1 In these pages, I will avoid making excuses for double entendres. As novelist David Foster Wallace wrote in his memorable 1998 essay for Premiere magazine about visiting a Las Vegas porn-industry awards ceremony, “It’s going to be a constant temptation to keep winking and nudging and saying ‘no pun intended’ or ‘as it were’ after every possible off-color entendre… [so] yr. corresps. have decided to try to leave most of them to reader’s discretion.” Policy so adopted, under the Wallace Rule. (David Foster Wallace, “Big Red Son” [1998], in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays [Boston: Back Bay/Little, Brown, 2005], 10.)

2 A series of ’90s films—including Jurassic Park, Judge Dredd, Multiplicity, Gattaca, The Fifth Element, and Alien: Resurrection—fired the public imagination, warning of the potential dangers of cloning and similar advances. “These movies, some of them sci-fi horror films,” science writer David Ewing Duncan reflects, “struck a similar chord to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in its day, which was then a reaction to the new science around electricity and electromagnetism.” (Interview with Duncan.)

3 “Irrational exuberance” is the term that Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan famously used in a 1996 speech to question whether investors’ unrealistic estimates of the market had “unduly escalated asset values, which [might] then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions [i.e., market corrections].” (Alan Greenspan, “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society,” federalreserve.gov, Francis Boyer Lecture, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, December 5, 1996, http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm.)

4 Though divorce rates rose to a bracing 50 percent during the 1970s and ’80s, they actually settled down in the ’90s. (Claire Cain Miller, “The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On,” New York Times, December 2, 2014.)

5 War terminology will be used in these pages to refer to American culture clashes at the turn of the century. Such phrases—battle, skirmish, front lines—can come off as histrionic. But given the lives and livelihoods destroyed by these clashes, they seem, for the most part, to be fitting and justified.

1 “Bobo” is short for “bourgeois bohemian,” a phrase coined by David Brooks and developed in his ’90s primer Bobos in Paradise (2000) as a shorthand for describing the nouveau global-citizen-minded, latte-loving American meritocracy.

2 Dr. Jamieson Webster, a Freudian psychoanalyst, holds a contrarian view. She insists that Sex and the City rarely depicts genuine, healthy sex. Of the four main characters, she tells me, “One is single, hung up on unavailable men, and has more libido in her closet. Ironically she writes a quasi–advice column on love. The other is a careerist lawyer who dates passive men. The other is [virtually] a man and fucks like a man and is terrified of commitment. And the last one is a prude obsessed with having a baby. Who is really enjoying themselves? No one is having a full, loving sex life.” (Interview with Webster.)

3 Come the 2010s, HBO’s millennial-era successor to Sex and the City—Lena Dunham’s Girls—would go one step beyond (by way of Brooklyn, not Gotham). “Over all, it’s a show that reminds you that the sexual revolution is a done deal,” Margaret Talbot would profess in the New Yorker, “that few women today see sex as a bargaining chip in a bid for commitment, and that gender parity tends to go along with more sex.… Studies have shown it to be true: societies in which the sexes are more equal are societies in which people have more sex.” (Margaret Talbot, “Girls Will Be Girls,” New Yorker, April 16, 2012, 39.)

1 Shortly afterward, as outlined in a retrospective article in the New York Times, private investigator Jack Palladino was hired by the campaign, reportedly with Hillary Clinton’s consent, to look into Flowers’s past. As part of a concentrated plan, drafted in March 1992, Palladino supposedly urged that “every [Flowers] acquaintance, employer, and past lover should be located and interviewed.” According to Megan Twohey in the Times, Flowers began to get feedback “from boyfriends and others who said they had been contacted by a private investigator. ‘They would say that he would try to manipulate them,’ Ms. Flowers recalled, ‘or get them to say things like I was sexually active.’” (Megan Twohey, “Her Husband Accused of Affairs, a Defiant Clinton Fought Back,” New York Times, October 3, 2016, A, 15; Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds [New York: St. Martin’s, 1999], xxi–xxii.)

2 Others say the Nightline appearance never had a prayer. An Arkansas death row inmate was set to be executed the next night and the governor didn’t want to be seen on TV yapping about the state of his marriage while his state was dispensing with a prisoner.

3 Considered one of the forefathers of modern network news, Hewitt had been the pioneer behind the storied Kennedy-Nixon face-off of 1960, the first presidential debate to be telecast.

4 Carville cowrote the book with his wife, Mary Matalin, who in 1992 was helping to run the campaign of Clinton’s eventual opponent George H. W. Bush.

5 Hillary Clinton’s defense of her husband’s behavior (and her slam of Gennifer Flowers later that week as a “failed cabaret singer” possibly seeking a payday and “fifteen minutes of fame”) would sow the seeds for the electorate’s long-term wariness of HRC’s candor and motives. In 2016, Politico’s Michael Kruse would quote one of Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley friends, Nancy Wanderer, about that post–Super Bowl appearance: “I just said the other day, ‘When did this business start, when people began to not like her, not trust her?’ And I think it’s the 60 Minutes interview.” (Michael Kruse, “The TV Interview That Haunts Hillary,” Politico.com, September 23, 2016; Sam Donaldson, “The Other Woman,” Primetime Live interview, January 30, 1992, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUOhUei6aTM.)

1 In all, one out of every three presidents has been a straying spouse, according to the conservative commentator and political theorist William Bennett, citing Brown University professor James Morone, who has calculated that fourteen U.S. presidents have exhibited extramarital behavior that “set off whispers.” The dean of campaign reporters, Teddy White, felt confident in his belief that of the presidential candidates he’d covered, all but three—Harry Truman, Michigan governor George Romney, and Jimmy Carter—had entertained “casual partners.” (William J. Bennett, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998], 24; Matt Bai, “How Gary Hart’s Downfall Forever Changed American Politics,” New York Times Magazine, September 18, 2014; Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure [New York: HarperCollins, 1978], 529.)

2 Never more so, perhaps, than the night Marilyn Monroe serenaded him with a breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

3 JFK’s sexual rapacity was reckless and, by several inside accounts, abusive. Journalist Timothy Noah, in a review of Mimi Alford’s memoir Once Upon a Secret, called Kennedy nothing less than “a compulsive, even pathological adulterer [who] treated women like whores… [and] had an appetite for subjecting those close to him to extreme humiliation.” (Timothy Noah, “JFK, Monster,” New Republic, February 8, 2012.)

4 Next came three shades of bland. Richard Nixon, by turns gawky and gruff, seemed practically asexual. (In an attempt to throw interviewer David Frost off guard—or to establish a kind of conspiratorial rapport—Nixon joshed with him before one of their postpresidential Q&As in 1977, “So, did you do any fornicating this weekend?” The agonized phrasing betrayed someone unaccustomed to making manly small talk—let alone fornicating.) Gerald Ford was a well-known straight arrow whom comedians would depict as a stumblebum. And the devout peanut farmer Jimmy Carter proved to be the National Prude. His Baptist beliefs—he would admit to none other than Playboy—helped him wrestle with his own private sex fantasies. “I try not to commit a deliberate sin,” he confessed, but “I’m human and I’m tempted.… I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.… And God forgives me for it.” While the nation’s youth were getting their groove on, the Oval Office had become, for a time, a hormonal no-fly zone. (David Greenberg, “The President Who Never Came in from the Cold,” Slate.com, December 4, 2008; Robert Scheer, “Playboy Interview: Jimmy Carter,” Playboy, November 1976.)

5 Though the Clinton household lacked a trustworthy father figure, Bill would later recount that he had an extended family, with relatives “in fifteen of Arkansas’ seventy-five counties.” They were a colorful bunch. The first strong male presence in his childhood was his mother’s father, James Eldridge Cassidy, a grocery store proprietor who taught him to treat all men and women, black or white, as equals. Buddy, his great-uncle, had conquered his own struggles with drink, swearing off alcohol one day and keeping that vow for half a century. The first time young Bill met his stepdad’s father, a parole officer, the man was en route to the state pen, escorting an inmate. As Bill would recount that initial encounter with “Poppy Al”: when his step-granddad first walked up to the family house in Hope, he was accompanied by a prisoner—handcuffed to his wrist. (Bill Clinton, My Life [New York: Random House/Vintage, 2004], 10–11, 15, 31).

6 The area’s healing waters had persuaded sixteenth-century explorers like Hernando de Soto to believe they’d stumbled upon the proverbial “fountain of youth.” As psychoanalytic pioneer Otto Rank pointed out, many heroes of history and the great myths had their origins in or around water, sometimes involving vessels that float along a river, echoing the birth trauma. Rank cites Babylonia’s Sargon, the Israelites’ Moses, the Hindus’ Karna, as well as Oedipus and Romulus and Remus. (Clinton, My Life, 25; Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero [1914] and Other Writings [New York: Random House/Vintage, 1964], 14–44.)

7 Arnie Sachs, the local cameraman who chronicled the scene, would remember Clinton making a beeline for JFK: “This kid barrels through the line [of American Legion representatives] and grabs the president’s hand, so I took the shot.” Sachs, who ran a company in Washington, D.C., called Consolidated News Photos as well as a photo shop just steps from Capitol Hill, had been assigned by the American Legion that day to cover the students’ visit and managed to catch the fateful shake on 2¼-inch film. (Clinton, My Life, 62; Adam Bernstein, “News Photographer Arnie Sachs; Took Pictures of 11 Presidents,” Washington Post, November 7, 2006; interview with J. P. Pappis.)

8 This phrase was originally meant to describe the contributors and readers drawn to the hipster magazine of the New South, the beloved Oxford American, launched in 1992. (Dwight Garner, “It Was the New Yorker with Hot Sauce,” New York Times, December 3, 2012.)

9 Often written as “Willy.”

10 Leave it to Boomers to call a politician a rock star. Rolling Stone ’s founder, Jann Wenner, had reportedly dubbed Clinton the “first rock and roll president.” But before the phrase “he/she’s a rock star” became devalued through overuse, its application in connoting an iconic personality was evidence that the rock idol, above all else in the Boomersphere, was the epitome of rebellious individualism, a person in whom success, excess, popularity, and cool had found full flower. In the ’80s you were “the King of Pop” or “the Pope of Print” or a “Master of the Universe.” By the ’90s, however, Top Dog had one designation: Rock Star. The jargonauts at Merriam-Webster trace the first use of the term to 1991, when novelist Stephen King was dubbed “a rock star of an author—his horror movies routinely go multiplatinum, and his byline operates like a brand name.” In fact, the term—as applied to non–rock stars—was prefigured by the term “superstar,” the most obvious example being the title character in the ’70s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. (Joe Eszterhas, American Rhapsody [New York: Knopf, 2000], 3; William Safire, “A Star Is Born,” New York Times, March 26, 2006; Sarah Crompton, “Andrew Lloyd Webber Interview: The Second Coming of Jesus Christ Superstar,” Telegraph [U.K.], September 21, 2012.)

11 While Clinton had exuded heat, Barack Obama was a throwback, exuding cool. Author Ishmael Reed called him “the president of the Cool,” comparing Obama’s demeanor to the great jazz masters of bebop, who possessed “an intensity and focus that lurk[ed] underneath the detached exterior.” Columnist David Brooks made a similar observation, noting, “Obama has displayed a kind of ESPN masculinity: post-feminist in his values, but also thoroughly traditional in style—hypercompetitive, restrained, not given to self doubt, rarely self-indulgent.… He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence.” Obama and fellow postboomers (from “the era of the workout gym,” as Brooks puts it) had adopted a “low friction manner” to suit the prevailing tone of their generation, which “was cool, not hot.” (Ishmael Reed, “The President of the Cool,” New York Times, December 19, 2013, A39; David Brooks, “The ESPN Man,” New York Times, May 15, 2012, A27; Brooks, “The Generation War,” New York Times, October 12, 2012, A27.)

12 “Bub” was used in the late nineteenth century as a term of endearment when one male wanted to convey brotherly closeness to another. If we are to believe the Dictionary of American Regional English, “bubba” was used in similar fashion among black males in certain parts of the South. But by 1979 the word came to signify a southern white male who held more or less conservative values. Though generally acceptable among certain bubbas, according to linguistic watchdog William Safire it was a synonym for “redneck” when applied to poor rural whites. (William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], based on Random House edition, 1993 [revised], 85.)

13 The photo, in fact, was taken on New Year’s Eve 1957 at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. And Cooper, as it happens, was the star of Clinton’s favorite film, High Noon, which the president reportedly screened seventeen times in the White House. (Graydon Carter and David Friend, eds., Vanity Fair’s Hollywood [New York: Viking, 2000], 10–11; Glenn Frankel, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic [New York: Bloomsbury, 2017], 294–95.)

14 Clinton’s attraction to Hollywood was more than just the starstruck fascination of a film geek. Players in the entertainment world—most of them Boomers—had been among his most visible supporters and fund-raisers. According to Time, the president did not hide the fact. During his “first 125 days” in office he hosted “Billy Crystal, Barbra Streisand, Sharon Stone (twice), Richard Gere, Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Quincy Jones, Sinbad, Christopher Reeve, John Ritter, Sam Waterston, Hammer, Lindsay Wagner and Judy Collins.” One had to stifle the urge to call the Lincoln Bedroom the Boom Boom Room. (Kurt Andersen, “The Clinton-Hollywood Co-Dependency,” Time, June 7, 1993.)

15 And all while making whoopee. Clinton, according to his sometime strategist Dick Morris, was asked a theoretical question on President’s Day 1995: “If you could ask your idol, John Kennedy, one question and only one question, what would it be?” The president later joked to Morris that what he’d really wanted to say was, “How did you do it? How did you get away with it?” (Morris, Behind the Oval Office, xviii.)

16 None other than Kenneth Starr, Clinton’s nemesis, would eventually deign to praise him on this score: “His genuine empathy for human beings is absolutely clear. It is powerful. It is palpable. And the folks of Arkansas really understood that about him, that he genuinely cared. The ‘I feel your pain’ is absolutely genuine.” (Nick Gass, “Ken Starr Praises, Laments Bill Clinton’s Legacy,” Politico.com, May 25, 2016.)

17 Indeed, Hillary Clinton won the 2008 New Hampshire presidential primary after appearing to mist up at a much-photographed gathering with voters in a coffee shop. (Karen Breslau, “Hillary Clinton’s Emotional Moment,” Newsweek, January 6, 2008.)

18 The era even created a new movie genre: the “guy cry” picture, epitomized by Field of Dreams (the 1989 absent-father baseball classic that would cause legions of grown men to weep) and 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, which Vanity Fair would call “the ultimate in ‘guy cry’ cinema.” (Margaret Heidenry, “The Little-Known Story of How The Shawshank Redemption Became One of the Most Beloved Films of All Time,” VanityFair.com, September 22, 2014.)

1 Closer to our day, Andi Zeisler, the creative director of Bitch Media, has noted that there is also a palatable, roll-your-own, consumer feminism—“marketplace feminism”—that has largely decoupled feminism from politics, positioning the movement as “a cool, fun, accessible identity that anyone can adopt.” This is, in its way, a kind of progress. But as Zeisler warns, the privatization of feminism is at a perilous remove from the feminist waves of the past, which were grounded in collective action intended to affect policy and bring down oppressive hierarchies. (Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement [New York: PublicAffairs, 2016].)

2 Themes set out in Roiphe’s article were explored more deeply in her widely read book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism.

3 In 1991, at the annual Tailhook gathering of Navy and Marine aviators, a gauntlet of intoxicated officers and others manhandled dozens of female military personnel, without their superiors objecting. A Pentagon report would later describe a variety of other sexually coercive or offensive acts at the convention. (“Excerpts from the Pentagon Report,” New York Times, April 24, 1993, A1; Eloise Salholz and Douglas Waller, “Tailhook: Scandal Time,” Newsweek, July 6, 1992; “One Lesson from a Messy Scandal,” editorial, New York Times, November 14, 2012, A28.)

4 The term had been in use, according to writer Ariel Levy, since at least the mid-’70s, around the time Susan Brownmiller published her seminal Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. The phrase, insists Levy, “was employed by the members of the women’s movement who wanted to distinguish themselves from the antiporn faction. But, of course, all of the feminists thought they were being sex-positive.” (Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture [New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2005], 63.)

5 New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, among many others, would rail about the Esquire story, declaring that it reduced many activists in the contemporary women’s movement to proponents of a kind of “babe feminism,” espousing a handful of issues that would make the discerning male salivate: (a) “Good Feminism = Great Sex”; (b) women are “too busy eviscerating one another to take [men] on”; and (c) “anyone who has been suspicious of the movement heretofore can have his fears confirmed: we’re angry because we’re ugly.” (Tad Friend, “Yes,” Esquire, February 1994; Anna Quindlen, “Public & Private; And Now, Babe Feminism,” New York Times, January 19, 1994.)

6 Part of the issue was physiological. As mentioned elsewhere in these pages, many preteens were demonstrating an anatomical acceleration in their sexual maturity. In 1997, a study of thousands of girls in the United States and Canada was published to much fanfare—and controversy. New statistics suggested that the age of the onset of secondary signs of puberty (which for five decades had typically hovered around thirteen years of age) had recently dropped to age eight for as many as 15 percent of the children surveyed. The possible causes influencing such premature development: additives in milk and beef, an obesity epidemic, longer daily exposure to light in industrialized society, and the environmental disruptions to the food supply due to substances like DDF and PCBs. “It’s as if an entire generation of girls has been put on hormonal fast-forward,” Time declared in a cover story. “Childhood is short enough as it is, with kids bombarded from every direction by sexually explicit movies, rock lyrics, MTV videos and racy fashions.” In a relatively narrow window of time, then, profound sexual self-awareness had become a crucial part of life among a much younger population. (Michael Lemonick, “Early Puberty: Why Girls are Growing Up Faster,” Time, October 30, 2000; Gina Kolata, “Doubters Fault Theory Finding Earlier Puberty,” New York Times, February 20, 2001, A1, 16.)

7 “It was parents, particularly fathers, who translated Title IX into a middle-class lifestyle known as ‘soccer parenting,’” writes Kay S. Hymowitz in Manning Up. “They loved having daughters who played sports.… It sure beat jump rope and tea parties.” (Kay S. Hymowitz, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys [New York: Basic Books, 2011], 67.)

8 The group, with albums and song titles like “Pussy Whipped,” “I Like Fucking,” and “Suck My Left One,” says culture writer Julianne Pepitone, “became a seminal part of the Olympia, Washington, and Washington, D.C., punk-rock scenes, proving grunge and grit weren’t just for the boys.” (Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven [New York: Hyperion, 2001]; interview with Pepitone.)

9 Hanna, one bleary night in 1990, had spray-painted the bedroom wall of Vail’s boyfriend Kurt Cobain, emblazoning the phrase KURT SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT. Hanna, according to Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross, “was referring to a deodorant for teenage girls, so her graffiti was not without implication: Tobi used Teen Spirit, and by writing this on the wall, Kathleen was taunting Kurt about sleeping with [Vail], implying that he was marked by her scent.” After Vail and Cobain’s subsequent breakup, he would write a cycle of songs that were ostensibly Vail-inspired, becoming the centerpiece of Nirvana’s decade-shaking Nevermind. (Cobain would meet his future wife, Courtney Love, in 1990.) (Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven, 167–69; Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution [New York: Harper Perennial, 2010], 49–50; David Fricke, “Life After Death,” Rolling Stone, December 15, 1994.)

10 Grrrls, womyn, and other terms were coined, often ironically.

11 There was a girl band surge, with groups such as TLC, Salt-N-Pepa, Indigo Girls, and Destiny’s Child drawing a large fan base. A mania arose for the Spice Girls, the British pop group. “The Spice Girls were having fun,” says the actor Alan Cumming, who would appear in the performers’ 1997 film Spice World. “They were very sexy and confident but it wasn’t all just for men’s enjoyment. It was very pro-women, [projecting] really good sort of messages for young girls. They were sexy but not inappropriate. They were very concerned about empowering women. That was their whole thing: Girl Power.” (Interview with Cumming.)

12 The preface actually appeared separately, two years after Sexual Personae was published. (Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays [New York: Random House/Vintage, 1992], xi, 101–24.)

13 The political triumph of Donald Trump a generation after Faludi’s book was published would exemplify, to many, a sort of Angry White Male whiplash that had finally resurfaced after the backlash to the backlash.

14 Some argued that female beauty, in counterpoint to Wolf’s proposition, was not a social construct manufactured to perpetuate male supremacy. It was instead an expression of aesthetics, taste, sex appeal, perceived fecundity (or virginity), animal magnetism, fear (or envy) of women’s creative power, physical and indeed metaphysical attraction. Psychologist Nancy Etcoff, for one, in her 1999 book Survival of the Prettiest, would express the belief that “beauty is a universal part of human experience.… It provokes pleasure, rivets attention, and impels actions that help ensure the survival of our genes.” The point: the female form, from epoch to epoch, has always been idealized and aggrandized, largely because of its sexual components. (Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty [New York: Doubleday, 1999].)

1 Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, in contrast—a political contemporary of Clinton’s—innately understood that to succeed at the time, in the words of journalist Leslie Bennetts, she had to “cloak her authority in gender mufti.” Pelosi, for example, would describe “her ability to order congressmen around [by] using her ‘mother-of-five voice.’” (Leslie Bennetts, “Pinning Down Hillary,” Vanity Fair, June 1994.)

2 Even Joe Klein, in his roman à clef about the Clintons, Primary Colors, would conjure a sex scene in which the Hillary character has an encounter with the protagonist, campaign strategist Henry Burton. Burton’s reaction: “I’d never, I realized, made love before to a woman who used hair spray.” (Anonymous [later revealed to be Klein], Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics [New York: Random House, 1996], 247.)

3 In 1998, Clinton foresaw a not insignificant downside of a no-holds-barred Internet, calling the new technology “exciting,” but wondering how the medium, “without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function… [would protect your] right to defend your reputation, or to respond to what someone says?” Then in Philadelphia, in 2016, upon accepting her party’s nomination as its presidential candidate, she would allow, “The truth is, through all those years of public service, the ‘service’ part has always come easier to me than the ‘public’ part.” (Rebecca Eisenberg, “First Lady Just Doesn’t Get It,” SFgate.com, January 22, 1998; “Hillary’s DNC Speech, Annotated,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2016.)

4 Columnist and critic Barbara Lippert would call her “a walking Rorschach test for our own ambivalences. In the stereotypical labeling of things male and female, it’s easy to feminize him and masculinize her.” (Barbara Lippert, “The Hillary Mystique,” New York, February 9, 1998.)

5 New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg would observe, “There are more ‘gates’ affixed to her last name—Travelgate, Whitewatergate, now Emailgate—than there are gates in the Old City of Jerusalem.” And the Times ’s Frank Bruni would declare, the morning after Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump, “She was forever surrounded by messes… all of them exhausting to voters who had lived through a quarter century of political melodrama with her.” (Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, August 8, 2016, A1, 14; Frank Bruni, “Donald Trump’s Shocking Success,” New York Times, November 9, 2016.)

6 In their post–White House years, Clinton and her husband reportedly took in nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in pretax income, much of it in speaking fees. (Dan Alexander, “How the Clintons Have Made $230 Million Since Leaving the White House,” Forbes, October 13, 2015.)

7 When praising her at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, President Obama, her onetime opponent, would state unequivocally, “There has never been a man or a woman—not me, not Bill, nobody—more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.” He then looked up at the ex-prez in the balcony seats, adding, “I hope you don’t mind, Bill, but I’m just telling the truth, man.” (Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Democratic National Convention,” Philadelphia, July 28, 2016, www.whitehouse.gov.)

8 “Virginity is mine to claim, is Madonna’s message,” columnist James Wolcott would write, duly impressed in the summer of 1985. “I’m pure as long as I belong to myself. This seems to me healthier than Brooke Shields’s campaign to make a national shrine out of her hymen.” (James Wolcott, “Let the Mascara Run,” Vanity Fair, August 1985, 71.)

9 I discussed the book with Sischy, the respected critic of the visual arts and longtime editor of Interview, over lunch, and in a follow-up email exchange in 2015, two months before her death from breast cancer. Sischy’s take: “[Sex] seemed to want to be a fetish object for the masses.… Madonna had such a strong track record of tapping into underground ideas and bringing them into the mainstream in a smart way. This time it didn’t work. In contrast to what was going on in the art world, Madonna’s Sex book felt like it was too manufactured and very commercial. The thing that’s interesting about the subject of sex is that when it is commercialized it loses its zip. The audience can tell. This project failed because it had such an aura of commerce that took over. It had an advertising sensibility—models were cast in a big open call, as I remember—and the whole project was accomplished in a matter of days, as opposed to something that was actually lived. With Sex there was a feeling in the art community that the real battles of the day [over AIDS awareness and action, LGBT rights, sexual exploration, gender roles, and so on] had been exploited and that people who had no real investment in these struggles had come in and made a flashy and portentous product of it all. It was a shame because Madonna genuinely cared about these issues and she herself had been on the front line, and continued to be. But this was a misstep.”

10 The 2016 documentary, Strike a Pose, was directed by Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan.

11 No one said it better than Madonna’s soul mate academician, Camille Paglia: “Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, ‘No more masks.’ Madonna says we are nothing but masks. Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism.” (Camille Paglia, “Madonna—Finally, a Real Feminist,” New York Times, December 14, 1990.)

12 Among those to appear in cameos on the broadcast: Melissa Etheridge, k. d. lang, Demi Moore, and Oprah Winfrey—the latter portraying Ellen’s therapist. (John J. O’Connor, “Coming Out Party: The Closet Opens, Finally,” New York Times, April 30, 1997.)

13 Glamorize, and how. Two weeks after the Time story, DeGeneres and Anne Heche would be invited to the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. They would meet President Clinton—glam himself, in black tie—and laugh along with the audience when comedian Jon Stewart said from the dais that the actress’s coming out had really been “an elaborate ruse to keep Larry King from hitting on her.” (Patrick Rogers, “Girls’ Night Out,” People, May 12, 1997.)

14 In eight films from 1990 to 1997, Moore plays a woman who communicates with a deceased lover (Ghost); who may have murdered an abusive husband (Mortal Thoughts); who serves as legal counsel in the staunchly male bastion of the Marine Corps (A Few Good Men); who considers a one-night stand in exchange for a million dollars (Indecent Proposal); who sexually harasses a male underling at work (Disclosure); who incurs her community’s wrath after falling for the local pastor (The Scarlet Letter); who, as a single mom, works as an exotic dancer (Striptease); and who volunteers to go through grueling Navy SEAL training (G.I. Jane).

15 Later in the decade the term “MILF” would enter general parlance, popularized by the 1999 film American Pie.

16 Among Thomas’s supporters for the appeals court position was Patrick McGuigan, part of hard-liner Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation, according to journalists Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in their book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. During Thomas’s fight for the Supreme Court post, wrote Mayer and Abramson, far-right figures Gary Bauer and William Kristol played key roles, as did an important Thomas mentor, Senator John Danforth, the Missouri Republican, who during the hearings would pray with Thomas and his wife, Virginia, in the senator’s office bathroom. As reported by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker, Thomas would officiate the 1994 wedding of conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh and currently counts among his friends Limbaugh’s fellow talk-show eminence Mark Levin. Virginia Thomas would later become an important force in the Tea Party movement. (Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994], 152–55, 170–71, 192–94, 289; Virginia Lamp Thomas, “Breaking Silence,” People, November 11, 1991; Jeffrey Toobin, “Partners,” New Yorker, August 29, 2011, 46; Harrison Smith, “Supreme Court Justices Officiate Lots of Weddings,” Washingtonian, May 18, 2015.)

17 None other than Robert Bork would reflect, “During the worst of the Clarence Thomas hearings, [he] was subjected to scurrilous and vulgar sexual allegations that were telecast internationally. The shock of seeing how far our government processes had descended was so great that I went to a friend’s office and said, ‘Television is showing the end of Western civilization in living color.’” (Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline [New York: HarperCollins, 1996], 335.)

18 In 2003, it would be revealed that unapologetic segregationist Thurmond—who spoke out often against the mixing of races—was in fact the father of a biracial daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams. Her true lineage had been kept a family secret for nearly seventy years. (Jelani Cobb, “The Segregationist’s Daughter,” New Yorker, February 7, 2013.)

19 In 2010, Virginia Thomas would leave a voicemail message on Anita Hill’s telephone answering machine, actually requesting an apology. (Charlie Savage, “Clarence Thomas’s Wife Asks Anita Hill for Apology,” New York Times, October 19, 2010.)

20 In but one example, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, according to a New York Times story written during the 1992 campaign, “specifically ran for the Democratic Senate nomination out of anger that Professor Hill had been ignored and Justice Thomas confirmed.” (Deborah Sontag, “Anita Hill and Revitalizing Feminism,” New York Times, April 26, 1992.)

1 “You can YouTube it—it’s hilarious,” Carville says. “It’s so funny you can’t stop laughing. So then when Stuttering John said, ‘Did [Governor Clinton] wear a condom?,’ [the attorney says,] ‘Well, that’s enough, we’re going to cut this off, it’s getting out of hand now.” (Flowers’s lawyer actually says, “We’re going to put this to a stop if there are any further questions that are degrading in my opinion.”) (Interview with Carville.)

2 “It got to be quite a big circus,” remembers Dan Payne. The Democratic consultant, along with a Republican counterpart, Todd Domke, had been asked to show up at Boston’s local ABC studio to be ready to comment on air as soon as the Flowers press conference ended. Payne recalls watching the raw feed with Domke and a few Channel 5 staffers. “It’s sort of looking like a press-chaos scene, with nobody knowing where this is going.… Everybody’s yelling at the same time. Domke, at the very end, [turns to us and] says, ‘Boy, I feel like I need a cigarette after that’—it was so raunchy.” But Payne had to shift gears—and fast. When asked on camera for his assessment of the fallout, if any, from the press conference, he gave a withering comment that in context seemed sensible at the time, but would become the stuff of prognostication legend. Payne’s sound bite would later be showcased in the Clinton campaign documentary The War Room : “The friction in this is going to be too much for Clinton to survive. I think it’s really a matter of days before he’ll have to get out [of the race]. If not hours.” That pronouncement, now considered something of a classic misjudgment, would usher in twenty-five years’ worth of dead-wrong political punditry. (Interview with Payne; The War Room, Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, directors [Cyclone Films, McEttinger Films, Pennebaker Associates, 1993].)

3 In a recent oral history of the New Hampshire showdown, Myers would recount a single, shining eleventh-hour rally at an Elks Club in Dover, New Hampshire, at which an exhausted Bill Clinton took the podium. “The place was full of union guys who were skeptical,” Myers told the New York Times. “Who is this guy? A draft dodger, a womanizer? But then Clinton talked about their lives and said, ‘I’ll be with you till the last dog dies.’… As long as I live, there will never be a political event that could come anywhere near that one in Dover.” (Patrick Healy, “Bill Clinton’s 1992 Make-or-Break Stand in New Hampshire,” New York Times, February 9, 2016, A14.)

4 On an entirely different level, Clinton was also capitalizing on the electorate’s growing unease with the media. Many viewed a vote for the Arkansas governor to be a vote against what he’d identified on 60 Minutes as the press’s perpetual “game of ‘gotcha.’” While many were put off by what they considered flimflam, others envied Clinton’s ability to work the angles—to keep his wife and maintain an affair or two; to run as a fortysomething outsider and run an entire state government. You had to hand it to the guy. Bill Clinton might be precisely the kind of crafty character who could stand down the snakes and clowns in Washington. (That same resourceful penchant for working the angles—even a similarly checkered reputation as a “player”—were not insignificant in stoking voter fascination with Donald Trump, the man who in 2016 would defeat Clinton’s wife for the presidency.)

5 Real name: Eppie Lederer.

6 To put the most cynical spin on it, as Rolling Stone ’s Hunter S. Thompson observed, “The net result of the Gennifer Flowers flap was a nine-point gain for Clinton in the New Hampshire popularity polls. The pro-adultery vote had spoken.” (Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie [New York: Ballantine/Random House, 1994], 50.)

7 A generation after Atwater, Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, would tell journalist Michael Wolff, “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they”—which Wolff would translate as liberals and the media—“get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.” (Michael Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots ‘An Entirely New Political Movement,’” Hollywood Reporter, November 18, 2016.)

8 The campaign “war room” catchphrase has been variably attributed to Hillary Clinton and to James Carville.

9 Over the previous decades, the Washington and campaign press corps had been a relatively genteel bunch; only the most persistent rumors seemed to withstand transcontinental vetting. But then came an avalanche. Legions of young journalists, post-Watergate, began striking out in search of bombshells. Talk radio metastasized. The ’80s debate programs (such as CNN’s Crossfire and Capital Gang, along with the PBS program The McLaughlin Group) got ever more heated. On top of that, certain reporters, as Joe Klein would describe in his book The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, were acting like gumshoes at publications that were late-’80s outliers (the alternative newspapers, the tabloids, and opinion journals with a political bent). Borrowing the sleuthing tactics of their British and Aussie cousins (some of whom had migrated to stateside newsrooms), they obtained video store rental records in 1987 and found out which movies the Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork had rented. Two years later they examined the horndog rumors that were dogging defense secretary nominee John Tower. Routinely, many of these journalists had been given their tips by sources with political axes to grind. And once the embarrassing stories emerged—and one party received a brushback pitch—the other party would demand an equalizer. Reporters in the press box followed the bloodsport. “There was a gleeful, voyeuristic quality to much of the reporting,” Klein would write about the 1992 race. “Politicians were now, routinely, presumed guilty—especially on the new, witlessly contentious television sound-bite shows: ‘Groups’ and ‘Gangs’ of journalists screaming at each other and making facile judgments about complicated issues.” (Joe Klein, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton [New York: Doubleday, 2002], 99.)

10 In Kroft’s judgment, once Flowers’s claims had pulsed up on a competing network, it was not unreasonable to cover them, even if only as a news item. “It was the policy of the mainstream media to ignore anything that was in the tabloid press because they considered it to be rumor, gossip—unreliable,” he says. “We didn’t really pursue [the story at first] because it was unseemly and, aside from this woman’s word, there was no corroboration.… [But] once somebody breaks the wall of silence, then everybody does it. So it began building. I believe it was NBC that broke through, and for the first time actually reported something that had been in the supermarket tabloids. “There were a lot of people who said afterwards, ‘This is a low point for 60 Minutes to go and have this conversation about that.’ I never felt that way because the glass had been broken the week before [and it was] hard to ignore. Particularly if you’re talking about a presidential candidate and if it’s the only thing that people on the street and on the campaign trail are talking about, and that it may end the presidential aspirations of the front-runner. I think that it demanded coverage. “If 60 Minutes had been the first, would we have gone on that night and done a story about Bill Clinton based on a report in the Star or based on Gennifer Flowers’s allegations? No. I’m sure we wouldn’t have.” (Interview with Kroft.)

11 Hart had adamantly refused the Public Grovel. And from a purely cosmetic perspective, his wife, Lee, in making only brief appearances on the stump that week, did the same. “One of the things that killed Gary Hart,” posits Steve Kroft of CBS News, “was the fact that his wife stood in the background [as Hart dropped out of the race]. There was kind of this sense that she was really upset with him and didn’t believe him. So I think the Clintons were very smart, [realizing] they would be much better having [Hillary] there and know[ing] that she was a very strong character. And they carried the day. So I think they learned a little bit from the Hart scandal.” The press’s decision, in the TV era, to probe a presidential candidate’s extramarital relationships “went back to Gary Hart,” Lanny Davis says today. Davis, who had attended Yale Law with the Clintons and would serve as a White House crisis adviser in the late ’90s, recalls the transition. “[Prior to the Hart scandal] the argument had always been: If it affects public policy or abuse of power and it involves sex—then it’s okay to write about it. But if it’s just about a personal peccadillo or weakness, or you can’t resist touching a nice tush with a thong over it, it has nothing to do with anything [and] we’re not going to write about that.… Something changed, and it started with Gary Hart.” Journalist Matt Bai, who would write the definitive study of the Hart scandal, agrees. “What you can see now, some 25 years on,” Bai would state in his 2014 book All the Truth Is Out, “is that a series of powerful, external forces in the society were colliding by the late 1980s, and this was creating a dangerous vortex on the edge of our politics. Hart didn’t create that vortex. He was, rather, the first to wander into its path.” Bai would add a coda, both cynical and insightful: “If post-Hart political journalism had a motto, it would be: ‘We know you’re a fraud somehow. Our job is to prove it.’” Bai rightly points out that part of the impetus for such reporting was that many bright, hungry journalists, after Watergate, had gone into the business to become another Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein—“which is to say, there was no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might turn out to be or in how dark a place they might be lurking.” (Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014], 32; interviews with Kroft and Davis; Bai, “Legend of the Fall,” New York Times Magazine, September 21, 2014, 39, 60.)

12 For scandals PBC (post–Bill Clinton), a Doppler-like shift affected the dynamic. Due in part to the sheer abundance of celebrities caught in compromising positions, memories began to foreshorten in the ADD era. And today the more distant the scandal, the more indistinct the initial transgression appears in the public’s rearview mirror, almost regardless of its original scuzz quotient.

13 Oprah Winfrey’s TV talk show, which had begun modestly in 1984 as AM Chicago, had zigged while its competitors zagged. The late New York Times media columnist David Carr would recollect that in the ’90s, “just when tabloid television was beginning to crest and threatened to tip over into a sea of cross-dressing Nazis, [Oprah Winfrey] pulled back, saying that she could build a bigger audience on uplift than on baser instincts.” Build she did. In Carr’s assessment, “she began proselytizing good books, nagging herself about her own weight and, most of all, listened to her audience. And the money kept rolling in bigger and bigger waves.” She became, in short, America’s Mother Confessor. Winfrey, acknowledging her own shame, failings, and mistreatment, would coax out overwhelming disclosures from her guests, along with their stories of redemption. Religious scholars, as the professor and columnist Mark Oppenheimer would point out, have made the case that she was drawing on the lessons she’d learned in black churches while growing up in Mississippi and Tennessee, and on the spiritual tutors and self-empowerment guides who would often appear on her program. Kathryn Lofton, a dean at Yale, would assert in her book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon that Winfrey’s method—reminiscent of nineteenth-century revival meetings—helped to acclimate her audience to “the familiar ritual turn of daily confession and rejuvenation.” By extracting personal admissions of sin or shame or sacrifice (and tales of triumph over adversity), Winfrey served to heal the truth-teller and, by degrees, the viewer. She was preaching to her own electronic megachurch, to what Karlyn Crowley, author of Feminism’s New Age, would call a nationwide “New Age feminist congregation.” Winfrey earned her followers’ fealty by propounding that individuals determined their own destiny. She said that women and men, through their beliefs, controlled the means of their own absolution. (Jennifer Eum, “How Oprah Went from Talk Show Host to First African-American Woman Billionaire,” Forbes.com, September 29, 2014; David Carr, “A Triumph of Avoiding the Traps,” New York Times, November 23, 2009, B1, 6; Mark Oppenheimer, “The Church of Oprah Winfrey and a Theology of Suffering,” New York Times, May 28, 2011, A20; Patricia Sellers, “The Business of Being Oprah,” Fortune, April 1, 2002; Laura B. Randolph, “Oprah Opens Up About Her Weight, Her Wedding, and Why She Withheld the Book,” Ebony, October 1993; Susan Wise Bauer, The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2008], 121–22.)

1 The more recent, popular, and playful term “vajayjay” would not make it into modern parlance until 2006, when it was used as a substitute to assuage TV censors monitoring an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Soon thereafter, according to the New York Times, “The show’s most noted fan, Oprah Winfrey, began using it on her show, effectively legitimizing it for some 46 million American viewers each week. ‘I think vajayjay is a nice word, don’t you?’ she asked her audience.” (Stephanie Rosenbloom, “What Did You Call It?,” New York Times, October 28, 2007.)

2 Ensler and others have been accused of adopting a flawed naming convention. While the vagina has become the de facto default word for a woman’s sexual locus (at the expense of the overlooked clitoris, which is widely considered far more significant in terms of female arousal), the word actually refers—as Toni Bentley has written (in a review of Naomi Wolf’s 2012 book Vagina: A New Biography)—“uniquely, and only, to the cylindrical passage that leads from the external world to the internal world of a woman’s sexual arena, and why it has now come to mean, erroneously, the entire shebang is beyond me.… [Wolf] simply climbs up on the old Eve Ensler vagina bandwagon.” (Toni Bentley, “A Woman’s Place” [review of Vagina, by Naomi Wolf], New York Times Book Review, September 16, 2012, 1, 14–15.)

3 The charitable organization “I Love Vagina” has been around since 1969 (https://ilovevagina.wordpress.com/ilv-charity/).

4 A smaller diameter, theoretically, would amplify arousal for both the patient and her sex partner.

5 A sidebar in the same Cosmo story, however, would play to readers’ worries. Under the headline “Does He Think You’re a Labia Loser?,” young men such as Scott, the stockbroker and Jack, the golf instructor were asked to give their take on super-protruding labia lips, which some men were said to consider a turn-off. The best answer came from Adam, the website designer : “I can’t say I recall ever seeing a vagina that turned me off.” (Carrie Havranek, “The New Sex Surgeries,” Cosmopolitan, November 1998.)

6 Moreover, why do many men now prefer that freer feeling, in layman’s parlance, around the “back, crack, and sack”? To wit: journalist Christopher Hitchens, who in 2007, as part of an “extreme makeover” for an article in Vanity Fair, surrendered to Ms. Janea Padilha. “You are painted with hot wax,” he wrote, “to which strips are successively attached and then torn away. Not once, but many, many times.” Later, he admitted, “Nothing would induce me to go through that again. It’s even worse than waterboarding!” (Christopher Hitchens, “On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Part II,” Vanity Fair, December 2007; interview with Hitchens.)

7 Eventually, Gwyneth would sing the sisters’ praises in Vogue and Naomi Campbell would describe them as gurus on Oprah. (Christina Shea, “Stop the Hair-Removal Insanity!,” Glamour, August 2004; George Gurley, “What’s New, Pussycat?,” New York Observer, November 23, 1998.)

8 Female sexuality in the ’90s, according to Daedone, was often overdramatized, both in private and in its cultural manifestations, untethered to the deep commitment and spiritual intensity that had long been a part of the ultimate act of human intimacy. “Freud actually said anything that is exaggerated is exaggerated because it hasn’t been integrated, and female sexuality often operated in an automatic way—like L.A.,” Daedone says, laughing. “The surface of it was out there, the show of it was everywhere apparent, but there wasn’t any depth to it. There was this arched-back, moaning sort of sexuality—you had all the symbols of it. But, as is said in semantics, you didn’t have the actual referent. In the ’80s and ’90s you experienced the liberation of the idea but none of that had been actually integrated into our bodies.” (Interview with Daedone.)

9 “It was not a product, it was an action,” adviser John Marquis says, shrugging.

10 Some hold that two others may have also influenced screenwriter Robert Towne and Warren Beatty in crafting Beatty’s character George Roundy: Jay Sebring (the stylist who was slain in the Manson murders) and Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser turned blockbuster producer, Jon Peters. (William Stadiem, “Studio Head,” Vanity Fair, March 2010, 281.)

11 Nance was unrelated to Paul, according to Heidi Fleiss, the former Hollywood Madam.

12 Then there are the secrets she reserves for her most valued customers. Tip One: “I tell my clients, take a little Vicks [VapoRub], very little, and put it on,” she says, making a dabbing motion. “And you’re going to feel, already, ‘Wooaaoh’”—she actually crosses her eyes—“And when he goes to her, the Vicks goes right to him”—she snaps her fingers—“It’s amazing. It’s cold fire [on] both of us. It’s better than Viagra.” Tip Two: “Couples in Brazil, we have sex every day, every day, every day. Sometimes the minimum. But the couple don’t need to have orgasm every single day. Love is what’s important.” (Interview with Janea Padilha.)

1 The term “masturbation,” in casual conversation, was giving way to the more offhanded “self-pleasuring.” Films and television sitcoms routinely referenced the subject. Radio host Howard Stern frequently discussed his own self-pleasuring habits and solicited similar stories from his guests.

2 Pro-life and right-wing groups had already been rallying against her for some of her other controversial stances (calling her the “condom queen,” for instance), including her contention that students be given greater access to birth control measures. (Karen Klinka, “Elders’ OU Invitation Elicits Doctors’ Protest,” Oklahoman/NewsOK.com, June 3, 1994.)

3 Good Vibrations, founded by Joani Blank in 1977 in San Francisco’s Mission District, promoted itself as “the clean, well-lighted vibrator store.” Its mission: to act as “a diverse, woman-focused retailer providing high-quality, sex-positive products and non-judgmental, accurate sex information.” By the ’90s, Good Vibrations had expanded across the country and ran a large mail-order and online business. (www.goodvibes.com.)

4 Ogden had started her research in the 1970s before joining forces with Komisaruk and Whipple. “Psychic coitus,” in fact, had been identified as early as 1896, and the phenomenon of imagination-induced “spontaneous orgasm” was subsequently described by Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, and the team of William Masters and Virginia Johnson. (William J. Broad, “I’ll Have What She’s Thinking,” New York Times, September 28, 2013.)

5 Related conditions had been identified since at least the nineteenth century. And in 1980 sexual dysfunction had been listed as a category in the American Psychiatric Association’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But Katherine Angel, who has written extensively on female sexuality, has pointed out that it wasn’t until 1987 that the DSM included female sexual arousal disorder under the category of sexual dysfunctions. (Katherine Angel, “The History of ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction’ as a Mental Disorder in the 20th Century,” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 23, issue 6 [November 2010]: 536–41, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2978945/; biographical page of Dr. Katherine Angel, Warwick Centre for the History of Medicine: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/people/pdf/katherineangel/.)

6 One of her mentors had been communications theorist Dean Barnlund, who would often speak with fondness of an early colleague of his, Alan Watts, the counterculture champion of Zen and the Tao.

7 According to Reese Jones, Daedone’s partner for a number of years, “OneTaste comes from the Buddhist term, ‘Once you’ve experienced one taste of the divine, nothing else will do.’” The name OM is borrowed from the term “om,” Sanskrit in origin, that is, according to Merriam-Webster, “a mantra consisting of the sound ‘om’ and used in contemplation of ultimate reality… a sacred syllable considered the greatest of all mantras.” (Interview with Reese Jones.)

8 Is there a serious pitfall in devoting so much of one’s raison d’être to sex—and to this narrowly directed technique? One former OM-er told the New York Times that she and her partner had left the OneTaste scene because they hoped to embark on new paths that were more “heart-focused rather than genital-focused.” To some critics, devoting daily (and arguably obsessive) attention to the mechanics of the female orgasm—instead of developing a more balanced interaction that accommodates both partners’ overall needs, sexual and otherwise—poses the risk of encouraging practitioners who might become sexually stuck, literally fixated on one partner’s clitoris above all else. Daedone counters this argument. “It’s an hour a day for most people in this practice,” she insists. What’s more, the meditative side of OM, she says, benefits “many other aspects of one’s life. You’re cultivating attention.” I make the point to Daedone that obsessed strokees can seem like compulsive long-distance runners, some of whom acquire a mental or physical need to put their bodies through high-impact strain, perhaps putting themselves at risk for long-term health problems. Couldn’t the practice prove limiting to one’s sexuality and, more important, to one’s emotional balance? On the contrary, she says, science now suggests that extreme athletes have a way of ascending to an elevated state that provides them with “sustained access” to a higher state of consciousness. She contends that “musicians, artists, extreme athletes” tap into what is sometimes called “flow”—a notion coined in the 1960s and ’70s by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and then popularized in four of his books published in the 1990s. Says Daedone, “It’s that sense of being ‘in the zone,’ of being so absorbed and consumed by the moment that you lose track of time and even one’s own awareness of self.” The science writer Steven Kotler, cofounder of the Flow Genome Project, has also pointed out certain neurochemical similarities between the “flow” experiences of those engaged in orgasmic meditation and extreme sports—indeed, across all altered states of consciousness. “OM-ing on a certain level,” he says, “no matter how you slice it, is a form of basic, low-grade masturbation. But Nicole has turned it into a practice thick with flow triggers. There’s sexual stimuli. There’s also scary, heavy, emotional stuff going on. She’s harnessing that attention and using it to serve as a focusing mechanism and turn it into a mindfulness process.” (Patricia Leigh Brown and Carol Pogash, “The Pleasure Principle,” New York Times, March 13, 2009; Mary Spicuzza, “Sex and Sexuality,” SF Weekly, April 4, 2007; John Geirland, “Go with the Flow” (interview with Csikszentmihalyi), Wired, September 1996; interviews with Daedone, Kotler, and Dr. Patrick Carnes.)

9 The term “demo” has a techie ring to it—with a dash of ’50s and ’60s engineering, test-pilot, and studio recording culture (not to mention counterculture “happenings” and peaceful protests, sometimes called “demos”), as well as the long-running “demo days” at MIT’s Media Lab and similar facilities.

10 After the session, Racheli, in a bathrobe, gives me a postmortem: “I’d shaken before but not like that. That was like being plugged into a light socket. The difference [was that] there were fifty people [in the room].” At an early stage, she says, “I heard a growl, like, Growl. And I heard someone in the room do the same growl. And it was like a pitched resonance, like a tuning fork. At one point, tears were rolling down my face.”

1 The comment about not inhaling would be one of only three Clinton gems to make their way, initially, into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The other two quotes (described later in this book) also grew out of Clinton mastery of truth’s elasticity: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and “It depends on what the definition of the word ‘is’ is.…” (Ellen Warren and Terry Armour, “Clinton Getting Familiar with Bartlett’s,” Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2001; Joe Klein, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton [New York: Doubleday, 2002], 11.)

2 The inhalation part may have been too coy by half. My late friend and colleague Christopher Hitchens, hardly a Clinton fan, had attended Oxford in the late ’60s while young Bill was there on a Rhodes Scholarship. Hitchens would contend in his memoir, Hitch-22, “[Clinton had] always been allergic to smoke and he preferred, like many another marijuana enthusiast, to take his dope in the form of large handfuls of cookies and brownies.” (Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 [New York: Twelve, 2010], 106.)

3 Clinton’s retort: “When asked about it, I said Quayle’s claim would strike terror into the heart of every fire hydrant in America.” (Bill Clinton, My Life [New York: Vintage/Random House, 2004], 412.)

4 Quayle’s use of the term “lifestyle choice” was already politically incorrect, wincingly so.

5 When the report was made public, as columnist Nicholas Kristof would note on its fiftieth anniversary, “Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist… [which was] terribly unfair. In fact, Moynihan emphasized that slavery, discrimination and ‘three centuries of injustice’ had devastated the black family. He favored job and education programs to help buttress the family.… [Eventually] William Julius Wilson, an eminent black sociologist… praised Moynihan’s report as ‘a prophetic document,’ for evidence is now overwhelming that family structure matters a great deal for low-income children of any color.” (Nicholas Kristof, “When Liberals Blew It,” New York Times, March 12, 2015, A29.)

6 The subject flared again two months before the election, when Murphy Brown, the ersatz TV newswoman, appeared in the show’s season premiere and spoke of Dan Quayle, the actual VP: “Perhaps it’s time for the vice president to expand his definition and recognize that whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes.” This time the show drew an audience of between forty and seventy million (sources range widely)—including Quayle, who for a photo op was joined by five single parents. That sentiment would be echoed a year later, articulated by another popular fictional character: Mrs. Doubtfire, played by Robin Williams. In the film of the same name, Williams’s character, a father who loses custody of his children, becomes a nanny in drag in order to spend quality time with his kids. (Talk about a committed ’90s dad.) Quoth Mrs. D., “There are all sorts of families, Katie. Some families have one mummy, some families have one daddy, or two families.… If there’s love, dear, those are the ties that bind, and you’ll have a family in your heart forever.” (Mark Harris, “‘Murphy Brown’s’ Rebuke,” Entertainment Weekly, October 2, 1992; Jonah Goldberg, “The Wisdom of Dan Quayle,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2013; Greg Braxton and John M. Broder, “It’s Murphy Brown’s Turn to Lecture Vice President,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1992; “Life Remembers ’92,” Life, January 1993, 48; Tim Teeman, “How Robin Williams’ Mrs. Doubtfire Won the Culture Wars,” TheDailyBeast.com, August 13, 2014.)

7 “It’s the economy, stupid”—the Clinton camp’s internal slogan for the campaign, coined by Carville—was derived from the sign on the wall at headquarters, which said, in full, “Change vs. more of the same. The economy, stupid. Don’t forget health care.” (Michael Kelly, “The 1992 Campaign: The Democrats—Clinton and Bush Compete to Be Champion of Change; Democrat Fights Perceptions of Bush Gain,” New York Times, October 31, 1992.)

8 Twenty-five years later, the Gores lead separate lives.

9 Senator Barack Obama would explore the same theme when delivering the keynote address at the DNC in 2004: “Tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America.”

10 Buchanan’s is the misplaced pugnacity of the bully. Such inflated hostility would become a trusty Republican default position over the next generation. Unable to bully the Democrats? Gingrich shut down the government. Unable to retaliate against Osama bin Laden? George W. Bush attacked Iraq. Unable to articulate a coherent message? Donald J. Trump, donning the cloak of Buchanan and Steve Bannon, struck out at everyone: women and the media, Mexicans and Muslims, POWs (“I like people who weren’t captured”), and the pope.

1 Or maybe erotica came third. “At one major [publishing] house,” observes Ken Auletta in the New Yorker, “there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business.” (Ken Auletta, “Publish or Perish: Can the iPad Topple the Kindle, and Save the Book Business?,” New Yorker, April 26, 2010, 26.)

2 What’s more, the no-porn provision was simply false. “I had some tapes back then,” says Betamax connoisseur Tony DiSanto, founding partner of DiGa and formerly MTV’s head of programming. As a twelve-year-old, DiSanto would lug his bulky recorder to a friend’s house to copy VHS movies onto Beta. “Beta’s quality was far superior. VHS [ultimately cornered the market] because it licensed the format in partnership deals with everybody—with Panasonic and other companies. But Beta was better.” Beta’s superiority is still heatedly debated among tapeheads. (Interview with DiSanto; Jack Schofield, “Why VHS Was Better Than Betamax,” Guardian, January 24, 2003, http://www.guardian.com/technology/2003/jan/25/comment.comment; John C. Dvorak, “Is Porn the Key to the High-Def DVD War?,” PCMag.com, April 9, 2007.)

3 In 1993, Gerard Van der Leun, in the first issue of Wired, wrote about new newsgroups that catered to “all sexual persuasions. For a while there was a group on the Internet called, in the technobabble that identified areas on the net, alt.sex.bondage.golden.showers.sheep. Most people thought it was a joke, and maybe it was.” A year later Richard Kadrey, an editor at the edgy cybersex magazine Future Sex, would explain that within the universe of alt.sex newsgroups, alt.sex itself was the largest, acting as “a sort of stepping-stone to more specific (and adventurous) regions of sexspace.” In second place: the S&M mecca alt.sex.bondage, also referred to as “asb.” According to Kadrey, asb, in the early ’90s, would become “one-stop shopping for both dominants and submissives, as well as general-interest perverts. The discussion topics range from broad questions… to the more specific [such as] ‘How long can I safely leave clothespins on a friend’s nipples?’” (Gerard Van der Leun, “This Is a Naked Lady,” Wired, March/April 1993; Richard Kadrey, “Alt.sex.bondage,” Wired, June 1994.)

4 Wolff would write columns for New York magazine on such subjects. He visited an erotic novelist and submissive (an avowed spankee), who’d grown her business by running ads in magazines (Cosmopolitan, the New York Review of Books) and on the Web. Wolff devoted another article to the rise of the webcam, an oddity that grew from a single lens in 1991 (trained on a coffee pot in a lab at the University of Cambridge that conveniently let researchers check the pot’s liquid level without leaving their workstations) to an out-and-out craze, pioneered by women like Jennifer Ringley, a Dickinson College undergrad who in 1996 started leaving a dorm-room camera trained on her for hours on end, in a sort of pedestrian version of online performance art—a DIY reality show. She eventually progressed to around-the-clock coverage, writes Wolff, “allowing people to peer in and watch her sleep, eat, work, bathe, dress, undress, and (occasionally) have sex.… I know people who keep Jenni in the corner of their [computer] screens as they work—she’s a background presence, like radio.” At the end of the decade, the social engineering experiment Quiet: We Live in Public would become the ultimate webcam moment. Leading into the new millennium, several dozen tech-savvy artist-participants were sealed up in a New York City warren and then webcammed around the clock—in the name of ad hoc anthropology, performance art, surveillance culture, sex, and drugs. Before it was all over, founder Josh Harris would see his human ant colony implode and the cops would be called. (The experiment presaged TV’s Big Brother reality series, which would launch in 2000.) By the 2000s, “lifecasting” would become a thing: streaming one’s everyday true-as- Truman existence, 24/7. (Michael Wolff, “Slap Happy,” New York, May 8, 2000, 22; Jamie Condliffe, “The World’s First Webcam Was Created to Check a Coffee Pot,” Gizmodo.com, April 4, 2013; Michael Wolff, “Must-See PC,” New York, February 22, 1999; Manohla Dargis, “Embracing Life Under Scrutiny,” New York Times, August 27, 2009; Hugh Hart, “Smart We Live in Public Probes Web Genius’ Hubris,” Wired, October 2009; Randall Stross, “A Site Warhol Would Relish,” New York Times, October 14, 2007; interview with photojournalist Donna Ferrato.)

5 The founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, introduced an early version of their search engine in 1996 while they were grad students at Stanford. (John Battelle, “The Birth of Google,” Wired, August 2013.)

6 Observes digital artist and designer Jonathan Harris, “Just like oil, timber, rubber, sugar, and the other resources that created great fortunes of the late 1800s, [t]oday’s most valuable resource is human attention, and, as before, great fortunes are being made by monopolizing this resource before most people understand its value.” (Email exchange with Harris.)

7 It may have been fitting, then, that the ’90s nicknames for the Internet’s two central U.S. server hubs were MAE West, in San Jose, California, and MAE East, in Reston, Virginia. (MAE stood for Metropolitan Area Exchange.) Tech writer, novelist, and culture critic Po Bronson once described the telecom co-op MAE West as the hippest destination in the Valley for after-hours field trips. “[I]n late 1997 it was a very cool thing to do if you were hosting a party anywhere near downtown San Jose,” he would recount. “[H]op on a shuttle bus with your guests and take them over to walk through the Mae. Put that on your invitation, and the RSVP rate doubled.” There was a sense of wonder to wander—to trespass—through the MAE maze and see the labyrinthine wiring that made up the literal sinews of this new virtual world. And it was not lost on visitors that the pulsing bosom of the western Web took its name from a comedic queen of burlesque, who helped pioneer risqué camp for the big screen. (Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift [New York: Random House, 1999], xix–xx; Michael Learmonth, “Hubba Hub,” Metro Silicon Valley, April 22, 1999, http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/04.22.99/slices-9916.html; George Davis, “The Decline of the West,” Vanity Fair, May 1934, 48, 82.)

8 In the ’80s and ’90s, the tales of science-fiction master Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982, were engaging a broader audience. His short stories (written during the 1950s through the ’70s) were being spun into movies that whipsawed through popular culture (Blade Runner, 1982; Total Recall, 1990) and influenced such films as 1999’s The Matrix. (Minority Report, from 2002, was also spun out of a tale crafted by Dick.) Into this mix arrived William Gibson, with a bang. His 1984 novel Neuromancer, the cyberpunk bible, jump-started the term “cyberspace.” Along with Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, 1992) and a handful of others, Gibson was anticipating and chronicling early hacker and Net culture. Meanwhile, there was Bruce Sterling, whose science fiction, as Metcalfe puts it, “was based on the inevitable [question] of ‘How does this all play out?’ You take this technology out of the labs and you corrupt it with human dreams and ambitions and shortcomings, and the result is this amazing world that he could just visualize so perfectly. That’s where the super-geeky guy always gets the hip chick, and it really started that whole thing.” (Interview with Metcalfe; Scott Meslow, “Philip K. Dick’s Messy, Mindbending Cinematic Legacy,” Atlantic.com, August 2, 2012; Simon Critchley, “Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Parts 1 and 3,” NewYorkTimes.com Opinionator, May 20–23, 2012; Andrew Liptak, “30 Years of William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” Kirkus Reviews, July 31, 2014; Tom Bissell, “Neal Stephenson’s Novel of Computer Viruses and Welsh Terrorists,” New York Times Book Review, September 23, 2011.)

9 The San Francisco–based science writer and entrepreneur David Ewing Duncan sees these roots as laying the groundwork for the ’90s scene in terms of tech innovation—and lifestyle. “There was always an innocence about San Francisco,” he tells me during a long lunch, “a strange kind of exciting naïveté. People were indulging in new and experimental things, whether it was sex or new companies or art or music—but there wasn’t any sense of danger, that this could all go horribly wrong. I think of the beach movies from the ’60s. It was innocent, youthful—some of the smartest people in the world [lived there] in the ’50s and ’60s. You literally had guys like Jack Kerouac and Wallace Stegner, these very liberal, counterculture sort of writers [intermingling with computer pioneers]. Back then Palo Alto, I’m told, was more like Berkeley. Stanford basically started shipping out whole departments from places like Harvard and MIT, and this attracted a new kind of person. “Then, it really hit its stride in the ’80s with Apple and the early IT and the Internet, and then another wave with the dot-coms in the ’90s. These were young, incredibly smart people. Whatever they set out to do in life, they would be successful at. And [they wanted] to rock the world and change things—to win at the highest level of the game. Now, that can come with sex. And there is a whole underground world, particularly in San Francisco, [where] people pursue things with an intensity and a kind of innocence and a sense of fun in a way that I don’t see elsewhere. That includes sex. It includes underground sex. It includes partying. [This is in contrast to other places, where] there was always something just slightly dirty or dark or edgy. But not [in San Francisco in the ’90s]. Women were as aggressive as men. Everybody was kind of empowered to be somebody that [they] normally weren’t because you wouldn’t have the money or the power to do it until you were much older. But it was also people who were very dedicated to their work. It wasn’t a bunch of ne’er-do-wells. They worked very hard. They played very hard. The club scene was a very intense scene. People barely slept. They were on a mission. The whole Internet thing was a mission. And San Francisco is a place where nobody judges you. I wouldn’t call it a utopia because there are all the usual problems people have. But this is a culmination of [a movement toward living in a state] of freedom—[without] a sense of evil there. Obviously during the whole [protest period and the murder of] Harvey Milk, San Francisco was quite violent. But by the late ’90s, it was a [haven] for libertines.” (Interview with Duncan.)

1 It wasn’t until the mid-2010s that robotics and VR had come of age on the cybersex frontier. In 2015, Wired, for example, visited VRtube—“a nascent online studio and distribution center for VR porn”—and wrote of the wonders of the coming explosion, reckoning that “no visual technology has ever been so perfectly suited to sexual applications.… [VR] doesn’t just change the frame. VR erases it. It allows us to exist inside the environment.” (Peter Rubin, “Virtual Reality Porn Is Coming, and Your Fantasies May Never Be the Same,” Wired.com, February 16, 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/02/vr-porn/.)

2 Judge Robert Bork, in his 1996 book on how liberalism has contributed to America’s decline, would warn about the truly degenerate areas of the early alt.sex sphere, referencing the writer Simon Winchester: “One day [Winchester] came upon a category called alt.sex, which has fifty-five groups including… alt.sex.intergen (intergenerational: the pedophile bulletin board) [and] alt.sex.snuff (the killing of the victim) which includes subcategories for bestiality, torture, bloodletting, and sadistic injury.… It is impossible in short compass to give an adequate idea of the depravity that is being [offered and] sold, apparently profitably.” (Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline [New York: ReganBooks, 1996], 135–36, citing Simon Winchester, “An Electronic Sink of Depravity,” Spectator, February 4, 1995, 9.)

3 American Express for a time blocked vendors from pushing porn after bogus charges began to show up on card members’ bills. A score of adult websites were cited by the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly asking customers for their card numbers if they wanted a free “trial” peek. In such scams, cardholders’ accounts would then be automatically—and fraudulently—charged. (“FTC, Credit-Card Cos. Bump, Grind Web Porn,” Forbes.com, August 25, 2000.)

4 In his book The Innovators, historian Walter Isaacson has described the contributions of Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who helped formulate Babbage’s basic computational device. Female minds and hands programmed ENIAC (the first electronic computer) as well as UNIVAC (a pivotal commercial computer). Grace Hopper, responsible for COBOL (a machine-readable programming language) became known as “the Queen of Software.” (Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014], 24–31, 88–100, 117, 323; Laura Sydell, “The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech,” NPR, All Things Considered, October 6, 2014.)

5 It is difficult to gauge the long-term impact of such bias—or the sea change that could result from gender equity. In 2014, the New Yorker would report that a respected global study of “four thousand R&D teams found that gender-diverse teams were considerably better at driving ‘radical innovation.’” And yet there is evidence that from the very start, cultural norms and the American educational system have made girls feel uncomfortable enrolling in computer science courses or, later on, pursuing tech careers. According to Eileen Pollack, author of The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club, a recent University of Washington study headed by Sapna Cheryan has found that “female college students are four times less likely than men to major in computer science or engineering.… Women today still are avoiding technical disciplines because, like me, they are afraid they won’t fit in.” (James Surowiecki, “Valley Boys,” New Yorker, November 24, 2014, 52; Eileen Pollack, “What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech,” New York Times, October 11, 2015, SR3.)

6 Palac would actually fly out and meet her mystery man ten months later, but only after he’d warned her he had been struggling to lose weight—“I’m working my way down from three hundred and fifty pounds.” Their first meeting involved blindfolds, cathedral candles, and a ménage that included a female “friend of a friend” serving as chaperone and who, Palac asserts, resembled “Sharon Stone—only better.” (Lisa Palac, The Edge of the Bed: How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life [Boston: Little, Brown, 1998], 111–16.)

7 The WELL, launched in the mid-’80s by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, was one of the most significant of the early digital communities. Initially it was based out of the offices of the influential Whole Earth Review in Sausalito, California; its name stood (and still stands) for “The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link.” As the Stanford culture and technology historian Fred Turner has noted in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, The WELL was a free electronic teleconference popular among counterculture cognoscenti, techies, journalists, and Deadheads, which for its era had a sizable percentage of female participants. “To many, these virtual communities—and the WELL prominently among them—seemed to offer alternatives to the hierarchical bureaucracies of a heavily institutionalized material world,” writes Turner. “[M]any imagined their movements as the reincarnation of the American frontier, a place where the world could be remade.” (“Learn About The Well,” WELL.com, The Well Group, Inc., http://www.well.com/aboutwell.html; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 141–44, 152, 279.)

8 Some antisodomy statutes remain on the books despite their being ruled unconstitutional. (Ashley Alman, “12 States Still Have Anti-Sodomy Laws a Decade After They Were Ruled Unconstitutional,” HuffingtonPost.com, April 23, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gay-voices/the-news/2014/04/21/.)

9 Come the 2010s, two-thirds of all gay and lesbian couples, as measured in one Stanford study, had made their acquaintance over the Internet. At the same time a third of all newly married Americans would first meet electronically, whether by logging online or by downloading mobile apps. (The comedian Aziz Ansari makes the point that every twenty-four hours OKCupid accounts for forty thousand dates and Tinder for twelve million “matches.”) (Laura Blue, “How Couples Meet,” Time, August 17, 2010; Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg, “How to Make Online Dating Work,” New York Times, June 14, 2015; John Heilpern, “Take This Tinder Advice from Aziz Ansari,” Vanity Fair, May 2015.)

1 From the perspective of many African Americans, Bill Clinton came to be considered “our first black President,” as Toni Morrison wrote in 1998. “After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.… And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men knew whereof they spoke?” In fact, two months before Morrison, in a Vanity Fair profile, comedian Chris Rock had ventured, “I view Clinton as the first black president. He’s the most scrutinized man in history, just as a black person would be. Everything he’s ever brought up has to be second-guessed. He spends a hundred-dollar bill, they hold it up to the light.” (Toni Morrison, “Comment,” New Yorker, October 5, 1998; David Kamp, “The Color of Truth,” Vanity Fair, August 1998, 167; Susan Wise Bauer, The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008], 176.)

2 His first week in office, Bush II would restore the ban. His first week in office, Obama would lift it again. His first week in office, Trump would reverse it. (Peter Baker, “Obama Reverses Rule on U.S. Abortion Aid,” New York Times, January 23, 2009; Anna Diamond, “Trump Strikes at Abortion with a Revived Foreign-Aid Rule,” Atlantic.com, January 23, 2017.)

3 Bush II signed the “partial-birth” abortion ban into law in 2003, and four years later the Supreme Court would uphold that ban. (Julie Rovner, “‘Partial-Birth Abortion’: Separating Fact from Spin,” NPR.com, February 21, 2006; Robert Barnes, “High Court Upholds Curb on Abortion,” Washington Post, April 19, 2007.)

4 Anti-LGBT hostility was certainly widespread. Politicians and clergymen excoriated Disneyland (Disneyland!) for holding its annual Gay Days. Conservative groups backed increasingly high-profile campaigns to “convert” homosexuals through absurd “reparative therapy” or “sexual re-orientation.” Comments like those of Illinois congressman Henry Hyde—“Most people do not approve of homosexual conduct”—were not uncommon. Some public figures were becoming especially outspoken against LGBT rights and same-sex partnerships. The steady drumbeat of such talk, and of hate speech in general, gave quiet cover for a surge in hate crimes. For the first half of the 1990s, according to statistics compiled by Washington’s National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “anti-gay violence… increased 127 percent” in six major American cities. (Attacks of this kind went routinely underreported.) The brutality was particularly abhorrent in the slaughter of members of the trans community. In 1993, the Nebraska killing of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man, was one of the first such incidents, in the words of journalist Buzz Bissinger, to focus “widespread public attention [on] an anti-transgender hate crime.” (The murder would inspire the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry.) And after a litany of unconscionable crimes targeting individuals because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, a single slaying in 1998 served to awaken lawmakers in Washington. In Laramie, Wyoming, Matthew Shepard was beaten, burned, and left to die, reportedly trussed up against a fence, as if crucified. The grisly, senseless death of Shepard—coming just four months after white supremacists had abducted an African American man named James Byrd Jr., then chained him to the back of a pickup and dragged him alive for three miles, resulting in his decapitation and death—accelerated the push (already a Clinton administration priority) for passage of the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act. (Despite such legislation, the menace would continue. In 2016 the FBI would report that when it came to hate crimes, LGBT people were “the most likely targets” of attackers. And among such victims, according to the Human Rights Campaign, “transgender women of color are facing an epidemic of violence that occurs at the intersections of racism, sexism and transphobia.”) (“Robertson’s Revenge: Gap Flag Flap Leads to Orlando Ban,” Church & State, September 1998, 15; “What Is Orlando Gay Days?,” Gaydays.com/history; Benedict Carey, “Psychiatry Giant Sorry for Backing Gay ‘Cure,’” New York Times, May 19, 2012, A1, 3; Adam Liptak, “Looking for Time Bombs and Tea Leaves on Gay Marriage,” New York Times, July 20, 2010; Buzz Bissinger, “The Killing Trail,” Vanity Fair, February 1995, 85–86, 142; Bissinger, “Across the Ages,” Vanity Fair Special Edition: Trans America, Fall 2015, 9; Melanie Thernstrom, “The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard,” Vanity Fair, March 1999, 210, 271–72; “HRC Condemns Wyoming Hate Crime…” [press release], Human Rights Campaign, October 10, 1998; “Matthew Shepard Act” [editorial], New York Times, May 6, 2009, A28; Rick Lyman, “Man Guilty of Murder in Texas Dragging Death,” New York Times, February 24, 1999; Haeyoun Park and Iaryna Mykhyalyshyn, “Hate Crimes Now Directed at L.G.B.T. People the Most,” New York Times, June 18, 2016, A12.)

5 “Given the enormous manpower needs of the wartime military,” military sociologists Wilbur J. Scott and Sandra Carson Stanley have noted, “many homosexuals served in World War II, often with distinction and without difficulty.” It was not until 1950 that a strict policy was instituted to bar homosexuals from serving or to weed out lesbian and gay service members if their sexual orientation came to light. “Congress enacted the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), [which forbid] sodomy.… Between 1980 and 1990, the U.S. military expelled an average of about 1,500 service members per year under the separation category ‘homosexuality.’” (Wilbur J. Scott and Sandra Carson Stanley, eds., Gays and Lesbians in the Military: Issues, Concerns, and Contrasts [Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter/Aldine de Gruyter, 1994], xi.)

6 Writes historian Nathaniel Frank, “Although it was their first meeting with Clinton as president, they never even discussed the evolving trouble spots in Iraq, Bosnia, or Somalia. Instead, they focused on whether a certain variety of love—instead of a certain variety of hate—could bring down the world’s strongest military.” (Nathaniel Frank, Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America [New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009], 82.)

7 Dole would go on to face the president four years later as the Republican nominee.

8 Nathaniel Frank reports that the phrase “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” as it applied to gay and lesbian members of the armed forces, was first articulated in late 1992 by Professor Charles Moskos, a top military sociologist who, beginning in the 1950s and on through the 2000s, had made a name for himself by advising the uniformed services on their policies and procedures for widening their ranks to include minorities. (During the 1990s debate, Senator Barney Frank had put forth his own middle-ground formula that stopped short of what would become “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—a policy he opposed. As he describes it in his autobiography, Frank, “I publicly proposed allowing LGBT people to serve in a sexually neutral way when performing their military duties, while remaining free to express their sexuality at other times.… As I saw it, refraining from discussing our sexuality with fellow members of the military was a restriction, but not an intolerable one. In fact, it did not greatly differ from how a majority of LGBT people behaved at the time in civilian occupations.”) (Nathaniel Frank, Unfriendly Fire, xvii–xviii, 26–28; Barney Frank, Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015], 161.)

9 McPeak would remain consistent. In 2010 he wrote an op-ed piece that defended the idea of keeping the provision in place: “I do not see how permitting open homosexuality in these [closed military] communities enhances their prospects of success in battle. Indeed, I believe repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ will weaken the warrior culture at a time when we have a fight on our hands.” (Merrill A. McPeak, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change,” New York Times, March 5, 2010, A27.)

10 Branch, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, was a longtime friend of Clinton’s and shared living quarters with Clinton and Hillary Rodham when the three of them worked on George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972. During Clinton’s eight years in office, Branch would conduct seventy-nine conversations with the president, which would comprise the backbone of his 2009 book The Clinton Tapes. (Wil S. Hylton, “The Bill Clinton Tapes” [Q&A with Branch], GQ.com, September 16, 2009.)

11 The center is now called the Palm Center and is based at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The writer of the original study was Sharon Terman. (Sharon Terman, “The Practical and Conceptual Problem with Regulating Harassment in a Discriminatory Institution,” PalmCenter.org, Palm Center Whitepaper, May 1, 2004; Yoji Cole, “‘Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass’: The Other Half of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’” DiversityInc.com, June 15, 2004.)

1 Colbert’s catchphrase, according to journalist James Poniewozik, was meant to call into question “the idea that it was more important for a thing to feel true than to actually be true.” Indeed, come the new millennium, power figures were tailoring the truth to suit their own purposes. And neologisms were spawned, some of which perfectly characterized the phenomenon. Science-fiction sage Bruce Sterling (in his 2000 novel Zeitgeist), for example, came up with the phrase “consensus narrative” to highlight the subjective nature of truth. By his thesis, truth—reality itself, in some respects—was envisioned as a narrative construct. (James Poniewozik, “A Makeover, Populist and Ambitious,” New York Times, September 10, 2015, C1; [re: Bruce Sterling] Andreas Müller and Lutz Becker, eds., Narrative and Innovation [Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media, 2013], 7.)

2 In 2016, a week after Trump was elected president, linguists advising the Oxford English Dictionary would select “post-truth” as their international word of the year. The terms “post-fact” and “alternative facts” would also make the rounds. Said Oxford’s Casper Grathwohl, “Fueled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.” (“‘Post-truth’ Declared Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries,” BBC.com, November 16, 2016; John Herrman, “Fixation on Fake News Obscures a Waning Trust in Real Reporting,” New York Times, November 19, 2016, B1.)

3 Barack Obama, by comparison, served two terms of a largely “fact-based” presidency, unlike those who came before and after him. The Budapest-based media observer Dean Starkman has made the case—as reported by Steve LeVine, the Washington correspondent for Quartz.com—that “[Donald] Trump’s brand of lying is rooted in a trend that goes back to the 1980s.… [Since that time, many] elite political and media figures have dispensed with [what Starkman terms] ‘fact-based argumentation itself, on everything from supply side-ism to climate-change denial to death panels to birtherism, you name it. In a sense, it’s more like never allowing any fact to become established (a practice that’s spawned its own field, known as agnotology). And then Trump just turned the knob on this practice to 11.’” (Steve LeVine, “New York Times Editor on Trump: ‘We Will Call Out Lies,’” Quartz.com, September 20, 2016.)

4 Klein would later backtrack on some of his criticisms, while not disavowing the underlying hypothesis. In his book The Natural, he would acknowledge that Clinton “gradually became far more disciplined in his statements and public actions.” (Joe Klein, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton [New York: Doubleday, 2002], 108.)

5 It is important to note that the lion’s share of Rauch’s and Bennett’s writings on this topic appeared at the time of (or after) the 1998 revelation of the president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But both critics were also addressing moral issues that were roiling in the public mind much earlier.

1 I was attending in my capacity as Life magazine’s director of photography, both covering the festival and screening an Apple-sponsored music video I’d produced for the main-stage monitors, contrasting Life images of Woodstock performers in 1969 with new portraits from 1994.

2 New graphic-design software, mail-order houses, and websites made it easier for minors to create or procure fake IDs. And a public service campaign was launched in 1990 to address driving-related fatalities: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” (“Drunk Driving Prevention [1983–Present],” Advertising Education Foundation, aef.com, http://www.aef.com/exhibits/social_responsibility/ad_council/2399/.)

3 “Blowjobs were fraught in the nineties,” according to Megan Carpentier, the editor, columnist, and self-described feminist and political junkie. “They weren’t really outré any more.… If anything, they were more of a thing that good girls did to avoid being ‘bad’ girls by having vaginal sex.… But they were also the ultimate expression of sex that men wanted and women gave: supposedly ‘unfeminist,’ unreciprocated, gross, uncomfortable, heavy with unspoken power dynamics. Women who gave blowjobs willy-nilly were the ones who made it harder for other women not to give blowjobs.” Among L.A.’s entertainment industry crowd, the b.j. became such standard fare that in 1996, L. Lou Paget, a rather Junior League–ish ex-Fox studio hand, began to host living room fellatio seminars for groups of “Hollywood wives, ex-wives, actresses, agents, and P.R. women,” according to Krista Smith, who wrote about the fad in Vanity Fair. During the three-hour sessions, Paget would hand out “instructional products (read ‘dildos’) affixed to fine-china plates” and participants would learn the fine points of the Basket Weave and the Taffy Pull. (Megan Carpentier, “Monica Lewinsky’s Story Is a Scandal of America’s Double-Standards,” Guardian, May 8, 2014; Krista Smith, “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” Vanity Fair, March 2000, 146.)

4 From 1982 to 1992 to 2002, the percentage of television households that turned on network shows in prime time shrank from 51 percent to 37 to 22. (James Poniewozik, “Here’s to the Death of Broadcast,” Time, March 26, 2009, 62.)

5 “Seinfeld signaled the end of Western civilization,” my friend Robert Longo, the artist, tells me. In his view, the program “brought in the idea of real selfishness that everyone’s adopted very prevalently in the culture. ‘I gotta get mine first.’… They all had that quality of not looking out for the fellow man—and finding humor in it. ‘Schadenfreude’ could have almost been the subtitle of the show.” (Interview with Longo.)

6 “Sunday In The Park: Jerry is on a mission,” Brad Darrach wrote in Life. “He and a friend are hunting for pretty girls in Central Park. Whenever they find one, the friend takes a picture of Jerry and the girl. ‘It’s a prank,’ Jerry explains—a way to ootz his absent buddy Mario Joyner, the comedian. ‘Mario had to be out of town this weekend, and we want to show him pictures of all the gorgeous girls he didn’t get to meet.’” The Life article points out that Seinfeld procures Lonstein’s phone number that day. (Brad Darrach with Judy Ellis, “Jerry Seinfeld Lets It All Hang Out,” Life, October 1993, 84.)

7 Well, yes and no. As Newsweek would point out, “During the budget crunches of the late ’80s, [the] networks pared down their standards-and-practices watchdog departments, giving adventurous producers an unchallenged path to the airwaves. The FCC, meanwhile, has lost its teeth to deregulation-happy courts. Since a 1988 federal court decision, the commission has agreed not to mess with programs running after 8 p.m., as long as they eschew the seven dirty words.” (John Leland, Marc Peyser, and Maggie Malone, “The Selling of Sex,” Newsweek, November 1, 1992.)

8 The genre’s roots can be traced back to long-form documentaries such as An American Family, the groundbreaking PBS study of members of a Middle American household, the Loud family, in the early 1970s.

9 When the Corcoran caved under public and congressional pressure, retribution was swift, including “months of national protests, artists’ boycotts, staff defections, patron withdrawals and more,” the L.A. Times would report. The museum’s director was dismissed, its finances crippled. And yet the art sword was double-edged. When the show traveled to Cincinnati, the institution and director there faced obscenity indictments. (Christopher Knight, “Damage Control at the Beleaguered Corcoran Gallery of Art,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1989; Christopher B. Daly, “Mapplethorpe Exhibit Opens,” Washington Post, August 2, 1990.)

10 In a chilling 1998 decision, the Supreme Court ruled against them, saying that Congress had the authority to dispense funds by such criteria. (“Historic Case: Finley V. NEA,” Center for Constitutional Rights, http://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/finley-v-nea.)

11 Cremaster featured satyr and fairy fantasies, erections and fallopian tubes, porn scenes and Isaac Mizrahi costumes—with cameo appearances by Norman Mailer, Ursula Andress, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. (Stephen Holden, “It’s About a Murderer and Yes, Bees, Houdini…,” New York Times, October 13, 1999; Jordan Hoffman and Alex Needham, “Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle…,” Guardian.com, July 14, 2015.)

12 Culture arbiter Kurt Andersen would affix a tongue-in-cheek moniker to the entire period: “The self-absorbed ‘Me’ Decade, having expanded during the ’80s and ’90s from personal life to encompass the political economy, will soon be the ‘Me’ Half Century.” (Kurt Andersen, “The Downside of Liberty,” New York Times, July 4, 2012.)

13 Within a six-month span, L.A.’s Tupac Shakur and Brooklyn’s Notorious B.I.G. would be shot to death.

14 I ask Regan to spell out the reasoning behind the design she chose for the logo of ReganBooks, the imprint she started in 1994 under Murdoch. It showed a lone woman holding a baby—and a sword. (Regan would leave the company under circumstances both acrimonious and litigious, but that’s a story for another decade.) Apropos of the logo, she says, women effectively took over the culture—by default and with defiance—once men neglected their traditional roles and obligations to their families. Men, in her view, “threw out the baby with the bathwater. And the ’60s had a lot of damaging effects on family life and children.… Now you have a whole culture of the latchkey kids. Nobody’s home. There’s no extended families, there’s no grandparents, there’s no father.” It started, Regan says, with the counterculture of the 1960s, when she was coming of age. “After the ’60s [men] decided, ‘Okay, you know what? We don’t have to get married. We don’t have to make commitments. We don’t have to raise the children—you do it.’ And they did.” Does she mean, I ask, that women, by the 1990s, held the upper hand in the power play between the sexes, and that “the men became sort of milquetoast and my gender allowed the women to just sort of rule?” She responds, “You didn’t allow us to rule. No. You abandoned us. You did not fulfill your obligations to us. You left us at the side of the road with children in our arms. We said, ‘Well, since you’re not going to help raise these children, we’ll do it ourselves.’” (Interview with Regan.)

1 In her Rivers biography, Last Girl Before Freeway, Leslie Bennetts maintains that sexual topics have always been essential to Rivers’s act. “Much of Rivers’ comedy, from the very first,” writes Bennetts, “had its roots in sex: sexual relations, gender battles, and women squaring off against each other. Indeed, she made her name as a sexually liberated single woman. During the early 60s, her stand-up routine often closed with the punch line: ‘I’m Joan Rivers, and I put out!’” (Leslie Bennetts, “Joan Rivers’ Remarkable Rise [and Devastating Fall] from Comedy’s Highest Ranks,” Vanityfair.com, November 2016.)

2 Since her earliest years in stand-up, Rivers had understood that women, as feminists, needed to confront the harsh reality that they were competing, living, and loving in a society governed by male rules and biases. “From the nineteen-sixties on,” New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum has argued, “Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh Realpolitik, one based on her experience: looks mattered.” And when the comedian made fun of actresses’ looks (“What’s Liz Taylor’s blood type? Ragu!”), she was telling her sisters, as Nussbaum puts it, “how to thrive in a sexist world”—to buck up through a “powerful alloy of girl talk and woman hate, her instinct for how misogyny can double as female bonding.… Rivers is explicit about her aim, which is not just to entertain but to educate: she wants fat girls to know that ‘they need to pull it together,’ to resist their mothers’ dangerous lies about inner beauty.” (Emily Nussbaum, “Last Girl in Larchmont,” New Yorker, February 23, 2015.)

3 Many contemporary feminists have come on board in recent years. A skeptical Jennifer Cognard-Black—who teaches gender and sexuality, and sits on the Ms. Committee of Scholars—would remark in 2015, “[In the past,] I would have said that getting your boobs done or your tummy flattened is not feminist, and now I’m really not sure.… From a feminist perspective, putting voice behind one’s body-image issues is better than feeling ashamed.” What’s more, the surgery surge was actually global, altering the appearance of women—and men—from Korea to Argentina, whose president Carlos Menem confessed he’d gone under the knife in 1991. “Brazil [recently] made plastic surgery tax deductible,” writes Time’s Joel Stein. “And Iran, where women cover their hair and bodies but not their noses, leads the world in rhinoplasty.” (“Rugged Machos Turning to Plastic Surgeon’s Scalpel,” Associated Press via Southeast Missourian, August 15, 1995; Joel Stein, “Nip. Tuck. Or Else,” Time, June 29, 2015, 42–43.)

4 At the giddy close of the ’90s (before the rupture of the dot-com bubble), HSX.com became the site of a popular “futures” market—cinema’s version of rotisserie-league baseball, in which players bet on the success or failure of newly released feature films. (Mark Harris, “Shorting Tinseltown,” New York, August 2, 2010, 16.)

5 Though the style arbiter Mr. Blackwell had been riffing on fashion gaucheries for years, it was the Rivers duo that formalized the riff, creating a sort of fashion rap that they televised vérité. By the twenty-first century, it would come to pass that many celebrities existed only to be photographed in front of a step-and-repeat wall in that narrow, flash-dappled span between the limo and the cloakroom.

6 ABC, which broadcast the Academy Awards ceremony, would adopt the fashion-interview format as part of its coverage in the time slot leading into the main event. And by 2011 the arrivals parade would become such an indispensable aspect of the evening that the network would expand its coverage (a short montage segment in the early years) to a full ninety minutes. (Manohla Dargis, “Oscars’ Red Carpet (Parallel Universe),” New York Times, March 6, 2011, AR10–11.)

7 In 1990, Hayman was named the fashion coordinator for the Oscar ceremony and began “sending an invitation to each nominee and presenter offering assistance in helping to choose an outfit for the great night,” according to the New York Times’ William Grimes. “It was a bright idea [Hayman remarked], because [many of] the stars dressed poorly.” (William Grimes, “Fred Hayman, Whose Giorgio Boutique Led Gilding of Rodeo Drive, Dies at 90” [obituary], New York Times, April 15, 2016, A25.)

8 Writer and editor Maggie Paley would report that Mattel, in 1993, came out with a Barbie playmate named Earring Magic Ken: “He wore what looked just like a chrome cock ring on a [necklace]. When questioned by reporters, the Mattel people [reportedly] pleaded innocence—they were simply following fashion. But gay men noticed, and that may be why Earring Magic Ken was, according to Mattel, ‘the best-selling Ken doll ever.’” (Maggie Paley, The Book of the Penis [New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1999], 197; Brian Galindo, “15 Surprising Things You Didn’t Know About Ken,” Buzzfeed.com, November 11, 2013.)

9 The exploitation of exported human hair had colonialist and racist dimensions: to accommodate the vanity of Western women, their sisters from the East were giving up parts of their own bodies. Banks correctly states that “the average woman from Asia growing her hair for profit lives in poverty.” (Ingrid Banks, “Hair Still Matters,” in Feminist Frontiers, ed. Laurel Richardson, Verta Taylor, and Nancy Whittier [New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003], 117.)

10 Dermatological tweaks were beginning to take hold. Desmond Morris would notice that “Bottom-lifters and bum-boosters were already being built in to certain female garments, but now… cosmetic surgeons [began] reporting a surge in requests for more voluptuous bottoms, both by fat injections and silicone implants.” In the even-more-arcane department, there was a parallel trend at the tail end of the ’90s: anal bleaching. The cosmetic procedure, which used a cream to adjust the color and tone of the anus to better match the surrounding skin, was the Brazilian bikini wax in extremis. Anal bleaching, part of a culture-wide gentrification-mania and germophobia, sought to spiff up the natural, well-used, and unkempt, and replace it with its ersatz ideal. Which brought up a question. For whose benefit, exactly, was a beautified butthole intended, except for the eye (or another body part) of the beholder—or for the person with her or his head up their arse? (Desmond Morris, The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body [New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, 2004], 229; Tristan Taormino, “Britesmile for Bungholes,” Village Voice, July 5, 2005.)

11 Mix had intended the song as exactly that: a celebration of more rounded women, who had been marginalized by myopic, noninclusive forces in commercial society. “Baby Got Back,” in truth, had been written partly in response to the experiences of Mix’s longtime partner, Amylia Dorsey-Rivas. As a Seattle-area teen, she’d been passed over for modeling and acting gigs in favor of lanky or waiflike women. “Being a woman of color—I’m half-Mexican, half-black, and have always been curvy,” Dorsey-Rivas would tell Vulture.com, “[i]f you were a little more broad at the beam, forget it. That kind of thing that women in my position went through made Mix angry.” Mix himself would insist that he’d meant his humor-laced homage as a protest song: “Girls had to look like heroin addicts to be accepted” for ads, videos, photo shoots, or runway jobs. He was saying: Enough. “Bottom line: Black men like curves.” (Rob Kemp, “‘And I Cannot Lie’: The Oral History of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s ‘Baby Got Back’ Video,” Vulture.com, December 19, 2013; Patrick S. Pemberton, “Still Liking ’Em Big,” San Luis Obispo Tribune, June 15, 2006.)

12 A year later Princess Diana did them one better (or worse) when she showed up at the annual Met Gala in a slip dress: midnight blue with come-hither black lace, one of the maiden creations of John Galliano after he’d taken over as Dior’s creative director. “This was important, as it launched Dior,” recalls Cosgrave, “and also controversial, as it did not fit. Some felt it was distasteful given her station. The slip-dress mishap was similar to Gwyneth Paltrow [in that] corseted bodice of the pink Lauren she wore in [1999 when] accepting her Best Actress Academy Award” for her gender-bending role in Shakespeare in Love. (Interview with Cosgrave.)

13 Teens also consulted makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin’s 1996 The Art of Makeup and his 1997 bible Making Faces to learn about the mysteries of the brush and sponge, liner and stick, and to extract beauty clues from studying the facial contours of their favorite actress or model. Two decades later, Rachel Syme, in the New York Times, would describe the influence of Making Faces on her fourteen-year-old peer group. “We all trekked to the Borders at Winrock mall in Albuquerque to buy a copy, using the savings we had built up by babysitting,” recalls Syme, who says her friends considered the book “a codex, a working syllabus, a kind of ‘Joy of Cooking’ with kohl.” (Rachel Syme, “Kevyn Aucoin’s ‘Making Faces,’” New York Times Magazine, August 21, 2015.)

14 Golden Shower was a none-too-veiled reference—as defined by the Urban Dictionary—to “the act of urinating on another person, usually for sexual gratification.” The fashion show sponsor, American Express, objected to the moniker, so McQueen agreed to change it to “Untitled.” (EJL, “Golden Shower,” UrbanDictionary.com, December 12, 2003; Liz Connor, “5 Things You Might Not Know About Alexander McQueen,” GQ-Magazine.co.uk, March 10, 2015.)

15 That said, even the Giseles of the world would soon be brought to high heel. Before the decade ended, fashion-forward actresses, rather than megamodels, would become the new “faces” of beauty products, the new mannequins in designers’ ads, and the new fashion magazine cover girls.

1 Incidents of breast cancer rose significantly in the 1980s and then leveled off come the 1990s, according to the Susan G. Komen organization, “likely due to increased mammography screening.”

2 Houston surgeon Gerald Johnson—known for clients like Texas-born model Anna Nicole Smith and for his unusual techniques (e.g., implanting a synthetic mesh in some of his patients’ mammary glands)—actually owned a swimming pool that was shaped like a giant breast. “Gerald was a genius,” says Rose today. “He would do ‘Kroger’s Specials’—the supermarket. He would get all the Kroger’s check-[out] girls in and do them ultra-inexpensively. One day he even tried to do [around] twenty breast implant [patients]. Gerald was a good surgeon, but eccentric.” (Mimi Swartz, “Silicone City,” Texas Monthly, August 1995, 66; Joan Kron, “Implant Nation,” Allure, February 2010, 111; interview with Franklin Rose; Art Harris, “Anna Nicole Nip Tucker Nipped!,” ArtHarris.com, July 10, 2007.)

3 That very week, Erica Rose is set to premiere in a new program, You’re Cut Off!, playing a spoiled-princess type. In 2015, with a law degree and a master’s in entertainment and media law, Erica would move to L.A. and become director of business development at Gentry Law Group. That same year, I check in with Cindi Rose, who tells me that she too is about to appear in a reality series, for which she has taped twelve episodes: Bravo’s Married to Medicine Houston. “He’s the established surgeon,” she says. “I’m the established wife, with a social background—the socialite of the city.” Behind every great man is a great reality show. Even Dr. Rose has put in time on the reality circuit, including a spot on the MTV program I Want a Famous Face. (Interviews with Cindi, Erica, and Franklin Rose; Cary Darling, “‘Ladies of Dallas’ and ‘Married to Medicine Houston’ Join Bravo Schedule,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, March 30, 2015; “Meet the Cast of ‘Married to Medicine Houston,’” TVDeets.com, January 8, 2016; http://lalawland.com/about; http://galengentry.com; http://la-divorce-lawyer.com/.)

4 According to media accounts of public records, Franklin did perform some minor work. When I later ask about the discrepancy, she tells me, “He did this little mini-lift.… They put in the tiniest, tiniest little implant there, which I didn’t want.… I was trying to keep the marriage together. It was something he wanted of me to do, and so I did that.” (Lisa Gray, “Image Augmentation,” Houston Press, December 30, 1989; interview with Cindi Rose.)

5 That night Franklin Rose offers evidence of his own career distinction: “There are maybe twenty, thirty people in history who’ve done as many breast implants as I have.”

6 Lynn Johnson—born in 1969, the same year as Penthouse—was selected as the magazine’s 20th Anniversary Pet following a nationwide search. The publication described her as a nineteen-year-old from Millerton, Iowa (dimensions 38D-24-36), who settled with her family in Houston. “I’m confident,” she told the magazine, “that the 1990’s will be our best decade yet.” Despite attempts to contact Johnson through former Penthouse executives and associates, I was unable to locate her for comment. (“20th Anniversary: Lynn,” Penthouse, September 1989, 139–52.)

7 Cindi Rose later talks about their time in the ’90s wilderness. While her husband was squiring women around town, she says, she dated three men seriously. “They all had their own jets. They had their own companies. Extremely successful… and younger than me.” And yet, she claims, “I was a single parent. I was home every night putting them to bed.… They were four and six years old when I divorced him.” (Interview with Cindi Rose.)

8 In an email sent ten days after my visit, Cindi stresses, “It is not adultery for a man that is the sin—it is the mistruths that have a domino effect.” She goes on to reiterate the importance of family in the Roses’ current lives and in life in general. And she declares that there is something extra that has kept them together: the inner nature of the man she reveres. “He is one of the kindest people on this earth. That is why I never quit loving him. I could not stay married to him in 1990 or I would have lost my own self-esteem, and he has apologized over and over.… I have never regretted my decision. It was a leap of faith.”

1 In high dudgeon, Maples’s spokesperson, Chuck Jones, would cry foul: “Marla is not the cause of the problem between the Trumps.” Jones would soon be brought to heel by his own scandal after stealing dozens of pairs of Ms. Maples’s shoes, acknowledging in court that he had maintained a “sexual relationship” with her footwear. (Elizabeth Sporkin, “Ooh-La-La Marla,” People, March 5, 1990; Laura Italiano, “Footwear Fetishist Chuck Jones Hit with New Harassment Indictment,” New York Post, June 27, 2012; Laura Italiano, “Court to Marla’s Harasser: Shoo Off!,” New York Post, September 26, 2001; Karen S. Schneider and Sue Carswell, “Agony of the Feet,” People, August 3, 1992.)

2 As the paparazzo makes his descent, my wife and I are among the 160 guests at the Taylor-Fortensky nuptials, sitting at the ceremony with actors Roddy McDowall and George Hamilton.

3 The Star scoop foreshadowed Morris’s career trajectory. Twenty years later he would become the chief political correspondent for none other than the Star’s sibling publication, the National Enquirer, penning pieces such as “Hill & Bill, THE WORST SHAM MARRIAGE EVER!” Ah, the blackguard calling the kettle black. (Alessandra Stanley, “Dick Morris Takes Aim at Hillary Clinton from a Tabloid Perch,” New York Times, July 9, 2016.)

4 Paris magistrates would clear the paparazzi of manslaughter charges, placing the blame solely on the driver, whose blood-alcohol numbers were shown to have been three times those permitted under French law. A decade later, a British jury would open an inquest and deduce that the photographers had “collectively” contributed to the crash, bearing a level of responsibility with regard to her death. “The celebrity culture has become a mass psychosis,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd would write the week of Diana’s death. “All that the celebrity culture teaches is a counterfeit empathy which mistakes prurience for interest and voyeurism for a genuine human identification.… The pictures of the Princess dying—and it is only a matter of time before these scummy photos surface—are not news. They are pornography. And pornography is the natural conclusion of a culture of voyeurism.… God rest her soul, because the journalists won’t.” (Craig R. Whitney, “French Prosecutor Says Pursuers of Diana Did Not Cause Crash,” New York Times, August 18, 1999; John-Thor Dahlburg, “Charges Dropped Against Paparazzi Implicated in Princess Diana Crash,” Los Angeles Times, September 4, 1999; Mary Jordan, “Paparazzi and Driver Found Negligent in Princess Diana’s Death,” Washington Post, April 8, 2008; Angela Balakrishnan, “Chauffeur and Paparazzi to Blame for Diana Death, Jury Finds,” Guardian, April 7, 2008; Maureen Dowd, “Death and the Maiden,” New York Times, September 3, 1997.)

5 The “gentleman of leisure,” as described by the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen during a series of lectures he gave in another Naughty Nineties—the 1890s—was chiefly engaged in the “non-productive consumption of time.” (Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899] [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 28.)

6 There was also the proverbial need to be informed so as to be in a position to gossip. In the age of the tabs, tab TV, and the Internet, it had never been easier to be looped in, especially when the subject was, say, Tonya and not, say, NAFTA. Just listening to the experts made you conversant. “The most pointless journalism of the year [1994] was the [on-air experts’] effort to lend analytical weight to the froth,” Jonathan Alter would write in Newsweek—in a time before punditry utterly polluted the airwaves. “Yes, Tonya Harding’s behavior raised questions about the pressures of big-time sports.… But that’s like saying we eat popcorn for the roughage.” (Jonathan Alter, “America Goes Tabloid,” Newsweek, December 25, 1994, 36.)

7 The board game Trivial Pursuit had become a national phenomenon in the 1980s.

8 Working from their respective home offices in mucky, plucky South Florida, muckrakers from the Star and Enquirer scoured the rap sheets and siphoned off the pond scum from Hollywood’s rank Jacuzzi. The Globe tabloid also figured into the mix. Director John Waters, the master of cinematic trash, would describe the three thus, to journalist David Kamp. The Enquirer : “We hate you because you’re famous”; the Star : “We hate you because you’re on TV”; the Globe : “We hate you because you’re famous and have sex.” Indeed, the “hallelujah days of the supermarket tabloid,” according to culture critic James Wolcott, ran from “the mid-70s to the late 90s.… At their peak in the early 80s, they had an estimated readership of 43 million per week.” Their finest hour—in terms of a nation wading into the muck? Catching two candidates in extramarital tangles in successive presidential campaigns: Senator Gary Hart in 1987 and Governor Bill Clinton in 1992. (David Kamp, “The Tabloid Decade,” Vanity Fair, February 1999; James Wolcott, “U.S. Confidential,” Vanity Fair, June 2002.)

9 The covers told the tale. People’s managing editor, Richard Stolley, would formulate a handy scale (called Stolley’s Laws) for determining who to feature on the cover so as to maximize newsstand sales: “Young is better than old. Pretty is better than ugly. Rich is better than poor. Television is better than movies. Movies are better than music. Music is better than sports. And anything is better than politics.” Stolley added a corollary after People’s sales spiked following the death of Elvis Presley (in 1977) and the murder of John Lennon (in 1980). “And nothing,” he declared, “is better than the Celebrity Dead.” Looked at in one way, the culture was becoming pop-heavy and postliterate. One could even extrapolate from Stolley’s recipe and suggest the following: trivia was better than substance; reality was better than fiction (though it was becoming more difficult to distinguish between the two); visuals were better than text; short texts were better than long (as USA Today, launched in 1982, had proven); scandal was better than “feel-good”; murder was better than scandal. And nothing was better than sex. (Richard Stolley, “Stolley’s Laws” [video], Stanford Publishing Course, Stanford.edu/group/publishing/cgi-bin/courses/blog/stolleys-laws.)

10 The Post, as media writer Jonathan Mahler would state in New York magazine, became “the beachhead of [Murdoch’s] American conquest. It was there that he perfected the mix of hard conservative politics and unapologetic tabloid values with which his name would become synonymous.” And it would set the greasy bar for the many daily newspapers that were limboing across the land. Soon tabloids everywhere were mashing up news and rumor just to keep up with the saucy Aussie, who bought the Boston Herald, then the Chicago Sun-Times. Murdoch’s prize, though, was the Post—profane, fearless, and hard right. Its distinguishing feature was its front-page headline, often pun-prone or alliterative. The best of these, naturally, harbored sexual undercurrents: “Headless Body in Topless Bar”… “I Slept with a Trumpet”… “Wacko Jacko Backo”… and “Madman Moammar Now a Druggie Drag Queen.” (Jonathan Mahler, “What Rupert Wrought,” New York, April 11, 2005; Garry Wills, “In Cold Type,” Vanity Fair, May 1984; Headless Body in Topless Bar: The Best Headlines from America’s Favorite Newspaper, Staff of the New York Post [New York: HarperEntertainment, 2008]; Niles Lathem and Doug Feiden, “Madman Moammar Now a Druggie Drag Queen,” New York Post, June 17, 1986.)

11 Meanwhile, new specialties became career paths: the media adviser, the handler, the crisis manager, and the “booker” or “wrangler,” who corralled fresh guests.

12 Package deals were the new big game. Once the media companies consolidated in the ’80s, they were in a position to offer multipronged story venues and spin-offs. And as the talent firms grew in size and sophistication, the agents and publicists upped the stakes and their takes, as did savvy attorneys and crisis managers.

13 In many ways, the subsequent practice of “binge” watching a batch of TV episodes—adopted by millions of Americans in the 2010s—was derived from the audience’s muscle memory of binging on those 1990s scandal sagas. In both cases, the narratives (especially if they involved sex or death or crime) became habit-forming, the contemporary equivalents of potboilers, page-turners, matinee serials.

14 Perhaps the grimiest escalation of all was the shotgun marriage of tabloid journalism and porn. That improbable pairing was announced in 1998, courtesy of Larry Flynt, whose flagship skin magazine, Hustler, had cornered the market in crude. Two years earlier, the publisher had been lionized as a First Amendment crusader on the big screen in Miloš Forman’s 1996 picture The People vs. Larry Flynt. Now, in response to what he saw as “sexual McCarthyism” against Bill Clinton and the Democrats, the smut king struck back. Clearly tunneling for Republican dirt, Flynt placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post that offered a $1 million reward for information about the extramarital affairs of current congressmen. And after receiving scores of leads, Flynt got his man. Within three months, Newt Gingrich’s would-be successor as Speaker-elect of the House, Bob Livingston, the Louisiana Republican, would bow out, having received word that Flynt was ready to publish a bombshell based on supposed accounts from four women. Hustler didn’t need to publish word one. (William Booth, “Is Larry Flynt a Hero, or Just a Hustler?” Washington Post, February 10, 1997; Booth, “How Larry Flynt Changed the Picture,” Washington Post, January 11, 1999; David Cogan, “Larry Flynt Scores,” LA Weekly, December 23, 1998; Charles McGrath, “Editing Hustler: A Dirty Job Allan MacDonell Just Had to Do,” New York Times, April 29, 2006; Interview with David Cogan.)

15 In a 1997 Vanity Fair column, James Wolcott tagged outing as a mutation of the tabloid press, “the dominant influence on media culture today [which] works from a moralistic takedown mentality.… The tabloid foragers assume that each celebrity has a private and public face, like two sides of a trading card, and that when the two sides clash, it’s open season. Some of the celebrities who come out may do so less from pride than from battle fatigue.” (James Wolcott, “Lover Girls,” Vanity Fair, June 1997, 67.)

16 Little wonder that one of the enduring film noirs of the decade was 1997 Best Picture nominee L.A. Confidential. The adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel looks at a morally corrosive city through the eyes of a corrupt ’50s tabloid called Hush-Hush. One classic line: “You’re like Santa Claus with that list, Bud, except everyone on it’s been naughty.”

1 In the mid-’90s, Christopher Hitchens would point out an important distinction in an article that examined how tabloid culture had made Americans “almost impossible to embarrass”: “There is a good reason the words ‘shameful’ and ‘shameless’ define the same conduct. You know you’ve behaved shamefully if you have exposed other people to needless annoyance or embarrassment. You don’t know you’ve behaved shamelessly if you don’t get this point.” (Christopher Hitchens, “The Death of Shame,” Vanity Fair, March 1996, 68–72.)

2 Love works in mysterious ways. The Lees would divorce in 1998 but would continue to reconnect or reunite over the years. Prior to marrying Anderson, Lee had been married to model Elaine Starchuk and actress Heather Locklear. Anderson would tie the knot with rocker Kid Rock (once) and Rick Salomon (twice), the latter notorious for orchestrating another sex tape, the Paris Hilton video, made public in 2003, that would become 1 Night in Paris. (“Pamela Anderson Files for Divorce from Rick Salomon,” Yahoo! Celebrity News via USmagazine.com, July 9, 2014; “1 Night in Paris” (2004), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412260/; Katie McLaughlin, “Paris Hilton on Sex Tape: ‘I’ll Never Be Able to Erase It,’” CNN.com, June 1, 2011.)

3 The first big sex-tape scandal erupted in 1988, involving twenty-something actor Rob Lowe, who had filmed an encounter with two young women, one of them a minor. (Lowe settled matters quietly with the family of the underage party.) By the millennium, the culture had become so accustomed to news of private pornos ending up on the Web or “in the cloud” that Lowe felt comfortable lampooning his indiscretion by agreeing to appear in the 2014 Cameron Diaz/Jason Segel comedy Sex Tape. (“The 25 Biggest Scandals of the Past 25 Years,” Entertainment Weekly, August 31, 2007, 23; Colin Stutz, “15 Musician Sex-Tape Scandals, from Tommy Lee to Usher,” Billboard, November 13, 2014; Alexandra Cheney, “Rob Lowe Appears in a New ‘Sex Tape,’” Variety, July 11, 2014; Marc Malkin, “Rob Lowe: ‘Fond Memories’ of His Sex Tapes, but Does He Ever Watch Them?,” E! Online, July 11, 2014.)

4 When Nadya “Octomom” Suleman—mother of fourteen, including octuplets—was offered a cruel million in 2009 to appear in a porn flick, columnist and editor Raina Kelley would observe, “We created Octomom. With our glorification of bizarre behavior, we dare the emotionally needy to shock and appall us. Then we slam them.… We are all, each of us, one national scandal away from being offered a million dollars to star in a skin flick.” (Raina Kelley, “Octomom Hypocrisy,” Newsweek, March 16, 2009, 58.)

5 The intruder may have been accompanied by an accomplice or two.

6 The title of the 1996 book about the case by New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin was The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson.

7 Spectators lined local streets, hauled out lawn chairs, and held up signs with slogans such as GO OJ GO and SAVE THE JUICE. (Bill Turque, Andrew Murr et al., “He Could Run… but He Couldn’t Hide,” Newsweek, June 27, 1994, 14–27; Nancy Gibbs, “End of the Run,” Time, June 27, 1994, 28–35.)

8 It was the talk of the town. “At dinner parties and in restaurants, whole evenings are spent discussing the case,” Dominick Dunne would note, reporting from the West Coast for Vanity Fair. “Everyone has a topper to everyone else’s piece of information.… ‘I saw Nicole jogging in Brentwood just the day before,’ said a man at a screening, to which another man immediately replied, ‘Craig Baumgarten played golf with O.J. that Sunday morning at Riviera.’” (Dominick Dunne, “L.A. in the Age of O.J.,” Vanity Fair, February 1995.)

9 In 1997, Simpson would lose a civil suit in which he was ultimately found liable for the “wrongful death” of Brown and Goldman and ordered to pay $33.5 million, only a fraction of which has ever made it to the victims’ families. Simpson was later jailed “on kidnapping, robbery and conspiracy charges, related to a confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers in a Las Vegas hotel room [in 2007].” (B. Drummond Ayres Jr., “Jury Decides Simpson Must Pay $25 Million in Punitive Award,” New York Times, February 11, 1997; Jane Wells, “20 Years Later, Winning OJ Civil Suit Was Never a ‘Pot of Gold,’” CNBC.com, June 11, 2014; “Victim’s Family Still Holds O.J. Simpson Accountable,” Associated Press via Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 9, 2014; Jennifer Steinhauer, “Simpson Attire Goes to Storage in Court Fight,” New York Times, June 16, 2009, A14.)

10 Prior to accepting the position, Starr, according to Gormley, “had appeared on national television arguing that Jones could sue the president; he had consulted directly with Jones’s lawyer Gil Davis; he had planned to file an amicus brief in the Jones case on behalf of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum.… Ken Starr was arguably the last person in the world suited for this explosive new Lewinsky [investigation] assignment.” (Ken Gormley, The Death of American Virtue [New York: Random House/Broadway, 2010], 329–30.)

11 In 2015, during a follow-up phone conversation, she says she prefers to call herself a homemaker.

12 During a cable TV interview at the time of the Clinton-Lewinsky revelations, according to Newsweek, “Trump weighed in, seemingly scorning [Paula] Jones by calling her a ‘loser.’… When Trump was asked about whether he would run for public office, he compared himself to Clinton, saying, ‘Can you imagine how controversial I’d be? You think about him with the women. How about me with the women?’” (Michele Gorman, “A Brief History of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton’s Friendship,” Newsweek.com, May 27, 2016.)

13 During the height of his acting career, such as it was, Bobbitt was represented by Paul Erickson, who had been the political director of the 1992 presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan, Mr. Family Values. (Tim Purtell, “The Shock Troops,” Entertainment Weekly, March 4, 1994, 22.)

14 Such severe severing, however, seems to be part of a microclimate of retribution in certain regions of Southeast Asia. “There have been a few incidents of penile amputation in other parts of the world, such as Singapore and Hong Kong,” People magazine would point out on the eve of Lorena Bobbitt’s trial. “And in Thailand in the mid-’70s, according to an article in the American Journal of Surgery, at least 100 women foreshortened their unfaithful husbands and tossed the offending organs out the window—an act known locally as ‘feeding the ducks.’” (Elizabeth Gleick, “Severance Pay,” People, December 13, 1993.)

15 In 1991, Ferrato would publish the first photographic book to directly and systematically address domestic violence, Living with the Enemy, leading to a shift in attitudes, funding, and legislative action. (Paul Moakley interview with Donna Ferrato, “Time 100 Photos: The Most Influential Images of All Time,” New York, NY, November 16, 2016.)

16 Susan Faludi, in the New Yorker, would describe the filming of John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut. “Bobbitt could barely get it up, much less keep it there,” she would report, stating that he relied on syringe shots of a miracle substance called prostaglandin to keep him going. (Susan Faludi, “The Money Shot,” New Yorker, October 30, 1995, 82–83.)

1 Newt’s gravity would again come tugging in 2016 when he would serve as an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, who, as if starring in the premiere episode of That ’90s Show, would introduce his own “Contract with the American Voter.” (Reena Flores, “What Do Donald Trump’s First 100 Days in Office Look Like?,” CBSNews.com, November 11, 2016.)

2 Each would acquire his name later on in life: Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III; Gingrich was born Newton Leroy McPherson.

3 They were, in the words of columnist Lance Morrow, the “famous fraternal twins of American power, yin and yang of the Baby Boom.… A generation or two ago, leaders were father figures. For better and for worse, Clinton and Gingrich—powerful yet indefinably immature—give off a bright, undisciplined energy, a vibration of adolescent recklessness.” (Lance Morrow, “Newt Gingrich’s World: How One Man Changed the Way Washington Sees Reality,” Time, Man of the Year, December 25, 1995, 50–51.)

4 When Gingrich eventually ran for president, he appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2011, and attributed his straying ways in some measure to his patriotism: “There’s no question that at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and that things happened in my life that were not appropriate.… [I]t may make me more normal than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect and maybe not understanding the human condition.” (Gail Collins, “Eye of the Newt,” New York Times, March 12, 2011, A3; Collins, “Newt’s Real Legacy,” New York Times, January 29, 2012, SR1, 7.)

5 It was sex, curiously enough, that had first immersed Gingrich in politics. In 1968, during his grad school days, administrators at Tulane banned two photographs that reportedly showed a naked art teacher and nude sculptures with “enlarged organs.” University officials dubbed the pictures obscene and forbade their publication in Sophia, an arts-and-literary supplement to the school paper, the Tulane Hullabaloo. In response, classmates held demonstrations. Gingrich was among a small group—the Mobilization of Responsible Tulane Students (MORTS)—who staged protests, drafted a platform calling for a “free press on campus,” and met with the university’s president to discuss key demands. (Bruce W. Eggler, “Student Demonstrations Subside but Protest Leaders Still Dissatisfied,” Tulane Hullabaloo, March 15, 1968, 1, 15, 19; “MORTS Issues Election ‘Platform’,” Tulane Hullabaloo, April 5, 1968; “Anniversary of the Newt,” Washington City Paper, March 25–31, 1988.)

6 Indeed, JFK Jr.’s grandfather Joe Kennedy had run Hollywood studios in the 1920s and was the sometime lover of Gloria Swanson.

7 For George’s March 2000 cover, a dreamy, blue-eyed Donald Trump (called “The Trumpster,” in small type) was photographed being kissed by an anonymous female model. The cover line: “The Secret Behind Trump’s Political Fling.” That fling would turn into a tease and, finally, a love affair.

8 During the cocktail hour before the 1998 Correspondents’ Dinner, I encountered one Ms. Paula Jones braving the pre-party scrum in the inner courtyards of the Washington Hilton. If recollection serves, she was in the company of the Web’s new bad boy, Matt Drudge. (Felicity Barringer, “Media Glamourfest; The Dinner, the Heartburn,” New York Times, May 3, 1998, WK5.)

9 One of the most memorable after-parties was held in May 1999, hosted by Vanity Fair. On that night, I remember being taken aback as I watched a collection of VIPs staring out onto the lawn at a particularly stylish couple cuddling in a white chair. The celebrities’ collective gaze, for a lingering instant, was fixed on none other than JFK Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette. (Three months later, Kennedy, Bessette, and her sister Lauren would perish when the small plane that Kennedy was piloting crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.)

10 George H. W. Bush had his own youth squad. Mary Matalin occasionally went the Annie Hall route, wearing men’s ties to “spunk up” her ensemble, as she put it. In her campaign memoir, Matalin would write about how her colleague Torie Clarke donned “lime-green and hot-pink suede miniskirts, which she wore with matching tights. She had a blond-red spiked hairdo. This was not your mother’s Republican.” In Matalin’s view, in fact, the media’s obsession with youth began not with Clinton’s first presidential run but one election cycle earlier, when Boomers entered the press corps in large enough numbers to make their mark covering Boomer candidates, consultants, and staffers. “The prominence of the Boomers on the national political scene,” she posits, “was the 1988 campaign.… The Boomer press covered us as personalities because of their own narcissism—not as individuals, but as a generational characteristic. To this day there is nothing the press of that era likes to cover more than themselves. The younger guys appear in their own media because it is now intrinsic to the [digital news] business, but they are less ‘center of their own universe’ than the Boomer generation.” The 1988 race, Matalin asserts, “was the first time it was tentatively permissible for operatives to be on the record and visible in their own right. Prior to that, at least on the GOP side, it was close to a fireable offense to be quoted in a story unauthorized, and unthinkable to be the topic of a story, à la [Lee] Atwater and the other personalities that emerged in 1988.” Former Clinton strategist Dick Morris would make a similar point, contending that the Clintons saw the press’s relentless animus, in part, as a function of affinity breeding enmity. “They resent us,” the president once remarked, according to Morris, “because we are the same age as they are, we’re all baby boomers, and they’re just jealous and envious.” This quote has been variously attributed to Bill and to Hillary Clinton. (Mary Matalin and James Carville with Peter Knobler, All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President [New York: Random House/Touchstone, 1994], 264, 336; Interview with Matalin; Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds [New York: St. Martin’s, 1999], xxv; Howard Kurtz, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine [New York: Simon & Schuster/Free Press, 1998], 85.)

11 In Vanity Fair, Sam Tanenhaus suggested there was “a genuine conservative chic.” Under the headline “Damsels in Dissent,” he profiled “a new breed of female conservatives” (ages twenty-four to forty-three), whom the magazine rendered in chic and striking studio portraits. Among them: Lynn Chu, Danielle Crittenden, Pia Nordlinger, Virginia Postrel, Wendy Shalit, and Amity Shlaes—at thirty-nine, the youngest member of the Wall Street Journal ’s editorial board. Similarly splashy treatment would be given to their peers (David Brock, Bill Kristol, and Lisa Schiffren among them) in the New York Times Magazine, though the accompanying photos were criticized as being more “ghouls gallery” than glam. (Sam Tanenhaus, “Damsels in Dissent,” Vanity Fair, November 1999, 144–58; James Atlas, “The Counter Counterculture,” New York Times Magazine, February 12, 1995; Christopher Buckley, Letter, New York Times Magazine, March 12, 1995.)

12 Baron earned a bit of notoriety for writing about how and why she administered a blowjob to a man who would become a presidential press secretary. She would also give Ralph Reed’s staff agita because while in his employ she penned a column for an Atlanta alternative weekly called the Sunday Paper that contained gems of this caliber: “I swear I don’t have a big vagina, but over the Thanksgiving holiday I told my father-in-law I did.” (Interview with Lisa Baron; Baron, Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All [New York: Citadel, 2011], 5, 10–11, 153, 192; Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts, “Thou Shalt What??,” Washington Post, December 22, 2005.)

13 James Warren, the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau chief at the time, recalls attending one memorable Brock fete. On hand, Warren says, was “a star-studded troupe of the new-conservative media elite. Matt Drudge answered the door. Mark Foley was there—the Florida representative later alleged to have sent come-on emails to young congressional pages. So was Laura Ingraham. And Michael Huffington, wearing a loosely buttoned cotton Hawaiian shirt. As I recall, this was the evening before the Washington Post’s ‘Reliable Source’ gossip column would reveal that Michael and Arianna were getting divorced. The column stated that Huffington ‘has said he has dreams of becoming a priest.’” Subsequently, after losing his California Senate bid, he would come out as gay in an Esquire story—by David Brock. (Interview with Warren and confirmation from an anonymous source; Annie Groer and Ann Gerhart, “Reliable Source” [column], Washington Post, June 27, 1997; “Michael Huffington Secret Unveiled: He’s Gay,” San Francisco Examiner via sfgate.com, December 6, 1998.)

14 Turner, at the time, was known for spouting off and had a habit of sparring with Gerald Levin, his new boss at Time Warner, which had acquired CNN and effectively demoted him. “You talk about barbaric mutilation,” he complained. “I’m being clitorized by Time Warner!” (Ken Auletta, Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire [New York: Norton, 2004], 66; Kim Masters and Bryan Burrough, “Cable Guys,” Vanity Fair, January 1997, 129.)

15 Over time, the reportedly hostile and intimidating working conditions for women at Ailes’s Fox News would become toxic. In 2016 an ex-cohost would file a lawsuit accusing Ailes of sexual harassment and alleging that the network “masquerades as a defender of traditional family values, but behind the scenes, it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion–like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny.” Other network employees would come forward to make supporting claims, even as Ailes, dismissed by Fox after an internal investigation, vigorously denied the charges. (Gabriel Sherman, “The Revenge of Roger’s Angels,” New York, September 5, 2016.)

16 Fox News would find its voice through Clinton’s second-term scandals and impeachment, then come of age at the decade’s final curtain: on election night 2000. As the networks, one by one, predicted Al Gore would be the likely victor in the presidential sweepstakes, Fox poll consultant John Ellis—a first cousin of George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, then Florida’s governor—phoned his relatives from the network’s New York decision room at 2 a.m. to inform them that, miraculously, “our projection shows that it is statistically impossible for Gore to win Florida.” As Ellis would tell the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth—me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the President-elect. Now that was cool.” Fox alone would declare Bush the next president of the United States. The numbers, however, proved too close to call, and it would take a ruling by the Supreme Court to award Florida—and the election—to Bush II. The coup de grâce, in 2016: Roger Ailes, after being let go by Fox, would go on to advise Donald Trump’s presidential bid. And speaking of connections, who was revealed to have served (while Fox News was covering Trump’s presidential campaign) as one of the five trustees “for a large bloc of shares in 21st Century Fox and News Corp that belongs to Rupert Murdoch’s two youngest daughters”? According to the Financial Times: none other than Trump’s older daughter, Ivanka, a friend of Wendi Deng Murdoch, the News Corp executive chairman’s ex. Ms. Trump reportedly “stepped down from the board” seven weeks after her father won the election. (Jane Mayer, “George W.’s Cousin,” New Yorker, November 20, 2000, 38; Caitlin MacNeal, “Trump Complains That Only Fox News Covered His CIA Speech Fairly,” TalkingPointsMemo.com, January 26, 2017; Matthew Garrahan, “Ivanka Trump Oversaw Murdoch Daughters’ Trust,” Financial Times, February 8, 2017.)

17 Consider this assessment in the New York Times a week after Trump’s victory: “It is the stunning paradox of American politics. In a bitterly divided nation, where Tuesday’s vote once again showed a country almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, one party now dominates almost everything in American governance. With Donald J. Trump’s win, Republicans will soon control the White House, both chambers of Congress, the tilt of the Supreme Court, more state legislative chambers than [at] any time in history, and more governor’s offices than they have held in nearly a century.” (Julie Bosman and Monica Davey, “U.S. Divided, but G.O.P. Dominates,” New York Times, November 12, 2016, A9.)

1 Sports sleuths have tried to attribute Jordan’s symptoms in the famous “Flu Game” to food poisoning or, as has been proposed, a wicked hangover. But journalists’ accounts—and video footage—suggest he was, in fact, fighting the flu. (Emmanuel Godina, “MJ’s ‘Flu Game,’” NBALead.com, June 7, 2016; Jesse Dorsey, “Jalen Rose Reportedly Claims Michael Jordan’s ‘Flu Game’ Was a Hangover Game,” BleacherReport.com, February 5, 2013; Rick Weinberg, “Jordan Battles Flu, Makes Jazz Sick,” ESPN.com, June 23, 2004.)

2 In the 1960s, anthropologist Lionel Tiger pointed out that this mind-set had its roots in prehistory. (The concept of “male bonding” is sometimes attributed to Tiger and his 1969 book Men in Groups.) Instinctively, male hunter-gatherers used to break off in insular bands that purposely kept women at bay. “Men courted and chose other men as working and fighting partners, and as recreational companions,” Tiger notes. Eons later, male cooperatives became institutionalized, as evidenced by “the extraordinary predominance of men in forms of public life ranging from church to army to sport to legislature to business to law enforcement. It also prospered in secret societies, mysterious social groups cutting across all sectors of social life.” (Lionel Tiger, The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women [New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999], 244.)

3 The march’s legacy will always be tainted by the racist and anti-Semitic pronouncements, and politics of exclusion, espoused by Farrakhan. But in the African American community, Farrakhan the man was beside the point. “The discussion of Farrakhan is a side issue for us,” political scientist Ronald Walters remarked at the time. “For most blacks, this is about pain.” (Charles M. Blow, “The Million Man March, 20 Years On,” New York Times, October 12, 2015.)

4 “By some estimates,” according to historian Steve Gillon in his book Boomer Nation, “over 100 megachurches were springing up every year by the 1990s…‘Baby Boomers think of churches like they think of supermarkets,’ noted a church marketing consultant. ‘They want options, choices, and convenience. Imagine if Safeway was only open one hour a week, had only one product, and didn’t explain it in English.” (Steve Gillon, Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever and How It Changed America [New York: Simon & Schuster/Free Press, 2004], 111–12.)

5 On hand at that very first Promise Keepers conclave was Dr. Jack Hayford, who addressed the crowd. An early leader of the megachurch movement (the founding pastor of the Church on the Way, in Van Nuys, California), he tells me, “It was a stunning sight. These things that were happening are not like anything in [the] history of our country, where men came together for such purposes in such size groups. There’s been men crusades, [but] this was unprecedented.” (Interview with Hayford.)

6 Small wonder, then, that as the country’s financial straits became more uncertain in the twenty-first century and industrial-sector businesses continued their decline, the “Make America Great Again” message would appeal to disaffected males. The morning after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof would frame it this way: “Trump was absolutely right that the economic system is broken for ordinary Americans, especially working-class men. Since 1979, real hourly wages for men have essentially been unchanged for the bottom half of Americans by income.” (“Unfortunately,” Kristof would go on, “Trump’s proposed policies would exacerbate the inequity that he campaigned on.”) The trend would not abate. Hanna Rosin identified the “alpha female” and would state in an Atlantic article called “The End of Men” (which she would expand into an influential book) that by the 2010s “for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same.” Indeed, if one contrasts current male wages with those at the beginning of the women’s movement—according to David Brooks, citing figures presented by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project—“median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent.” That said, the gender salary lag would persist. Some fifteen years into the new millennium, American women, writes New York Times personal finance reporter Tara Siegel Bernard, would “continue to make less than men for the same work.” (Nicholas Kristof, “Gritting Our Teeth and Giving President Trump a Chance,” New York Times, November 9, 2016; Hanna Rosin, “The End of Men: How Women Are Taking Control—of Everything,” Atlantic, July–August 2010, 12, 60; David Brooks, “Free-Market Socialism,” New York Times, January 24, 2012, A27; Tara Siegel Bernard, “Vigilant Eye on Gender Pay Gap,” New York Times, November 15, 2014, B1.)

7 Millions of men were retreating into their shell and lashing out virtually. At the core of a new generation of video games—especially “first-person shooter” games—were remote-control massacres that would trigger what experts began to call a “lower empathy” threshold, a generational desensitization to the real-world carnage wrought by guns, bombs, and laser-guided armaments. These were worlds away from the pokey video arcade games of the 1970s.

8 In a 1999 article for the New York Observer, George Gurley asked readers, “What’s Your Gay Quotient?” as a way of addressing men’s identity along the decade’s more flexible gay-bi-straight spectrum. “Let us look upon our own [age],” observed Gurley, referencing Henry James, “and declare it the Ambigous Age. Even the greatest, most solid American historical personage of all, Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter himself, is entering the terrain of sexual uncertainty [as] two upcoming biographies… argue that Lincoln had a homosexual bond with his dear Illinois friend, Joshua Speed.” (George Gurley, “… What’s Your Gay Quotient?” New York Observer, June 28, 1999.)

9 Kimmel would go on to set up SUNY Stony Brook’s Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities.

10 In time, the “angry white male” would become a sanctimonious construct steeped in its own liberal bias. After Trump won the presidency, humanities professor Mark Lilla would lay out the so-called “whitelash theory”: a perceived white backlash to the growing clout of women and minorities. “The media’s newfound, almost anthropological, interest in the angry white male,” in Lilla’s view, “reveals as much about the state of our liberalism as it does about this much maligned, and previously ignored, figure.” Many liberals, according to Lilla, believed that Trump had succeeded by “transform[ing] economic disadvantage into racial rage.” But they were deluding themselves. This sort of thinking “sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns. It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run.” (Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November 20, 2016, SR6.)

11 Alfred Gingold would lampoon these epistles in his 1991 book Fire in the John, intended as a manly twelve-step manual for the “mid-life soft male.” (Alfred Gingold, Fire in the John: The Manly Man in the Age of Sissification [New York: St. Martin’s/Cader, 1991], 67, 119–21.)

12 “When I taught Iron John at Berkeley in the 1990s,” recalls Michael Kimmel, “the young male students didn’t get it at all. They saw masculinity as ‘aspirational’ and anticipatory, whereas Bly was nostalgic about what was lost.… At the Bly events I went to it was the older men who were weeping and the younger men were always looking around puzzled.” (Correspondence with Kimmel.)

1 Actor (later California governor) Arnold Schwarzenegger helped persuade the manufacturer, AM General, to produce the civilian version after he’d encountered some Humvees driving along the road while he was shooting a movie. In October 1992, he would take possession of the first such vehicle to come off the assembly line. (Joe Mathews, “The Hummer and Schwarzenegger,” Washington Post, February 28, 2010; The 90’s: The Last Great Decade?, Nutopia and National Geographic Channel, July 2014.)

2 Bill Clinton, Mr. Un-Inhale, often liked to faux-smoke his unlit stogie. Shortly after the Clintons took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in fact, Cigar Aficionado magazine would report that while George and Barbara Bush had discouraged smoking on the premises, “Hillary Rodham Clinton took the next step and removed the ashtrays [and] specifically prohibit[ed] smoking in the White House.” (Carl Sferrzza Anthony, “Our Presidents and Cigars,” Cigar Aficionado, Autumn 1993.)

3 The original ad was published without the wedding ring; the telling detail was added a few months later. “The only difference between the old and new versions,” writes Anne Higonett, “was the addition of a tiny but densely symbolic detail: a wedding band on the man’s ring finger. Today, all photographs of children hinting at ‘pleasure’ are suspect, let alone photographs of children explicitly titled ‘pleasures for men.’” (Anne Higonett, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood [London: Thames & Hudson, 1998], cited in Sara Bragg and Mary Jane Kehily, Children’s and Young People’s Cultural Worlds [Bristol, U.K.: Policy Press, 2013], 45.)

4 By now the term has passed its shelf life. “The metrosexual,” culture critic Teddy Wayne declared recently, is “a term that’s already become obsolete because it applies to such a broad spectrum [and nowadays refers to an urban male] who tends to his appearance as obsessively as does Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.” (Teddy Wayne, “Let’s Call a Yuppie a Yuppie,” New York Times, May 10, 2015.)

5 Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine, along with ESPN-TV, would contribute in their own way to a “new jock vanity,” according to the New York Times. So too the tandem explosion of the “lad” magazines in the 1990s, such as Loaded and Maxim. Mark Simpson announced in his essay in the Independent, “The New Lad bible ‘Loaded’ magazine, for all its features on… babes and sport is (closeted) metrosexual. Just as its anti-style is style… its heterosexuality is so self-conscious, so studied, that it’s actually rather camp. New Lads, for all their burping bloke-ishness, are just as much in love with their own image as any metrosexual, they just haven’t come to terms yet.” (Bruce Feiler, “Dominating the Man Cave,” New York Times, February 6, 2011, ST2; Mark Simpson, “Here Come the Mirror Men: Why the Future Is Metrosexual,” Independent, November 15, 1994.)

6 One sign of the lengths to which Hollywood actors would go? The ’90s saw “the dawn of ‘male celebrity groomers,’” according to the New York Times, which designates Diana Schmidtke as one of the forerunners of this breed. Her clients in recent years: George Clooney, Viggo Mortensen, and Jon Hamm. Guyliner, anyone? (Bee Shapiro, “Sometimes a Guy Just Likes to Feel Pretty,” New York Times, September 19, 2013, E3.)

7 L.A. was also the locale of the “Hair to the Chief” incident. Only in the 1990s could the president of the United States have been accused of sitting on Air Force One and delaying air traffic on two runways at LAX while a pricey hairstylist gave him a tarmac trim. The Secret Service and the White House would assert—and the FAA would later prove—that the reports about air congestion had been erroneous. True, “Cristophe of Beverly Hills” had been giving Bill Clinton a clip job. But the appointment had caused hardly a ripple: one other aircraft was reportedly delayed two minutes before taking off. (Thomas Friedman, “Haircut Grounded Clinton While the Price Took Off,” New York Times, May 21, 1993; “Clinton’s Runway Haircut Caused No Big Delays,” Newsday via Baltimore Sun, June 30, 1993; Katy Steinmetz, “Top 10 Expensive Haircuts,” Time, April 2, 2010.)

8 “This was true in the 1970s as well within the urban pimp culture scene,” Banks continues. “No one challenged Ron O’Neal’s masculinity in the blaxploitation film Super Fly. If anything, he was hypermasculinized and seen as the perfect example of a ‘brother’s brother.’ That is, a man’s man. He had women, money… a fancy car. And he had straightened (‘fly’) hair.” (Ingrid Banks, “Hair Still Matters,” from Feminist Frontiers, ed. Laurel Richardson, Verta Taylor, and Nancy Whittier [New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004], 116.)

9 Gen X and, later, Gen Y, were often following sports for virtual reasons: to root for particular athletes who might round out their fantasy-league teams. Today many a millennial sports nut has never set foot in a stadium or rooted for a “home team.” Instead, having been brought up almost exclusively on televised sports and Web highlights—and beholden to players and personalities rather than to sports franchises—he or she tracks the stats of players so as to field and trade them in a digital fantasyland.

10 Some of the network’s influence also extended to the look of the on-air talent as well. For the most part, the channel’s commentators and hosts, some of them former athletes, dressed conservatively, if nattily, in the ’90s. But many were primping, more or less, as they screened the day’s highlight reels—for other men. “ESPN has an unmistakable obsession with the male body, clothed and unclothed,” writes Bruce Feiler. “‘The proper man dresses properly’ is the prevailing message of a parade of handmade suits, wide-knotted ties… [down to] the ultimate sports accessory, ‘the ring’”—as in: the championship ring, the most exclusive bauble in professional sport. (Bruce Feiler, “Dominating the Man Cave,” New York Times, February 3, 2011.)

11 Saggy pants and laceless gym shoes originated as a jailhouse style (or a counter-embrace of the jailer’s rules), Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams would contend. “All this is born out of prison,” noted Adams. “We took the shoestrings and the belts from prisoners.… The first indicator that your child is having problems is the dress code.” Presidential candidate Barack Obama would pick up the thread in 2008, while fielding a question during an MTV interview: “Brothers should pull up your pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on.… Some people might not want to see your underwear. I’m one of them.” (Clyde Haberman, “Put This on a Billboard: Droopy Pants Can Kill,” New York Times, April 2, 2010, A19; Geoff Earle, “Kick in the Pants from O,” New York Post, November 4, 2008.)

12 Rodman broke the sports-star mold. He would offer synopses of his sexual encounters and admit to having his scrotum pierced. He would talk openly about his homosexual fantasies. (“I wouldn’t be ashamed to say I was gay,” he told Playboy in 1997. “I’m the first to say I would fuck a man’s brains out.… We all have a little homosexual in us.”) He would frequent strip clubs and gay bars. Like an X-rated Ali, he would brag, “I am the reality. I’m Elvis, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead all wrapped into one. The president of the United States gets a hard-on just thinking about me.” Prone to stunts, Rodman—who was not averse to appearing in public in drag—would appear on the court sporting different hairdos, dyed a new shade one night or patterned into a “text message” the next. (“Dennis Rodman: The Playboy Interview,” Playboy, June 1997, 62, 171; “Dennis’ Biography,” DennisRodman.com/bio; Michael Silver, “Rodman Unchained,” Sports Illustrated, May 29, 1995; Chris Heath, “Wherever He Goes, There He Is,” Rolling Stone, December 12, 1996; Mike Puma, “Rodman, King or Queen of Rebounds?” ESPN.com, October 9, 2003; Vincent M. Mallozzi, “Rodman, Heading to Hall of Fame, Is Already Back on ‘A’ List,” New York Times, May 15, 2011, SP5.)

13 Pro athletes had always drawn their share of groupies. But with the rise in sports stars’ salaries and media exposure, these admirers stepped up their game. In 1992, a female writer for Esquire memorably embedded with a coterie of NBA companions, who would rank and rate players like wines. At this level of play, the athlete and his partner, if both were stylish and smoking hot, enhanced each other’s public wattage. (E. Jean Carroll, “Risk and Romance Among NBA Groupies: An Embed’s Report,” Esquire, April 1992, via Deadspin.com.)

14 In his mid-’90s novel, Microserfs, tech-age sage Douglas Coupland would describe some of these programmers as people who ate “flat” foods—snacks that could be slid to them under their closed office doors as they pulled yet another all-nighter. (Douglas Coupland, Microserfs [New York: HarperCollins, 1995], excerpted in Wired, January 1994.)

15 The man in the man cave was also watching, oddly enough, recycled games. The Classic Sports Network, launched in 1995, allowed Boomer viewers to relive “oldies” games whose outcomes they already knew.

16 One sports genre that also broke out around this time was mixed martial arts (MMA), a national phenomenon at venues across North America. Competitors went at each other in cages in a sort of Brazilian-Greco-Roman (s)mash-up of feet and fists. The Ultimate Fighting Championship was incorporated in 1993 to promote MMA. But the violence, not to mention the barbaric behavior among some of the fans, was considered too extreme for TV, and sustained coverage would not make it onto cable until the next decade. (Amy Chozick, “The Slugfest in the Executive Suite,” New York Times, February 17, 2013, BU1, 6; Barry Bearak, “A Toehold in the Mainstream,” New York Times, November 12, 2011, D1, 4–5.)

17 It was the age of the preferred lie—a golf term that was virtually invented for Bill Clinton, denoting the act of moving one’s ball to a less encumbered position.

18 HGH—human growth hormone—took off in the ’90s as “the love child of Viagra and Botox,” wrote Ned Zeman in Vanity Fair. “The New England Journal of Medicine, circa 1990, [reported] the results of a study in which a dozen men between the ages of 61 and 81, received large doses of H.G.H. for six straight months.” The result: diminished body fat and a boost in lean muscle mass. “The treatment, in the authors’ view, essentially reversed ‘10 to 20 years of aging.’” (Ned Zeman, “Hollywood’s Vial Bodies,” Vanity Fair, March 2012.)

19 Deflating is an apt metaphor for how this mind-set would persist among certain sports teams. In the 2015 AFC Championship Game, the New England Patriots would be accused—then exonerated, then not-so-exonerated—of secretly deflating their game balls, ever so slightly, in order to make them easier to grip, thus giving them an edge. (The jokes that followed, about shriveled balls, were reminiscent of those from the ’90s, about corked bats.)

20 Over time this reasoning would extend to the public’s perception of America’s ultimate contest of all: the political system. And by the next millennium, there was ample irony to go around when the nation elected Donald Trump as president, embracing his campaign contention that “Our system is rigged”—this from a man who for years had buttressed his fortune by using the tax code to his advantage. Trump, in fact, was a master rigger. In the world of reality TV, where he had expanded his renown, “truth has a low priority,” asserts longtime Boston Globe journalist Martin Nolan. “Rules are for losers.” (Ashley Martin, “Donald Trump, Slipping in Polls, Warns of ‘Stolen Election,’” New York Times, October 13, 2016; Jonathan Martin, “Donald Trump’s Anything-Goes Campaign Sets an Alarming Political Precedent,” New York Times, September 17, 2016.)

21 Twenty-one-year-old Jordan Spieth would don the green jacket in 2015.

22 The couple would divorce in 2010. By the middle of the decade Woods would tell Time magazine, “She is one of my best friends now.” (Associated Press via ESPN.com, “Woods Ambulance Crew Had Concerns,” March 13, 2010; “Tiger’s Private Struggles,” Time, December 3, 2015.)

1 New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley would later remark, in a comparable vein, “Despite what many conservatives maintain, Hollywood doesn’t set the social agenda. More often it timidly trails the culture, then belatedly buys in and turns up the music.” (Alessandra Stanley, “Staking a Claim on Social Causes,” New York Times, March 3, 2014, C1, 5.)

2 The groping scenes between Stone’s character and her live-in female lover are shot and sequenced so as to play to the male gaze: we watch as a clench-jawed Douglas watches, agog. At Stone’s sprawling house, and later on the disco floor, the lovers tongue one another or bump and grind as if to rattle Douglas by forcing him to witness something he’s being denied. The sequences, to some, represent a warped hetero-male vision of lesbo lust.

3 Dovetailed into this sequence of screen roles were three others—arguably among Douglas’s best—that addressed similar, if less sexualized, truths about male failings. Douglas’s character in Wall Street (1987) was his most memorable. So masterfully did he play the part of a cutthroat broker touting the Reagan-era motto that “Greed is good” that for three decades people would approach him, professing that they’d chosen a career in finance because they’d been inspired in part by his character—a role that had been meant to demonize, not glamorize, what one of the film’s screenwriters, Stanley Weiser, called “the hyper-materialism of the culture.” Then, in Falling Down (1993), Douglas would play a laid-off defense contractor. Trapped on a California freeway, his character begins to unravel before going on a rampage. “Falling Down,” in Douglas’s view, was meant to address the impact of “a whole phenomenon. After the war [in the Persian Gulf] and after Vietnam, we had a feeling that a mission was accomplished. At one time, Southern California was known for its defense industry, not for show business. So the idea [was] that these guys—the military—had achieved the end of the Cold War and had achieved their ends, their justice. And now… there was this complete disillusionment about, ‘Well, I tried so hard and I worked so hard for my country, and now they’re giving me a pink slip.’” The American President (1995) was a romantic comedy in which Douglas, as commander in chief (opposite Annette Bening), anticipates the scandal that would erupt three years later: a West Wing love affair, a young daughter, a 60-plus approval rating, and an order to bomb targets in North Africa. Like the aforementioned films, there was a similar underlying theme, Douglas says: “[Writer] Aaron Sorkin was going for ‘Is anybody worth redemption?’”—a phrase Douglas has used elsewhere to describe Basic Instinct. And in an added bit of meta-mischief surrounding that feature, there was one press organization, Douglas claims, that tried to square the circle. “I’m not going to mention their names,” he says, but “one magazine did a follow-up article about the movie, and supposedly liked it, and sent in a writer, and the writer came to my office with a dress split up to her, you know, her waist on the sides and kind of flopped across the middle. And basically the seduction aspect was going on in this interview. I realized what they were [doing], going to try to make a comparison and try to get me in a situation similar to Clinton, to show art imitates life, you know. Well, I’m a gentleman, and the last thing I’m going to do is mess around with a reporter!” (Interview with Douglas; Michael Lewis, “Greed Never Left,” Vanity Fair, April 2010; Bernard Weinraub, “‘Basic Instinct’: The Suspect Is Attractive, and May Be Fatal,” New York Times, March 15, 1992.)

4 Thelma & Louise, discussed elsewhere, would virtually create its own genre.

5 In the 1800s, “dude” connoted “dandy.” By the 1960s, a dude was a hang-loose surfer. A generation later, Sean Penn updated the surfer-dude archetype as stoner Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Since then, according to linguistics professor Scott F. Kiesling, as cited in the Atlantic, “The term has long implied a particular understanding of fellowship among guys. Its dominant linguistic function, Kiesling argues, has been to enable men, mainly young men, to address one another in a conspicuously straight mode of laid-back camaraderie [that, as Kiesling states, offers a sign] ‘of closeness with other men (satisfying masculine solidarity) that also maintains a casual… distance (thus satisfying heterosexism).’” (J. J. Gould, “A Brief History of Dude,” Atlantic, November, 2013; Mike McPadden, “Awesome-Splaining Fast Times at Ridgemont High for Millennials,” VH1.com, January 26, 2016.)

6 Divorced for five years, and raised Irish Catholic, he continues to observe his ex-wife’s faith: Orthodox Judaism. At one point he agrees to dogsit her Pomeranian—so she can go with her new beau on a Hawaiian vacation.

7 The Dude’s character also borrows a soupçon of Job, Meursault (from Camus’s The Stranger), and Jules Feiffer’s Alfred, who, in Little Murders, uses daydreams as a coping mechanism when a succession of muggers batter him mercilessly.

8 Bruce Feirstein, the humorist and screenwriter (with several James Bond pictures to his credit), has devised his own Grand Unified Theory about why the creativity of the studio system devolved so drastically. “In the 1980s, when I first started selling scripts,” he tells me, “the executives were political, even if they went to film school, and got into the business to ‘change the world.’ Their ideals and hopes were reflected in films like M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter. By the mid-1990s, the lower-ranked executives—the first gatekeepers, if you will—seemed to be less political, less well informed, and more about the spectacle at the box office. The scripts I was getting asked to write or rewrite seemed to have no worldview beyond what the executives or screenwriters had seen in other movies.… Over the decade that followed [the mandate] from studios was to make things ‘edgier’ and ‘darker.’ And a sense of derivativeness began to creep into the pictures. The ‘water cooler’ aspect of movies began to evaporate. “My theory is that starting around 1995, at the dawn of AOL, Netscape, and Internet 1.0, the so-called ‘best and the brightest’—those who wanted to change the world—shifted their interest from Hollywood to the Internet. Northern California was where the future was being invented; there were less rules, less structure, and it was more like Hollywood itself was in the 1920s. If you were really smart and wanted to make a difference in the world, you went into what was then called cyberspace. “[It was] a brain drain,” he concludes. “I’m mainly talking about big studio releases, but… consider this: between 1995 and 2015, Hollywood gave us endless sequels, remakes, TV-shows-into-movies, and superheroes, while the IT world gave us Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, the iPhone, the iPad, and Twitter.” (Interview with Feirstein.)

9 Representative of the wider genre: Wild at Heart (1990), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Poison (1991), Terminator 2 (1991), Thelma & Louise (1991), Unforgiven (1992), Man Bites Dog (1992), Love and a.45 (1994), The Usual Suspects (1995), Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995), Se7en (1995), Sling Blade (1996), L.A. Confidential (1997), Grosse Point Blank (1997), Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), American History X (1998), Fight Club (1999), and Ghost Dog (1999).

10 Moira Weigel, who writes about gender, media, and culture, has discussed such films as part of a continuum, including a cinematic movement coming out of Europe: sadomodernism. Certain European directors such as Michael Haneke, observes Weigel in the journal n+1, were attempting in the 1990s to use the depictions of suffering and death to wake up viewers to their own violations and to indict white bourgeois culture and its “spectatorship as violence.” In contrast, writes Weigel, “Haneke seems the opposite of Quentin Tarantino, another director whose obsession with violence has become his signature. Tarantino knowingly parodies genre clichés in order to repurpose the intense feelings that they inspire.” (Moira Weigel, “Sadomodernism,” n+1, Spring 2013, 136–40.)

11 Pulp Fiction possessed a knowingly ironic nastiness: the heroin OD; the gangland-style slayings; the anal-rape scene replete with ball gag and samurai sword. The moral quandary would be summed up in the cover line of the September 1995 issue of the Washington Monthly (picturing the film’s female lead, Uma Thurman): “PULP AFFLICTION : Are Today’s Hipsters Cool or Cruel?” (Gareth G. Cook, “The Dark Side of Camp: Why Irony and Detachment Sometimes Add Up to Nastiness and Snobbery,” Washington Monthly, September 1995; Gavin Edwards, “‘Get the Gimp’: Breaking Down Pulp Fiction’s Most Notorious Scene,” RollingStone.com, May 21, 2014.)

12 Jim Windolf, the culture critic and editor, argues for a sort of poetic justice (which others might view as yet more indiscriminate camp): “The Travolta character is killed in the end while taking a dump. A more ignominious ending could not be imagined.” (Interview with Windolf.)

13 Other films of the era, more traditional in spirit, used the backdrop of violence and civil strife to stiffen the moral spine. Spike Lee’s 1989 classic, Do the Right Thing, for example—about racially inflamed incidents in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy, on the hottest day of the year—concludes with two contradictory (some say complementary) quotes that flash on the screen. The first, from Martin Luther King Jr., counsels, “That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind.” The second, from Malcolm X, advises, “I don’t even call it violence, when it’s self-defense. I call it intelligence.” While the film appears to be ambivalent, it is actually urging the moviegoer to hew to an ethical middle path. (The irony of it all: while critics warned that Spike Lee’s film might actually incite riots, it did nothing of the sort. Overall, it sent a life- and neighborhood-affirming message. One might even call the movie conservative, in its way.)

14 The films became forerunners, surely, to the most successful cable-TV dramas of the 2000s—serial sagas that writer David Kamp has described as focused on “slow-burning despair and moral ambiguity [centered around] people who succumb to the darkest, most transgressive aspects of their nature.” The Sopranos, which premiered in 1999, “gave lie to the notions that… there had to be so-called closure,” director Allen Coulter has said, “that there was a moral at the center that you should carry away from the show.” Indeed, the ethically neutered character would come to dominate high-end cable over the next generation, epitomized, perhaps, by Walter White, Breaking Bad ’s schoolteacher/meth dealer, “a protagonist who made a conscious decision,” writes New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “to step permanently outside our civilization’s moral norms.” (David Kamp, “The Most Happy Fellowes,” Vanity Fair, December 2012, 173; Sam Kashner and Jim Kelly, “The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos,” Vanity Fair, April 2012, 222; Ross Douthat, “The World According to Team Walt,” New York Times, September 29, 2013.)

15 It got even more down and dirty. Critic and essayist James Wolcott, one of the great pop-culture synthesizers of our time, identified a substratum within this breed of film, which he dubbed scuzz cinema: “The Big Three [elements] of scuzz film: sex, sadism, and greasy appetite—the white-trash combination platter.” (James Wolcott, “Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Big Stain,” Vanity Fair, April 1998, 148, 152.)

16 My Boomer friend Lester points out that South Park pioneered the use of puerile and excruciatingly un-PC comedy (sexist, racist, the works) to educate viewers about the perils of bigoted behavior and attitudes. “By the end of each episode,” he insists, “the lesson is fundamentally good-spirited, reinforcing more positive social ‘values,’ than, say, Family Guy” (which premiered in 1999). My millennial son, Sam, disagrees. “Elites and liberals would see South Park as ironic,” he says. “But the deeper intention of the comedy backfires. Many viewers believe it lines up with their actual beliefs. It’s entertaining because they see nothing as sacred.” Sam’s millennial cousin, Rosie, goes further: “I was ten years old watching it and the boys [in my class] loved it and then said nasty things, quoting offensive, ironic comedy before they knew what irony was.” As she grew older she realized, “You don’t need an entire episode of abusive humor, written by white guys, to show that misogyny [or racism] exists. Hire more women to write more shows with positive messages.”

17 Meanwhile, on Canadian television and then on MTV, The Tom Green Show brought prank-shock comedy to a new level of puerility. Green performed unthinkable acts in broad daylight: sucking a cow’s teat, humping a dead moose (“Bullwinkle’s Last Stand”), and mortifying his parents by defacing the hood of the family car with a huge porn decal. The Man Show, premiering on Comedy Central in 1999, encouraged viewers to settle into their man caves, hold on to their puds, and follow the bouncing babes. Recurring gags revolved around scatology, beer chugging, and lingerie-clad models on trampolines. Its audience didn’t seem merely fixated but regressing through Freud’s psychosexual stages, from phallic back to anal and oral. (Charisse L’Pree, “One World, One Image, One Channel: A History of MTV,” May 1, 2002, https://charisselpree.com/2002/05/01/history-of-mtv/; Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture [New York: Free Press, 2006], 122.)

18 Critic David Kehr fingers 1996 as the watershed year. Jim Carrey’s The Cable Guy, Kehr contends, “was one of the first ‘cringe comedies,’ in which the humor is grounded in the painful humiliation experienced by its protagonist.” (David Kehr, “Jim Carrey as the Id Unleashed a Bit Before Its Time,” New York Times, February 21, 2011.)

19 The Farrellys spike the film with so many moments of social discomfort (every misunderstanding leads to a deeper morass, mirroring the Seinfeld /Larry David playbook)—and, at the same time, so many layers of schmaltz—that they seem to be declaring that any intimation of innocence is virtually impossible in these adulterated times.

20 Austin Powers was the overcompensating, clueless, and unapologetically sexist spy from the “Swingin’ Sixties,” created by comedian Mike Myers in the 1997 film comedy Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Powers became a ’90s mascot. And he would spend much of the 1999 sequel searching for his mojo—lost in a time-machine mishap that leaves him unable to “shag.” (Some of the memorable characters in the Powers harem: Alotta Fagina, Felicity Shagwell, and Ivana Humpalot.)

21 In many ways, they were Woody Allen’s comedic descendants, a group that included everyone from the slackers, gearheads, and weirdos of these ’90s comedies to Chris Rock (who acknowledges a debt to Allen, insisting, “I’ve checked into hotels under [Allen’s character’s name] Alvy Singer”) to the alumni of Paul Feig and Judd Apatow’s seminal 1999 TV series Freaks and Geeks. These latter comedians—Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen among their ranks—took Allen’s odd duck and reinvented him as the all-American man-boy. Writer Stephen Rodrick, for one, has specified Apatow & Co.’s “brand of ‘dude humor’ [as] bumbling young guys who behave badly but have hearts of plated gold.” (Frank Rich, “In Conversation: Chris Rock,” New York, November 30, 2014; Stephen Rodrick, “The Nerd Hunter,” New Yorker, April 6, 2015, 38.)

22 At a 2000 benefit dinner in Beverly Hills, Bill Clinton called out the film’s producers by name (“David and Steven and Jeffrey… and all the DreamWorks folks and all of you who are here tonight”), and jokingly told the audience that he was an unabashed fan of the film: “I loved American Beauty. I love Kevin Spacey.” (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, William J. Clinton, 2000–2001, Book 1 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2001], 725.)

1 St. Claire was a Columbia grad who, after paying her dues as a Wall Street consultant, would become a stripper and porn star. She would eventually flower as a successful actress, entrepreneur, pro wrestler, pro-wrestling manager and promoter, VJ, and rock journalist. (Jasmin St. Claire, What the Hell Was I Thinking?!! [Albany, GA/Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2010], 15–40; interview with Anthony Haden-Guest; notes from Haden-Guest 1996 interview with St. Claire; “Jasmin St. Claire: Biography,” Internet Movie Database, IMDb.com, 2015.)

2 “The antipornography movement among feminists lost steam in the 1990s,” says Fordham University’s Kirsten Swinth, an expert in gender and cultural history in America. Instead, she contends, “feminist energies went in a series of important directions to address reproductive freedom and sexual vulnerability and violence. This included defending abortion rights in the face of mounting challenges from the right. It included supporting queer sexualities and the development of queer studies.… In my judgment, [the decade’s so-called] preoccupation with sexuality was not a simple triumph of the sexual revolution, but a complex mix of (1) the deepening sexualization of commercial culture and (2) ongoing campaigns to change policy, law, and practice to end sexual violence and protect reproductive freedom.” (Interview with Swinth.)

3 During this period, sales of porn magazines were being trampled by the boom in videos, CD-ROMs, and DVDs. Professor Samir Husni, who teaches journalism at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, is the country’s leading expert on the history of the American periodical. “From the late ’80s until, like, 1997, there were more new sex magazines published than any other genre. One year in the ’90s—I still remember the number vividly—one-seventh of all new publications were sex magazines [often devoted to special interests]. You could dissect the human body—name any part—and you will have five magazines for it. There was actually a magazine called Foreskin Quarterly. That’s how specific it got.… Tattooing on naked bodies… Titles devoted to black ass or Hispanic ass. And so the established magazines like Hustler and Penthouse, to compete in that market, started to go completely pornographic. They left nothing to the imagination. With the advent of the Internet, they figured the definition of obscenity is no longer applicable to communities that are literally unbounded.” Though porn magazines earned revenue for a time by loading up on ads for dial-in phone sex and DVD inserts, it was too little, too late. Online porn, Husni explains, would sound the skin mag’s death knell. “When pornography became disseminated on [cable] and on your laptops,” says Husni, “you can’t compete in print. I mean, no matter how much you shake the magazine, it will never move the same way.” (Interview with Husni.)

4 By 1998 Hef had become so respectable in the publishing world that he was inducted into the pantheon: the American Society of Magazine Editors’ “Hall of Fame,” alongside no less than Byron Dobell (ex-editor of American Heritage) and Gloria Steinem (founding editor of Ms.). (“Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame,” National Magazine Awards/American Society of Magazine Editors, magazine.org/asme/national-magazine-awards/magazine-editors-hall-fame.)

5 In the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, for example, Time’s Margaret Carlson contended that George W. Bush’s “money shot was a tear in his eye, better even than Clinton’s lip biting.” (From an October 2, 2000, Time column, “The Oprah Primary,” collected in Margaret Carlson, Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999], 122–23.)

6 In the ’90s, photographers Jeff Burton, Ken Probst, and Larry Sultan—following Barbara Nitke’s lead in the ’80s—documented the on-camera frenzy and off-camera ennui of adult-film sets, gay and straight, creating bodies of work that sold well in galleries. Sultan created chilly tableaux showing porn actors, filmmakers, and crew members in their San Fernando Valley milieu: furnished upper-middle-class homes that were rented for the purpose, or sets that replicated suburban bedrooms. Sultan’s stills, often depicting “breaks in the action,” managed to place porn artifice inside a spooky American wholesomeness that was equal parts Helmut Newton, Twin Peaks, and Pleasantville. (Suzanne Stein, “Larry Sultan, 1946–2009,”SFMOMA.org, December 17, 2009; Jenna Garrett, “Photo du Jour: Boredom on an 80s Porn Set,” FeatureShoot.com, June 17, 2014; William L. Hamilton, “The Mainstream Flirts with Pornography Chic,” New York Times, March 21, 1999.)

7 Many publications would repeat these numbers, yet Forbes would eventually call them largely “baseless and wildly inflated.” Citing stats from 1998 through 2001, Forbes.com asserted, “For the $10 billion figure to be accurate, you have to add in adult video networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, Web sites, in-room hotel movies, phone sex, sex toys and magazines—and still you can’t get there.… Skepticism is in order, though, because as David Klatell, associate dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism notes, ‘[Pornography] is an industry where they exaggerate the size of everything.’” (Dan Ackman, “How Big Is Porn?,” Forbes.com, May 25, 2001.)

8 By the 2010s, Broadway’s annual ticket sales would soar to $1.37 billion. (Jesse Lawrence, “Broadway Just Had Its Highest-Grossing Year Ever,” Forbes.com, July 10, 2015.)

9 Nineties amateur tapes, which began as a “fringe fetish,” according to journalist Ben Wallace, would become “one of pornography’s most popular aesthetics—and, as such, one co-opted by the pros.” (Benjamin Wallace, “The Geek-Kings of Smut,” New York, February 7, 2011, 30.)

10 The new equation often proved a sore spot for the onscreen recipients. Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott would call 1998 Year One of “Redi-Wood,” stating that whatever benefits the drug brought to male staying power, “Viagra has resulted in a grueling strain on porn women, whose bodies are pounded by battering rams in scenes that can drag on near-forever. Couple this with anal sex’s no longer being a specialty in a porn career… and the wear and tear on the body amounts to consensual rape.” It was only a matter of time before many hardcore viewers began to believe that such roughhouse sessions were, in Wolcott’s argot, “the marauding norm.” (James Wolcott, “Debbie Does Barnes & Noble,” Vanity Fair, September 2005.)

11 Wallace would recount in his classic essay “Big Red Son” that when filmmaker Rob Black was bestowed with AVN’s 1998 Best Director/Video award for his porn feature Miscreants, he was lauded from the stage as “a guy who can take buttholes, midgets, and fried fish, and make a love story.” The whole nine yards. (David Foster Wallace, “Big Red Son” [1998], in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays [New York: Little, Brown, 2006], 36.)

12 Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, has long been one of the nation’s foremost antiporn crusaders. And the state, with its large Mormon population, has maintained so stiff an opposition to “obscene materials” that its lawmakers as recently as 2016 voted unanimously to designate porn as “a public-health crisis.” (“Hatch Offers Anti-Porn Bill, Decries Judges,” Tulsa World, June 5, 1996; interview with Robert Rosen; Belinda Luscombe, “Porn and the Threat to Virility,” Time, April 11, 2016, 42.)

13 Nancy Libin, an expert on digital privacy law and cyber security, a former counsel to Senator Joe Biden and later to the Center for Democracy and Technology, points out, “In ACLU v. Reno—the case that struck down the CDA—the [Supreme] Court distinguished the Internet from other kinds of broadcast media, like TV and radio. It found that the Internet was less intrusive because it requires users to take ‘a series of affirmative steps more deliberate and directed than merely turning a dial.’ Because it was not technically possible to screen Internet viewers by age or to block content harmful to kids without also blocking adults’ access to constitutionally protected speech, the Court struck [down] the law on First Amendment grounds. COPA was an attempt to address the constitutional infirmities that the Court found in CDA.… CPPA was struck down, [in turn,] because a majority on the Court found that virtual images [purporting to represent minors, either through computer-generated imagery or young-looking adults,] met neither the definition of ‘obscene’ or ‘child porn’ and the law therefore blocked lawful content.” (Interview with Libin.)

1 Since then, Fleiss regained some interest in her old trade, working as a consultant to her longtime friend Dennis Hof, proprietor of seven Nevada brothels. “I advise him,” she says. “Interior design. [Helping to] put together a museum on brothels.” She monitors trends too. “There’s a huge call for trannies now. A guy, if they’re a little bit high, they are insane for trannies.” But Fleiss’s heart, she maintains, is with her more manageable flock. (Interview with Fleiss; John M. Glionna and Javier Panzar, “In Nevada, There Is Little Love Left for Brothels,” Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2015.)

2 Before my visit, I had read up on multiple-pet owners. “Animal hoarding,” according to a key research consortium that studies the practice, “is likely a final common pathway from a variety of traumatic experiences which result in dysfunctional attachment styles to people and lead to compulsive and addictive behavior.” But Fleiss seems to have broken the mold and, per usual, defied convention. In her case, I feel I am in the company of someone determined to be a nurturer, caretaker, and provider for those she has taken under her wing. These are the very attributes, in fact, of the best madams. (“FAQs for Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium,” Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Tufts University, vet.tufts.edu/hoarding/faqs-hoarding/.)

3 Sheen dated and married models and actresses. He befriended porn stars. After procuring sexual services, he was known to leave a handsome tip over and above the steep fee. He battled substance abuse and got in trouble with the law repeatedly for incidents of violence against women. And in the perverse counter-karma that seemed to define tabloid personalities of the period, Sheen became, by the 2000s, the star of the sitcom Two and a Half Men—and, for a time, television’s highest-paid actor. (“Charlie Sheen in Hospital for Drug, Alcohol Problems,” CNN.com, May 22, 1998; Jim Rutenberg, “Charlie Sheen’s Redemption Helps a Studio in Its Struggles,” New York Times, February 4, 2002, C8; Karen Thomas, “So Bad, but Such Good Fun,” USA Today, August 27, 2003, D3; Tracie Egan Morrissey, “Charlie Sheen’s History of Violence Toward Women,” Jezebel.com, March 2, 1001; “Charlie Sheen Breaks Silence, Tells Radar: ‘I’m Fine… People Don’t Seem to Get It,’” Radar.com, January 29, 2011; “Charlie Sheen’s Porn Star Girlfriends,” Radar.com, December 24, 2015; Mark Seal, “Charlie Sheen’s War,” Vanity Fair, June 2011, 173; Dorothy Pomerantz, “Hollywood’s Highest-Paid TV Actors,” Forbes, October 11, 2011.)

4 The model and actress is the daughter of Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland.

5 When I phone her in 2015 to see how she’s getting on, she tells me she has had a change of heart—and is on a new mission. “It took me a long time to understand the birds. Now I’m an [animal rights] activist. They do not belong as pets in my home or your home. There is no way to have a normal life and have a macaw. They live a hundred years. They are powerful fliers. They are not supposed to have their wings clipped and live in a cage. It’s a huge, huge problem. I’m dedicating myself to two things,” she promises. “There’s not one sanctuary where they can live free. I need to create a place where [birds like these] can live. [This initiative] needs to be done, state by state. Secondly, I’m hoping to stop the breeding—to stop the pet trade. This is the rest of my life—to try and help them. That gives me hope.” In the meantime, her loyal, radiant hens and cocks give her unconditional love, and company, in a world that has often betrayed or discarded her.

1 The scene was encapsulated in a ’90s den of decadence called the Hungry Duck, a Moscow nightclub with female and male strippers and a history of violence, prostitution, underage debauchery—and what journalists Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi have called a “rape-camp” vibe. “The stories,” wrote Andrew Roth, in an almost nostalgic recap in the New York Times, “were outlandish and often unverifiable: of barroom brawls where eyeballs were knocked out of their sockets, public sex in the booths and topless dancers falling off the bar.” Not to mention two thousand lost passports—and eight wayward bullet holes lodged here and there. (Andrew Roth, “A Decadent Reminder of Russia Before Putin,” New York Times, August 6, 2012, A7; Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia [New York: Grove, 2000], 236; Katherine P. Avgerinos, “From Vixen to Victim: The Sensationalization and Normalization of Prostitution in Post-Soviet Russia,” Vestnik, The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies, October 23, 2006, http://www.sras.org/normalization_of_prostitution_in_post-soviet_russia.)

2 Historian Douglas Brinkley recently told me that he sometimes considers the 1990s “the decade of the Two Bills: Bill Clinton and Bill Gates.” Call it the Bill Epoch. (Interview with Brinkley.)

3 Closer to home, according to British journalist and social activist Julie Bindel, who helped found the organization Justice for Women, certain tourists in the ’90s and 2000s (typically middle-aged women from North America and Europe) explored “the darker side” of fun-in-the-sun vacations, traveling to beachside destinations like Jamaica, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic with the intention of paying for sex with “beach boys” or guides. Bindel, writing about one such sex tourist—a forty-three-year-old Canadian woman who regularly traveled to Jamaica for trysts—pointed out, “The knowledge that many of her sexual partners are desperately poor does not seem to spoil her enjoyment.” (Julie Bindel, “The Price of a Holiday Fling,” Guardian, July 5, 2003.)

4 A Czech-born photographer I know, Hana Jakrlova, was in her twenties and living in Prague at the time. “Prior to the fall of the [Berlin] Wall, the control you had was over your mind, but you were always physically restricted. You couldn’t move around. You could go to Yugoslavia once in five years, if you were lucky. But what you could control was your body. And so there was in Bohemia a history of libertine ways, more so than in Moscow and elsewhere. The freedom of sleeping around was a way to express yourself. In other areas of life you were not free. It wasn’t about exploring; life generally sucked. But people found joy in sex and relationships.… Then, [after] the week of November 17, 1989—the week of the Velvet Revolution—the next day pornographic magazines appeared on the newsstands. They had never been allowed. Advertising became this aggressively childish [and] tasteless thing: ‘Naked tits—and buy Skoda, a brand of Czech car.’ Never before would you see a billboard under Communism. But now there was a set of tits on a billboard.” Madonna Swanson, an American-born daughter of Czech émigrés, is a program manager who assists global companies after mergers and acquisitions. She too recalls the unapologetic attempt to profit off of women’s bodies. “Day one, the Velvet Revolution,” Swanson says. “Day two: in a heartbeat—boom—sex was everywhere from a marketing point of view. If you’re selling a mobile phone, a sweater, below the bustline [models’ clothing] was coming unraveled.” (Interviews with Jakrlova, Swanson.)

5 True enough. As disco died a slow death, landlords and discotheque operators were left holding the bag. Many a pressured tenant decided to fill those empty spaces with adult entertainment.

6 In these boom years, almost every male-bonding movie had an obligatory scene in which detectives, drug dealers, college buddies, or office grunts would meet for a pop at the local strip club.

7 Peter also started offshoots such as a gambling-and-nudie cruise-ship operation; Platinum magazine; and a film-and-video franchise. (Peter publicity materials; interview with Peter; Matt Schudel, “Michael J. Peter: The Solid Gold Touch,” [Broward and Palm Beach] Sun Sentinel, October 3, 1993; Eric Conrad and Warren Richey, “Hedonism on High Seas: Nude Cruise Isn’t NFL’s Idea of Fun,” Sun Sentinel, January 24, 1995.)

8 Press reports at the time verify his firm’s valuation, estimating that his staff numbered five thousand strong. (Schudel, “Michael J. Peter.”)

9 The ruling was later overturned. (“Canadian Court Rules Lap Dancing Indecent,” Toledo Blade, June 27, 1997.)

10 This ran counter to comedian Chris Rock’s tongue-in-cheek axiom in his 1999 song parody, “No Sex”: “No matter what a stripper tells you, there’s no sex in the Champagne Room.”

11 Mergers and Acquisitions.

12 “From the earliest days of business to the Mad Men era to the ’90s to now, sex has gone with the territory when there’s excessive money involved,” says Scott Gutterson, a New York attorney and accountant. “The Wall Street guys—I have many clients who are brokers, bond guys in the many-millions-of-dollars-a-year range. They’d think nothing in the ’90s about taking ten guys to the [redacted-name strip club] as a legitimate business expense—entertainment—where you could get a blowjob in the VIP room for a couple hundred dollars. The New York DollHouse was directly across from [one of the city’s] IRS office[s]. I once went to an audit [at which my client had] $7,000 in receipts for a strip club. I did not do that infrequently. Because the law states, ‘Entertainment is deductible if it is ordinary and necessary.’ Some audits were successful, some weren’t. In the ’90s this was the mentality of those guys.” (Interview with Gutterson.)

13 Giuliani was not averse to appearing in drag. At the 1997 Inner Circle show (an annual spoof revue for journalists covering City Hall), for example, the mayor played a convincing Marilyn, down to the pink dress, mascara, and beauty mark. Appearing that evening with the Broadway cast of Victor/Victoria (about a woman playing a man playing a woman), Giuliani joked, “I already play a Republican playing a Democrat playing a Republican.” (David Firestone, “Jaws Drop as Giuliani Steals Show in Heels,” New York Times, March 3, 1997; Sara Kugler, “Giuliani’s Cross-Dressing Antics Debated,” Associated Press via Washington Post, April 14, 2007; Nicole Levy, “The Inner Circle Opens Up,” Politico/CapitalNewYork.com, March 14, 2014.)

14 “Defining deviancy down” was a term coined by New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in an influential 1993 essay. “Over the past generation,” he argued, “the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and,… accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by an earlier standard. This redefining has evoked fierce resistance from defenders of ‘old’ standards, and accounts for much of the present ‘culture war’ such as proclaimed by many at the 1992 Republican National Convention.” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down,” American Scholar, Winter 1993, 19.)

15 The rulings would soon lurch in the other direction. Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg, would go on the Late Show with David Letterman, and when the host asked him about the role strip clubs played in drawing jobs and tourists to Gotham, Bloomberg cracked, “Adult bars are clearly part of it. That’s what capitalism is all about.” Indeed, as recently as 2017, the name “Trump” graced Atlantic City’s Taj Mahal, once home to a Scores-branded strip club. (Elizabeth A. Harris, “Bloomberg Spars [Lightly] for 15 Minutes with Letterman,” New York Times, September 30, 2010; Alexandra Villarreal, “As Atlantic City Struggles, a Strip Club is Helping Provide Jobs,” New York Observer, September 12, 2014; “Reports: Trump’s Name Taken Off…,” Philly Voice, February 15, 2017.)

1 Even so, Carnes did provide his expert opinion in the harassment case brought against Clinton by Paula Jones, stating that the governor’s 1991 encounter with Jones and its aftermath had “caused Ms. Jones to suffer severe emotional distress” along with “consequent sexual aversion.” The judge in the case, Susan Webber Wright, discounted aspects of Carnes’s declaration, stating that they did “not suffice to overcome plaintiff’s failure of proof on her claim of outrage.… [N]otwithstanding the offensive nature of the Governor’s alleged conduct… [p]laintiff’s actions and statements in this case do not portray someone who experienced emotional distress so severe in nature that no reasonable person could be expected to endure it.” (Liza H. Gold, Sexual Harassment: Psychiatric Assessment in Employment Litigation [Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2004], 3–5.)

2 Some contend that some of the attributes that draw people with type-A personalities to the thrills of high-level politics (the constant need for public attention, reward, or affirmation; the need to be empowered; the risk of public failure, humiliation, and punishment, and so on) can also draw them to other addictive behaviors. “Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction,” the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson declared in his book Better Than Sex. “But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal—like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody.… That is addictive thinking. That is politics—especially in presidential campaigns.” (Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie, vol. 4. of The Gonzo Papers [New York: Ballantine, 1994].)

3 Ex–White House staffer Linda Tripp, when summoned to testify by the independent counsel investigating Clinton, declared that the president, as she understood it, took to using a datebook or calendar to tick off “all of the days he had been good [and] overcame the compulsion to be with someone sexually other than his wife.” Note: Tripp’s grand jury statements, whatever else they are, are also the testimony of a Clinton detractor. (Ken Gormley, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr [New York: Crown, 2010], 507.)

4 As a teacher at Princeton, Ryan had been canned in the ’80s for sleeping with students; he’d had unsafe sex with men and women during the early march of AIDS, and then slept, in turn, with other lovers, unprotected; he’d sought underage partners, having himself been molested as a young boy. Another particularly powerful study of sexual addiction is Susan Cheever’s Desire, in which she states, “One primary characteristic of addiction is always a broken promise, whether it’s a promise made to oneself or to another person.” (Michael Ryan, Secret Life: An Autobiography [New York: Pantheon, 1995]; Susan Cheever, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008].)

5 “For me, it was totally about sex, just sex—not that soft, romantic stuff,” says another woman I know who has been in treatment for her own sex and alcohol addiction, and requests that she be referred to as Tiffany. “I think that’s another face of addiction, closer to obsession and perhaps more female. But there are plenty of women who are sex addicts and don’t give a fig for romance, cuddling, blah-blah—all the patronizing stuff that men think we long for.”

6 Pat Carnes wrote his first paper on the concept of sex addiction in 1972. Later that decade, sexual-addiction programs, patterned on the twelve-step model, sprang up, taking real measures to counter some of the missteps of the ’60s sexual revolution. New leaders emerged in the recovery movement, and a 1978 article in the British Journal of Addictions, by Jim Orford, was the first, Carnes says, to detail and identify “sexual dependency as a class of addiction in a peer-reviewed medical journal.” For Carnes personally, the most revelatory moment of all might have come in 1982. Right as his book Out of the Shadows was about to be published, a colleague asked him to join him at a conference at the University of Minnesota. The keynote speaker, Carnes recalls, was “a woman from an Ivy League university” who had a patient onstage with her: a pedophile, who was obese as a result of the high drug dosage he was taking to help curb his urges. “He was saying, ‘I know that my weight has made me grotesque now, but I would do anything to get better, to stop my behavior.’ And she would periodically make derisive comments about him as a person, and even used the [phrase], ‘Hey, you pathetic fat slob,’ and would get the audience to laugh at him. “I walked out in tears,” Carnes says. “What I saw was sexual prejudice. He was earnestly saying he wanted to get better. And I knew that people could. I went down, I sat next to the Mississippi River—the river flows right through the campus—and I just realized that there are these attitudes out there about people who do sexual things without any understanding or appreciation of it. My friend came, and he sat down, put his arm around me, and he said, ‘Pat, I just wanted you to see what you’re going to be up against. When that book comes out, you’re going to run into anger and laughter because the culture can’t deal with the realities of what you’re talking about.’” Carnes forged ahead. By the 1990s he was heartened to see that there was a wider acceptance of addiction in general throughout American society. Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, and others spoke the language of addiction and recovery. The self-help field became a movement. Megachurches, their pews overflowing, encouraged public disclosure, apology, and forgiveness. During the decade, as Carnes recalls, a national society emerged to address issues related to sex addiction; books on the subject began appearing regularly; and a sex-addiction medical journal was established. “In essence,” he says, “if you were determined, you could find help.” (Interview with Carnes.)

1 The term “marriage equality” was not yet in wide circulation.

2 By the late 1980s, writes Carol J. C. Maxwell, these shifts were apparent in terminology “adopted by all pro-life direct action groups, new and old, Catholic and evangelical. Activists abandoned the terms ‘sit-in’ and ‘intervention,’ with their rational, instrumental, and civil-liberties connotations, and adopted the term ‘rescue,’ based on a Biblical injunction, thus heightening the emotive character of their call to fulfill a duty to come to others’ aid.” (Carol J. C. Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America: Meaning, Motivation, and Direct Action [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 62–63.)

3 Maxwell cites statistics by Faye Ginsburg from “Saving America’s Souls: Operation Rescue’s Crusade Against Abortion.” (Fundamentalism and the State, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 557–88.)

4 The first “bombings and arsons,” according to sociologist and minister Dallas A. Blanchard, started in 1977, peaked in 1984, and “picked up again in 1991.” (Dallas A. Blanchard, The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Rise of the Religious Right [New York: Twayne, 1994], 54–59.)

5 According to Maxwell, “The trend toward violent acts suggests a shift on the part of a minority away from relatively passive attempts to ‘save babies’ toward more aggressive attempts to control others’ behavior, tragically culminating in the ultimate measure of stopping providers by killing them.” Such actions, while alienating many in the movement, also had the effect of terrorizing medical professionals and women who contemplated having an abortion. As Maxwell would write in 2002, assessing the right-to-life movement in the ’90s, “The combined effect of a large, persistent pro-life movement and a limited number of acts of anti-abortion violence committed by a minority of abortion opponents may encourage fear and a concomitant reluctance to perform abortions despite support for legal abortion.” (Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 79–80, 85.)

6 The procedure is used in instances of fetal abnormality or in cases involving a threat to the health of the would-be mother.

7 LGBT or LGBTQ were designations that would become standard a generation later.

8 Attorney Evan Wolfson, a longtime advocate for marriage equality, founded the organization Freedom to Marry. Wolfson understood that for many lesbian and gay partners in the 1990s, marriage was beside the point; to some, it was actually an expression of assimilation into straight culture. “Some thought marriage was ‘patriarchal and exclusionary,’” he would later tell the New York Times, “while others said the gay rights movement ‘was supposed to be about liberation,’ not [about] joining heterosexuals.” Steven Mauldin, my brother’s partner, remembers the odd reaction the day of the ceremony: “The irony was that a lot of my gay friends took it less seriously than my straight friends. Support came mostly from heterosexual people. Literally, I had friends who thought it was a joke… hysterical.” (Erica Johnston, “Meet Two Activists Who Brought Sweeping Change to the Gay Rights Movement,” Washington Post Magazine, October 3, 2014; Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “In Fight for Marriage Rights, ‘She’s Our Thurgood Marshall,’” New York Times, March 28, 2013, A19; interview with Mauldin.)

9 Two of the ’90s’ most popular network shows, Roseanne and Friends, aired episodes featuring same-sex ceremonies. Later in the decade, the topic would become more standard fare on such programs as Ellen and Will & Grace.

10 In 2003, Massachusetts made history by issuing the country’s first marriage licenses to gay and lesbian partners.

11 “In the first half of 2016 alone,” according to a Washington Post analysis, “87 bills that could limit LGBT rights have been introduced [in state legislatures], a steep increase from previous years.” (E. Mason, A. Williams, and K. Elliott, “The Dramatic Rise in State Efforts to Limit LGBT Rights,” Washington Post, June 10, 2016.)

12 The Trump administration, from the first, was dead set against reproductive choice. During his first two weeks in office, the president nominated a pro-life jurist to the High Court; he signed a directive denying aid to overseas nonprofits involved in matters of choice; he named a series of cabinet nominees, many of whom saw little daylight between church and state; and his vice president, Mike Pence, attended a large pro-life rally. “‘Life’ is winning,” Pence told the crowd. “[We will] embrace a culture of life in America.” (Elizabeth Landers, “Vice President Mike Pence Speech Right at Home at March for Life,” CNN.com, January 27, 2017; Ben Kamisar, “Trump, Like Obama, Signs Flurry of First Week Executive Actions,” TheHill.com, January 29, 2017.)

13 Marriage was on the rocks for many reasons. First, even though faith is not a prerequisite to marital stability, many couples lacked a firm or common spiritual grounding to reinforce their commitment. While a greater number of Americans in the 1990s defined themselves as religious, they were increasingly less likely to adhere to a fixed set of values tied to a single organized religion. In many cases, their spiritual affiliation became a DIY matter. (“The Way” had become “Have It Your Way.”) Between 30 and 40 percent of Americans were practicing a different faith than the one they’d been born with. Often the faithful were less connected to an established denomination or congregation with stable rules, roots, a hierarchy, and a system of belief that might reinforce conjugal fidelity or long-term commitment to a partner. Second, while marriage has been “extolled in the pulpits… since colonial times,” writes sociologist Andrew Cherlin, “divorce has [also] been part of the individualistic side of American culture. Well before it was legal in Britain or France… divorce was legally available in America.” Third, there were professional pressures building at the fin de siècle. Dual-career couples saw office demands cut into me time and we time. With one eye on the workplace, many young marrieds delayed or deferred having kids. And increased business travel or relocation, in a global economy, meant less family time and more opportunity for infidelity. Popular culture played its part. The idea of an “affair” was consistently presented in fiction, movies, and television as stock, if stigmatized, behavior: less a moral lapse than a logical consequence of a character’s personal flaws or a couple’s struggles to communicate or express intimacy. (“It’s not our partner we seek to leave with the affair,” psychotherapist and sexologist Esther Perel advises, “it’s ourselves.”) The 1997 book The Ethical Slut would become a bestseller by advising readers how to navigate the moral dynamics of affairs and various forms of nontraditional companionship. In short, many who sought lovers beyond their committed partner or spouse were becoming more comfortable—despite all the pain inflicted or the risks and guilt and fallout—with what culture critic Sam Eichner calls “casual duplicity.” Many others were maintaining numerous relationships (with or without their partner’s knowledge) for reasons that were sexual, cultural, economic, social, or personal, with little duplicity involved whatsoever. This was how they chose to live and to love. Meanwhile, extramarital relationships, as covered in news accounts, began to seem commonplace, if only because of the extensive media play given “sex scandals” befalling public figures. Political commentators worked themselves into a lather trying to explain the marriages of Bill and Hillary Clinton or Newt and Marianne Gingrich in much the same way they had focused on the marriage of Gary Hart and his wife, Lee, after the senator’s affair with Donna Rice was made public. (“If it doesn’t bother me,” Lee told reporters in 1987, “I don’t think it ought to bother anyone else.”) Forces on the right at times tried to shift the blame for the “marriage crisis” to the left, to minorities, to myriad “others,” even if patterns of divorce, remarriage, and single parenthood were just as common in largely conservative, religious, or “red state” regions. As author Angela Stanley has noted, “Marriage as the norm in the United States has been on the decline for decades.” An expert in African American social issues, Stanley has tried to dispel the myth that black women have played an outsize role in this overall “crisis.” She asserts that part of the dynamic has been that “poor people of color, a disproportionate number of whom are black men, [were swept] into the criminal justice system.… These men have significantly reduced employment and economic opportunities and are sometimes viewed as less viable partners.” At the same time, she points out, “significantly more black women than black men are earning college degrees.” The result—along with many other factors—has meant that “black women marry later, but they do marry.” (Interview with Gay Talese; Andrew J. Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today [New York: Knopf, 2009], 33, 166, 182, 186; Ryan Selzer, “Why You’re Happily Married and Having an Affair,” Daily Beast, November 2, 2014; Alex Williams, “Open Marriage’s New 15 Minutes,” New York Times, February 3, 2012; Sam Eichner, “Bill Simmons, Ben Affleck and Epic Man Caves,” UrbanDaddy.com, June 23, 2016; Polly Vernon, “Is Anyone Faithful Anymore?,” Guardian, March 6, 2010; Jonathan Rauch, “Cheatin’ Hearts,” Chicago Tribune, September 23, 1998; James V. Grimaldi, “Marianne Gingrich, Newt’s Ex-Wife, Says He Wanted ‘Open Marriage,’” Washington Post, January 19, 2012; Angela Stanley, “Black, Female and Single,” New York Times, December 11, 2011, SR1, 6.)

14 In 2015 the Reverend William Hultberg, in his eighties, would tell me, “More than 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. Fifty percent of all [American] births are out of wedlock or aborted. A billion dollars has been spent in the past twenty years fighting gay marriage. Give me a billion dollars and… how I could have helped heterosexual marriage.” (Interview with Hultberg.)

15 Corollary 1: There appeared to be a need for stable partnerships, period, among a large segment of American adults—as if a fixed relationship were better than none at all; as if cohabitation brought a level of financial and emotional security; as if there were negative social or personal costs associated with being unattached or uncommitted. Corollary 2: The economic prosperity of the period had given “more Americans the time and money to develop their senses of self,” writes Andrew Cherlin. “It suggests a view of intimate partnerships as continually changing as the partners’ inner selves develop.… It suggests that commitment to spouses and partners are personal choices [rather than lifelong vows] that can be, and perhaps should be, ended if they become unsatisfying.” (Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round, 29–30.)

16 Well, nearly high-flying. In 1995 Gingrich was granted a ride on Air Force One and threw a hissy fit when the commander in chief, during twenty-four hours of flight time, chose not to exchange word one with him. And then Gingrich’s host had had the chutzpah to allow the Speaker and the other passengers to deplane from the aircraft’s tail exit. “Where,” Newt fumed, “is their sense of manners?” The brat was out of the bag. The next edition of the New York Daily News bore an illustration of a whimpering Gingrich in a diappie, with the headline “CRY BABY—NEWT’S TANTRUM : He closed down the government because Clinton made him sit at back of plane.” (Alexander Nazaryan, “Newt Gingrich, Crybaby: The Famous Daily News Cover Explained,” New York Daily News, January 6, 2012.)

17 The bill opened with this language: “1. Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. 2. Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society that promotes the interests of children.” (Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round, 126.)

18 Many attribute Bill Clinton’s 1996 victory to his new pet social causes, which drew the support of swing voters, not insignificantly the so-called soccer moms identified by the president’s pollster and adviser Mark Penn.

1 In “The Merchant’s Tale,” for example, Chaucer describes the lechery that results when an elderly man takes what he believes to be aphrodisiacs.

2 Having joined the company in 1972, he retired in 1998 as the company’s czar for worldwide drug discovery and medicinals, R&D Europe division.

3 Enzymes are proteins that accelerate cellular reactions. The ones in saliva, for instance, break down the cracker you chew so that your body gets its nutrients, and the cracker tastes good because the enzymes release its sugars. (Interview with Dr. Michael Mendelsohn.)

4 The chemical patent lists Terrett, his boss David Brown, and senior chemist Andrew Bell. The names on the patent for the use of the compound to treat erectile dysfunction: Terrett and Peter Ellis.

5 Terrett left Pfizer in 2006. He is now the chief scientific officer at Ensemble Therapeutics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

6 In Greek mythology, satyrs were followers of Dionysus and were sometimes depicted with erections.

7 “The general increase in the medicalization of impotence,” writes Meika Loe, “coincided with technological innovation [such as] the surgical implantation of a penile prosthesis, performed by urologists. Thus, the problem of impotence transferred from psychologists to surgeons or, more specifically, urologists.” Loe goes on to quote Lynne Luciano, the author of Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America: “As the urology profession tried to bring more treatment areas under its control, male sexual dysfunction would be declared a disease rather than a psychological disorder. Virtually overnight psychogenic conditions were downgraded to contributing factors.” This shift, in turn, set off what journalist John Leland has described as “a turf war between shrinks and urologists” as scientists, creating drugs like Viagra, and the pill before it, “reduce[d] complex human endeavors to biology, then monkey[ed] with the biology.” (Meika Loe, The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America [New York: New York University Press, 2004], 39; Lynne Luciano, Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America [New York: Hill & Wang, 2001]; John Leland, “A Pill for Impotence?,” Newsweek, November 17, 1997; Jay Baglia, The Viagra Ad Venture: Masculinity, Media, and the Performance of Sexual Health [New York: Peter Lang, 2005], 25; David M. Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis [New York: Penguin, 2001], 294–97.)

8 Priapus is a Greek fertility god typically depicted with a lance-length phallus. In a first-century AD mural that survived the devastation of Pompeii, Priapus can be seen opening his toga, the better to settle—and weigh—his hammerheaded feller on a set of scales. (Maggie Paley, The Book of the Penis [New York: Grove, 1999], 22.)

9 Irwin Goldstein, in an interview with Jack Hitt for the New York Times Magazine, would go on to describe the pertinence of such percentages. “At a certain point all sex is mechanical,” he ruminated, apropos of heterosexual union. “The man needs a sufficient axial rigidity so his penis can penetrate through labia, and he has to sustain that.… I am an engineer… and I can apply the principles of hydraulics to these problems.” To wit: the “‘typical resistance’ posed by the average vagina,” writes Hitt, “is a measurable two pounds. The key is to create an erection that doesn’t ‘deform’ or collapse when engaging that resistance.” (Jack Hitt, “The Second Sexual Revolution,” New York Times Magazine, February 20, 2000.)

1 That fall a panel of about fifteen experts had gathered in Orlando to perfect and endorse the questionnaire for wider use among urologists and to hear further results of Pfizer’s newest volunteers. “I was invited by [Pfizer’s] Dr. David Cox—which is a sort of interesting name,” says Goldstein. “At the meeting emerged the International Index of Erectile Function”—which remains a respected method for determining impotence and for helping judge the efficacy of a given ED regimen. “It was the sentinel event, really,” Goldstein asserts. “At that very moment the field shifted.” No longer were invasive penile devices required; all a patient needed was a pencil. (Interview with Goldstein.)

2 A Latin American knockoff would be named Eviva—as in “revive”—perhaps a linguistic nod to apple-plucking Eve. And in the Middle East one homespun version would be called, simply, Erecto 100.

3 Pierre Wicker, the man at Pfizer with overall responsibility for the clinical trials, kept the tests on track (along with the channels to the FDA) and helped line up key experts for their advice, including Goldstein, Ray Rosen, Harin Padma-Nathan, and urologist Tom Lue. (Various interviews.)

4 Viable drug candidates for women would not emerge until the mid-2010s.

5 No surprise, this. According to Dee Dee Myers, “As crazy as it seems, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that clinical health studies routinely included women.… In the 1980s, for instance, a study examining risk factors associated with heart disease studied 15,000 men—and no women.” The change was largely spurred on by Dr. Bernadine Healy, President George H. W. Bush’s appointee to head the National Institutes of Health in 1991. “Within months,” according to Myers, Healy “made it clear that women could no longer be excluded from the agency’s clinical trials.… It wouldn’t have happened without Healy—and the [growing number of] women in Congress [in the 1990s].” (Dee Dee Myers, Why Women Should Rule the World [New York: HarperCollins, 2008], 55–56.)

6 Michael Mendelsohn, the former head of cardiovascular research at Merck, has a different perspective. “How many drugs do you know that created their own disease? In reality—no matter who coined the term, and when—erectile dysfunction didn’t really exist before Viagra. Men who never really knew they had erectile dysfunction now had a way to name it and a way to treat it.” (Interview with Mendelsohn.)

7 The five-day shoot, in Santa Barbara, required a posse. On hand, by O’Brien’s tally, were the models cum actors, two or three photo assistants, a stylist, an assistant stylist, a producer, the ad agency’s art director, an assistant art director, and two or three account representatives from Pfizer. In addition to creating five portraits of five males in various natural environments, the agency asked for one more situation. “We had to do a set of pictures of this couple walking over a hill and being lovey-dovey,” O’Brien says. “They had to kiss each other and all this stuff. It gave me the heebie-jeebies. I just felt awkward that two strangers, who hadn’t known [each other], being [affectionate. I had] them on these hills above the clouds, and holding hands, and bumping into each other. Sunrise and sunset… romantic. They did it again and again.” As O’Brien remembers it, one of the agency or client reps repeatedly encouraged more touching rather than less. “They were saying they really have to get ooey-gooey. I mean, gooey, but not ooey. [I was hired] because they thought I could do ooey-gooey good.” (Interview with O’Brien.)

8 Pfizer would actually go on to erect stations at NASCAR tracks where fans could go and get diabetes screenings and high blood pressure tests at no charge—a commendable initiative since both conditions, like ED, can presage serious heart issues. (Only in America could car races be conceived as plausible, unironic, even laudable venues for erectile-dysfunction education. Gentlemen, start your engines.)

1 Tripp’s taping, many believed, stemmed from her animus toward Clinton and/or her plans to write a book. She would deny this, telling CNN’s Larry King that she had taped Lewinsky so as to “prove” that Lewinsky had had an affair, thus ensuring that Tripp herself could not be “set up for perjury.” (“Tripp Had ‘No Choice’ but to Make the Tapes,” CNN.com, February 16, 1999.)

2 My daughter, Molly, a schoolteacher, told me that in one of her education seminars in college, she and her classmates watched the video as part of a lesson plan that covered how to recognize the body language and facial expressions of people who are lying.

3 Every media outlet—from Drudge to Entertainment Tonight to Fortune to the Star—would cover it ad nauseam. “The story that caromed off the keyboard of an Internet tipster,” wrote the New York Times’ Janny Scott ten days into le scandale, “appears to many in journalism to have blurred the boundaries between mainstream and tabloid news.… Editors have found themselves debating whether to use words like ‘semen’ on the nightly news.” (Janny Scott, “A Media Race Enters Waters Still Uncharted,” New York Times, February 1, 1998, A1.)

4 To give House Speaker Newt Gingrich his due, he maintained that he pushed for Clinton’s impeachment on the grounds that the president had been untruthful at his deposition. Looking back on the period, Gingrich would tell Newsweek that he had had a private conversation with Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles in which Gingrich recalls Bowles saying, “‘Look, virtually every guy I know has had an affair.’… I said, ‘This isn’t about Bill Clinton groping some girl. This is about the president of the United States, who is a lawyer, sitting in front of a federal judge, lying under oath, in a case in which it is a felony.’” That said, the march toward impeachment was part of a holier-than-thou crusade that the Republicans in the ’80s and ’90s had refined to an art. The ethical buzzsaw would claim Gingrich himself when he was forced to resign as Speaker in 1998 after an internal House probe. (The IRS would later clear him of violating any tax provisions.) Historian Steven Gillon would eventually make the case that Gingrich, ironically, “never acknowledged or accepted his role in creating the culture of ethical inquisition that would eventually destroy him.” Destruction, of course, would eventually give way to resuscitation. Gingrich would reemerge in the 2010s as a presidential candidate and later a loyalist in the Trump camp’s culture-war campaigns. (Jake Tapper, “Gingrich Admits to Affair During Clinton Impeachment,” ABCNews.go.com, March 9, 2007; Peter J. Boyer, “Newt Wants You!” Newsweek, December 19, 2011, 34; “Scars Remain From Gingrich Ethics Case,” AP via USA Today, December 25, 2011; 1997 Steven M. Gillon, The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 105.)

5 Along the way, fact and fiction got tangled up. In the 1980s, ex-actor Ronald Reagan, while threatening to veto a bill that would raise taxes, dared Congress to “Go ahead, make my day,” invoking the words of actor Clint Eastwood (playing Dirty Harry in the film Sudden Impact). In the ’90s, U.S. bomber pilots in the Gulf War, having grown up playing video games, monitored their targets on airborne displays fashioned after… video games. In the new century a vice presidential candidate (Governor Sarah Palin) would land her own reality show, a presidential candidate (Governor Rick Perry) would perform on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, and an NBC reality TV personality (Donald Trump) would become president of the United States. The real and virtual worlds—as anticipated by sci-fi sages such as Philip K. Dick and William Gibson—had merged. To some degree, America’s ever more surreal national politics had fallen into the mediated world’s hobbit hole. And Trump became its apotheosis: a creature of media as much as Reagan had been a creature of the Hollywood studio system. In equal measure, much of geopolitical behavior—even global conflict—became indistinguishable from propaganda, presented for media consumption. (Even terrorist organizations formed media units to recruit volunteers or dispense atrocity videos across the Internet.) As Shakespeare had advised, “All the world’s a stage”—and we watched, sometimes mesmerized, often incensed, on our plasma screens, our laptops, our iPhones. (William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 2, scene 7, [First Folio, 1623], www.folger.edu/as-you-like-it.)

6 Pinsky examines the connection between violence and narcissism. “René Girard is a social scientist and philosopher who basically theorizes that society is organized around the focus of violence: a common enemy or scapegoat. That special enemy galvanizes us and we unify or we metabolize our violence by focusing it together on one [object]. He would argue that human sacrifice was always part of religion, and that’s how we organize violent societies. When you look at really violent, narcissistic societies, where there’s lots of childhood trauma, you start to see the sacrificial impulse coming out. And I believe that all of what we do to celebrities is out of a sacrificial impulse. We make [or] elevate a god and then destroy it.”

7 The phrase itself is a rather new construct, as Jessica Bennett has noted, in Time. “‘It was a different time back then. There was no consciousness raised about slut-shaming. Bullying wasn’t even in the vernacular,’ says Leora Tanenbaum, the author of Slut!, which first established the term slut-bashing (a precursor to slut-shaming) when it came out in 1999. ‘People who were decision-makers and influential writers were making comments about [Lewinsky’s] hair and body. It was a textbook case of the sexual double standard.’” (Jessica Bennett, “The Shaming of Monica: Why We Owe Her an Apology,” Time, May 9, 2014.)

8 The law validating the authority of special prosecutors—set up after the Watergate scandal in the 1970s—lapsed in 1999 after the Clinton impeachment debacle. (Carol Elder Bruce, “An Independent Counsel Law Needs to Be Restored,” New York Times, June 13, 2012.)

9 “Election cycles,” Lewinsky notes, “started to take on more of an entertainment value and a Hollywood luster. People magazine superseded Time magazine. Reagan, surely, had changed some things, but the Clintonian style shifted it further. There was a silent campaign going on to make the voter ask: who is the candidate I most want to have a beer with? The family of the candidate was suddenly significant. Does the candidate have charisma? All of these attributes, which we came to ascribe to the kind of leader we wanted, are really useless when it comes to leading. So the private life and the surface personality overtook the public role of the public servant.”

10 Quoth Clinton himself on 60 Minutes, back in 1992: “What the press has to decide is: Are we going to engage in a game of ‘gotcha’?” (“Clinton Conceded Marital ‘Wrongdoing,’” Washington Post, January 26, 1992.)

11 “Mores were also a matter of economics,” Lewinsky adds. “Look at [the 2013 film] The Wolf of Wall Street—the story line took place late ’80s, early ’90s. Did this great influx of wealth end up becoming an opportunity for us to move forward in a way that [promoted] higher consciousness? No. Many people used that new money to open their sexual appetites. They had more resources, more time, which led to inhibitions being expunged. So people were giving into some darker sides of themselves—drinking more, doing more drugs—which led to more sexual liberation as an aftershock to the ’60s sexual revolution.”

12 Lewinsky acknowledges that popular culture also played a major role in affecting sexual mores. Indeed, the neighborhood where Lewinsky grew up is a short drive from the communities depicted in some of the most provocative television shows of the ’90s: Melrose Place, Baywatch, and Beverly Hills 90210.

13 Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in the summer of 1998, Lawrence K. Grossman, formerly the president of NBC News and PBS, would observe, “Like a recurring nightmare, an improbable connection was made between [Monica Lewinsky’s] dress and the O. J. Simpson murder case. Former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, [the LAPD detective who happened to be] a key witness in the Simpson trial, appeared on MSNBC, the cable news channel that gained the dubious reputation of programming ‘All Monica, All the Time.’ Fuhrman revealed that he had been contacted the previous October by his one-time book agent [Lucianne] Goldberg, who asked him how DNA could be extracted from a dress.” (Lawrence K. Grossman, “The Press and the Dress,” Columbia Journalism Review, June 1998.)

14 Lewinsky’s persona, she says, was defined in part by her upbringing and her role models. “Pop icons of my generation,” she reveals, “were Molly Ringwald in those John Hughes films. Her characters were probably a really good example of what I was trying to be: more open and [more comfortable with] exploring the boundaries than in previous generations where you were shut down about your sexuality and your acceptance of others’ behavior and orientation.” That said, Lewinsky was not ready for either the scorn or the praise that came her way simply for being a modern young woman. Sex-positive feminist Susie Bright, for one, actually swooned over her in an article for Ms., labeling Lewinsky “our living Helen of Troy” and “a sexual superstar,” reminding readers that “the day after Monica’s interview [with TV host Barbara Walters], the lipstick she was wearing—Club Monaco brand, in the color ‘Glaze’—sold out at cosmetics counters.” Bright would go on, “I understood Monica’s universal erotic appeal. But it’s through her words that I have discovered Monica’s big secret: she has a big IQ.… She may be naïve about love, but she is good with the law. Monica Lewinsky wanted to be president when she was in the second grade.… In [school she] excelled [and became one of many] thwarted [and] gifted young women.… This big girl should have been mentored to run the world, not run little games around the little men inside it.” (Interview with Lewinsky; Susie Bright, “The Beauty & the Brains,” Ms., June 1999.)

15 For all the talk of progress in this arena, Anita Hill tells me, society often avoids the root of the matter. “My issue isn’t with [the culture’s] permissiveness,” she says. “The problem is the overexposure and the sense of entitlement that people have toward others; that culture tells you they’re able to participate with you sexually in any way they want. For young women there is this false sense that they are in control of their sexual expression. They feel it’s okay to be sexually explicit because ‘I’m making that choice.’” Hill illustrates her point with an incident she recalls at Brandeis, where she teaches. “The other day a [female undergraduate] student told me a group of friends got together, male and female, and they routinely did it and called it Porn and Doughnuts. They got together and watched porn. Part of the thinking, she said, [was] ‘We’re agreeing to do it, so the pornography’s not problematic. We’re all in an equal place.’ She also said that during one of the scenes, a woman said, ‘Oh, that looks like that would hurt,’ but there was no response from the men, [who] didn’t object. They just sat there and just ate the doughnuts. In [these women’s] minds, their having chosen to participate made it okay, so whatever happened after that was okay. It gets to the issue of agency: your ability to control your sexuality, own your body, and use it as you want to and not be exploited.” (Interview with Hill.)

16 Gerstein, who helped draft Lieberman’s public remarks, was also in charge of his “values” portfolio, covering legislative matters related to subjects like teen pregnancy, fatherhood, and sex and violence in the entertainment industry. Today he runs a strategic communications firm.

17 Bill Clinton, upon departing the presidency, posted a favorability index of 68 percent, essentially tying him with Ronald Reagan at the same stage. Hillary Clinton, for that matter, was similarly well liked at the height of her husband’s troubles. “She was often more popular when she was suffering a traditionally feminine humiliation,” posits the New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot. “As First Lady, her approval ratings rose after the Monica Lewinsky revelations and during Kenneth Starr’s investigation.… Like the female protagonist of a quest narrative—or, perhaps, of a dystopian fantasy—Clinton has made it through all her challenges to face [Donald Trump], the bull-headed Minotaur of sexism at the end of the maze.” As recently as 2014, a poll by the Wall Street Journal, in conjunction with NBC News and the Annenberg Survey, revealed Clinton to be the “most admired” president of the previous twenty-five years. (“Clinton’s Approval Rating Up in Wake of Impeachment,” CNN.com, December 20, 1998; Megan Thee-Brenan, “Poll Finds Disapproval of Bush Unwavering,” New York Times, January 17, 2009; Margaret Talbot, “That’s What He Said,” New Yorker, October 24, 2016, 20; Janet Hook, “Poll: Clinton Most Admired President of Past 25 Years,” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2014.)

18 Jeffrey Rosen, citing sociologist Émile Durkheim, writes of the lasting impact of public trials as collective rituals: “The process of identifying and punishing exemplary violations of moral and social rules is the process by which we identify what, precisely, those rules are. By insisting that Clinton be acquitted and [Justice Clarence] Thomas confirmed, perhaps the public established clear limits on what kinds of violations of privacy it would tolerate, and, in the process, it reasserted the boundaries between the public and private sphere.” (Jeffrey Rosen, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America [New York: Random House, 2000,] 157.)

1 If Democrats had tacked left in their attitudes, so too had GOP voters, especially millennials. Wrote columnist David Brooks, during the 2016 campaign, “According to the Pew Research Center, young Republicans are much more moderate than older Republicans. Among millennials who lean Republican, only 31 percent have consistently conservative views.” (David Brooks, “The Self-Reliant Generation,” New York Times, January 8, 2016, A23.)

2 Much of the animus, asserts Faludi, can be traced to “1992, when [Clinton’s] husband destroyed the myth of Republican invincibility and Hillary Clinton was anointed the feminine face of evil.” (Susan Faludi, “How Hillary Clinton Met Satan,” New York Times, October 29, 2016.)

3 The foundation presented an eerie conflict-of-interest template for the Trump Organization.

4 Political correctness, writes Moira Weigel, the culture critic and literary scholar, was the perfect straw man on which to hang Trump’s ideology. PC, by this theory, was devised in part to galvanize voters against “powerful, unnamed” forces working against establishment interests; in reality, the new guardians of public conscience and behavior were actually trying to create social and legal sanctions against sexism, racism, prejudice, and hostility against those who were traditionally denigrated as “others.” As Weigel points out, “Most Americans had never heard the phrase ‘politically correct’ before 1990, when a wave of stories”—in particular a Richard Bernstein article for the New York Times—“began to appear in newspapers and magazines… [lamenting how] the country’s universities were threatened by a ‘growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform.’… PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them.… [The act of opposing] political correctness also became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era.” (Moira Weigel, “Political Correctness: How the Right Invented a Phantom Enemy,” Guardian, November 30, 2016; Richard Bernstein, “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct,” New York Times, October 28, 1990.)

5 Many voters identified with aspects of what appeared to be his isolation: they, too, were averse to self-analysis, remote, impulsive, indiscriminately discontent, and, at times, lonely.

6 After all, Trump had hinted he might run for president in 2000, suggesting Oprah Winfrey as his running mate. Then he cried “wolf,” as in Blitzer, every four years thereafter. In 2015, while considering throwing his hat in the ring once more, Trump reportedly made “calls from a summertime vacation in Scotland to buddies back in New York,” according to Politico, and “answer[ed] his own question with a reference to his eleventh-hour decision to skip the 2012 presidential race: ‘If I pull out again, nobody is ever going to believe me again.’” (Gwen Ifill, “Before 2016, Donald Trump Had a History of Toying with a Presidential Run,” PBS.org, July 20, 2016; Glenn Thrush, “10 Crucial Decisions That Reshaped America,” Politico.com, December 9, 2016.)

7 The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson would note, as Trump was about to take office, “With one tweet last week, Trump inflamed a conflict with China. With another tweet on Tuesday, Trump caused Boeing stock to plummet. With a third on Wednesday night, Trump prompted a series of threatening calls to the home of a union leader who had called him a liar.” (Jenna Johnson, “Donald Trump Attacks a Private Citizen on Twitter,” Washington Post, December 8, 2016.)

8 Trump was known to call into Howard Stern’s show. The low points: discussions of boob jobs, anal sex, and his wife’s tidy bowel-related behavior. (Andrew Kaczynski, “Trump Isn’t Into Anal, Melania Never Poops, and Other Things He Told Howard Stern,” Buzzfeed.com, February 16, 2016; David Remnick, “American Demagogue,” New Yorker, March 14, 2016.)

9 Adds millennial Tim Zahner, an online marketer, “In the age of 24/7 content and social media, we’ve reached ‘clutter of voice.’ And Trump knew that to break through that clutter he had to move to the extreme. We’ve seen this across society, pop culture, the Middle East. Trump knew that a loud and angry voice was more important than any policy he put forth.” (Interview with Zahner.)