Let's talk about sex.
(OK, so that's not exactly your run-of-the-mill American Prospect topic sentence. It's nothing at all like, say, "Let's talk about the trade deficit." Or, "Let's talk about Kofi Annan." Or even the one that became so popular in the first week of November, "Let's talk about slagging Bob Shrum with a pie." But it got your attention. And, so, we proceed.)
There seems to be a lot of sex going around in Washington. There's certainly a lot of talk about sex going around in Washington (and, I will grant you, Washington is the place in which a fresh copy of the latest General Accounting Office report counts as foreplay). Washington is a town in which an old mullion like Henry Kissinger -- who otherwise couldn't find a date on the Singapore docks, even if Neil Bush wasn't in town -- is considered something of a Casanova. But it seems to have reached something of a boil. For example, I don't believe there's anyone at the Federal Communications Commission that's not wearing a raincoat these days. (The same might be said of one-ninth of the Supreme Court, but hell, that was 13 years and one Bush in the White House ago.)
I was puzzled for a while, and so I determined to go to the one place in Washington where I knew I could find the lowdown on the down low, the red-hot center of the steaming love cauldron that is the District.
Where else, of course, but the United States Senate?
Back on November 18, the Senate's subcommittee on science, technology, and space held a hearing concerning the threat to us all posed by people who consume too much pornography on the Internet. Basically, the witnesses testified that this was in no way a good thing and is only made worse by the fact that it's easier for people to get their pornography on the Internet than it used to be when you had to go sneak off and find whichever one of your friends had managed to spirit away a dirty magazine. (You think I make this stuff up, but that's the exact argument made by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, the subcommittee's chairman, who apparently declined to name the youthful miscreant who used to perform this great public services to the youth of Garnett, Kansas. Who knows? Maybe he's the mayor now.)
Most of the testimony was fairly standard Beltway bloviation, and the whole enterprise kept cracking up on that inconvenient First Amendment thing. But then a woman named Judith Reisman, who represents something called the California Protective Parents Association, proposed a groundbreaking solution. She told the committee that the stuff on the Internet wasn't speech at all. Instead, she argued, it was a drug. "Erotoxins," she called them.
A brief excursion into constitutional law is necessary here. Speech is protected; intoxicants are not. That cold beer on the counter after you've been working in the garden? No matter how loudly it's calling to you, if you slug it down and then pass out in the foyer, you cannot make a First Amendment argument in its defense to the angry life-partner standing above you with the fireplace poker. (And, as for the harder stuff, well, that's a more open question. I mean, if a person's hallucinations don't have a right to free speech, Sean Hannity becomes largely mute.) Therefore, if we can prove the existence of erotoxins, and if we can define speech as (literally) addictive poison, well, voila! (as we say here in the United States of France). You discover that the nation's capital is as thickly overhung -- and, boy, is that a bad descriptive right there -- with erotoxins as Houston is with hydrocarbons, although the current administration seems as opposed to the former as it was supportive of the latter.
The more I looked around me, the more I came to believe in erotoxins. Nobody's immune. I mean, have you seen that picture of Maureen Dowd sprawled across the staircase in Rolling Stone? And then there was her Thanksgiving-week column about airport screening procedures that read as though it were written by Mickey Spillane (more mentions of lingerie in that one column than Scotty Reston used in a half-century). All of a sudden, she's decided to audition for whenever it is that Adrian Lyne decides to remake The Trouble With Angels? There's got to be something in the air.
And it's not just on the Washington cocktail circuit or the higher reaches of the punditocracy, either. Look at poor Bill O'Reilly.
(Author's Note: ALLEGEDLY. Please apply that word where appropriate over the next couple of paragraphs. Thank you.)
There's the unfortunate fellow, innocently shopping at Bed, Bath & Beyond, and somebody sneezes nearby -- probably Janet Jackson, but perhaps Nicolette Sheridan -- and, suddenly, our hero feels a little funny, and those long, spongy things hanging from the wall begin to speak to him in low, purring voices. Shaken, he flees to a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant for a quick bracer, but he no sooner sits down than there's the voice again, sweet and smooth as molasses, whispering from the appetizer on a nearby table. He bolts for the telephone, but he blacks out, and wakes up several months later in a lawyer's office.
Since I became aware of the erotoxins all around me, I have begun to take precautions. (I declined to wear a mask, largely on the grounds that wearing a mask can cause some confusion among the people whom the erotoxins already have infected.) I'm not too concerned, though. I live in Boston, which in its culture rather famously traded the Puritans for Roman Catholicism. Whatever erotoxins were here prior to 1629 are long gone.
I'm not sure but I think they all went to Cambridge.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer for The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.
