In Praise of Indecency

by Paul Krassner

  At the 2008 Olympics, eight-gold-medals winner Michael Phelps, referring to the race where his goggles got filled with water, described it as “a wardrobe malfunction.” That same year, an appeals court ruled that the FCC “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” in the Janet Jackson case, and observed that the flashing of her breast happened too fast to be considered “so pervasive as to amount to ‘shock treatment’ for the audience.” But in November, the FCC asked the Supreme Court to appeal that ruling.

  On the radio in 2003, the word “fuck” was censored out of such songs as “Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back),” “A Toast to Men (Fuck the Men)” and “She Hates Me,” with a chorus of “She fuckin’ hates me.” Although the lyrics were bleeped in these songs, disc jockeys were forced to be creative when it came to announcing the titles. Battlestar Galactica invented “frak.” The FCC had declared “fuck” to be “one of the most vulgar, graphic and explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the English language,” no matter the context. Conservative pundit Dennis Prager characterized the fight over “fuck” as central to civilization’s “battle to preserve itself.”

  Then, in 2005, a ray of light. The FCC ruled that isolated use of words describing private body parts—including “ass,” “penis” and “testicle”—were not indecent if aired as scripted dialogue. As a self-taught semanticist, Lenny Bruce would’ve been intrigued by the changing attitudes toward the use of previously taboo words. He wouldn’t have been able to perform on TV his classic analysis of Las Vegas, because the heart of it was about the exploitation of “tits and ass.” But at the 2006 Emmy Awards, Helen Mirren and Calista Flockhart both proudly revealed that they were “ass over tits.”

  “If a joke is just as funny saying ‘penis’ rather than ‘pecker,’ that’s fine,” said Greg Garcia about his NBC sitcom, My Name Is Earl, “but sometimes it’s funnier to say ‘pecker’ and that’s what you have to do because it’s our job to make people laugh.”

  In a report on NPR about Voodoo Doughnuts, a shop in Portland, Oregon, the following was deleted for fear of complaints about indecency and bad taste: “The doughnut store is holding a ‘Cockfest’ contest next week. Contestants, all male, will see who can put the most doughnuts on their unit. Last year’s record was five. No pre-competition training—that is, Viagra—allowed.”

  And fast-food chain Jack in the Box was sued by rival Carl’s Jr. for implying in TV commercials that its Angus beef hamburgers are made with cow anuses.

  At the request of defense lawyers, a Nebraska judge ordered a college student who was raped not to use the words “rape,” “victim,” “assailant” or “sexual assault” on the witness stand for fear of prejudicing the jury. Perhaps she could testify, “He stuck his thing in my thing against my will.” Would George Carlin have introduced a new routine in his HBO special about “The five words you can’t say in court”?

  A prudish school librarian tried to have an award-winning children’s book, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron, banned because a ten-year-old orphan, who overhears someone say that he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog on the scrotum, thinks it sounded “like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

  In March 2007, on International Women’s Day, a public high school in Westchester, New York suspended three 16-year-old girls for saying the word “vagina” during a reading from The Vagina Monologues. Principal Richard Leprine said the girls were punished for disobeying orders not to say the word, which he referred to on the school’s homepage as “specified material.” Writer Brigitte Schoen suggested calling the play Elastic Muscular Tube Monologues. And an episode of 30 Rock revolved around the use of a euphemism for “cunt.” That show was titled “The C Word.”

  At the 2007 Emmy Awards, when Katherine Heigl heard her name announced, she mouthed the word “shit.” It didn’t take a professional lip-reader to ascertain that. Late-night TV show hosts and sitcom characters use this “lip flap” method to say forbidden words because they want to be bleeped. The live studio audience laughs when they hear the uncensored version, and the home viewers figure out what’s being said as if they’re doing a dirty crossword puzzle.

  (I once published a cartoon in The Realist by an artist who knew the New Yorker wouldn’t touch it. The guest on a TV show was saying, “Frankly, I didn’t give a damn about it!” A family watching at home heard him say, “Frankly, I didn’t give a bleep about it!” Thought balloons showed that the mother was thinking “Fuck?” The father was thinking “Piss?” The grandmother was thinking “Shit?” And the child was thinking “Crap?”)

  When Sally Field accepted the best dramatic actress award for her role in Brothers & Sisters, her acceptance speech concluded, “Let’s face it, if the mothers ruled the world, there would be no g-[bleeped starting at this point] oddamned wars in the first place.” Ray Romano—referring to Patricia Fieaton, who had played his wife on Everybody Loves Raymond and now had a new sitcom partner, Kelsey Grammer on Back to You—said, “Frasier is fucking my wife.” Bleeped, of course.

  Not bleeped, but apologized for on-air: Diane Keaton on Good Morning America, fawning over Diane Sawyer’s plump lips, said she’d love to have had lips like that, because then she wouldn’t have had to “work on my fucking personality.” And Jane Fonda on the Today show, talking about The Vagina Monologues, told Meredith Viera, “I was asked to do a monologue called ‘Cunt.’”

  The award for hardcore irreverence without resorting to four-letter words goes to Kathy Griffin. When she received an Emmy for her reality show, My Life on the D-List, she declared, “A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. [Holding up the trophy] This award is my god now. Suck it, Jesus!” Entirely deleted.

  In 2006, Isaiah Washington, a black actor on Grey’s Anatomy, referred to fellow cast member T. R. Knight as a “faggot.” Next January, at the Golden Globe Awards, he uttered the same slur while denying that he had used it previously. Faggot has become the second f-word in the evolution of euphemisms. Now, regarding the euphemism for fuck, “somebody said the f-word” is morphing into “somebody dropped the f-bomb.” Of course, a multi-bigoted person could easily say “no s-word, that m-f-n-f ought to try out a g-d-c,” meaning “no shit, that motherfucking nigger faggot ought to try out a goddam cunt.” But one thing you never hear anybody say is “the n-h-h-word.” It’s still okay just to say “nappy-headed ho.”

  During the 2007 Muscular Dystrophy telethon on Labor Day, Jerry Lewis was doing a bit about imaginary family members, and he started to say to one of the show’s crew members that his son, “the illiterate faggot,” but stopped before reaching the g-letters, saying “no” instead, and he apologized the next day for his “bad choice of words.” He was not wearing the T-shirt that says “Marriage Is For Fags.” Nor, for that matter, the T-shirt that says “Fuck Yoga.” Or the one that says “Fuck Frank Gehry.” Or the T-shirt with a slogan “Fuck da Eagles” that Fox apologized for showing in prime time.

  Camille Paglia dissed A1 Gore for his “prissy, lisping, Little Lord Fauntleroy persona” that “borders on epicene.” Ann Coulter called Gore “a total fag” and John Edwards a “faggot,” explaining that the word “has nothing to do with gays—it’s a schoolyard taunt, meaning ‘wuss’”—which, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, applies to men who are “unmanly.” She said that Bill Clinton’s promiscuity proves his “latent homosexuality,” and she wrote that the odds of Hillary Clinton “coming out of the closet” in 2008 were “about even money.” Hillary denied in The Advocate, a gay magazine, that she was a lesbian. Oh, yes, and John Gibson called Rosie O’Donnell a “fat lesbian vampire bat bully.”

  At the live Billboard Music Awards show in 2002, Cher responded to her critics, “People have been telling me I’m on the way out every year, right? So fuck ’em. I still have a job and they don’t.” Next year on that same awards sh
ow, Nicole Richie recounted her Simple Life experience: “Have you ever tried to get cowshit out of a Prada purse? It’s not so fucking simple.” In both instances, the FCC ruled that Fox TV had violated their standards of decency because any use of the word “inherently has a sexual connotation.” Each violation could result in a fine as high as $325,000.

  But, in what would turn out to be a pivotal decision, the FCC in 2005 reversed an indecency ruling against CBS’ The Early Show, determining that a Survivor contestant calling another player a “bullshitter” did not constitute indecency because it was used in the context of a news show.

  I recalled that in 1984, when I was a guest on the Today show, they wouldn’t reimburse my airfare or hotel bill, because “We’re a news show, not an entertainment show like Good Morning, America.” This, from Today, a program which once featured Willard Scott delivering the weather in Carmen Miranda drag and justifying it as entertainment. But, had NBC paid my way, it would’ve been “checkbook journalism.” Preceding me was a segment about private corporations running prisons. During my interview, Jane Pauley asked what kind of material I would include if I were publishing The Realist then (a year before I relaunched it). “Oh,” I replied, “I’d probably have a satire about private corporations running prisons.” I later learned that the Today show had paid the expenses of the guest who was a corporate executive in the prison business. The line between news and entertainment was blurring.

  In September 2007, a three-judge panel in a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Fox TV’s challenge against the FCC for indecent and profane language. During the live court hearing, C-Span viewers were treated to such uncensored words and phrases as “motherfucker,” “eat shit” and “fuck the USA.” Judge Peter Hall posed a hypothetical to FCC attorney Eric Miller: “This is being fed out by cable here, and presumably the broadcast media can pick it up. Tet’s say they pick up a portion of [Fox lawyer Carter Phillips’] argument, and the words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ are actually broadcast over six o’clock news tonight. Is that going to be the subject of FCC hand-slapping?”

  Miller: “I think plainly not.”

  Hall: “Because?”

  Miller: “For the reasons stated in this very order with respect to The Early Show case. The commission has emphasized that it will exercise great restraint when it comes to news programs.”

  Hall: “Tet me expand the hypothetical, to where Fox— wanting to air, so its viewers are reminded of exactly what’s at issue here—pulls up the clips from the Billboard Music Awards and shows those two instances of Cher and Nicole Richie, as background or in conjunction with reporting on what’s happening in this courtroom here today.”

  Miller: “To be indecent, the use of the language has to be patently offensive, which under the commission’s analysis requires that it be presented—”

  Hall: “So how is a rebroadcast of the clip in the context of news any less offensive than it is in the Billboard Awards?”

  Miller: “Because in that context, as the commission explained in The Early Show order, it’s not being presented to pander or titillate or for shock value. It’s being presented to inform viewers what the case is about.”

  The court reasoned that, “In recent times, even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced ‘sexual or excretory organs or activities.’” The decision cited examples that had been set by the White House. It was acceptable to broadcast George Bush, captured by a live microphone, saying to Tony Blair while chewing on a mouthful of buttered roll, “See, the irony is what they [the UN] need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.”

  Similarly, it was acceptable to broadcast Dick Cheney, also caught by a live mike on the Senate floor, saying, in response to Patrick Teahy—who complained about Halliburton profiteering on the Iraq war without competitive bidding for contracts, and about Bush’s judicial nominees—“Go fuck yourself.” This was on the same day that the senate passed legislation, 99-1, described as “the Defense of Decency Act.” The Washington Times reported that Cheney “responded with a barnyard epithet, urging Mr. Leahy to perform an anatomical sexual impossibility.”

  Nevertheless, the Bush administration appealed the Fox vs. FCC decision on “fleeting expletives,” and the case was argued before the Supreme Court in November 2008. Justice John Paul Stevens wondered aloud if the word “dung” would be considered indecent. Solicitor General Gregory Garre warned that loosening indecency standards could lead to “Big Bird dropping the F-bomb on Sesame Street.”

  An appeals court has reversed the FCC’s reversal in the Bono case, and suddenly he is, once again, not guilty of indecency. But, by June 2009, when the Supreme Court is scheduled to announce its ruling in the Cher/Richie case, the reversal of Bono’s reversal could be reversed. Until then, though, it would be retroactively acceptable to broadcast Bono saying, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.” Otherwise, Governor Pataki would surely have revoked his posthumous pardon of Lenny Bruce.

  MASTURBATION HELPER

  MASTURBATION HELPER

  Pornography is a $57 billion industry—$20 billion in the United States alone, with an estimated two hundred porn flicks produced every year—devoted essentially to providing imagery for men to masturbate by. However, in Indonesia, according to an Internet factoid, the punishment for masturbation is decapitation. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I checked out Snopes. com, and they have nothing to say about it.

  But chopping somebody’s head off as punishment for playing with himself doesn’t exactly fit the crime. Maybe chopping off his hand would serve justice better. Decapitation seems to be a more appropriate sentence for oral sex; at least it’s closer to the scene of the crime. Meanwhile, in civilized nations, online porn has enabled countless millions of horny men to ejaculate on their keyboards. No wonder the terrorists hate us. They think our computers are too personal.

  Islamic Voice describes masturbation as an “abominable and wicked act” that’s forbidden in Islam. The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia stated that masturbation causes disruption of the digestive system, inflammation of the testicles, damage to the spine—“the place from which sperm originates”—plus “trembling and instability in some parts of the body like the feet,” not to mention weakening of the “cerebral glands,” leading to decreased intellect, even “mental disorders and insanity.”

  The fundamentalist Christian New Life Ministries—afraid that our sexually frustrated troops in Iraq will turn to pornography and masturbation—is making available special kits to preserve their sexual purity. Each kit comes with a workbook, a Bible study guide and a daily devotional. “You are sexually pure,” GIs are told, “when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife.”

  Of course, that principle would apply to citizens too. Consider the case of Ronald Castle, Sr., a supervisor with the Department of Social Services in upstate New York. He was charged with harassment, criminal nuisance and public lewdness for masturbating into the coffee cups of fellow employees. It gives new meaning to an old romantic song, “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” Plus, Ronald Castle, Jr. is blessed with a renewed sense of gratitude that he’s alive today, instead of having been burned to death at the moment of his father’s ejaculation and swallowed by some unknowing caffeine addict.

  Rather than going to prison, Castle, Sr. should be sentenced to a kind of community service, where he can actually masturbate for altruistic reasons. Several years ago, Good Vibrations, a shop in San Francisco specializing in sex toys, erotic books and adult videos, declared the month of May to be National Masturbation Month, and a tradition was born. Since then, those in the know have been encouraged to obtain pledges from stores and individuals who sponsor their masturbatory events in cities across the country. The funds raised are donated to various sex-positive causes.

  Good Vibrations’ online customers were reminded: “Make sure you’re we
ll-rested, with ready hands and plenty of batteries and lube—it’s Masturbate-a-thon weekend! You still have time to sign up your friends and family to help you raise money for every minute you spend masturbating this weekend. Spread the message of healthy self-love and collect funds for some excellent charities, all with a big ol’ smile on your face. Download the pledge from our website. Wank on!”

  Gonzo sex writer and educator Theresa Reed, known as Darklady, organized and promoted the first Masturbate-a-thon in Portland, Oregon. Her invitation stated, “Our special location will be revealed when you join the elite Benevolent Society of Masturbators. Come dressed erotically and patriotically.” The party had a patriotic theme: “Masturbate Your Way to Freedom.” Artist Steve Hess contributed the logo, an American eagle clutching a vibrator and a tube of lube.

  The event—benefiting the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, the Center for Sex and Culture, and Planned Parenthood—featured free food and drinks, condoms and lubrication, DJs and live bands, strippers and porn stars, door prizes and streaming video on the Internet. The ThrillHammer Orgazmatron machine proved to be a most popular competition. The woman who rode it the longest became the winner. She was crowned Miss Masturbate-a-Thon and presented with a beautiful tiara, not to mention the afterglow of multiple orgasms galore.

  “Originally,” Darklady told me, “I planned on hosting this party at my home, as I’ve had many large sex parties there. However, when I began talking to the ThrillHammer people, we decided something bigger would be in order. Being online fanatics, we definitely wanted to go beyond the more grassroots, humble masturbate-at-home events being held elsewhere. We held the party at the wonderfully pro-sex space at Ascension Dungeon and had some of the most agreeable and competent security folks I’ve had the privilege to work with. I was very impressed by the enthusiastic turn-out and the innovating things people did. One man brought a pyramid-like sex swing. Local cable host Harry Lime came along with his camera crew to videotape the ThrillHammer fun, and people flocked to both the camera-friendly and camera-free rooms. We had no unpleasant incidents and everyone seemed to have a great time.”