CHAPTER 2
Down the Rabbit Hole
The story of ’90s sexuality really starts more than four million years ago, beginning with the earliest bipeds, up through the Bushmen, and on through the Boomers. Indeed, the sexual codes of our species did not begin with Madonna, or the Virgin Mary, or even with Eve. Nor did America’s ingrained debates about sex begin in Puritan times, let alone the free love ’60s.
The tale goes back epochs. “Our earliest ancestors copulated with just about everybody,” writes anthropologist Helen Fisher in her book Anatomy of Love. “And yet gradually serial monogamy emerged [and, over time] we evolved three basic drives: the sex drive, romantic love, and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brain. They’re going to survive as long as our species survives.”
This is not to say, as Fisher tells me today, that monogamy, anthropologically speaking, means sexual fidelity. “In all hunting/gathering societies, men and women form pair-bonds, but they are also adulterous. We are sexual animals. And we often have many sexual partners.… Hunter-gatherers practice sexual social monogamy and clandestine adultery.”
If what Fisher and her colleagues say is true, then how does the species balance this dialectic? And how is it possible to get an anthropological fix, in the here and now, on a tribe from the 1990s that is pursuing both its own sex drive and its hardwired instinct for romance?
I ask Dr. Helen Fisher to join me on a field study. I ask her to travel back with me to the land of Manolos, Cosmo’s, and Rabbits.
We embark with the intention of observing a small band of women suspended in a sort of ’90s time warp. Fisher has agreed to interpret the clan’s behavior in the context of four to five million years of intimate interaction. We settle on our target: a group of passengers riding around on a Manhattan tour bus and visiting sites featured in HBO’s ’90s megahit Sex and the City. Our study sample consists of fifty-three women in a tint-windowed coach, a contemporary tribe exploring the mysteries of urban romance while taking their cues, quite literally, from four characters on cable television: Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda.
The passengers on our bus are a mixed bag: tourists in their twenties and thirties from Ireland, New Zealand, Miami; three retirees from Australia; giggly knots of gal pals in flats, designer sunglasses, and smart scarves from New Jersey and the outer boroughs. They’re here because each of them has paid $49 for a three-and-a-half-hour tour of locations from Sex and the City. First stop: the Pleasure Chest, a popular West Village sex-toy emporium. And yours truly, as one of only six males in their midst (the other men have come with “dates”), is grateful to have the good doctor in attendance.
Fisher is a vivacious sixty-something Rutgers anthropologist. Trim, attractive, and full of zest, she is wearing a black turtleneck and carrying a chic knapsack. Her specialty is the neurochemical basis of interpersonal attraction. But she has also studied the prehistoric roots of human sexuality and love. She has pondered the torrid dusks before the last Ice Age and the frigid midnights of Victorian England. It is my hope that Fisher, playing a latter-day Margaret Mead, might shed some light on this phenomenon: an effulgence of women, by the dozen, pouring out of tour buses twice a day, six days a week, as they visit destinations (Bergdorf Goodman, Magnolia Bakery, the stoop outside Carrie’s brownstone) that were once prominently featured on a cable TV series—one that has not aired an original episode since 2004. Fisher is more than game.
We follow the women into the Pleasure Chest, where they wander among tubes and jars of lubes and jellies. They eye rhinestone-studded handcuffs and a wall of dildos. One friend asks another to photograph her mock-gagging on a pink plastic thermos-y thing—a large, penis-shaped “Dicky Chug Sports Bottle.”
They pass a display case of cutting-edge vibrators, each with external clitoral stimulators, each a different shade and shape, some bearing distinctive names: Little Dolly, Big Boss, Meany. One by one, as the tour bus waits outside, the women file by to gawk. Hand after outstretched hand swoops down to finger the shafts, stroking neon purple or midnight blue. The women laugh in sly cahoots and then move on, some toward the cash register.
In season 1, episode 9, from August 1998, Sex and the City’s Miranda (played by Cynthia Nixon) visits the Pleasure Chest and introduces the Rabbit vibrator to the initially reluctant Charlotte (played by Kristin Davis). “I have no intention of using that,” Charlotte says, balking. “I’m saving sex for someone I love.” She is persuaded, however, to bring one home for a trial run. And she ends up hooked. (“Oh, it’s so cute,” she squeals. “It’s pink, for girls! And, look, the little bunny has a little face, like Peter Rabbit.”) Peter, indeed. She becomes a hermit, so enraptured with her cunny bunny that her City sisters have to barge into her apartment and perform a “Rabbit intervention.” Soon the sex toy, thanks to Charlotte’s segment, would hit the big time. Because of a TV program, a long-vaunted masturbatory accoutrement—a “marital aid,” as it was referred to in polite company—would become a down-the-middle diddler for the open-minded woman.
The women in the tour group are hardly here incognito. It is a bright Indian summer Saturday, at high noon. And many seem to be pregaming, kicking off a girls’ weekend. In groups of three and four, oblivious to passersby, they enter or exit the store and gather outside for snapshots next to the window display. In the glass case behind them sits a black-and-silver LELO Smart Wand body massager (a sleek and gleaming twelve inches) that doubles, says a shop attendant, “as a clit vibe.” One young British woman shouts to her friends, “Orgasm poses!” and her companions oblige.
If the Sex Decade had a pop-culture apotheosis, it was surely Sex and the City. Premiering in the summer of ’98, the series aired for six seasons (and two follow-up films) to help educate, thrill, and, some say, corrupt a generation of young women. Here was a program that was more like a movie: steamy subject matter, zero laugh track, scenes often filmed with a single camera, characters obsessed with wardrobe. Here were four brainy, attractive strivers all hyperconscious of their career paths, their social status, and their Manolos. Here were BFFs who believed that there was nothing more natural or rewarding in life than convening over a liquid brunch or an after-work round of Cosmo’s (or two or three) and openly talking about their sexual tastes; bemoaning their romantic fiascos; and, once they’d dashed off into the night, openly having sex—on screen—with a motley string of loverboys. (Samantha: “Ladies, can we cut the cake and get out of here?—I have a three-way to go to.”)
In its Sunday night perch on HBO, Sex and the City—based on Candace Bushnell’s sex-and-lifestyle column in the New York Observer—first attracted a more urban, upscale, “bobo”1 viewership. But it soon caught on with a broad audience, at first jarred by—and then enamored of—its barrage of adult situations.
Sex and the City clicked on many levels. With its quartet of intertwined story lines. With its zippy writing, snappy dialogue, and social insights. With its confessional voice. (In every episode, Carrie, as narrator—played by Sarah Jessica Parker—offered pearls of wisdom: “Twenty-something girls are just fabulous, until you see one with the man who broke your heart.”) In all, the series had precisely the right recipe for the times: sex, sisterly candor and cattiness, savage sarcasm, more sex—and binge shopping. The show was groundbreaking in placing its characters in a succession of overtly sexual circumstances; in its ability to derive humor, however dark, from the moral quandaries of social rituals; in its consistent ability to look at the world from a female perspective (often at the collateral man’s expense); and in its focus on single women preoccupied with their romantic lives. It was what many considered to be television’s first uncensored feminist comedy.2 It made the case that the women’s movement had not only delivered gender and sexual equity but had liberated women to pursue their sex lives on their own terms.3
In its first season Sex and the City tackled the ménage à trois and adultery; spanking and anal. (Miranda: “If he goes up your butt, will he respect you more or respect you less? That’s the issue.” Samantha: “You could use a little backdoor.”) Also on the tote board: the high anxiety of the late period, and how to handle a male underwear model—or a dude with a “gherkin” dick.
Here, then, some fifteen years later, Fisher and I witness the all-American spin-off of the show: the glib, postmodern guided tour. From the comfort of an air-conditioned coach, the passengers listen to a woman standing at a microphone. On today’s trip, she’s a young, perky part-time singer-actress who goes by the name of Lou. In sync with her shpiel, four overhead monitors run clips from episodes that correspond to the sites outside. Pass the Madison Square Park dog run and Lou recalls the scene where a half dozen pooches, freed from their leashes, start humping one another. (“Remember the doggy gang bang?” she asks.) Pass the Plaza Hotel and Lou mentions the Oak Room, “where Samantha met the senior-citizen millionaire.” It is time for the ride’s first test. “And what distinctive trait,” she asks, “did he have? Did I hear you say, ‘Saggy ass’? Repeat after me”—and the riders, in a dulcet chorus, chime in, “Sag-gy… ass.”
As we crawl south through traffic, Lou speaks in code, yet the passengers nod at the references and shout out rejoinders. “How about Friar Fuck? Mr. Too Big? The no-happy-ending massage guy? The hot priest guy?” (She’s referring, I find out later, to the nicknames of men with whom Samantha—played by Kim Cattrall—did not consummate.) “How about Sarah Jessica Parker’s EPT test, when she’d just found out she was pregnant?” The bus pack sighs, in unison, “Awwww.” (Lou, of course, means the actress’s character Carrie, but the distinction seems immaterial since Lou also refers to a few recent on-the-street Sarah Jessica sightings.)
The event operators, On Location Tours, have been hosting these junkets since 1999, capitalizing on sexually charged entertainment as nostalgia. Historian Daniel Boorstin, back in the ’60s, had described the mind-set of the modern tourist as being magnetically drawn to “pseudo-events.” But today we have turned this anomaly into an industry. In trying to intuit vanished civilization, many of us have dispensed with walking the cold stones of the Appian Way and prefer instead to meander through invented ruins—in this case the remnants of a televised fable.
While I express an unguarded cynicism, Dr. Helen Fisher views the bus ride experience as healthy and hopeful. Fisher is pleasantly surprised by the unfettered vibe. The bus riders seem largely uninhibited—and happy. Their mothers and grandmothers, she notes, came from uptight generations. “We’re still a sex-negative society in America,” she says. But watching this group smiling together among the vibrators, or pointing out oddities from the windows of their coach, Fisher sees only the slightest hint of inhibition. “In the past, they would have had no outlet for such expression,” she says. “Now they dare do it. In public. They’re back to doing it like they did fifteen thousand years ago. Avidly. I think they’re almost feigning embarrassment.”
What Fisher observes, she posits, is women returning to their natural habits, courtesy of this Potemkin habitat. “In ancient hunting-and-gathering societies,” Fisher explains, “women would go off and do their gathering together every day. I traveled very briefly with a hunting-and-gathering society in Tanzania, called the Hadza. The women go together to do their gathering, and the men often go individually to do their hunting. The day I was there, [the women] were gathering berries out of a tree, and some tubers that tasted like potatoes. They would all go together—fifteen women, with older children. (Very small children stayed in camp, as they’re too heavy to carry.) Their interaction consisted of giggling, chatting. They were talking in a click language. They were very relaxed with each other, talking constantly. In many respects, it had a sense of community that is missing, really, in much of America, because these people live with each other day and night—there’s no privacy—and know everything about each other.”
She continues, “When you read some of the famous ethnographies of the !Kung Bushmen from tribes from Botswana and Namibia, who share the same basic heritage as the Hadza, the women get up in the morning, and they go out gathering, and they start saying, ‘Oh, my back hurts,’ and ‘Boy, he took forever—I don’t want to do that again’ kind of thing. They’re making all kinds of comments about the men and the other women.
“Gossip was the first form of social control. It was the first form of spreading the news in very basic forms of language, most likely as early as a million years ago. They were probably gossiping by then: ‘Johnny’s a pretty bad lover, and Jim has three wives and can’t seem to manage. Jody is sleeping with—’ I mean, come on. The oldest human conversation was probably about the weather. The second oldest was probably about who’s sleeping with whom. Because, from a Darwinian perspective, love matters. I mean, who you have sex with is going to lead to who you have babies with, and who you have babies with is going to make an enormous difference in the future of your DNA.”
Fisher moves on to discuss the role of the menstrual hut in certain cultures. “Men perceived that women were consigned to being ‘cast out’ to the menstrual hut,” she says, “but women like it there. In traditional societies, menstrual blood was regarded as very powerful. So a woman who was menstruating couldn’t touch a man’s hunting gear, for instance. Blood was a polluting substance. I talked to an anthropologist some time ago who lived in an Amazonian community for a long time, and he discovered that these women loved going to the menstrual hut because it was five days off from work. It’s some distance away from the village, somewhere they can talk about life and sex with their best friends.” In short, Sex Before the City. The long brunch. The gals’ getaway. No men allowed.
Fisher, with a knowing grin, stands outside the Pleasure Chest, her arms folded. “They appear to be doing it for female bonding,” she says. But there is much more going on. “By watching videos and discussing these old sex stories from the program—stories they’re already familiar with—they’re empathizing and identifying with the characters. They’re sharing in other people’s joys and sorrows. You see love, sex, heartbreak. You can jack up your whole limbic system, but you don’t have to go through it yourself. Plus, they’re picking up sex tips and the mores of fashion so they can discuss it among themselves. It’s the whole package.”
The women—each with a souvenir Pleasure Chest spanking wand—reboard the bus, which starts purring again. “The bus is a wonderful image of a world that is entirely changed. What’s in the bus—the women—hasn’t changed for two hundred thousand years. It’s the bus—the culture—that’s changed. The bus itself is the expression of a dominant culture in which women are now free to express their sexuality. Marriage was the only women’s ‘career choice’ for ten thousand years. In agrarian societies around the world, until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, pairs were stuck together, economically, until ‘death do us part.’ Along with that, we [adopted] a whole lot of ideas about what a man is and what a woman is, and among those ideas was that women were less sexually interested, that their place was in the home, that they were less intellectual… that they were less economically competent. They were second-class citizens.
“A hundred years ago, on a Saturday like this one, an upper-class woman would be getting the children ready for the park, perhaps taking a ride on her horse, sidesaddle so that nothing would be damaged—because she was a vessel in which a man put his seed. Her point was to have babies and pass on the male line. And the male was equally stuck. The bottom line: there wasn’t an opportunity for a woman to get on the bus.
“But at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution you see women beginning to move back into the job market. So, as women were reemerging to be financially liberated, they began to be emotionally and sexually liberated, and that’s exactly what they’re doing now. Can you imagine? A bus that takes women on a sex tour? In other cultures, they’d be in chadors, covered up, hidden, and out of touch with their own sexuality.”
She makes a final observation. “For millions of years, we lived in these little hunting-and-gathering bands, and in those bands women were just as economically, socially, and sexually powerful as men. They commuted to work—to do their gathering every day. They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal. Women were no less adulterous than men. “The hallmark of our modern world is that women are piling into the job market in cultures around the world, and with that, their natural sexuality is emerging. They can once again express it.
“Sexually speaking, we’re closer now to how we were a million years ago than we have been in centuries.”
For a million years, give or take, nighttime had been a time of rest, a time for storytelling, a time to retreat from the daily threats to one’s survival. Nighttime also became the time for romance. Fast-forward to the mid-1950s. As television became the national (and then the global) hearth, nighttime again emerged as the time for stories—especially Sunday night, when families gathered in the cathode gloaming. Indeed, each one of the ninety-odd episodes of Sex and the City first aired on a Sunday night. And groups of women, sometimes mothers and daughters together, would sit down to watch Carrie and friends talk about love, pine about wayward partners, and screw their brains out. (Meanwhile, the menfolk, to be completely sexist about it, would sit down in another room, glued to sports.)
And sports it is. It is time to click the remote and travel back to one such enchanted evening: Super Bowl Sunday 1992.