role in educating Americans about sex.

In 1991 a group of Navy and Marine Corps aviators attended the Tailhook 1991 Symposium at a Las Vegas Hilton Hotel. During the event, drunken officers took over a third-floor corridor for a ritual "running of the gantlet." Women who traversed the gantlet were fondled, touched, pushed and treated to conduct unbecoming. A drunken male forced his hands down a female officer's shirt, grabbing her breasts. She had to bite his hand to escape. Another reached under her skirt and tried to remove her panties. Another woman told of being repeatedly bitten on the buttocks by a Navy officer. She kicked her assailant, who then departed.

When women complained, they were told: "That's what you get when you go to a hotel party with a bunch of drunk aviators."

Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, one of the 26 women who were attacked at Tailhook, went public with her charges. The Navy launched an investigation.

Admiral Frank Kelso declared, "It's not 'Boys will be boys.' The times have changed." Acting Navy Secretary Dan Howard told U.S. News & World Report, "There's a subculture here, the macho man idea, the hard drinking and skirt chasing that goes with the image of the Navy and Marines. That crap's got to go."

The Navy ordered all units to stand down for a day of sensitivity training; administrators at the "Top Gun" school added a six-week course in core values. In the wake of Tailhook, the Navy received more than 1000 sexual harassment charges and 3500 charges of indecent assault.

The toll on this new battlefield was staggering. In 1996 Newsweek would point out that no admiral had been lost in combat since 1944, but within the past year the Navy "had lost five admirals to sex—to disgrace for sexual harassment or inappropriate sexual behavior."

The crisis moved through the armed forces. A Pentagon survey of 90,000 active-duty service members in 1995 found that between one half and two thirds of military women had experienced some form of harassment—from teasing and jokes (44 percent) to looks or gestures (37 percent) to pressure for sexual favors (11 percent) to actual or attempted rape (4 percent).

At the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, 19 female soldiers charged they had been raped or sexually assaulted by drill sergeants, instructors and commanders. The Army set up a hotline to process rape and sexual harassment complaints: It received 4000 calls in the first week alone. Investigators thought 500 were serious enough for further investigation. The Veterans Administration concluded that one in four women veterans had been raped or sexually assaulted while on active duty.

The military announced a policy of zero tolerance and launched a series of courts-martial that produced mixed results. Juries found some charges to be clear-cut assault, others to be instances of consensual sex.

The armed forces proved to be as politically correct as college campuses. In January 1995, Captain Ernie Blanchard addressed cadets at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. He told a joke about a cadet's fiancée wearing a brooch featuring maritime signal flags. "She said the flags meant I love you. They really said, Permission granted to lay alongside."

When the commandant of cadets complained, Blanchard apologized. But a dozen Coast Guard women demanded officers launch a criminal probe into the joke. Blanchard offered to resign, but was turned down. On March 14, 1995, he committed suicide.

The crusade to reestablish moral authority in the ranks spread to other acts. Lieutenant Commander Kelly Flinn was tossed out of the Air Force for having an affair with the husband of an enlisted soldier. The hierarchy tried to explain that Flinn was ousted because she had disobeyed a direct order not to see the man and that she had lied about continuing the affair.

The notion that sex was something subject to direct orders made for water cooler conversations, but at the heart of the controversy was America's puritanical mean streak.

Sex would not do as it was told. In the wake of Flinn, some 67 officers were court-martialed for adultery in 1997. Air Force General Joseph Ralston had to turn down a top post when it was revealed he had had an affair more than a decade earlier. The blade of zero tolerance reached deep into the past.

Don't ask, don't Tell

The desire to use the military as a proving ground for moral ideas appealed to Presidential candidate William Jefferson Clinton. In his 1992 campaign he promised to ban sexual discrimination from the armed forces. On taking office, he promised, his first act as commander in chief would be to allow gays to serve in the military.

Gays had always served, sometimes with distinction. Clinton would end the witch-hunts, the persecutions, the cause for dishonorable discharge. Just as Truman had ended racial discrimination in the military with the stroke of a pen, so Clinton would end sexual discrimination.

No single act would incite such hatred or invite so much retaliation from the Religious Right. Jerry Falwell had stepped down as leader of the Moral Majority in 1989, saying he was going back to saving souls. But the issue of gays in the military had Falwell pleading for funds to fight the "new, radical homosexual rights agenda." Viewers could telephone a 900 number (at 90 cents a minute) to add their names to a petition urging Clinton not to lift the military ban. Some 24,000 viewers responded, within hours. Falwell began to churn out fund-raising letters that asked, "Are we about to become a hedonistic nation of unrestrained homosexuality, abortion, immorality and lawlessness?"

Televangelist Pat Robertson asked viewers of the 700 Club to telephone Capitol Hill. More than 434,000 calls came flooding into the congressional switchboard.

D. James Kennedy, of Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida, beseeched his supporters: "I'm writing today to ask your support in fighting this depravity. I'm deeply saddened that [Clinton] believes it's OK to go against the laws of God."

The Reverend Lou Sheldon labeled Clinton "the homosexual President with his homosexual initiatives."

Americans were split on the issue. A poll in the February 8, 1993 Newsweek found that 53 percent of Americans favored allowing gays to serve, 42 percent opposed it.

The arguments reflected the depth of the bias. Senator Sam Nunn (D–Ga.) thought allowing gays to remain in the military could violate the privacy rights of heterosexual soldiers. Being the object of another man's gaze would unnerve America's finest and incite violence. Gays scoffed that they already shared showers with heterosexuals—in college dorms, in steam rooms at health clubs—without chaos.

Nunn and the Joint Chiefs of Staff hammered out a policy of "Don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue." Recruits did not have to testify to their heterosexuality or homosexuality on enlistment. The military would no longer conduct queer hunts. But the line wavered. Open homosexuality would still be grounds for discharge. Gays who went public—say, by marching in a gay rights parade or making public statements—would face discharge.

What constituted going public? Was cyberspace the same as a parade ground? In one widely publicized case, sailor Timothy McVeigh was discharged after he described himself as gay on America Online. Naval investigators demanded and received the identity of the man calling himself Tim and discharged him.

The policy, designed to shield gays, actually increased the number of discharges, from 597 in 1994 to 997 in 1997.

The Playboy President

A right to privacy was central to the Sexual Revolution. Conservatives castigated the notion, saying that the Supreme Court had concocted it out of thin air, that the word appeared nowhere in the Constitution.

The right to privacy was first articulated in 1890 in a Harvard Law Review article by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren. The two were concerned about the rise of yellow journalism, in which reporters paraded personal gossip, tales of suicide, accidents, engagements, elopements and divorces. According to scholar Rochelle Gurstein, author of The Repeal of Reticence, Brandeis and Warren were alarmed by the scandal-hungry mob and papers that served them: "The unprecedented reporting of subjects previously believed to fall beneath public notice led to a rancorous debate concerning the proper role of the press in a democracy."

Brandeis and Warren invented the concept of a right to privacy, "the right to be let alone." Although men who became public figures "renounced their right to live their lives screened from public observation, [there are] some things all men alike are entitled to keep from popular curiosity, whether in public life or not."

In the Sixties and Seventies, the Court used Brandeis' formulation to support the Sexual Revolution—finding in the right of privacy the right to birth control, to read erotica, to possess pornography, to choose when and whether to have a child. It stopped short of kicking the state out of the bedroom in a 1986 ruling that upheld a Georgia sodomy statute.

With a few notable exceptions, the press had previously respected the privacy of public figures. And public figures had practiced reticence. In 1976, when a Playboy reporter asked Jimmy Carter his views on sex, the candidate responded that he was human, that he had lusted in his heart for women other than his wife. That disclosure made Carter the first politician to talk openly about his sex life. It almost derailed his campaign.

In 1987 the press questioned Gary Hart about his private life. He challenged reporters to "follow me around." They did and produced a photograph of young Donna Rice sitting on Hart's lap aboard a boat called Monkey Business.

Sex became a character issue. Hart's blatant escapades—as well as his cavalier taunting of the press—was proof, it was said, that he lacked the discretion and judgment needed for high office.

The confrontation between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill scorched the boundary between public and private behavior. Hill's backers, from whatever motive, charged that Thomas' sexual character disqualified him for the nation's highest court.

If there were skeletons in a candidate's closet, they had better not be wearing lingerie.

On October 3, 1991, William Jefferson Clinton, governor of Arkansas, declared his intention to run for the Presidency of the U.S. He was the first candidate to have come of age with the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties, and the first to put his sex life to a vote. The rumors started early.

According to a lawsuit filed by a disgruntled state employee, Clinton had had an affair with a lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers. She denied the story. Others whispered that Clinton had a black love child, that he had slept with Miss America, that he hit on anything wearing a skirt.

Bill Clinton admitted that his marriage had not been perfect and took his campaign to New Hampshire. New York called it the Bimbo Primary. Time called it Clinton's "moment of truth."

Gennifer Flowers later changed her story and sold it to a supermarket tabloid for a reported $100,000. My 12-Year Affair with Bill Clinton, screamed the headline in the Star, Plus the Secret Love Tapes that Prove it!

On the evening of the 1992 Super Bowl, the Clintons went on 60 Minutes. Clinton admitted knowing Flowers, saying that she was "a friendly acquaintance." He said the allegation of a 12-year affair was false.

CBS correspondent Steve Kroft asked, "You've said that your marriage has had problems, that you've had difficulties. Does that mean you were separated? Does that mean you contemplated divorce? Does it mean adultery?"

Clinton replied, "I'm not prepared, tonight, to say that any married couple should ever discuss that with anyone but themselves. I have acknowledged wrongdoing. I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage. I think most Americans who are watching tonight—they'll know what we're saying, they'll get it and they'll feel we've been more than candid."

It was up to the nation and the press, said Clinton, "to agree that this guy has told us about all we need to know."

Mrs. Clinton, after denying that she was doing a Tammy Wynette Stand by Your Man routine, put it this way: "I'm sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he's been through and what we've been through together. And, you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him."

Time spoke of Clinton's "zipper control" problem and the threat posed by the "bimbo du jour" (at least three other women he had explicitly denied sleeping with were making Gennifer-like charges). Clinton's own staff worked to contain "bimbo eruptions."

The story was huge in New York and Washington. Both Newsday and the Daily News ran the same headline: Sex, Lies and Audiotape.

The mainstream press recoiled from the tabloid stench. But the crisis seemed to provoke a dick-measuring contest. The New York Times, for example, buried its coverage in an unsigned story eight inches in length in the back pages, while The Washington Post devoted 43 inches.

In an eerie moment of voyeuristic self-loathing or delusions of grandeur, the press inserted itself into the story. Edwin Diamond, in a New York article called "Crash Course: Campaign Journalism 101," confessed that the press had dozed through the Kennedy years, "missing three years of phone calls, round-the-clock FBI stakeouts, coast-to-coast liaisons and an organized crime connection," but that "eight Presidential campaigns later, the sex lives of Presidential candidatesare a more open field of inquiry."

"The press," he lamented, "is thoroughly confused, and at times both confused and sanctimonious, about its role in such matters. Currently, the media are drowning in a sea of self-recriminations about their coverage of Clinton and Flowers."

"Pornographers are trying to hijack democracy," wrote a Boston Globe columnist. Time titled a story on the New Hampshire primary "The Vulture Watch."

Robert Scheer, the Playboy reporter who had been present when Jimmy Carter brought up lust, suggested that Clinton should have said, "I've lived a full-blooded life. So far as I know, no one got hurt and I was always careful to use a condom and I urge others, when the need calls, to do the same."

It would not be the last time America played the game of "What he should have said."

The Quayle Moment

The Religious Right had pitted family values against the excesses of the SexualRevolution. The Clinton moment was soon overshadowed by what journalist Lance Morrow called "one of those vivid, strange electronic moral pageants."

Vice President Dan Quayle, who had himself survived a charge he had dallied with a lobbyist when his wife came to his defense (saying, "Dan would rather play golf than have sex any day"), crossed the boundary between the real world and fantasy.

In a speech before the Common wealth Club in Los Angeles, Quayle invoked the traditional law-and-order theme of the Republican Party. He castigated "indulgence and self-gratification" and an entertainment industry that "glamorized casual sex and drug use."

Quayle launched into familiar territory. "The failure of our families is hurting America deeply. Children need love and discipline. They need mothers and fathers. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong.

"It doesn't help matters," said Quayle, "when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice."

Quayle shot himself in the remote. The nation did not want a TV critic one heartbeat from the Presidency. Single mothers and women who wanted to protect their reproductive rights voted Bill Clinton into office.

Déjà Vu Debauchery

In 1991, in the wake of the William Kennedy Smith trial, Congresswoman Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.) proposed the Sexual Assault Prevention Act. The bill was a feminist wish list, a catalog of victims' rights that sought to change the rules of justice.

The bill established a new double standard. Women had won protection in rape trials—shield laws kept their names (but not those of the accused rapists) out of the press. A woman's past sexual history could not be introduced by the defense to establish promiscuity.

The SAPA embedded into law feminist theories about men as sexual predators. Not only were men rapists and abusers, they were rapists and abusers all the time. Sexual harassers, it was said, exhibited a pattern and practice of abuse.

Senate investigators had turned up a second woman who claimed that Clarence Thomas had harassed her. In the William Kennedy Smith trial, women came forward to say that they too had experienced rough sex at the hands of the defendant. The stories were not heard by the jury.

Molinari's bill gave victims of sexual crime the right of "discovery." A man's past was prologue; prior misconduct would be admissible in court. In 1994 President Clinton signed the bill into law. In doing so, he laid the foundation of his own ordeal.

Long before it affected courts of law, the new double standard made itself felt in the court of public opinion. The press took the character issue as a permit to probe public figures. A woman who had once worked for Senator Bob Packwood (but had turned up in his opponent's campaign) charged that years earlier he had made an unwanted sexual advance. The press subsequently uncovered more than 20 women who said the same thing, that the Senator was a serial fondler. Packwood resigned from office.

The American public had forgiven Clinton's past by voting him into office. His political enemies, knowing that scandal has no statute of limitations, that confessions can and will be used against the unwary, saw an opportunity. Conservative Richard Mellon Scaife subsidized a fund for anti-Clinton journalism. It rapidly bore poisonous fruit.

The American Spectator hit the stands in late December 1993. David Brock reported that several Arkansas state troopers claimed to have provided then-Governor Clinton with women on various occasions. At the Excelsior Hotel, on May 8, 1991—five months before announcing his Presidential candidacy—Clinton had entertained a woman named Paula in his room. She had left smiling and had reportedly told the trooper she was willing to be Clinton's regular girlfriend if he wanted.

On February 11, 1994, the Conservative Political Action Conference introduced Paula Corbin Jones at a press conference. The Paula in Brock's story said a trooper had escorted her to Clinton's hotel room. After several minutes of small talk, Clinton suggested "a type of sex" that would not require her to remove her clothes.

The New York Times mentioned the press conference in a 250-word story buried on page eight.

Jones began to supply details. She told a reporter for The Washington Post that Clinton had dropped his trousers and underwear and asked her to perform oral sex. She had headed for the door. She then told two women about the encounter. The Spectator story, she said, had humiliated her.

Although it was too late to file a sexual harassment claim with the EEOC, her lawyers drafted a "tort of outrage" and filed suit on May 6, 1994. She sought $700,000 from Clinton (she also sued the state trooper for defaming her by suggesting she had sex with Clinton). Her new lawyers added to the story. Their client could identify "distinguishing characteristics [in Clinton's] genital area."

Clinton's lawyer called the charge "tabloid trash with a legal caption." James Carville, his campaign advisor, said simply, "Drag $100 through a trailer park and there's no telling what you'll find."

Jones' own sister and brother-in-law depicted her as something of a slut. Her sister told the press that Paula had told her, "Whichever way it went, it smelled of money."

Jerry Falwell began hawking a pair of anti-Clinton tapes for $40 a pop.

The case of Jones vs. Clinton moved through the courts. Initially, the press continued its reticence, or rather, its bend-over-backward practice of reporting the story about the story. Thomas Plate of the Los Angeles Times said, "What the American press is asking is whether Clinton is a serial bonker and, if he is, whether that is related to some basic element of character."

William Henry III pondered in the pages of Time "How to Report the Lewd and Unproven."

Joe Klein, a Newsweek reporter who had covered the Clinton campaign, realized the way to cover Presidential sex was through fiction. Primary Colors (by Anonymous) was a brilliant depiction of the Stantons—a womanizing politician and his wife—that was so thinly veiled, it could have been the naked truth. The novel ends with the narrator facing a moral choice: Can he separate the public man from the private and work for a sexually compulsive candidate out "to make history"?

The Lust Loophole

The stories were there for those who were looking.

In 1995 Anne Manning confessed in a Vanity Fair article that as a young campaign worker almost 20 years earlier, she had performed oral sex on Newt Gingrich when they were both married to other people. According to Manning, Gingrich insisted on oral sex so that, if questioned, he could say, "I never slept with her."

The Washington Post explored "the new lust loophole" in an article that revealed how Senator Charles Robb of Virginia had defended himself against charges of adultery. In a memo to his staff, then-Governor Robb explained, "I've always drawn the line on certain conduct. I haven't done anything that I regard as being unfaithful to my wife, and she is the only woman I've loved, slept with or had coital relations with in the 20 years we've been married—I'm still crazy about her." He too could answer a reporter's question with the coy denial, "I haven't slept with anyone, haven't had an affair." But Robb had reportedly accepted nude massages and oral sex from young beauties.

Are we having sex now, or what?

The oral sex loophole was shared by Clinton. One of the troopers involved in the Paula Jones case came forward to say that Clinton had found proof in the Bible that oral sex is not adultery.

Politics made fellatio a national topic. On Nightline Ted Koppel wondered whether "oral sex does or does not constitute adultery." Experts on the Bible and Talmudic texts opined that the answer wasn't clear.

In May 1997 the Supreme Court voted 9-0 that the President was not above the laws of the land, that Paula Corbin Jones could pursue her lawsuit against Clinton while he was still in office. The Justices believed that his lawyers could handle a sexual harassment suit in such a way that it would not diminish or distract him from his duties as the President.

Never had the Court been so wrong.

The Feeding Frenzy

The Jones team, now supplemented by private investigators, pro bono hairdressers, plastic surgeons and fashion consultants, moved forward. They exercised their rights of discovery, tracking down women (an estimated 100 victims) alleged to have been propositioned by the President. And they set a date on which to grill Clinton about past indiscretions that might fit the pattern of a sexual predator.

Journalists began to look at the legal merits of Jones' case. Trying to explain why feminists were not outraged by the charges of sexual harassment, as they had been over Anita Hill, Gloria Steinem pointed out that, unlike Thomas, Clinton took no for an answer.

Playboy noted that even if you believed Paula Jones' account, no sexual harassment had occurred. There was no quid quo pro. Even if the invitation was unwanted (about which there was some doubt), it was not repeated. Jones was free to leave, as she did. You can't outlaw sexual interest. If you love a person who doesn't love you, that is unrequited love—the basis of all of country-and-western music.

Jones recruited a new legal team, funded by the conservative Rutherford Institute. Interrogatories filed in October 1997 asked Clinton whether he had or had proposed having sexual relations with any woman other than his wife during the time he was Attorney General of Arkansas, Governor of Arkansas or President of the U.S.

Clinton refused to answer.

In December, the lawyers amended their lawsuit to charge that Clinton had discriminated against Paula Jones by treating favorably women who had accepted his sexual advances. On the list of possible witnesses was a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. On January 17, 1998 lawyers interrogated Clinton for six hours.

Monicagate

Judge Susan Webber Wright placed a gag order on the deposition, but within days the nation knew the details of the inquiry. The President had been asked about Kathleen Willey, a former flight attendant and Clinton fund-raiser, who claimed he had fondled her when she came to him for a job.

The President denied the charge. The lawyers asked if he had had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

The most bizarre aspect of the deposition was the definition of sexual relations crafted by Paula Jones' lawyers and Judge Webber Wright: "For the purposes of this deposition, a person engages in sexual relations when the person knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person."

What kind of definition of sexual relations leaves out the lips and mouth? Tossed out by the judge were definitions that specified "contact between any part of the person's body or an object and the genitals or anus of another person" and "contact between the genitals or anus of the person and any part of another person's body." Contact meant "intentional touching, either directly or through clothing."

Focusing on the first definition, the President denied having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

Matt Drudge, an Internet gossipmonger, challenged the President's account. Newsweek, he said, had known of an affair between Clinton and Lewinsky, but had chosen not to run with it.

Newsweek responded on February 2, 1998 with a cover story by Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas. Isikoff had been in contact with Linda Tripp, a former White House employee who had taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky in which the two discussed Lewinsky's affair with "the big creep." In one tape, the two discussed how many men Monica had slept with. "What about the big creep?" asked Tripp. "No," replied Monica. "There was no penetration."

The dialogue was right out of Clerks, except that one of the friends had a tape recorder.

Both women were possible witnesses in the Jones case and had exchanged ideas on what, if anything, they should say. In her affidavit, Monica denied having sex with the President.

Lewinsky told Tripp she and the President had engaged in phone sex, talking dirty at two or three A.M. She had performed oral sex. Lewinsky said she was keeping a navy blue dress stained with Clinton's semen. "I'll never wash it again," she said. There were rumors about sex with a cigar.

Everyone seemed willing to comment on the allegations. Andrea Dworkin declared that Clinton's "fixation on oral sex—nonreciprocal oral sex—consistently puts women in states of submission to him." Camille Paglia said that Clinton used oral sex "to silence women."

There was no shortage of stereotypes. Lewinsky was the exploited intern, the victim—except that friends told the press she had gone to Washington to earn her "Presidential knee pads." She was an innocent debauched by a powerful man—except that she was a Beverly Hills girl who grew up in a culture where blow jobs were as casual as handshakes.

The producer of Wag the Dog, a movie about a President who molests a "Firefly Scout" and tries to cover up the scandal by launching a war against Albania, addressed the nation. "Hey," wrote Barry Levinson, "we were just kidding."

On January 12, 1998, Tripp played her tapes for Ken Starr, the independent investigator who had inherited the stalled Whitewater probe. Starr had spent four years and $40 million trying to establish that the Clintons had been involved with fraud and obstruction of justice regarding an Arkansas real estate deal.

Starr asked for and received permission to expand his investigation. The witch-hunt was on. It was not the sex, the nation was told, it was the lying, the perjury, the obstruction of justice.

It was about the sex.

The Starr Chamber

The President angrily denied the affair, as he had with Gennifer Flowers and every other alleged sex partner. Wagging his finger, he declared, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

Hillary Clinton said the affair reeked of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Linda Tripp had tried to sell a book on the White House to Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent who had previously attempted to publish anti-Clinton trash. Alfred Regnery, whose conservative publishing house had looked at the manuscript, was the Reagan-era Republican who had commissioned Judith Reisman's absurd study of cartoons in men's magazines. His political career had ended when the press disclosed that police, while investigating an odd situation that supposedly included threats to his wife and forced oral sex, once found a cache of porn. A lawyer associated with the Rutherford Institute, which seemed strangely in sync with Starr's office, had represented Reisman in an outlandish lawsuit against the Kinsey Institute. (Reisman had charged that Kinsey was a child molester with a homosexual agenda, that the Sexual Revolution was a lie.) A group of conservative lawyers known as the Federalist Society worked in the shadows, drafting legal motions and exchanging leads.

Starr was a one-man national inquisition. He papered Washington with subpoenas. America watched the parade of shell-shocked witnesses, and grew used to the leaks and abuses of power. When Starr seized the records of the bookstore where Lewinsky had bought a copy of Nicholson Baker's Vox—a novel about phone sex—only a few cried outrage. Starr stripped away executive privilege, lawyer-client privilege, mother-daughter privilege, the bond between President and Secret Service bodyguards, between President and friends.

Almost unnoticed, on April 1, 1998, Judge Webber Wright dismissed the Paula Jones lawsuit. While the then Governor's behavior may have been "boorish and offensive," she wrote, "the plaintiff has failed to demonstrate that she has a case worthy of submitting to a jury." There was no quid pro quo. Jones had not suffered setbacks at work (indeed, she had been given satisfactory job reviews, a cost-of-living increase and a merit raise). That she had not received flowers on Secretary's Day in 1992, one of her claims of harm, "does not give rise to a federal cause of action."

It was too little too late.

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Through it all, the President's popularity rating remained high. Most Americans, it seemed, thought that the President's sex life was none of our business. When a cartoonist drew a Presidential seal with the Playboy Rabbit Head, Hugh Hefner dubbed Bill Clinton "the Playboy President." Here was a politician who embodied lust, whose libido refused to wilt under the pressures of the office, who was vital, sexual and competent. But that very insight—that Clinton was the first politician to have come of age in the Sexual Revolution, to have dabbled with sex, drugs and rock and roll—played to the passions of conservatives fighting a culture war.

It is said that television brought the Vietnam war into our homes. Media response to Monica Lewinsky brought the Sexual Revolution home. According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the major networks had aired just 19 stories about Gennifer Flowers' original allegations of adultery. They had run just one story of Paula Jones' first press conference, nine stories covering the filing of her lawsuit. In the week of January 21, 1998, the networks devoted 124 stories to the White House intern. By August 15, 596 stories had run on the network evening news shows. Oddly, it was a silent movie. We saw clips of Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp walking to their cars, of White House aides and battalions of lawyers emerging from grand jury interrogations, but it was almost a year into the scandal before we heard Monica's voice.

The scandal forced America to confront the often contradictory views it held about sex. News commentators found themselves using words they had never used on air (reporting that when the President played golf with Vernon Jordan, they discussed "pussy").

An editorial in The Washington Post asked, "What is sex?" The author, an associate editor of the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, saw the Clinton scandal as a wonderful opportunity to define sex. She pointed out that most Americans think only of intercourse when asked such questions as, "Is it OK for teenagers to have sex?" Get rid of the foreplay-intercourse-orgasm model and "sex would become characterized not as a single act, but as a wide, open-ended and fluid range of physical intimacies." A more succinct statement of the goal of the Sexual Revolution cannot be found.

The real beneficiaries, according to the author, "would be our children: All sexual behaviors between people, we could explain, are to be considered real, meaningful and significant. All involve real feelings, real decisions and real accountability. There are no ethical free spaces when it comes to being sexually active, whether that activity happens to include sexual intercourse or not."

Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show, had the most honest reaction to the scandal. Sex was above all ludicrous, Clinton a laughingstock. Hardly a night passed without a shot at the President:

"Al Gore is now just an orgasm away from the Presidency."

"I don't want to imply President Clinton is getting a lot of sex on the side, but today Pamela and Tommy Lee asked to see his movie."

"This was the first State of the Union speech that was simulcast on the Spice Channel."

"Mike McCurry said today the President denies ever having an affair with this woman and he is going about his normal daily routine. Denying having an affair with a woman pretty much is Clinton's normal daily routine."

"If President Clinton had followed Joycelyn Elder's advice, he wouldn't be in trouble now."

"Hillary has hired her own White House intern: Lorena Bobbitt."

"Clinton says he wants to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The problem is, to Clinton, those are three different things."

Leno's monolog helped the President. It humanized sex and pulled the rug out from under the stern moralists. Humor is a form of tolerance, a recognition that love and lust regularly include ridiculous behavior.

Compared to the official inquiry, Leno's nightly monolog was lighthearted and free of prudery. He was Everyman, and the laughs shared with six million viewers a night the best indicator of our fin de siècle sophistication. Without it, Clinton and America might not have survived.

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On August 17, 1998, Starr's staff set up video cameras in the White House and interrogated President Clinton for four and a half hours.

That evening the President told the nation, "I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate."

On September 9, Starr sent his report to the House Judiciary Committee. Cameras showed agents hauling dozens of sealed boxes into the Capitol. The independent prosecutor charged Clinton with perjury (claiming he had lied about having sexual relations with Monica in his deposition and to the grand jury), obstruction of justice for conspiring with Lewinsky to conceal the truth of their relationship, further obstruction of justice (deliberately misleading lawyers and asking Vernon Jordan to get Lewinsky a job) and abusing his power (misleading staffers and frustrating lawyers by claiming executive privilege). The Starr report was grimly attentive to sexual details, a Puritan document that was worthy of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

For more than a century, the Sexual Revolution had been about the control of sex. Who should judge—the church, the state or the individual? On the morning of September 11, Clinton played the religion card, telling a breakfast prayer meeting, "I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned. It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine—first and most important my family, also my friends, my staff, my cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family and the American people. I have asked all for their forgiveness."

Most networks carried the extraordinary speech live. On CNBC Clinton's face was surrounded by the stock market tickers, by the Dow Jones and Nasdaq indexes, which twitched like the scrolling lines of a polygraph. The Dow moved upward more than 100 points within an hour of the talk. God was silent, but the market had forgiven Clinton.

On that same Friday the House voted to release the 445-page Starr report on the Internet. Newspapers and magazines reprinted the report, or carefully edited portions.

The frenzy continued. The reaction came in two waves. Talking heads in Washington discussed, in sober tones, recklessly destructive behavior, impeachable offenses, the death of outrage and, oh yes, sex.

The Starr report was about sex—oral sex without climax, oral sex with climax, the stained blue dress, sex with cigars, phone sex and footnote sex. A level of sexual detail that once landed works by artists such as Theodore Dreiser, Edmund Wilson and D.H. Lawrence in court now was part of the Congressional Record. We knew the numbers: He had touched her bare breasts nine times, stimulated her genitals four times, brought her to orgasm three times, once to multiple orgasm. Footnote 209 alleged oralanal sex. The President had masturbated during phone sex and described the act as the ultimate wake-up call.

Some read the report and saw a touching portrait of a man whose sexual world had been reduced to a space no larger than a doorway, who found erotic refuge in the electronic whisper of phone sex, who found himself in a world where it was impossible to consummate passion with real sex. His denial was the stuff of the adulterer discovered, not of a perjurer. Whatever the feminists could say about the imbalance of power, this was a man who was captivated by the glimpse of thong underwear. The leader of the Western world was a fool for love.

There were some who called the report pornographic, pointing out that the very Congress that had voted to cleanse the Internet of porn had itself despoiled cyberspace. But pornography is meant to arouse. The style of the Starr report was more conducive to loathing. The "explicit, but coldly clinical report is a furtive sex drama" was Time's appraisal. "Sanctimonyfest," said columnist Molly Ivins. The formula was as old as Anthony Comstock's annual report to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice: You were allowed to share the salacious details of various sexual scandals and be aroused—so long as the emotion aroused was prudery, not passion, punitive, not pleasure-bent.

For George Will, a Newsweek columnist who evidently has never masturbated, the question for the country was, "Should this man, who is seen in Starr's report masturbating in the West Wing after an episode with the intern, be seen for 28 more months in the Presidency?"

Cotton Mather Inc.

And there it was. The Starr report had obliterated the fences that make good neighbors. In the classic Puritan world-view, the moral agenda of the community imposed itself completely on the individual. Every detail of lust was subject to scrutiny and loathing.

For more than a hundred years, America had evolved away from that invasive, totalitarian code, creating and protecting a space for individual pleasure, individual freedom. The Starr report presumed that privacy was an illusion, or worse—that it was the breeding ground of conspiracy. The report exhumed e-mail, recorded private conversations and forced Monica Lewinsky to divulge the most intimate details of her life. It was an act of public shaming unprecedented in 20th century America.

Ken Starr was Cotton Mather reincarnate, a Christian champion in the grand tradition of Anthony Comstock and Charles Keating. "Who better to bring Bill Clinton to justice," The Wall Street Journal asked, "than a hymn-singing son of a fundamentalist minister?"

Monicagate was a culmination of something, the bloodletting that follows any revolution, the final conflict, a sexual Armageddon. Margaret Carlson, resident scold for Time, had written months earlier, "We've been building to this sexual peak for decades, through scandals concerning bold-type names from stage, screen and sports, Congressmen, Senators and Presidential candidates. And now, live from the capital, it's the President. As the ultimate celebrity trial goes forward, there's little hope of truth and every chance we'll all be diminished."

René Girard, literature and religion scholar at Stanford, told Joe Klein that Clinton was a classic scapegoat. "In Greek mythology, the scapegoat is never wrongfully accused. But he is always magical. He has the capacity to relieve the burden of guilt from a society. This seems a basic human impulse. There is a need to consume scapegoats. It is the way tension is relieved and change takes place."

Clinton, wrote Klein, is "all that his accusers loathe most about themselves: the guilt about the sexual excesses of the past quarter century, the self-hatred of a generation reared in prosperity and never tested by adversity."

Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.), who had on occasion ranted about the "flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality" of our permissive society, now called for impeachment.

Ronald Brownstein, in the Los Angeles Times, declared, "With its unmistakable tone of disgust, Starr's manifesto is not only the opening bell in a battle over impeachment but a resounding salvo in the culture wars that have raged for a quarter century about the impact of the Baby Boom generation on American morals."

The House Judiciary Committee voted to release the tape of Clinton's deposition. The nation watched four hours of legal jousting. Clinton steadfastly defended his admission of inappropriate conduct as sufficient; the definition concocted by Paula Jones' legal team was bizarre. His denial was legally true, if absurd. It was not his job to do the work for the opposing counsel. His anger became our anger. His approval rating rose to extraordinary heights.

Salon magazine, an Internet publication, revealed that Henry Hyde, the Republican who had spearheaded the impeachment inquiry, had himself had an adulterous affair—and, indeed, had broken up his lover's marriage. Hyde dismissed it as a youthful indiscretion. He was 41 at the time. Congressman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), both Clinton opponents, confessed they had had extramarital affairs. Columnists began to question what we required of a public figure, where the inquisition might lead. USA Today reported that an "air of sexual McCarthyism chills the nation's capital."

Larry Flynt offered a $1 million bounty for anyone who could prove adultery in high places. If Ken Starr could squander the taxpayers' money on a sexual witch-hunt, why not a private citizen?

Voters in the November 1998 election expressed their dissatisfaction with Republican moralizers. When the GOP lost five House seats, Newt Gingrich stepped down as Speaker of the House and strategist for the party.

A hearing would only reveal the true sin of America—the hypocrisy of self-appointed moral guardians. But the Republicans still moved forward. When they voted, they would vote with stones.

The House Judiciary Committee split 21-16 along party lines to move the articles of impeachment to the entire House. It's not the sex, the majority said, it's the lying.

The nation watched Republicans who had themselves cheated on wives and broken marital oaths make speeches about sacred honor, the rule of law, about what to tell the children, about the meaning of oaths, about truth and lies and the ability to lead. They watched Democrats discuss the triviality of the charges, the Founding Fathers' intent when they first drafted the words "high crimes and misdemeanors."

It was moral karaoke, practiced indignation, the inspired reading of a Starr-scripted score. It was the great American art of hypocrisy played large. On the day of the vote, Robert Livingston, a Louisiana Republican slated to become Speaker of the House, stunned his peers. Livingston admitted to a series of marital infidelities. He offered his resignation as a model for the President. Larry Flynt's million-dollar bounty had claimed its first victim.

Along strict party lines, the House voted 228 to 206 to impeach Clinton for perjury in his grand jury testimony, 221 to 212 for obstruction of justice. The air inside the Beltway was bitter, brittle and bipartisan. Clinton's response to the vote (and to Livingston's resignation) was a simple statement: "We must stop the politics of personal destruction."

On February 9, 1999, Henry Hyde, acting as manager of the House prosecution team, made his closing argument before the Senate. "I wonder if after this culture war is over," he warned, "an America will survive that's worth fighting to defend."

The Senate acquitted Clinton of perjury (55-45) and obstruction of justice (50-50). That vote, more than any other measure, became the lasting battlefield statistic of the Sexual Revolution. Are we having sex yet? It was almost too close to call.

Postscript

The Sexual Revolution had begun as a clash of personalities. Self-appointed champions grappled to control the sex lives of millions. Anthony Comstock versus Margaret Sanger. Will Hays and the Legion of Decency versus Hollywood. Charles Keating and the Citizens for Decent Literature versus Lenny Bruce. Ed Meese and the Meese Commission on Pornography versus Playboy. The Reverend Donald Wildmon and the National Federation for Decency versus television. Ken Starr and the Religious Right versus Bill Clinton. Like two actors fighting atop a speeding train, the conflict was fascinating. But the train moved on and we returned to everyday life.

In the wake of the vote, Paul Weyrich, president of the conservative Free Congress Foundation, threw in the towel. "I no longer believe there is a Moral Majority," Weyrich told followers. "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values. The culture we are living in becomes an ever wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics."

The future of sex would arrive, propelled by forces outside the political. The attempted Puritan coup was defeated by the city electric, the technology that entertained and educated Americans, providing free and open discussions of sex. No longer could a prosecutor rise and condemn an act with the accusation that good citizens don't do such things. Ever since Edison's vita-scope gave us the flickering image of the kiss, Americans have increasingly made sex visible. The electric lights that had taken sex out of the shadows now provided not a sewer, but a pulsing, sensuous, saner environment. A carnal consensus for the new millennium.

The barrier between public and private wavered, then disappeared completely as sex became part of the news. Modonnar rocked the world with erotic fantasies. Dennis Rodman lived his, as did Ellen DeGeneres, Marilyn Manson and Marv Albert. U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders contemplated teaching kids masturbation. Woody Allen and schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau offered other lessons.

Fashion ads grew increasingly explicit, while elsewhere scandals became the national obsession. We forgave Hugh Grant, and maybe Mike Tyson, but not the Hollywood Madam. Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill conducted a teach-in on the nature of sexual harassment. John Gray turned the battle between the sexes into interplanetary warfare. The religious Right and the FCC targeted Howard Stern's on-air bawdiness. Austin Powers satirized sex in the Sixities. A post-Viagra Hef restored the rep of the Playboy Mansion as Party Central.

The culture wars continued as censors went after rap groups in Florida and a museum director in Cincinnati. A banner by artist Mike McNeilly urged No Glove, no love from one giant wall of Playboy's Sunset Strip offices. Some suggested that cybersex would replace the real kind—you just clicked on the virtual babes. Videhounds watched Pamela and Tommy Lee cavort. Television heated up with Sex and the City, as well as the Clinton thing. Bob Dole became the spokesperson for erectile dysfunction. Our appetite for sex would brook no obstacles.