Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

makes you a puritanical, born-again weirdo. It’s not enough just to talk like Mae West. Anybody can do that. We need proof. Pam has the proof. In the short-term, the Tommy-Pamela videotape sullied her already sketchy reputation. But it was probably the greatest thing that could have happened to her long- term legacy—it made her transcendent and organic in the same breath.

Whenever I hear intellectuals talk about sexual icons of the present day, the name mentioned most is Madonna. That seems like a good answer, and it’s the kind of answer Madonna has worked very hard to perpetuate. Earning that title was her only career goal. But Madonna’s not even close to representing contemporary sexuality in any important fashion. She tries way too hard, and it never seems honest. It’s very telling that the two best songs in Madonna’s catalog—“Like a Virgin” and “Like a Prayer”—are titled after similes. Her whole career is a collection of similes: Madonna is like a sexual idol, but that’s just the plot for her self-styled promotional blitz. When she overtly attempted to embody Marilyn Monroe in the video for “Material Girl,” Madonna got the dance steps perfect but completely missed the message: That song suggests that sex is about money, and that sex is about power, and that sex is about getting what you want. Well, fine. That’s how it is with Madonna. But with the original Monroe, sex was about sex. It was completely without guile or intellect. Being a sexual icon is sort of like being the frontman for an Orange County punk band: As soon as you can explain why you’re necessary, you’re over.

Madonna is an unsuccessful sexual icon because she desperately wants to be a sexual icon. Pamela Anderson is the perfect sexual icon because she wants to have sex. You think that makes her dumb? Well, maybe you’re right. But how smart are you while you’re having sex? What part of sex is “intellectual”? Certainly none of the good parts.

There are a lot of interesting moments on my Pam ’n’ Tommy Fuji videotape, several of which are so weird that its authenticity can’t be doubted. Pam and Tommy listen to MC Hammer and Soul Asylum. They try to write a cookbook for dope smokers. Tommy uses the word rad in casual conversation. Pam tells Tommy, “You’re the best fucking husband on the planet,” and they get married with the aid of a spaceman. But if you had a transcript of this film, you’d find that there’s one phrase that appears more often than all others: “Where are we?”

This question is asked over twenty times, and it’s never answered. They’re on a boat, they look at the horizon, and they say, “Where are we?” And if someone wanted to use Pam as a metaphor for the decline of American morality and the vapidity of modern relationships, they could point out that phrase as an illuminating example of a lost generation. “Where are we, indeed,” such a critic might write in the last paragraph of an essay. But that kind of snarkiness is more negative than necessary, and it misses the point. We don’t need Pam to know where she is; she helps us understand where we are.

(metaphorical fruit interlude)

“You’re missing the point,” she said. “What you’re saying makes sense in theory, but not in practice. You’re trying to compare apples and oranges.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” he asked in response. “Apples and oranges aren’t that different, really. I mean, they’re both fruit. Their weight is extremely similar. They both contain acidic elements. They’re both roughly spherical. They serve the same social purpose. With the possible exception of a tangerine, I can’t think of anything more similar to an orange than an apple. If I was having lunch with a man who was eating an apple and—while I was looking away—he replaced that apple with an orange, I doubt I’d even notice. So how is this a metaphor for difference? I could understand if you said, ‘That’s like comparing apples and uranium,’ or ‘That’s like comparing apples with baby wolverines,’ or ‘That’s like comparing apples with the early work of Raymond Carver,’ or ‘That’s like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths.’ Those would all be valid examples of profound disparity. But not apples and oranges. In every meaningful way, they’re virtually identical.”

“You’re missing the point,” she said again, this time for different reasons.

7 George Will vs. Nick Hornby 0:86

Like many U.S. citizens, I spend much of my free time thinking about the future of sports and the future of our children. This is because I care deeply about sports.

In the spirit of both, I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as “the sport of the future” since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come. But people continue to tell me that soccer will soon become part of the fabric of this country, and that soccer will eventually be as popular as football, basketball, karate, pinball, smoking, glue sniffing, menstruation, animal cruelty, photocopying, and everything else that fuels the eroticized, hyperkinetic zeitgeist of Americana. After the U.S. placed eighth in the 2002 World Cup tournament, team forward Clint Mathis said, “If we can turn one more person who wasn’t a soccer fan into a soccer fan, we’ve accomplished something.” Apparently, that’s all that matters to these idiots. They won’t be satisfied until we’re all systematically brainwashed into thinking soccer is cool and that placing eighth[35] is somehow noble. However, I know this will never happen. Not really. Dumb bunnies like Clint Mathis will be wrong forever, and that might be the only thing saving us from ourselves.

My personal war against the so-called “soccer menace” probably reached its peak in 1993, when I was nearly fired from a college newspaper for suggesting that soccer was the reason thousands of Brazilians are annually killed at Quiet Riot concerts in Rio de Janeiro, a statement that is—admittedly—only half true. A few weeks after the publication of said piece, a petition to have me removed as the newspaper’s sports editor was circulated by a ridiculously vocal campus organization called the Hispanic American Council, prompting an “academic hearing” where I was accused (with absolute seriousness) of libeling Pele. If memory serves, I think my criticism of soccer and Quiet Riot was somehow taken as latently racist, although—admittedly—I’m not completely positive, as I was intoxicated for most of the monthlong episode. But the bottom line is that I am still willing to die a painful public death, assuming my execution destroys the game of soccer (or—at the very least—convinces people to shut up about it).

According to the Soccer Industry Council of America, soccer is the No. 1 youth participation sport in the U.S. There are more than 3.6 million players under the age of nineteen registered to play, and that number has been expanding at over 8 percent a year since 1990. There’s also been a substantial increase in the number of kids who play past the age of twelve, a statistic that soccer proponents are especially thrilled about. “These are the players that will go on to be fans, referees, coaches, adult volunteers, and players in the future,” observed Virgil Lewis, chairman of the United States Youth Soccer Association.

Certainly, I can’t argue with Virgil’s math: I have no doubt that battalions of Gatorade-stained children are running around the green wastelands of suburbia, randomly kicking a black-and-white ball in the general direction of tuna netting. However, Lewis’s larger logic is profoundly flawed. There continues to be this blindly optimistic belief that all of the brats playing soccer in 2003 are going to be crazed MSBL fans in 2023, just as it was assumed that eleven-year-old soccer players in 1983 would be watching Bob Costas provide play-by-play for indoor soccer games right now. That will never happen. We will never care about soccer in this country. And it’s not just because soccer is inherently un-American, which is what most soccer haters (Frank Deford, Jim Rome, et al.) tend to insinuate. It’s mostly because soccer is inherently geared toward Outcast Culture.

On the surface, one might assume that would actually play to soccer’s advantage, as America has plenty of outcasts. Some American outcasts are very popular, such as OutKast.[36] But Outcast Culture does not meld with Intimidation Culture, and the latter aesthetic has always been a cornerstone of team sports. An outcast can be intimidating in an individual event—Mike Tyson and John McEnroe are proof—but they rarely thrive in the social environment of a team organism (e.g., Duane Thomas, Pete Maravich, Albert Belle, et al.). Unless you’re Barry Bonds, being an outcast is antithetical to the group concept. But soccer is the one sport that’s an exception to that reality: Soccer unconsciously rewards the outcast, which is why so many adults are