Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

David Halberstam has noted that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were actually raised with paradoxical pathologies: Halberstam insists Magic’s middle-class upbringing was a traditional white experience, while Bird’s impoverished, screwed-up childhood (his father committed suicide when Larry was nineteen) was more stereotypically black. Perhaps this is part of the reason both men could so successfully represent people who have absolutely nothing to do with them. I am not a white person; not really. I am a Celtic Person. That’s my identity, and I’m never going to try to pretend I’m some sort of eclectic iconoclast. This does not mean I’m always right and you’re always wrong, nor does it mean I subconsciously need other people to feel the same way I do about anything. You don’t need to side with the Boston Celtics to be a good person. But you should definitely side with somebody. Either you’re with us or you’re against us, and both of those options is better than living without a soul.

(Fonzie recalibration interlude)

In every episode of Happy Days, Arthur Fonzarelli was surrounded by adoring teenage girls. The Fonz would snap his fingers and they would rush to his embrace. This phenomenon was central to all Happy Days–related discourse. We (as viewers) were constantly regaled with stories of his remarkable exploits at the popular make-out locale Inspiration Point; these tales often involved twin sisters. This was just an accepted part of life. Richie Cunningham would periodically wander up to the Fonz’s spartan apartment over the garage, and—inevitably—Fonzie would be with a buxom (and strangely mute) high school junior.

This forces us to pose an ethical question: Are we to assume the Fonz was having sex with all of these girls? I mean, this was the 1950s, and Milwaukee is a conservative Midwestern city. It’s hard to believe that such a staid community would be supersaturated with so many sexually aggressive teenage girls. Moreover, we are supposed to perceive the Fonz as a “good guy,” correct? Oh, he’s a bit of a rogue (what with all the bull riding and shark jumping and whatnot), but he’s certainly not the type of guy who would sexually corrupt dozens—perhaps hundreds!—of virginal high school females, many of whom would have undoubtedly been under the legal age of consent in the state of Wisconsin (currently eighteen years of age). That scenario is unthinkable. We cannot exist in a society where someone like Fonzie would be lionized for being an insatiable sexaholic, a statutory rapist, and a potential child molester. This is not the behavior of a “good guy.” And since Fonzie never seemed to have a long-term rapport with any of these girls, it’s unlikely that he ever experienced a loving, mutually satisfying, logically advancing relationship (the lone exception being Pinky Tuscadero, who did not seem to reside in the immediate Milwaukee area).

That being the case, there is only one conclusion to draw. For the entire 255-episode duration of Happy Days, the Fonz was a virgin.

9 Porn 1:09

When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore?[40]

Now, this is not an attack on housewives. I can’t say I support the idea of every housewife in America being a whore, but I suppose things could be worse; a loose army of housewife whores is obviously preferable to 2 million housewife serial killers, or 3 million housewife crackheads, or 10 million housewife crossbow enthusiasts. Still, the fact that we have so many whorific housewives is mildly unsettling and profoundly inexplicable. It’s hard to wrap your mind around the motivations of a forty-four-year-old mother smiling while someone takes a series of photographs that prominently feature her birth canal.

Yet according to the affable robots at google.com, there are 6,250 sites on the Internet that prominently include the phrase “naked housewives.” There are also 7,110 that include the phrase “nude housewives,” which I suppose is technically classier. We have 586 that promote “housewife whores,” while a solid 2,600 offer a more generic alternative (“housewife sluts”). I could only find 51 that contain the phrase “my wife is a whore,” although that number is somewhat offset by the 6 sites specifically promoting that “my wife is a fucking whore,” not to mention the semiofficial domain name housewifewhore.com. Since one can assume all of these sites have—conservatively—50 whores apiece, that’s a little over 830,000 domestic sexaholics in English-speaking countries alone, all of which can be located in roughly ninety seconds.

Considering how few women are still stay-at-home moms, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993. However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet has accomplished is the normalization of amateur pornography. There is no justification for the amount of naked people on the World Wide Web, many of whom are clearly (clearly!) doing so for non-monetary reasons. Where were all these people fifteen years ago? Were there really millions of women in 1986 turning to their husbands and saying, “You know, I would love to have total strangers masturbate to images of me deep-throating a titanium dildo, but there’s simply no medium for that kind of entertainment. I guess we’ll just have to sit here and watch Falcon Crest again.”

This phenomenon blows my mind, but—apparently—nobody else is the least bit surprised. It has been my experience that people who are especially obsessed with Internet technology (HTML designers, “new media” pundits, Lord of the Rings fans, etc.) tend to become extremely agitated when you start to talk about Internet pornography, typically because they think that it degrades the social import of the Web and insults all the be spectacled geniuses who create it.[41] The argument they make in response is usually something along the lines of this: “Okay, sure—there’s porn on the Internet. But who cares? There are some perverts on computers who spend all day looking at Teri Hatcher’s ass, but there are just as many perverts in public libraries looking at medical journals and playing with themselves under the table. You wouldn’t judge the merits of literature by the actions of those losers, and it’s equally shortsighted to study the Internet through the prism of its lowest common denominator. People who obsess about Internet porn are missing the point.”

The first time I heard that argument, it seemed savvy. However, I’ve grown to realize that the opposite is true. People who aren’t obsessing about Internet porn are missing the point, because that sleaze was the catalyst for everything else. I doubt that pornography has been good for the advancement of society, but I suspect it’s done wonders for the advancement of computer technology.

People always forget how new the Internet truly is. I was a senior in college during the spring of 1994, and I knew exactly two people who had e-mail addresses. They wrote e-mails to each other. It seemed completely impractical and a total waste of time. From what I could tell, the only people who were sending e-mail were people who drank Zima, and they mostly used the Internet to discuss properties of calculus or to send Steven Wright jokes to other weirdos in Canada. They were mostly CompuServe users. I can recall an extremely antisocial MC Hammer fan in my dormitory who had a Macintosh in his room and once tied up the phone line for five hours while he downloaded the Batman logo for no apparent reason; soon after, he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of Ibuprofen. This did not seem like the future.

However, I can also vividly recall my friend Robert showing me something in the fall of 1994 that seemed legitimately amazing—and while it didn’t prompt me to get an e-mail address, it did reinvent my image of how prevalent the Internet was going to become. Robert had always been a ground-floor computer nerd, and I asked him if there truly was an avalanche of porn online (which was something I had read about in the newspaper). Robert said, “I could show you lesbians having sex in two seconds.” Now, I assumed he meant “two seconds” figuratively, as in “I just have to wash my hair and put on my makeup—I’ll be ready to go in two seconds.” Obviously, I was wrong. Robert meant two seconds as in 00:02. And the actual image of two vacant blond girls with serpentine tongues was not nearly as mind-blowing as the fact that someone has designed a hypercomplicated network to show me lesbian smut. I could not fathom why this technology— for this particular purpose—would even exist.