In 1999, STDs reached epidemic levels in America. MTV teamed up with the Kaiser Family Foundation to find out who got them and why. The channel aired the results of the study as part of their Sex in the 90s series. But the program seemed to do more to stoke fear than to educate. Likened to “a detention-class film strip” by Entertainment Weekly, the special shamed those who contracted STDs, especially the women.
“Sex is famously hot hot hot, but nobody talks a lot about how badly you can get burned,” warned MTV News host and father figure Kurt Loder. “Misconceptions” and “careless behavior” caused diseases that “most people know little or nothing about,” he intoned. “As clear as this danger is, many people continue to make tragic mistakes that can’t be undone.”
The film doesn’t hold politicians or educators accountable, or demand more resources for sex education. Instead, it heaps blame on the regretful, infected interviewees—almost all of whom were women. The three straight women interviewed told a familiar story. After unprotected sex with a trusted partner, they were now “paying the price” with chlamydia, herpes, gonorrhea, etc. They accept responsibility for “making a mistake,” and admit they deserved the “slap in the face” diagnoses.
Women and girls had more to worry about than physical discomfort. An STD diagnosis meant not only that they could become sick, but also that they would inevitably be labeled sluts. “I had that connection between promiscuity and STD. Once I got an STD, therefore, I must be promiscuous,” said Adina in the MTV film. A fire roars behind her, a reminder of how she “got burned.”
“‘I have to be one of the biggest sluts in the world’ is what was going through my head because this would not happen to somebody who doesn’t sleep around,” added another woman, Kari. A third woman scolded viewers, “‘It’s not going to happen to me’—that’s the biggest myth. It will happen to you.”
Jennie Miller was ashamed to discover she had human papilloma virus (HPV) and told ABC News, “The first thing that came into my mind was, ‘I am never going to have sex again . . . I’ll never date again.’” Women were expected to be sexual gatekeepers, required to set boundaries for going to bed, and blamed if things went awry. But even when women took the precautions to prevent STDs, they were often slut-shamed. An executive producer of Beverly Hills, 90210, Jessica Klein, said she was stopped by higher-ups from doing a scene in which a female character puts condoms in her purse before a date. “They said that would make her seem like a ‘slut,’” Klein said.
TRAUMARAMA
In the epoch just before the mainstreaming of the internet, teen magazines offered the biggest window into ideas and conversations about how girls felt about sex and their bodies. Seventeen brimmed with front-of-the-book features dedicated to answering readers’ many queries about these topics. Today, if you’re a girl with a question, you just Google it. Back then, as strange as it sounds, you wrote in to a magazine for advice, or hoped a magazine advice columnist would answer a question that was brewing in your mind. The gurus at Seventeen knew the answers and delivered them with expert confidence, if not actual expertise.
Readers posed queries about tough topics like STDs and virginity, and often it was the magazine’s staffers, not medical doctors or psychologists, who would reply. Sometimes their “advice” was pejorative and judgmental. In the January 1995 issue, a reader inquired about crabs. Before explaining the parasitic infection, the magazine replied that crabs sounded made up, “but they’re real. And they’re real gross.” Another woman writing to Seventeen in May that year asked if her inverted nipples were normal, to which the “expert” responded, “You just have to deal with those first couple of times being shirtless around someone else and eventually your embarrassment will go away.”
Features like YM’s “Say Anything” and Seventeen’s “Traumarama” published real-life embarrassments, such as period-related humiliations, couples kissing and locking their braces together, and teachers reading confiscated love notes, stoking fear among teen girls that just being a girl guaranteed mortification. They reinforced the “grossness” of girls’ bodies, period-shaming, and the injunction that girls should please boys. Quizzes like “Are You a Boyfriend Addict?” “Are You Obsessed with Him?” and “Are You Jealous?” extended the theme.
These magazines also offered some fascinating reporting on topics like censorship at student newspapers, the real lives of teenage moms, and useful service journalism, like what kind of summer job might suit you best or how to boost your SAT vocabulary. But this fare was less common. I recall as a teenager skipping right past that stuff as I searched for advice that would help me better navigate being a teen girl. Instead, what I read only fed my insecurities.
Teen magazines may have shamed young women’s bodies and sexual curiosities, but they spelled huge opportunity for advertisers. New reads like Teen People, Jump, Twist, and All About You raced to the shelves to capture a sliver of the burgeoning market. By 1998, Seventeen, Teen, and YM circulation numbers hovered around two million per magazine. In the first quarter of that year, Seventeen earned $17.5 million in ad revenue. YM revenue topped $7 million, and Teen brought in over $6 million. Teen People quickly overtook staples Vogue and Vanity Fair in circulation upon its debut.
OBJECTIFICATION THEORY
In 1997, researchers Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts offered a theory about the underlying cause of girls’ insecurities, lack of self-esteem, and body strife. “Objectification theory” explained that women and girls are “acculturated to internalize an observer’s perspective as a primary view of their physical selves.” Thus, because society values female bodies primarily for their function and consumption, women and girls are more susceptible to suffering as their bodies change, like during puberty, but also due to pregnancy, weight fluctuation, and aging. This objectification enables discrimination, sexual violence, undervaluing women, and depression, the authors wrote.
In other words, this hall of fun-house mirrors in which society objectifies girls, then hoodwinks them into objectifying themselves, causes women and girls to experience real-world suffering.
In the absence of an authentic playbook for female identity and sexuality in the 90s, girls coming of age understandably turned to media and cultural scripts that prized sex and objectification. What girls were told about sex—in school and society, and by elders and peers—stood in stark contrast to what girls were sold about sex through entertainment, advertising, and pop culture.
This knowledge void, combined with the struggles of self-esteem and body image created or exacerbated by the media, haunted girls and young women. Advertising and entertainment increasingly sold young women the dictum that their sexuality should be bionic, breasty, and blonde, and that this was achievable through consumption: buy this diet or this underwear to make men want to sleep with you, because being desired by men is the path to self-esteem, power, and love. These pronouncements underpinned advertisements for practically everything in teen magazines and on TV and movie screens. Consumer-oriented messaging about sex would evolve into raunch culture of the early 2000s (see Chapter 12), which inveigled women into believing that feminism and independence were won only through overt, male-engineered sexuality.
Thanks in large part to marketers and educators, teenage girls and boys were imprinted with radically different attitudes toward sex. Boys were encouraged and even pressured to pursue sex (with girls and girls only). Girls like me learned about sex through a scrim of fear, but we were also charged with preserving the sanctity of our own bodies, which we didn’t yet know or understand. Boys’ sexual aggression was celebrated; girls were taught submissive sexuality, and blamed and shamed for sexual consequences.
COERCED AND FORCED SEX
In 1994, sociology professors John Gagnon and Edward Laumann published a study of sex in America that was widely called the most definitive to date. Two hundred twenty researchers conducted in-person interviews with nearly three thousand five hundred men and women between the ages of eight
een and fifty-nine. Perhaps the most worrisome finding was that more than a third of young women reported that peer pressure convinced them to have sex for the first time. The study authors suggested that young women should learn to resist peer pressure as one part of avoiding teen pregnancy. It was as if individual women needed to answer for and fix a broader cultural problem.
To wit, girls’ early sexual experiences were often blurred by substances not uncommonly given to them by boys in the first place. “Whatever gauzy, Fabio-induced fantasies they had about the first time were usually numbed out with drugs or alcohol; the reality was, at best, disappointing, at worst, coerced or forced,” reported Peggy Orenstein in her 2000 book, Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World.
But the conversation about sexual consent was shaped by the concept of date rape. “Date rape” captured the imagination in the early 90s, and led to a backlash against women who discussed it or, worse, accused men of it. This was thanks largely to the William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson rape trials, and also to journalist Katie Roiphe’s book The Morning After, which questioned whether date rape was as prevalent on college campuses as it seemed from feminist conversation. Reports about rape’s pervasiveness worked to debunk the myth that women are mostly raped by strangers; the crime is perpetrated more often by men who know their victims. However, knowing the perpetrator led some women to blame themselves or to question whether what they experienced was technically rape. This reaction dovetailed with the chauvinistic theory that many women who charged rape were making it up. “Men say it is a concept invented by women who like to tease but not take the consequences,” reported Time in 1991.
Still, to stanch the flood of sexual assault, feminists, campus activists, and victims’ advocates marched, protested, and organized Take Back the Night walks. Detractors accused them of being hysterical and classifying too much sex as rape. When you consider that one in four women are reportedly raped in their lifetimes, maybe they weren’t hysterical enough.
This boorish attitude prevailed in the sexual assault scandal and cover-up that embroiled the military in 1991. Eighty-three women and seven men were sexually assaulted by navy and other military personnel during a convention of the aircraft carrier support group, Tailhook. Navy lieutenant Paula Coughlin told 60 Minutes that she was sexually assaulted by a horde of drunk men at the Las Vegas gathering. She said she feared being raped, and was subsequently ignored when she reported the incident to her superiors. A Pentagon report later found that the navy had thwarted its own investigations into the assaults at Tailhook because of inherent organizational misogyny and a desire to save face. It cited an internal dispute during which one admiral compared women navy pilots to “go-go dancers, topless dancers or hookers.” Another high-ranking official added that the victims “would not have gone down the hall if they did not like it.” The Tailhook incident furthered the belief that no woman was safe from victimization or blame.
THE CONDOM QUEEN
Against this backdrop of abstinence, disease, and sexual coercion and violence, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders embraced talking about sex with gusto. From the outset of her tenure, the first-ever African American and second-ever woman surgeon general advocated for widespread sex education in schools. She also championed the availability of contraceptives. Elders talked frankly about safe sex to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease. Instead of flowers, she kept a bouquet of roses fashioned from condoms on her desk. Being disparaged as “the condom queen” didn’t bother her. “If I could get every young person who is engaged in sex to use a condom . . . I would wear a crown on my head with a condom on it!” she said.
In December 1994, at a United Nations conference on World AIDS Day, a psychologist asked Elders whether educating students about masturbation could limit the spread of HIV/AIDS. She answered that sex education should begin “at a very early age.” She continued that masturbation “is something that’s part of human sexuality and it’s part of something that perhaps should be taught. But we’ve not even taught our children the very basics. And I feel that we have tried ignorance for a very long time and it’s time we try education.”
This reasoned answer—that there’s nothing wrong with self-pleasure, and that comprehensive sex education must be the nation’s priority—was not the takeaway. Critics accused Elders of wanting to teach schoolchildren how to masturbate. Even though Elders tried to correct the record and clarify that she hadn’t been recommending that schoolchildren take masturbation tutorials between geography and lunch, only explaining that masturbation was a natural part of life and as such might be included in comprehensive sex education, she was pilloried by the media. Late-night television mocked her for talking about sex. Jay Leno joked that she “pardoned Pee-Wee Herman,” in reference to actor Paul Reubens, who had been arrested for masturbating in an adult movie theater. Conan O’Brien cracked that she would return to teaching classes “filled with teenage boys.” David Letterman mocked her on numerous episodes. In a Top Ten list of least-convincing alibis, he said number two was being “alone in my room doing some of that Joycelyn Elders stuff.” Late-night comedians determined that Elders was too sexual for men but plenty qualified to teach boys. As ever, their jokes belied the double standard that sexuality was forbidden for women to discuss but was men’s province to flaunt.
Elders was right, of course. The country’s abstinence-oriented sex education was failing to prevent disease or cultivate sexually healthy adolescents. Thoughtful, comprehensive sex education could help. But Elders’s comments exposed the shame inherent in sex, shame that was baked into abstinence-only education’s legal definition: “Sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”
According to her biography on the National Institutes of Health website, Elders simply “left office” in 1994. There is no mention of why or how. In fact, her dismissal was almost gleeful. The White House “went out of its way to make clear that her resignation had not been voluntary,” but, rather, was “forced,” according to the New York Times. “If she had not resigned, she would have been terminated,” said Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff. The message was that she was bullish and rogue and could not be controlled. “Getting Out the Wrecking Ball” was the title of a Time magazine article about the firing.
Elders’s male predecessor, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who served Republican presidents Reagan and Bush, had discussed masturbation, too, and in the exact same context as Elders—AIDS prevention. He somehow managed to keep his job. “I went to Washington feeling like prime steak, and I left feeling like low-grade hamburger,” Elders told a reporter.
HORN DOG
Heterosexual male sexuality was cause for celebration in the 90s. While bodily shame and blame for disease stuck to women, men faced no such consequences. Instead, their libidos were enshrined in the media, laws, medicine, and even the White House.
Men’s sex lives were extended for decades by one particular 90s discovery. In March 1998, the FDA approved an erectile dysfunction drug, sildenafil. Soon after, a small blue pill called Viagra crashed date nights and relationships across the country. The drug was an instant hit—some forty thousand prescriptions were filled during its first weeks on the market. Viagra was met with plenty of jeers and jokes about aging male virility. However, it also came to symbolize the superiority of male sexuality over female sexuality. Where was the drug that would help women achieve pleasure in the bedroom? It still doesn’t exist. Influencers believed Viagra was the answer to women reaching for power in the 90s, and predicted the drug would stop them cold. Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse magazine, assured men the drug would “free the American male libido from the emasculating doings of feminists.” In short, sex was power. Now, men could get it in pill form.
Viagra debuted shortly after America learned that the president of the United States had an affair with an intern. The celebration of male sexuality in the 90s is insepa
rable from Bill Clinton. By the time he became president, there was both a familiarity and a fatigue with his caddishness, said Ty West, who covered the scandal for the NBC News magazine Dateline. “Being a horn dog was part of his persona before he was elected. So it was like, we’ve already voted on that. This is not new,” West told me. Monica Lewinsky herself had mocked Clinton’s seamy reputation with women before she became involved with him, parrying jokes about a colleague needing “kneepads,” and disagreeing with female White House staffers who found their boss irresistible.
If male sexuality is prioritized, presidential sexuality is cause for genuflection. The media and some of Clinton’s own staff excused his “horn dog persona.” That Clinton was just being himself by having an affair with a White House intern helped shift the blame for the sex scandal onto Lewinsky. The president’s public-facing discretion on the matter was rewarded by the culture. This took many forms. There were bro-y maxims printed on buttons and bumper stickers like “My President Slept with Your Honor Student,” “Commander in Heat,” and “One More Whore and We Get Gore.” People wore shirts with the president’s photo that read, “Will Work for Head.” A New Yorker cover featured a slew of news microphones trained on Clinton’s crotch, reminding America how newsworthy his sexual magnetism had become.
It even spilled into his dealings with the press. Nina Burleigh, a White House reporter, wrote about the thrill of Clinton ogling her during an Air Force One card game. “It was riveting to know that the President had appreciated my legs,” she wrote. “If he had asked me to continue the game of hearts back in his room . . . I would have been happy to go there and see what happened . . . I probably wore the mesmerized look I have seen again and again in women after they have met him.”
Reporter Tabitha Soren interviewed Clinton a handful of times in the six years she covered him for MTV News, and recalled his comments about her appearance during interviews. “He’d say, ‘That’s a great skirt.’ Or, ‘I really like that color on you,’ something slightly innocuous, but that makes you aware of your body and you get off track. It’s unsettling, even if it’s a compliment.” Soren believes the fawning was tactical, intended to distract her rather than flirt. “After it happened a couple of times I realized, he’s doing this on purpose. I’d walk out and hit my forehead like Homer Simpson. He did it again! How could I waste a minute answering him?” she told me.
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