Alec Mouhibian

A column by me for the Sun (now defunct).

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Recently I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt that said, “My Weiner Does Tricks.” No wonder mine can only play dead.

Loud is the debate over whether the exposure and saturation of sexual content in our culture is destroying our moral values. I’m more concerned about our erotic values. Just as pre-marital sex made nonsense of the honeymoon, pre-sexual chatter is destroying the practice altogether.

Two sexual revolutions have forged a firm new convention, featuring explicit sex-speak that crosses generational and situational boundaries. Gone is the subtlety and double-meaning through which sexual content used to be presented. What goes on between the sheets is best conveyed between the lines, but as that T-shirt shows, this is the era of the one and one-tenth entendre.

Compare any hip-hop lyric to the following stanza from an old blues song, “Too Many Drivers,” by Lightning Hopkins:

Baby you got too many drivers
When you ain’t got but just one wheel
You know things look mighty funny when
Two men’s
Driving your automobile

This joins such fine company as Memphis Slim’s “If You See Kay,” Alberta Hunter’s “You Can’t Tell The Difference After Dark,” and the great antique dealer’s anthem, “If I Can’t Sell It, I’ll Keep Sittin On It.” Will a nightclub ever again impart such charm?

Pop culture has also observed the dressing-down of nudity. And sex education, once comfortably confined to the black market, has become institutionalized. Teens discuss their sex-lives with condom-dispensing counselors, while Planned Parenthood has a Teen Wire website where “experts” answer sex questions from tots.

“I’m a 14 year old guy and I have breasts. What can I do to make them smaller?”

“My grandma said I have a lot of pimples because I get horny. Is that true?”

“Your stupid pamphlets and website have drained me of the desire to see anybody naked,” I wrote them. “What should I do?”

As a philosophical libertine and a practicing eunuch, I’m disgusted by all this frank discussion. Nora Gelprin, “Oral Sex Lady” of Rutgers University, says “We must not forget that the desire of early adolescents to feel sexual pleasure is normal and natural and should be celebrated, not censored.”

Is she serious? Celebrated? Should Trojan release a “party-hat” series?

After my father gave his talk about the birds and the bees, I emerged with a vast knowledge of falcon nesting habits, but not (thankfully) of anything else. It would be revolting to discuss these things with one’s lover, let alone parents and grandparents. The only family involvement should be of a safely distant cousin or uncle, preferably of a slightly perverse nature, who therefore wouldn’t look down on you.

The liberality of our current sexual atmosphere would indeed be cause for private celebration, were it not being so publicly celebrated. As it stands, the openness has diffused sex of tension and made the sexual revolution seem like a conspiracy organized by abstinence-mongers. It all makes the picket-fence, mom-and-pop monogamy of the 1950s throb with eroticism by contrast, and the only thing that now feels even moderately freakish is cuddling.

In today’s intrusive sexual atmosphere, only a prude would even think about partaking in a “blow job,” a “tossed salad,” or a rump romp. These might be tolerable as routine foreplay, but only if they lead to something truly exciting—like a kiss on the cheek.

Simple logic explains why overexposure and informality are turn-offs. Tension is the soul of drama. Drama is the left elbow of lust, giving it an edge. Take out tension and you get the domino effect—that is, dominos becomes more thrilling than dominatrix.

This isn’t just a matter of taste. The destruction I speak of is literal. Oral sex is now so common that it’s no longer erotic enough to qualify as “sex” for most people. “Oh, it wasn’t sex,” you’re soon to hear a friend say, “just intercourse.” Before long, the only act to qualify will be some gravity-defying acrobatic feat, the type that can only be attained through perfect psychic balance, inner peace, and an ecstasy pill.

The old, contrary convention of marital monogamy was much hotter. Marriage may be an evil, sinful institution—but evil is wild. Let’s face it: committing your entire life to someone at a premature age, in a grand ceremony, and saving the point of consummation for an exotic locale is far more glamorous, exciting, and risqué than pantsless collisions at parties. It may be stupid, but you can’t deny its appeal. On the heat-scale, causal beats casual any day.

One might of course argue that the current excess, though devaluing, is still better than the repression of old. Surplus, after all, is better than deficit, right?

Maybe—if there were evidence that actual sex is more prolific than before. Except for oral sex, which officially doesn’t count, there isn’t any evidence. All we have are some inflated numbers reported by the least trustworthy source in humanity: adolescents. Collegians can’t be counted on, either. An acquaintance of mine considers it a “date” any time he steps on a stranger’s foot in an elevator and she says “ouch.” Our surplus is merely in mood-killing words and unwanted visuals, not in pleasures. And it’s not like declining birthrates prove otherwise. We’re keeping the lubricating bathwater but not conceiving the baby.

So “sex isn’t sexy,” as Florence King observed, nor can it any longer be witty. Too bad. The big social lesson of this decade will be that, for all our vulgar bravado, the biggest playas in America turned out to be Catholic priests.