Agent Orange On Your Secret Garden
I never thought I’d say this, but I’m tired of sex.
I have eros-fatigue.
We have been so awash in lurid details about sexual misadventures between men and women in New York, Hollywood, Washington, Aberdeen, Minot and Little Rock that it’s made me long for some old-fashioned, deadly earnest policy stories.
What ever happened to Goals 2000? Have we reinvented any more government lately? Give me a GAO report - quick!
Is there a sequel to that book Michael Dukakis used to read - “Swedish Land Use Planning”?
Seen in the crimson glow of today’s tawdry obsessions, maybe that book was dirty, after all. Heaven only knows what those Swedes were using that land for anyway.
I don’t want to hear another word about any unexpected features in unexplored places on the president’s body. I don’t want to hear Gennifer Flowers testifying for the defense that there was “no mark.” I don’t want to hear about Marv Albert’s dentata, Frank Gifford’s inamorata or Eddie Murphy’s Toyota.
We are all so complicit in this national pastime that, at any given moment, we are six degrees of separation from Marc Zigo. You start out reading a story about health insurance for poor kids. Then you get to Teddy Kennedy’s name. Then you think of Joe Kennedy. Then you think of Michael Kennedy. Then you think of the baby sitter and statutory rape. Then you think of rape and Alex Kelly. Then you think of Kelly Flinn. Then you’re back to Marc Zigo.
Bill Clinton’s agenda, with airy appeals for racial healing and better math lessons for junior high students, offers no bold substance. It simply looks like a dodge to distract everyone from his scandals.
The only news stories I can bear to read any more are the ones where the French laugh at us and call us zee beeg ee-diots. The American love of Puritanism is even more stupid than the French hatred of capitalism.
They were wrong about Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rourke, but they’re right about this. We are foolishly doomed to be both indulgent and flagellant, to be naughty and guilty, to pretend we have seen the light and then act in the same old ways.
The more men and women blend, the more we clash. The more we talk to each other, the less we understand each other.
Our erotomania has deadened us to eroticism. We talk about sex constantly, but nothing is sexy. Our society is all kinky explicitness. But pleasure demands discretion, silence, privacy, the absence of reporters.
Consider the risible state of feminism. Older feminists spend all their time hiding, so they can avoid commenting on Paula Jones. Younger ones present the blindingly obvious as brand new ideas.
Like the Bill Murray comedy, where he had to relive the same day over and over, these groundhog feminists cannot make any progress because they suffer from gender amnesia, a condition that forces them to keep rediscovering the same things over and over again.
In her hilarious new book, “Promiscuities,” Naomi Wolf reveals to us that women like men and that they like to be touched. Well, duh.
(For good measure, she adds that kids should be taught to neck to avoid teen-age pregnancy. A national petting policy.)
After Betty Friedan, after Germaine Greer, after Gloria Steinem in a bunny suit, we’re just getting around to the ancient Tao instructions to men: “He must know how to feel his woman’s nine erotic zones.”
At a crowded reading here on Monday night, Ms. Wolf told the audience that a certain area of the female body was only discovered in 1976. Then she read from what she calls her most popular page, 185, which describes the ancient Chinese “milestones of female desire.”
“She lifts her body, pressing him. It indicates that she is enjoying it extremely. She relaxes her body. It indicates that the body and limbs are pacified.”
Her Yin tide having crested, her yin essence is in balance. These are the discoveries that 13-year-old boys have been sneaking out of their parents’ libraries for years with the National Geographic and the Kama Sutra.
My fellow Americans, we must be candid. There is sex. Now, can we please change the subject?
xxxx