I was surprised to learn, in Thursday's New York Times, that the word "asshole" has nothing to do with sex. The news was carried in Maureen Dowd's Thursday column, which quoted Times editor and style maven Al Siegal instructing reporters that the word Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush used to describe Times reporter Adam Clymer should be referred to as a "vulgarity," rather than an "obscenity."
"It has nothing," Siegal pronounced, "to do with sex."
The next day, Newsday's nationally syndicated celebrity gossip columnist Liz Smith (specialist in the matter at hand) was effusive in her praise of the Times and its position on "asshole."
"I just love to get this sort of thing straight, don't you?" Smith gushed. "Hurray for the certainties of the English language!"
Loath as I am to complicate the certainties of English — or any other language, for that matter — and much I would like, along with Smith, to keep this and all things arrow-straight, I find myself compelled to demur. While the assholes of most Americans may have nothing to do with sex, mine does. It has a great deal to do with sex. It was formed, in utero, from the same cells that would also have formed my cervix, had I been granted one. While I dare not speak for the anuses of New York's mainstream journalists, which undoubtedly grew from specially cultured certainties, the tissues of mine as seen under a microscope are virtually indistinguishable from those of the cervix. It is vulnerable to many of the same sexually transmitted diseases and cancers that threaten that indisputably sexual organ. And, if I may hazard a guess here, it is comparably susceptible to sexual pleasure.
Anal terror is nothing new in mainstream journalism or in society at large. Anal ignorance is, however, more perplexing. Even the President of the United States knows that a person engages in "sexual relations" when he or she "knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person." Granted, the intersection of politics and the law is hardly a place where sex can be fairly judged. So to literature, a much more accurate gauge of human behavior sexual and otherwise: even John Updike has heard about anal sex, and describes it with evident delight in the third installment of the "Rabbit Angstrom" series.
And those are just the heterosexual assholes.
When it comes to the homosexual variety, our certainties become vastly more complicated, especially when it comes to the coverage of the New York Times. The paper, contacted by Nerve, called Siegal's comment "off the cuff" and "not intended for publication," and assured us we'd find the paper's style manual, co-authored by Siegal, to be "gay-friendly." But the paper's history is a bit gay-unfriendly. The Times refused to use the word "gay" in the context of sexual orientation until 1987. As the late Randy Shilts documented in his 1987 book And the Band Played On, the Times virtually ignored the AIDS epidemic as it first swept through the gay community, refused to list AIDS as a cause of death in its obituaries and in its scant coverage handled the "homosexual" angle gingerly at best. In one instance the Times described a 1983 San Francisco AIDS memorial demonstration as "mostly male."
Being mostly male myself, I would like to call some attention to a few other words and expressions that people and some politicians commonly use as though they had nothing to do with sex in general or homosexuality in particular. Take "suck," as in "georgewbushsucks.com" (property of the Bush campaign). It is shorthand for "sucks dick." When you say that public transportation in your city "sucks," you are essentially calling it a faggot.
"Rock n roll." It means fucking. "Groovy." More fucking. "Snafu." Acronym for "situation normal all fucked up."
I could go on, but I choose not to, opting to end instead with a plea for civility in public discourse. Let us all take Dubya's major-league moment in front of the mic to recall the halcyon days of American politics, when men like LBJ and Nixon occupied the Oval Office and everyone was simply a "cocksucker." And let us hope for mainstream journalism's enlightenment on gay issues and sensitivities, and for the emergence of its collective head from its [obscenity], where at present it is firmly lodged.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
 |
Paul
Festa's essays appear in Nerve, Salon, the Best Sex Writing
anthologies for 2005, 2006 and 2008, and other publications. He is
the author of OH MY
GOD: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever, which is based on Apparition of the Eternal
Church, his award-winning and critically acclaimed film about the
music of Olivier Messiaen. A violinist, he has toured extensively,
given the U.S., Boston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles
premieres of Messiaen's 1933 Fantaisie, and performed with the
Stephen Pelton Dance Theater and the North Bay Shakespeare Company. He
is the official historian of the Presidential Memorial Commission of
San Francisco, and is revising a novel. More info at paulfesta.com. |
©2000
Paul Festa and Nerve.com
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