Leave it to the Big Media -- the Sam Sawyers and Diane Donaldsons of the press -- to completely miss the hard-core lesson of Clinton's porno presidency.
Eight years into a decade that has resolutely refused to define itself with a good pick-up line -- we remember the '80s as the Decade of Greed, and the '70s earned the moniker the Me Decade -- l'affaire Lewinsky has finally delivered us from the evil of the nameless 1990s. Wrap your lips around the Decade of the Penis.
Never before -- and perhaps never again, so enjoy it while it you can -- has the male organ been so prominently discussed, dissected, and displayed as over the past few years. While there have been occasional Iggy Pop-ish flashes of brilliance and Richard Gere-esque moments of Breathless exposure, the '90s have shown more dick than a John Holmes film festival.
It hasn't all been easy come, easy go. Indeed, for the first half of the decade, the penis took a beating, first popping into public consciousness during the 1991 Senate hearings for Clarence Thomas, an inquiry ultimately focused on whether the Supreme Court hopeful had filed an amicus brief in the matter of Anita Hill v. Long Dong Silver. That spectacle inspired the feminist rallying cry "Men Just Don't Get It" and the much-heralded Year of the Woman in politics. But, in fact, the male organ moved to center stage faster than Wayne and Garth could say "schwing."
To wit, the Sophoclean irony of basketball great Earvin Johnson, who appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show and copped to being HIV-positive, pointed to his own less-than-magic Johnson and mumbled the limp laugh line, "Please put your thinking cap and your cap on down there." (In yet another validation of the iron law that history presents itself first as tragedy and then as sketch comedy, Johnson apparently hired the same writing team for his own one-night stand with late-night TV.)
In 1993, the travails of another all-too aptly named character, John Wayne Bobbitt, helped kick start one of the greatest national debates since Lincoln met Douglass and Harry met Sally. As men and women pondered the ethics and mechanics of castration, Bobbitt - soon to be a major motion porn star - was grateful not only to his doctors but to the jury that eventually acquitted him of sexually assaulting the missus. "I just want to get on with my life," quipped the self-admitted foreplay failure, who later emerged triumphant as the eponymous hero of the adult movie Frankenpenis.
More or less concurrently, the self-crowned King of Pop, Michael Jackson, took a break from merely grabbing his crotch on stage to drop trou and have his family jewels photographed as part of a molestation case. Never one to pass up a photo op, he also reportedly posed for shots of his buttocks, lower torso, and thighs.
With visions of Jacko's genitalia still dancing in the national psyche like the ersatz gang members in the "Beat It" video, Howard Stern's radio show and memoirs -- Private Parts and Miss America -- helped thrust yet another schlong -- thankfully, an apparently diminutive one - into the face of Joe Sixpack and Sally Baglunch. Stern's recent on-air measuring of his erect pecker at a full 6 inches raises perhaps more troubling perjury issues than anything mentioned in the Starr Report.
The presidential putz made its first public appearance in '94, and, in keeping with the first half of the Decade of the Penis, it was put through a grinder. Paula Jones charged Bill Clinton not simply with sexual harassment -- a serious charge, yet easy enough to avoid mental imaging -- but, perhaps more to the point, of having a crooked, albeit erect, penis. As the nation that once turned its lonely eyes to the blessedly baggy-pants-wearing Joe DiMaggio grappling with that bit of M. C. Escher imagery, prostate-cancer sufferers - such as Squirmin' Norman Schwartzkopf - wandered the media landscape like so many overzealous "greeters" at Wal-Mart.
The later years of the '90s have seen the penis get a fairer shake, though no less exposure. Two years ago, everybody's All American Michael Jordan explained why he endorsed every currently available consumer product except for condoms. "They're too small," explained the Space Jam star, no doubt firing up the imaginations of Trojan Plus ad execs with a whole new "Be Like Mike" campaign.
Box office colossi like Boogie Nights have featured the biggest and best movie prosthetics produced during the entire period from Doctor Zaius' first tribunal to Roddy McDowall's journey to the eternal sound stage.
Similarly, The Full Monty, en route to documenting the depths to which British men will sink rather than work, built its plot climax around manly full-frontal nudity.
And this year saw Viagra, the first purely recreational substance to win FDA approval since model-airplane glue, become the latest drug craze. Amidst reports of death and hyperaggresive users, septuagenarian presidential loser Bob Dole proclaimed -- while wife Libby remained strangely silent -- that it worked "great," thereby fulfilling the prophecy in the Stones' tune "Start Me Up": Someday science would make a dead man come. And, of course, there's the presidential winner, whose recent travails have established that his penis, crooked or not (hmm, that might explain the semen-stained dress), nonetheless works like a charm.
As the Decade of the Penis finishes up, one is left wondering only what might come next. As the literary critic and prominent Kinsey Report reviewer Lionel Trilling suggested back in the 1940s, American culture is nothing if not dialectical. If the Year of the Woman helped beget the Decade of the Penis, then it's an even-money bet that the Decade of the Penis may well usher in a Century of Vagina. And sure, while there have always been occasional Muffys from Family Affair available for public consumption and there were four years of an actual Bush administration, the next 100 years may well show more pussy than the average issue of Cat Fancy.
