6. BOUNDARIES

What we’re doing is f—— with the rules.
There should be no rules, man.
We’re being honest to ourselves.

—PETER FONDA1

 

The first soldier to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War came from Batavia, New York—or so the town claims. Batavia also claims the first home run NFL quarterback John Elway hit as a minor league baseball player. Between that first Union soldier, and that first Elway home run, probably the biggest event in town was a speech by Helen Keller in 1926 that drew a crowd of one thousand people. All of which tells us that Batavia—a town of sixteen thousand people about thirty-five miles east of Buffalo, where summer temperatures average a temperate 68.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and average home prices level off at $100,000—is no hot spot.2,3 It’s the kind of American town marked at its city limits by totem poles bearing the quasi-heraldic badges of Kiwanis, Rotary, and Lions that proclaim it to be the traditional stomping grounds of the enduring American burgher.

Enduring; but not unchanging. And in the Batavia burgher’s changes, plenty revealing. Take the town chapter of the Rotary Club. Lampooned early in the twentieth century by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H. L. Mencken, and G. K. Chesterton, the Rotary Club as an institution was definitively laid to rest as corny beyond redemption by Sinclair Lewis. While the Pulitzer-Prize–winning author’s own standing isn’t what it used to be, his efforts to skewer the boosters and belongers in small towns like Batavia live on. Americans may not actually read Babbitt anymore, but the eponymous character of George Babbitt, Rotarian, remains the indelible face of small-town commerce, small-town probity, and small-town prejudice: in short, the face of every social institution that artsy-woolly, misfitting freethinkers have always rebelled against—and have always needed to rebel against. Not for nothing was Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, by 1930, defining a “Babbitt” as “a businessman or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards.” Less than flattering, this definition nonetheless stands as testimony to the accuracy with which real-life Babbitts mirror middle-class standards.

And what middle-class standards do twenty-first-century Babbitts reflect? A fascinating lack thereof, as demonstrated by the contemporary Rotary Club of Batavia. It’s not that club members aren’t still pillars of their community, but, as we have seen from Loudon County to Los Angeles, such pillars have grown hollow even as their communities have grown attenuated. In Batavia, this condition became a matter of public record in 2004, the year the local chapter decided to raise money for the town hospital by producing and marketing a calendar.4

This, of course, was a very Rotary thing to do—a practical, charitable act that combined public-mindedness and public relations, enhancing the health of the community, almost literally, along with the reputation of the club. Somewhat more extraordinary, though, was the club’s choice of calendar illustrations. From January to December, the calendar would feature portraits of the shoe store proprietor, the banker, the warehouse owner, the printer, the insurance broker, and on, each posed in his roughly half-century-old birthday suit, strategically fig-leafed by a newspaper, a bouquet, a jackhammer, or some other handy accessory. “There was one group shot,” The New York Times wrote in its account of “Rotarians Gone Wild,” describing the careful placement of privacy props. “Each man held a cardboard Rotary symbol about the size of Frisbee.”

In so doing, the calendar boys of Batavia revealed more than a passel of old nipples, bellies, and dewlaps. They illustrated, in four-color splendor, the extent to which the middle class—keeper of convention, repository of standards—has been stripped of convention and gutted of standards. Or, maybe, the extent to which the middle class has adopted a new convention—an adolescent-driven, take-it-all-off, rock culture, no-boundaries convention—even as it has ditched the old standards.

It’s probably worth establishing that there was a time when, it’s safe to assume, Rotary Club members didn’t consider taking off their clothes in public, period. The whole concept of naked Rotarians is one that even Sinclair Lewis, without having experienced the eight decades that have bumptiously passed since Babbitt came to life, couldn’t possibly have dramatized without venturing into the realm of science fiction with a detour through Freud. Rotary Clubs then and now raise money for charity, but once-fixed reference points of common convention—reference points on which Lewis’s brand of satire once depended—have vanished. It’s as though magnetic north has lost its pull and the compass spins directionless.

Interestingly enough, Batavia’s Rotarians—the shoe store proprietor, the banker, the warehouse owner, the printer, the insurance broker, and on—seemed to have felt a little lost themselves when they first embarked on their calendar project. As Mr. July, aka Jim Isaac, forty-nine, a title search executive and former Rotary president, put it, “My first reaction [to the idea] was, what is Rotary International going to think about this?”

The Rotary ex-prez’s first reaction is telling in itself, conveying his confidence—well-placed, it turned out—in having the support of the Batavia community. He didn’t say: What will Batavia think of this? He was worried about Big Rotary. In his own community, there would be no local loss of face in Rotary’s loss of clothing, no social sanction, and Mr. July knew it. But in seeking permission from Rotary International, the Batavia chapter was giving voice to its collective hunch that something wasn’t quite right. Maybe it was the simple act of exhibitionism that troubled them. Or maybe it was a more complicated reaction to the strange homage that solid, respectable Rotary would be paying to the girlie calendar, a porn form designed to inspire a kind of private and sophomorically sexual gratification poles apart from the public philanthropy and civic improvement that Rotary supports. In other words, the aura around this Rotary fund-raiser was always going to be more Playboy Mansion juvenile than public-square mature. Was it—and this is the operative word—appropriate?

Not to worry. “The response I got,” Mr. Isaac said, “was, resoundingly, ‘This sounds like a fabulous project, do it.’” I wonder if, secretly, he and the boys were just the slightest bit disappointed. Something had given them pause—some atavistic burst of forgotten moral code—causing them to wonder whether calendar portraits of what could still be called “town fathers” aping what could still be called “wayward daughters” was so tastelessly dopey (what was that archaic word, “vulgar”?) that if the local hospital really needed money maybe the club should just raffle off a Chevrolet. At least one man’s wife put the kibosh on hubby’s participation: She “took the decision out of my hands,” said this one Rotarian who kept his shirt (etc.) on. “She said no.”

Note the peer-appeasing, completely childish transfer of responsibility to the grown-up in charge—the one grown-up in charge—who bucked consensus to keep her husband’s pants on. It was the adult thing to do, but she, apparently, was the only adult to do it. In short, Mrs. Rotary was a nonconformist who exemplifies the paradox of twenty-first-century life: the extent to which following once-reflexive middle-class manners and mores has become, weirdly enough, an act of rugged individualism—the extent to which adult behavior has become the behavior of the maverick. Meanwhile, the herd prevailed; it always does. With Big Babbitt’s hearty approval, Batavia’s boosters, rather than shoot for local pillar-dom through an inadvertently elevating if conventional act of philanthropy, set their sights a good bit lower. Large, Rotary-logoed pasties notwithstanding, they hit their target.

In this terror-shattered, shock-addled world, the Boys of Rotary produced no audible explosion—not even a puff of smoke. Indeed, our twelve bare Rotarians didn’t even work up to a sizzle as sex objects; at worst, the old sacks were merely appetite-supressing. And no more so than the Pink Ribbon Men of Marin County, California, whose nudie calendar raised money for breast cancer,5 or the Ladies’ Bridge Club of Farmland, Indiana, which bared its seventy- to ninety-year-old bods in a bid to save a county courthouse that was even older.6 But in mocking themselves as centerfolds, our fellow citizens ill-serve their communities. If imitation, even by way of comedy, is the sincerest form of flattery, Rotary et al were not only making pornography sweet and spoofable, they were also extending their venerable club’s brand name, or just plain middle-class stamp of approval to pornography’s presence in the life of the community. By sending up the girlie calendar in the back room, Rotary et al, were, in effect, pinning it up in the front office, or even family room. It would be interesting to see what stance all these centerfolds take the next time a strip club or “adult” video outlet tries to set up shop inside city limits. While it remains unlikely that these Babbitts would actively encourage X-rated establishments to open shop in town, it’s also unlikely that they could even begin to explain why Main Street is, or should be, any different from the wrong side of the tracks.

In the creation of such calendars, however banal, something significant is lost: another length or segment of boundary that cordons off certain behaviors from the community at large, ruling them out as antisocial or just plain inappropriate. Famously enough, Boston once employed a censor to draw the line, although not against Rotary and bridge club. The censor’s concerns were the traveling acts and entertainments that hit town. The last such official was Richard J. Sinnott (pronounced “sin not”). Between 1960 and 1980, Mr. Sinnott alone could keep a show from going on anywhere in his undoubtedly fair city by revoking the municipal license of theaters, nightclubs, and other venues for morally questionable presentations. His powers weakened as moral codes unraveled, but in an earlier era, the prospect of being Banned in Boston caused playwrights to gnash their teeth, producers to bite their nails, and assorted freethinkers to tear their hair over the Boston bubble. Whitman, Hemingway, even Snow White were all banished for a time from the city by Mr. Sinnott’s predecessors, among them the Pilgrims, who, in the seventeenth century, banned Christmas celebrations in Massachusetts, undoubtedly for being too merry.

By 1960, though, no book no matter how salacious was subject to Boston’s censor, and examples of obscenity and pornography, once beached on the seamier side of life, were beginning to make their splash in the cultural mainstream. As a government institution, censorship, even in Boston, was about to go under. In its last glugs, though, as Mr. Sinnott’s 2003 obituary in The New York Times points out, a rating like “banned in Boston” was in fact a money review that could turn even a real lemon into the showbiz version of forbidden fruit. The only stripper Mr. Sinnott ever kept off Boston’s boards later thanked him for tripling her salary. When a dance company failed to draw Mr. Sinnott’s stamp of disapproval for performing half-naked, producers were furious, later sending Mr. Sinnott a postcard from New York. “Thanks a lot,” they wrote. “The show closed.” Eventually, so did the censor’s office.7

Looking back, Mr. Sinnott wasn’t sure his roughly ten bans had been worth the bother. He thought they might have made Bostonians look like “party poopers.” So they did, but what of it? While Boston’s bluestocking statutes made the city the butt of jokes, could they also have served some public good? After all, neither Whitman, Hemingway, nor Snow White suffered much for being banned, and at least one stripper in the world ate better for a while. Looking back on decades of ever-more free speech that have made ever-more graphic depictions of sex and scatology ever-more ubiquitous, maybe now is the time to indulge in a little nostalgia for Boston’s quaint attempts to put a lid on it. There was in the city’s quixotic efforts a certain idealism; the city believed in the public good, and it believed said good should be protected by maintaining an obscenity-free zone within city limits. This notion, no doubt, had something to do with the legacy of such founding fathers as John Adams, a native of nearby Quincy, Massachusetts—where, by the way, Bostonians would travel in 1929 to see a proscribed performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude.

As president, Adams specifically noted that the viability of the new nation depended on “a moral and religious people.” If smut was threatening Main Street, what else were good patriots to do but clean it up? And how bad was it, really, to go to Quincy for Eugene O’Neill—and to New York City for anything else?

As the fates fixed it, Mr. Sinnott passed away around the time the mighty Wal-Mart chain announced it would no longer be selling the magazines Maxim, Stuff, and FHM. This British trio of dirty glossies—glossy dirties?—adds up to a male common denominator so low it’s negative. In a kooky spin on the Victorian art of euphemism, however, publishers here and Over There persist in calling them “racy” or “lad” magazines—almost quaint terms that ring a bright-young-things sort of bell. This is a far cry from the bludgeon of dumb sex and crudity the magazines really wield. “Maybe they [Wal-Mart] think Tyra Banks should have been wearing pink instead of black,” Stephen Colvin, whose company publishes Maxim and Stuff, told The New York Times. “For any men’s magazine to put a woman on the cover seems a bit troubling to them.”8

This is about as disingenuous as it gets. Wal-Mart, one of the last stretches of Main Street still in existence, banned the magazines just as it bans all pornography, soft and hard, which is only part of the story. Just because Wal-Mart stopped selling Maxim et al., doesn’t mean the mags have disappeared in a black hole. Anti-obscenity crusades far more fanatical than Wal-Mart’s have never pulled off such a trick.

And that’s not the goal—or at least it shouldn’t be. As Walter Berns has written, “the principle should not be to eradicate vice—the means by which that might be conceivably accomplished are incompatible with free government—but to make vice difficult, knowing that while it will continue to flourish covertly, it will not be openly exhibited.”9 In other words, temperance, yes; abstemiousness, no. Decency, yes; piety, no. Brown paper wrappers, yes; book burnings, no. Far better to drive the noxious stuff out of the mainstream and over to the margins than to eradicate it altogether. “Consumers should have the freedom to decide for themselves what they want to purchase,” magazine publishers of America says. And so they do. Only sometimes consumers should have to turn off Main Street to do their shopping. The old boundaries we postmoderns have erased may never have eliminated vice in the past, but they certainly kept it at a distance, physical and imagined. Such divisions forced individuals to break from the Babbittry if they wanted to engage in it—secretly, if they were to remain in the middle class as “hypocrites,” or openly, if they were to drop out into either artful “Bohemia” or chronic degradation.

Today, Babbitt qua Babbitt makes marginal behavior a mainstream activity, and the line of demarcation is lost. Goofy Rotary calendars aside, the mainstream publishing boom in explicit sex guides—“shiny paperbacks extolling the excitement [of] oral sex, anal sex, fetishism and S&M,” reports The New York Times—bears this point out. The anonymous aspect of Internet commerce allows any would-be happy hooker or surreptitious sadist to shop unseen under the counter and buy “without the traditional embarassment,” as Crown’s Steve Ross put it, and without the risk of exposure.10 Such anonymity erases the line altogether, and what was once well-charted and easily negotiable social territory reverts to a kind of cultural no-man’s-land, a place where anything goes and nothing matters, not really. That’s because when nothing is sacrilegious, nothing is sacred, either.

We have been famously taught, as a culture, to “let it all hang out.” What isn’t as obvious is that we have also learned, as a culture, to suck it all in: “it” in the latter case being the collection of instincts and habits acquired over centuries that once prevented us from letting it all hang out in the first place. Modesty, shame, fastidiousness, self-respect: These are the “hang-ups” of our time, the natural reactions we stifle in order to don the mask of the happy libertine—or the happy parent of the happy libertine. And stifle them we must to play the role, voices steady, manners nonchalant, amid the torrents of profanities and soul-shrinking depravities that bubble up in a mainstream without margins.

Why the inhibition over giving in to our inner modesty? In a coarsened, decorum-lite society, no one wants to be labeled a “prude.” Given its very personal application, “prude” may be even worse than other such terms of opprobrium as “racist” or “sexist.” But as hot-button epithets, such terms have something in common: Just uttering them is supposed to blast to bits all inklings, observations, or expressions of difference (for good or ill) that lead to division, to boundaries, and thus to hierarchies. It is these hierarchies—based, for example, on racial disparities in test scores that lead to a dearth of black students and a preponderance of Asian students in the Univerity of California system; or sexual differences in upper body strength that bar women from employment in fire departments—that are anathema to the wide-open society.

Let’s stick with the scarlet “P.” To be branded a prude is to be castigated and reviled for trying to reinstate, or even personally observe, any old boundary or defunct propriety that effectively walled off some aspect of marginal behavior from the mainstream. To be branded a prude is to be castigated for doing so, as though such efforts were the trivial expression of a mean mind. It is “prudish” to frown on bad language. It is “prudish” to avoid graphic depictions of violence. It is “prudish” to regret sexual relations out of wedlock. To be disturbed by skimpy teen fashions. To yank a kid from sex ed. Such “prudery,” if that’s really what it is, is understood as a retrograde effort to reimpose limits on human behavior, and as such is fervently, even religiously opposed by the mainstream muses of modern liberal culture—Judge Bork’s radical egalitarians and radical individualists.

No one, then, wants to be labeled a “prude.” We open the arts section of The New York Times one day and read about Mostly Mozart, ticket sales for Broadway musicals, and a photographer who “has photographed the sexual lives of sadomasochists since 1994.”11 We turn the page.

Rich Lowry of National Review, the conservative editor of the conservative (and historically Catholic conservative) magazine, goes to watch Sin City—an animated gore-fest of murder, decapitation, and defilement—and posts his thoughts online: “Interesting and well-done, but very hard to watch for those of us who don’t have a high tolerance for torture and dismemberment.”12 He blogs on.

NBC’s Katie Couric reports that three in ten children aged thirteen to sixteen are sexually active, with nearly half of them having engaged in oral sex and/or sexual intercourse.13 She cuts to a weather report.

A national Republican organization banks $2,500 from porn star Mary Carey and lets her sup with the president—along with six thousand other donors, including her XXX-producer Mark Kulkis—at a congressional fund-raiser for the family-values candidates of the GOP. “They’ve paid their money. No matter what they do, the money is going to help elect Republicans to the House,” said National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) communications director Carl Forti.14

So it goes. And so it flows—the mainstream, that is—carrying all that is marginal along with it. Incidentally, Mr. Kulkis, the pornographer, who made his stash filming unsimulated, unprotected sexual intercourse (or whatever), also happens to serve as honorary chairman of the NRCC’s Business Advisory Council—a “small, prestigious group of conservative businessmen and women.”15 By belonging to this super-chamber of commerce, is Mr. Vice paying homage to Mr. and Mrs. Virtue? The answer is no. In this case, no act of hypocrisy has made the X-rated producer’s participation possible—no shadings, no secrets, no fear of disclosure. He has taken his seat alongside other “conservative” businessmen and -women as a pornographer, full-frontally, as it were, unbowed, unmolested by the morally pliant Babbittry around him. His presence on the Republican business council may actually be flipped around and seen as the homage prudery-free virtue now pays to vice—the homage the mainstream pays to the marginal, Main Street to the red-light district.

The story of a one-day book ban on a national bestseller may be understood in similar terms. The book in question was America (The Book), a mock textbook in mock civics by mock anchorman Jon Stewart and the mocking writers of The Daily Show. Or maybe I should write: a “textbook” in “civics” by “anchorman” Jon Stewart and the “writers” of The Daily Show. The quotation marks, of course, convey the nudge-nudge nihilism that is comedian cum author Stewart’s stock-in-trade. Not that it was Stewart’s comedic commentary that brought on the ban, however brief, in a corner of southern Mississippi. Instead, it was a picture.

On page ninety-nine, the book features a photograph of the nine justices of the Supreme Court posed to reveal what the skin mags not so long ago taught us to call “full-frontal nudity.” No strategically placed gavels or legal briefs here, à la Rotary. Just head-on, puckered, spreading nakedness.

The photos are fakes, of course, with bodies culled from a nudist Web site superimposed to match the famous faces of the court. Cutouts of the justices’ black robes hang nearby, with a caption instructing readers to “restore their dignity, by matching each justice with his or her respective robe.” Notably enough, this was over the line for good ol’ Wal-Mart, which decided not to sell the book in its stores (although it was available at Wal-Mart Online). And it was over the line for the Jackson-George Regional Library System in the state of Mississippi, which banned the book.

“We’re not an adult bookstore,” said library system director Robert Willits, in the brief interlude during which the eight branches of the Jackson and George counties’ library system managed to function without circulating the book. (More on the unfortunate corruption of the word “adult” later.) “Our entire collection is open to the public. If they had published the book without that one picture, that one page, we’d have the book.”16

In a time when Babbitt takes it all off, it should come as no surprise that the plight of the stripped justices struck no sympathetic chord in the community at large. No hoisting of pitchforks, literal or figurative, materialized in defense of Homestead America. Nor was there even the passive acquiescence of silence. Quite the contrary; the public square clanged with calls supporting the book. You can’t tell us what not to read, was the gist.

The library’s more modest proposal, of course, was simply not to make a certain book available within the library system—to keep the mainstream free of the marginal, to uphold the basic dignity of the law of the land against pornographic ridicule. Libraries necessarily amass limited collections on limited funds. Whether personal whim, expert opinion, or ignorance, some criterion or other comes into play with regard to what books make it onto any shelf. This is fine with Joe Public, apparently, so long as the criterion that comes into play isn’t based in a moral belief: in this case, the moral belief that a nihilistic attack on the custodians of the law of the land by exposing them in the nude is a bad thing. Over the line. Something that doesn’t merit space on the shelf. “The people” thought otherwise, and loudly. After about one day, the Jackson-George Regional Library System made America (The Book) available to cardholders.

But it was nice while it lasted. The ban, that is. For a minute there, it seemed as if Babbitt were alive and well in a small corner of Mississippi, striking a quixotic blow for the kind of middle-class morality that once strived to mark off the public square in order to keep it neat and clean—quite sterile, even, in that wholesome way that once drove artists off into paroxysms of creativity. Or at least into paroxysms. What should be clear, though, is that it’s not as if Babbitt isn’t alive and well; he is. And he still embodies prevailing middle-class standards. It’s just that the middle-class standards to which, as Webster’s puts it in its definion of Babbitt, he unthinkingly conforms—from Batavia to Marin to Farmland to Jackson—have changed completely.

As it happened, the book-banning story coincided with the appearance of a Vanity Fair magazine profile of founding Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. The story, an unblushing exercise in hagiography, depicted the seventy-four-year-old pornographer as “the fallen king,” “one of the greatest success stories in magazine history,” blah, blah, doomed by “Reagan-era censorship, the Internet, and a series of expensive dreams.” No typography of irony here. No irony, period—all of it, presumably, having been used up on “democracy” in the Jon Stewart book. Just soupy gush. Lamented Guccione son Bob, Jr.: “He wanted so much to be acknowledged for something other than pornography.” Alas.

But what a pornographer he was. Having launched Penthouse in 1969, “Bob outraunched Playboy by displaying genitalia and pubic hair in a magazine,” as a former colleague approvingly told Vanity Fair. “That had never been done before.”17

Balboa led the way to the Pacific. Edison turned on the lights. Guccione displayed genitalia and pubic hair. No wonder he gets the star treatment. In truth, of course, genitalia and pubic hair have been with us since Adam and Eve; they just never before made it into a magazine that plied the mainstream, both as a widely available mass publication, and as a mass influence on a wide variety of publications. Three or four decades later, thanks to Guccione and the wheels of progress, we get a full-frontal look at the Supreme Court in a bestselling book by a television star. As Rotary International might say: How “fabulous.”

The Guccione article went on to allude to the greatest hazard of the porn trade: not censorship, which can actually spice things up, but jaded customers. This pornographer’s nightmare began to come true as early as the middle 1970s. And now? Thirty years later, simply having lived through the intervening decades—or even through a description of the intervening decades—makes us all, to a very real extent, jaded customers. That’s because it’s hard to function in this world without a working knowledge of sexual depravity, bestial violence, and untoppable profanity, regardless of whether we are brothel owners or housewives, pedophiles or bird-watchers. We are all denizens of the same cultural no-man’s-land that pop pornographers and other boundary-crossers have created even as we have willingly stripped ourselves of propriety’s guidelines and signposts of convention. And that’s why Batavia’s Rotary Club could boldly—or, rather, banally—go where no Rotary has gone before; and why Mississippi librarians were repudiated in their efforts to hold a line that no longer exists.

And not just against birthday suits. In the Jon Stewart book, for one, there is also the, well, naked intention to level and degrade a pillar of democracy—the law—leaving vicious little snaps of humiliation, discomfort, and exposure in its place. This is a kind of pornography in itself, I would argue, but one Americans delightedly consume, absolutely smug in partaking absolutely of the First Amendment. Such destructive absolutism is another prevailing convention to which the modern-day middle-class conforms, and as unthinkingly as its forbears ever did to the morality of the past. The difference is, the middle-class reflex used to be to protect institutions, perhaps to a fault; today, it is to mock them, perhaps out of existence.

Maybe this is that “other” legacy Guccione Minor yearns for. Certainly, pornograhers are owed their due in creating a society in which all the lines—between speech and pornography, mainstream culture and adversary culture, middle class and Bohemia, bourgeois life and rock lifestyle, Us and Them, people who take their clothes off for the camera and people who don’t—have been trampled out of existence and forgotten.

Or disguised. The Victorians have received much grief for their efforts to use language to cloak the corporeal, which must have reflected not only their moral creed but also their determination to rise above an intrusive physical side of life that still tied humanity to chamber pots, among other unpleasant things. In any case, Victorians, so they say, preferred “limb” to leg; “form” to body, and supposedly even draped shawls over the legs—sorry, the “limbs”—of pianos. That said, there is no euphemism more opaque and more absurd than our contemporary labels for the sex industry, from “gentlemen’s clubs,” where the paying customers are anything but, to “adult entertainment,” which, of course, means pornography and the “mature” (eighteen-and-up) audiences that support it.

There is, in these terms, an explicit bar to children for which, I suppose, we should be grateful. At the same time, this language tells us that to reach “maturity” is to enter an R-rated—or X-rated, or NR-rated—world of mass voyeurism in which explicit, often depraved, depictions of sexuality, violence, and assorted barbarisms add up to “adult” behavior. Is someone who watches sexual intercourse on screen or buys a lap dance in a strip club “mature”? If so, is someone who doesn’t watch sexual intercourse or buy a lap dance “immature”? Victorian euphemisms were more or less intelligible; our euphemisms mask the basest, most stunted behaviors in the guise of adulthood.

This lingo masquerade is by no means limited to the sex industry. When the scripts of the 2001 fall television season made (pre-9/11) headlines for including what The New York Times described as “every crude word imaginable, including one considered to be on the furthermost reaches of decorum”—wherever that is—The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin had this to say: “Broadcast television can grow up as the rest of the country does. There’s no reason why we can’t use the language of adulthood in programs that are about adults.”18

No, no reason at all. But Sorkin’s idea of promoting “the language of adulthood” was to get a network okay for a character to “curse in a way that uses the Lord’s name in vain.” Producer Steven Bochco was engaged in a similar campaign to help broadcast television “grow up” by bringing American television viewers “a scatological reference that has never been uttered on an ABC series.” In other words, we can forget Bartlett’s Quotations, the Federalist Papers, and War and Peace. Finally, we’re talking the “language of adulthood.”

Obviously, there’s no curse or “scatological reference” that’s new to a culture rooted in earthy Anglo-Saxon civilization. What’s new, though, is the promulgation of such raw references in the media mainstream—over our airwaves, into our homes, and throughout our casual lexicon—as an act of cultural elevation. This probably started with Lenny Bruce, whose fame as a comedian (lasting) depended on the shock of profanity (fleeting) that he used in his stand-up routines. It is worth bearing in mind that it was a pornographer, Playboy’s Hugh Hefner, who first got Bruce booked at a mainstream venue in Chicago. It was “the big time at last,” writes Gerald Nachman, in an admiring essay in his book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comics of the 1950s and 1960s.19 Interestingly enough, Nachman notes that Bruce’s material, however startling to mainstream audiences, wasn’t original then, either.

His language was blunt street talk, but he was hardly the first dirty comic; others, like Belle Barth, Rusty Warren, Pearl Williams, Redd Foxx, and the notorious B. S. Pulley, rose to underground fame using filthy language (in some cases wearing a Yiddish fig leaf). The difference was that Bruce was in the public eye. Barth and company hid out, mainly in the Catskills, Miami Beach, and the saloon gulags. Foxx and his comic brethren were walled off in black ghetto rooms; Pulley (Big Jule in Guys and Dolls) was a harmless curiosity.20

This redefines Bruce’s role: rather than a breaker of taboos, he was a popularizer or amplifier of broken taboos, notable for bringing trash talk from “saloon gulags” into ritzy venues. Sometime after BMI began broadcasting what Variety once called “leer-ics,” and sometime before Bob Guccione stacked up “genitalia and pubic hair” at the corner newsstand, Bruce brought the blue streak to center stage. Maybe more shocking than the act, though, was its effect on the audience.

Malcolm Muggeridge, writing in Esquire in 1965, observed: “Every time he used an obscene word or expression you could feel the audience shiver with delight. It was what they were waiting for, what they had paid for, what they wanted of him. He met their requirement generously and contemptuously, spitting out the filth as though to say, ‘Take that, you vile bourgeois scum!’” The critic remarked on “the spectacle of smart, rich people being lambasted and simply loving it. Please, please, Lenny, despise us again, spit on us again, insult us again!”21

From that masochistic midpoint in a small club, to that first “f——” in the nation’s movie theaters from M*A*S*H in 1970,22 to those 162 “s——” from South Park broadcast over cable television in 2001,23 we have “progressed” to a point where profanity knows no boundaries. Funny how when you can say anything—cross any line, break any taboo—expression and communication fail to ascend to new levels of complexity or nuance. Or even to old levels of complexity or nuance. Rather, they revert to a broad and formless brutishness. Meat on a slab, rather than food for thought. Which suggests it wasn’t only innate artistic virtuosity, then, that inspired Cole Porter, for example, to sculpt “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” out of the prosaic muck of procreation in the animal kingdom with his electric eels that do it “though it shocks ’em I know,” and those shad roe that do it, “Waiter, bring me shad roe.”

It was also a deeply etched set of boundaries, which society had engineered, that drove a dazzling mind to use the language to transform the stuff of instinct into high art. It is said Porter was delighted that “Love for Sale” (1930) was banned from the airwaves, and no doubt double-banned in Boston. But that’s called crossing a line (Porter) and keeping it, too (society). If Porter had written in the age of U2 (“keep f——— up the mainstream”), he would have made his mark, or not, as someone else, someone who never had to write his way out of a conventional box. This tells us that without social standards, there would have been no Great American Songbook standards. And without manners, there would have been no comedies of manners—no “Private Lives.” Similarly, in a time of “no-fault divorce,” there can be no Anna Karenina; in the era of one-night stands, no Brief Encounter.

Sticking with Porter’s example, then, we can see that even when he wrote “Anything Goes” for the 1934 hit show of the same name—a show that also featured “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “All Through the Night,” and “You’re the Top”—anything didn’t go, not really, not so long as sex and drugs (not rock ’n’ roll) remained frothy allusions in a theatrical score that played mainly to an elite, theater-going crowd. Not incidentally, “Anything Goes” (lyrics and book) went under the Hollywood censor’s knife before it was filmed for a mass audience.

Today, a lifetime later, anything not only goes, but it goes unremarked upon. Take the oeuvre of 50 Cent, the artist behind that 2005 ode to (oral) sex, “Candy Shop” (“I’ll take you to the candy shop, I’ll let you lick the lollypop”). While it is impossible to compare Cole Porter, a highly trained theatrical composer from the upper echelon of American affluence, with 50 Cent, a fatherless former drug hustler turned rapper, a passing juxtaposition helps us gauge what is acceptable in the mainstream culture when it comes to treating love and romance. Dance bands under Paul Whiteman and the Dorsey Brothers helped make “Anything Goes” a pretty popular song in the 1930s. Five-million-plus Americans made The Massacre, the album that includes “Candy Shop,” the second-highest seller of 2005 and helped its composer-performer rake in $73,351,514.85 for the year.24 With 1.9 million sales, “Candy Shop” was also the number one song in a new musical product, ringtone sales for cell phones.25 “Candy Shop”—“Get on top then get to bouncing ’round like a low rider”—was also one of biggest prom-trotting ditties of the season.

The song wasn’t always played at the prom, of course, because there were some schools that drew some kind of line. Such schools restricted party playlists, barring the original lyrics of, say, “Get Low” by Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz, allowing a somewhat sanitized version to play in the high school gym. But nothing could keep the original lyrics out. “During one verse, when the edited versions says, “Till the sweat drop down and fall, till all these females crawl”—already organdy-and-lace-lovely—“the students shout the original line, which includes a graphic reference to male anatomy and a vulgar term for women.” So reported The Boston Globe, which also quoted an eighteen-year-old girl, who said: “Sometimes people don’t even know it’s the edited version, because we’re singing it anyway and we’re louder than the music.”26 As in:

Till the sweat drop down my balls

Till all these bitches crawl

What is there to say, especially when no one wants to be labeled a “prude”—“Happy Graduation”?

It’s not as if the world that’s supposed to be these kids’ oyster won’t take them as they are. But rather than discovering those new frontiers people used to talk about, this generation is better suited for crossing any old lines out there that might still exist. Meanwhile, their elders are hardly through transgressing. While they don’t throb to the beat of balls that fall and bitches that crawl, today’s adults seem to be affected by the same impulse to strip away lingering strictures and culture codes, whether consciously or not. The conservative writer Peggy Noonan, she of the lyrical pen, opened a recent Wall Street Journal column with a joke that ended with the punch line, “bitch.”27 This has got to be some kind of first—but what next? Even the first lady of the United States hasn’t held her ground during this cultural shift, as Laura Bush’s monologue at a recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner shows.

This annual media dinner, carried live on C-SPAN since the advent of cable, features the president delivering something of a comical command performance—thoroughly scripted by comedy writers and even more thoroughly vetted by political advisers. At the event in question, in 2005, Laura Bush “stole” the mike from her husband and told her own jokes—or, rather, told her own jokes thoroughly scripted by comedy writers and even more thoroughly vetted by political advisers.

As far as her press clippings went, the first lady was a hit, with kudos coming from left and right. But there were a few of us—in the media I can count them on one hand—who wished that a grown-up had happened by the East Wing to cut some of the first lady’s jokes from the script, and replace them with some new video adventures of the president’s beloved black Scottie, Barney, or something.

Why? Here is where boundaries and guidelines come back in—or should: When a lady happens to be first lady, “funny” at any expense isn’t part of the job description, not when “funny” comes at the expense of her husband’s image. And I don’t mean “image” as in the artificially spun, public relations product. I mean “image” as in public symbol: President of the United States. Commander-in-chief. Leader of the Free World. That’s her fella. In these explosive times, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers under arms, such symbolism is a sobering thought, or should be, even during a night under the lights on the town.

In other words, feet of clay are fine, but there was no reason to bring the barnyard into it. During the 2004 election season, Whoopi Goldberg steered a Democratic fund-raiser into the gutter with a crude pun on the Bush family name, prompting Republican accusations that John Kerry didn’t “share the same values” as the rest of America.28 But what about the rest of the Bush family? Laura Bush is no stand-up comic, but that was all the more reason certain sorts of jokes should automatically, reflexively, and unquestioningly have been ruled out for her public delivery. Jokes that link the president’s hands and the underside of a horse, for instance. Jokes that create a regrettably indelible image of the first lady, the vice president’s wife, a Supreme Court justice, and the secretary of state—the diplomatic face of the United States—together at Chippendales, enthusiastically waving dollars bills at hulking, bow-tied male strippers. Even jokes that make a Mommie Dearest out of former first lady Barbara Bush.29 Such material won’t pull more than a PG rating these days, but a first lady in any era should be mature enough to avoid all so-called “adult” material.

Once upon a time, such discretion was a no-brainer, an almost autonomic response that came out of rules so reflexive as to need no articulation, much less conscious thought. No more—which is why so many more people, including conservatives, applauded Mrs. Bush than not. But “George,” she said, “if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you’re going to have to stay up later.” It sounds like road company Jay Leno, but it was the first lady, and she was talking about a solemn if controversial goal her husband is pursuing, ordering hundreds of thousands of American military personnel into harm’s way to accomplish it. The hilarity of her moment passes—the calendar turns, the book circulates, the centerfold fades—but something has changed. The first lady has crossed a line.

Laura Bush is not Joan Rivers. Splashing into the media mainstream to join the derisive fun of comedy today, decoupling fateful words from mortal purpose, is a risky proposition for the wife of a superpower leader. One day, “ending tyranny” is Mr. Bush’s raison d’être—the high-flown focus of his second inaugural address. The next day, it is Mrs. Bush’s punch line. The day after that—who knows? Even in an era that prizes the guffaw above all, the lingering air of uncertainty isn’t worth the media snickers. Sure, the first lady managed to “humanize” her husband, as The New York Times so admiringly put it.30 Certainly, she knocked him down some pegs, which in our age is much the same thing.

As an illustrative point of contrast, it’s worth thinking back to other presidents and other first ladies, particularly ones who led in wartime. Would we have said Eleanor had “humanized” FDR by doing a stand-up routine in 1942 about Franklin always “fearing fear itself”? Or that Pat Nixon had humanized Richard by wondering in 1972 where the heck the peace was that Henry Kissinger had promised was “at hand”? Or that Nancy Reagan had humanized Ron in 1987 by teasing him about tearing down that old wall?

“Lighten up,” I was told ad nauseam by readers of my weekly column presenting this same argument. This may be the password for Mrs. Bush, blazing a trail for first ladies to come, but where does it leave the rest of us? Lightened up, all right, having cast off one more weighty hunk of decorum. But is that a good thing? And what do we do now? And what does the first lady do next time? When the White House helpmeet, hostess, and christener of battleships fails to step on the brakes at the boundary of good taste, all the once-shared notions of public conduct are totalled.

I realize that the wreckage is in the eye of the beholder. And, if the tally from my own personal mailbag is an accurate reflection, at least 60 percent of the country robustly applauded Mrs. Bush’s act, and would call for an encore. But from that 40 percent who cringed came a common point of departure: “I am not a prude, but…” was a frequent opening phrase. (A favorite variation: “I am a pretty coarse old cow, but…”)

To be a prude is to be “excessively or priggishly attentive to propriety or decorum,” a shallow figure of easy ridicule that a decorum-lite and lately coarsened society like ours holds in particular contempt. Hence, the letter writers’ defensive posture: They were not paying excessive attention to a trivial matter of, say, which fork to use, and they knew it; they were concerned with a larger issue. But this was a distinction that the 60 percent who vociferously rejected any and all criticism of Mrs. Bush didn’t see and, I believe, couldn’t see. The line was lost to them. It’s not that my 40 percent were offended as individuals by some person’s jokes; they were offended as citizens by a first lady who forgot herself. The readers who bristled did so because they knew a line was there somewhere—or used to be there somewhere—that divided life between subjective notions of private fun and objective notions of public conduct, and they didn’t like seeing the first lady of the United States even quasi-officially cross it.

In effect, these readers were themselves validating essential boundaries: between a private person and a public actor; a stand-up comic and the president’s wife; childish behavior and mature conduct; good taste and bad; and between private life and public life. This is a hopeful sign. But it’s also true they were expressing themselves as individuals who believed they were alone, even isolated, in their feelings. After all, three-plus decades ago, the Supreme Court, yet to be unrobed by Jon Stewart, collectively threw up its hands and declared there was no such thing as obscenity, thus eliminating the shelter of shame and modesty. Perhaps not suprisingly, then, these people seemed convinced there was no socially sanctioned place for them to go with their convictions.

As Walter Berns noted years ago, there had been a sudden change: “Nothing that is appropriate to one place is inappropriate to any other.”31 He was specifically addressing the impact of court decisions on obscenity; but ever since, in all areas of conduct and culture, communal notions of what is appropriate and when, what is appropriate and where, have sunk like a rock. Underwear-as-outerwear, pedicures for four-year-olds, Rotarians as centerfolds—why not?

Internet blogs and reality shows are the logical expression of such confusion, as the citizen-voyeur assumes his role in a society that is wide open. Bearing witness to a real-life range of behaviors that were once walled off from public scrutiny (from weight loss to pain, titillation, rejection, revulsion, and humiliation) still gives pause sometimes, but how can we not look? A sex partner sues a sex blogger for invasion of privacy for being “cruelly exposed to the world.”32 Some critics express genuine shock at a new reality show, Intervention, in which, as The New York Times reported, “viewers are invited to witness an addict’s decline and then participate in the crucial moment when family and friends confront the troubled soul with a life-altering choice: rehabilitation or banishment.”33 Even so, such blogs are a way of life and such shows get a pass (unless, as in ABC’s abruptly canceled show, Welcome to the Neighborhood, they offend PC sensibilities by eliminating Asian, Wiccan, and Latino contestants) due to the increasingly faint demarcation between public and private life, between appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

Are there any lines left? I came across a significant one in a story about a thirty-nine-year-old Brooklyn mother who found herself transfixed by the online revelations of her nanny’s sex life.

As Helaine Olen, the mother, wrote in The New York Times, it was her husband who was not amused by the nanny’s online “tales of too much drinking for [his] comfort” and catalog of sexual experience (among other things—and partners—the nanny wrote about touching her breasts while reading The New Yorker).34 “This is inappropriate,” Dad said. “We don’t need to know that Jennifer Ehle makes her hot.”

Mrs. Mom disagreed. Instead of screeching: If she’s in a lather over The New Yorker, what happens when she gives junior a bath? this modern mother was composed, nonchalant. No prude, she. There was nothing about nanny, she maintained, not her flaunted promiscuity, her heavy drinking, or her parading these flaws in cyberspace, to disqualify her from caring for the couple’s young, impressionable, defenseless, helpless toddlers. “Didn’t she [the nanny] have a right to free expression? It wasn’t as though she was [sic] quaffing Scotch or bedding guys, or the occasional girl, while on the job.” At least, not according to the blog.

But then the nanny crossed that last frontier: She blogged “sarcastically” about her employers’ home life. She judged it and found it wanting. This, to Ms. Olen, meant nanny “broke the covenant.” How? Understand that drinking to excess and sleeping around are merely lifestyle choices and, as such, not to be judged—apparently not even by an employer whose children are potentially at risk. In return, however, the employer’s lifestyle choices, however stodgy, however bourgeois, are not to be judged either. As in: I don’t judge you, you don’t judge me. In critiquing the household, the nanny was—sin of sins—being judgmental. “My issues, my problems, my compromises, my entire being,” the mother wrote, “seemed to be viewed by her as so much waste.” For this, finally, the nanny was fired.

But maybe there is another factor in this calculus. The mother reveals having been “more than a little envious” of nanny’s wanton ways. On being ridiculed online by the younger woman, she experienced a terrible sting: As a wife and mother of very young children, the infinite debauch on the wild side was behind her. Perhaps on one level, then, this was a showdown between the perceived prude and the proud libertine. Ms. Olen saw herself stuck with the finite proposition of making a life. This gave her pause.

Living in a society that upholds the floozy as an “authentic” “free spirit” only reinforces such doubts and ambiguities. In a society without the boundaries that are the bases for judgment, the dutiful wife who makes a home and raises some kids really has nothing over the licentious lass who doesn’t. Without moral judgmentalism, what’s left is just the contrast between sensational excitement and grinding routine. No wonder Mrs. Mom felt stung. Nanny’s promiscuity is just a lifestyle choice, as valid as motherhood. This helps explains why, when the XXX-porn star bought her ticket to the GOP fund-raiser, no eyebrows were raised. “No matter what they do,” the Republican spokesman said, “the money is going to help elect Republicans to the House.”

No matter what they do, the porn star sups with the president; the nanny cares for the kids (unless she critiques the missus); the Rotary twelve are pillars of the community. No matter what Penthouse or America contain, they rate space in the public square. A creed of nonjudgmentalism has erased all the lines we used to live by. But just because they can do these things, should they?

In considering the answer, it’s worth recalling the Sensation art controversy which brought this question, however briefly, to light in 1999. The brouhaha was kicked off by that inelegant clump of elephant dung mooshed onto the breast of a portrait of the Virgin Mary by a British artist on display as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sensation exhibition. Familiarly known as “Dung Virgin,” this work of “art,” which was also dotted with pornographic magazine cutouts, drew the wrathful judgment of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who tried, in vain, to shut off city funds to the museum displaying it and other items from the Saatchi Collection. These included, as art critic Roger Kimball described them: “pubescent female mannequins, for example, studded with erect penises, vaginas, and anuses, fused together in various postures of sexual coupling … the portrait of a child molester and murderer made from what looked like a child’s hand prints, [and] the bisected animals (pigs, cows) in plexiglass tanks full of formaldehyde.”35 While applauding Giuliani’s efforts as “a courageous, heartfelt gesture,” Kimball saw in the legal wrangle over the First Amendment that Giuliani initiated evidence of “an important public failure.”

For it brings the law to bear on a realm of activity that, in a healthy society, should be ajudicated in the court of taste and manners. To my mind, the controversy over “Sensation” has much less to do with free speech than with some basic questions about the kind of public life we want to encourage.36

Precisely. Because ours is not a “healthy society” with a functioning court of taste and manners, the law, for Giuliani, became the court of last resort. And he lost. But if the First Amendment guaranteed government funding of the “art” in question, it didn’t really lay the controversy to rest. Legality aside, a more difficult question remained: Was “Dung Virgin”—not to mention chopped animals and cutouts of private parts—something worthy of public regard? To answer his own question, Kimball invoked the work of a British judge named John Fletcher Moulton, who, speaking on the subject of law and manners in the 1920s, noted that “there is a widespread tendency to regard the fact that [one] can do a thing”—as in display “Dung Virgin” or Mapplethorpe’s snaps—“as meaning [one] may do it. There can be no more fatal error than this. Between ‘can do’ and ‘may do’ ought to exist the whole realm of which recognizes the sway of duty, fairness, sympathy, taste, and all the other things that make life beautiful and society possible.”37

This realm between “can do” and “may do”—even a fine line between the two—has all but vanished. Lord Moulton described his realm as being suspended somewhere between the law of the land and the desire of the individual. He called it “the domain of obedience to the unenforceable.” This is the domain of self-restraint, a place inaccessible to an adolescent society for whom “limit” is only limitation, and where little if any space ever shows up between the exercise of personal desire and the restrictions of the law. It is this absence of “unenforceable” behaviorial boundaries—self-restraint—that has made what one “can do” increasingly indistinguishable from what one may or should do.

Of course, much more than manners, arts, and letters have suffered from this lack of lines to live by. Our culture without boundaries increasingly reflects a larger world without boundaries—and it’s a brave new world, all right. It begins with the increasingly amorphous proposition of personal identity (sexual, national, married name or not). It continues at home, permeable to the toxic seepage of television and the Internet. It goes to church, where the world’s Catholics have had to confront line-crossing sexual crimes. And it extends to our national borders, which are increasingly porous to aliens and terrorists. Where there is no line, there is increasingly no will to draw any line. And that can be not only confusing, but also downright dangerous.

There is the temptation to see such perils only in the dry, quasicosmic terms of “civilization” or “culture.” But a culture without boundaries—a society without grown-ups and a middle class without guidelines—can be a dangerous place to live. The shocking and tragic story of a young woman named Lyric Benson, a newly minted Yale graduate who was gunned down before her mother’s eyes by her spurned lover, Robert Ambrosino, offers a particularly searing and unforgettable illustration why.38

She was nineteen when they met after her sophomore year; he was a New Haven “townie” pushing thirty and rough around the edges—that is, worldly-wise and real to an impressionable theater major. According to newspaper accounts, they moved in together, sharing a group house with other Yale students. They became “engaged” during her senior year, at which point, Ambrosino, according to The New York Times, “flew her mother and stepfather” to town from their home in North Carolina to celebrate. After graduation, with Lyric knocking on the door of the New York acting world, they continued to live together.

The rest of the terrible story practically writes itself. What seemed cozy in college was constricting in the real world. Lyric moved out. Ambrosino harassed her, stalked her. And then, one night in Manhattan, outside her apartment building, with her mother looking on, he shot her in her lovely face and turned the gun on himself, committing suicide.

It’s a wrenching story of violence, pain, and waste. But how does this crime relate to broken barriers on artistic expression and social conventions? Maybe the best way to answer is to harken back to the past: In a culture with boundaries, in a society with grown-ups, in a judgmental, conventional, straitlaced world of reflexive manners and bourgeois mores, this tragedy might never have happened—and not just the murder and suicide, but also the relationship itself.

In our day, such a relationship, which seems to mismatch not just age and experience but also aptitude and opportunity, is quite unremarkable—and maybe therein lies the rub. No one dares to find, or even thinks to find, such a live-in arrangement in any way remarkable—as in worthy of remark, caustic or cautionary. Nonjudgmentally, society allows, and even enables, such a young woman to pass effortlessly into such a love affair with more emotional and sexual and professional baggage than she is equipped to handle. Our young women deserve more protection. Judgmentally, society should make it more costly, or at least a little more uncomfortable, for such a pair to perpetuate a relationship.

How? By throwing up the same old trip wires and obstacles that have blocked, or, at least, slowed lovers through the ages: punitive parents, outraged “dowagers” (that imposing term for old ladies), incredulous peers, college rules, moral codes, social stigmas—all the “artificial,” “narrow-minded,” “pointless” constraints society once mustered to try to quash what was once rather poetically known as “free love.” From Romeo and Juliet to Anna Karenina, great (and not-so-great) literature is simply littered with such constraints; indeed, it relies on them for creative tension, plot, and character development. None of which is to say that traditional social conventions and boundaries of behavior alone offer any guarantee of happily-ever-after. But facing down family, answering to a college dean, even winning over suspicious friends provide critical tests of any affair, reaffirming a couple’s desire to be together … or not. Maybe as reflected in the gimlet eye of a disapproving community, an unemployed barfly wouldn’t look so great to a Yale undergrad. Maybe a few nasty stigmas in the mix would convince an older man that living with an inexperienced student isn’t really worth all the trouble.

But no such disapproval, no such trouble, no such boundaries, no such grown-ups, exist any longer. Sadly, neither does Lyric. Society failed to mount a rigid defense of the young woman; instead, it provided the warm, slightly moist embrace of nonjudgmentalism that created a cocoon of unreality for the doomed affair. Society failed, period. As barriers and boundaries disappear, so, too, do our signposts, markers, and guides. We gain mobility, free rein, and lattitude, but we don’t know where we are.

More dangerous still: We don’t know who we are.