America Unzipped by Brian Alexander Page A

don’t watch all that much TV and my old set works fine. I am also taken aback by his use of the phrase
corporate America.
I have never really thought of the sex industry the way I have thought of General Electric or Hewlett-Packard or the Union-Pacific Railroad. But of course it is part of corporate America and has been for some time now, woven into the fabric of business in ways that go unacknowledged.
    Obvious examples are easy to come by. Now that most travelers own cell phones and avoid the minibar, in-room hotel spending at the nation’s largest lodging companies is powered by adult movie fees. Almost 40 percent of DIRECTV, one of the nation’s largest satellite television services, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s giant media group, News Corp. It offers Hustler TV, Playboy TV, and four other adult services. Competitor Dish Network also carries adult channels. Cable companies like Cox, Time-Warner, and Comcast offer X-rated shows, too. Cerberus Capital Management, which bought Chrysler from Daimler-Benz in 2007, invested in the publisher of
Penthouse
magazine and helped keep it afloat in 2003 while former vice president Dan Quayle, a champion of “basic American values,” now chairman of Cerberus, was a board member.
    Supposing Harvey is correct, and that he simply opens doors by giving us permission, and that we can walk through the doors or not, I ask if he thinks we are any happier for doing so.
    â€œAre we happier with this stuff than without it? Some people are and some people are not.” Well, perhaps I have asked an obvious question so he has given me an obvious answer. “This is not the most important thing that defines happiness,” he continues. His business is about fantasy. It is escape, a temporary thing.
    â€œOne of the reasons we almost always see large dicks in porn flicks is because people accept this as fantasy. If you wanted to make men feel good, you would have small dicks. I have suggested to some of our people here from time to time that there must be a niche market for small dicks, and they all say, ‘Come on! They gotta be big!’”
    We only achieve happiness when we have sense of accomplishment, Harvey says. “Only in overcoming obstacles of various kinds do we get any sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in life. A chess player does not get much satisfaction out of checkers.”
    Masturbation has always seemed a lot like checkers to me—fun but not very challenging.
    Sexuality, Phil tells me, when it’s good, can be a way of asserting or a “way of submitting oneself to the power of another person. That has strong psychological components, not just enhancing intimacy but ratifying a love between two people. The bond is important in life. Sex ratifies the bond.”
    When Harvey says this, I am struck by something Susan Montani and Candida Royalle said as we were talking in Montani’s living room. Taboo is good, they said. “Doing something slightly taboo—don’t you think when you do it, when you share that with a partner, it is like a special new link, a secretly shared thing?”
    â€œPorn is not a huge taboo anymore,” Candida said, “but it is still a taboo and that helps it retain its sexiness.”
    â€œSo what happens,” I asked, “when nothing is taboo?”

CHAPTER 2
    What Would Jesus Do?
    I S AY H ALLELUJAH AS C HRISTIANS K ISS THE M ISSIONARY P OSITION G OOD-BYE
    The new moralism in this country has been growing for the past two decades. The awakening is manifesting itself in the change in the national life-style.
    â€”Jerry Falwell, 1986
    L ike a lot of good Christian men, Joe Beam has wrestled with sex and been pinned to the mat. That was a while ago, when Joe was younger, but he still feels the pain of his defeat every day. So he has had the staff of the Four Points Sheraton in San Diego remove the TV from his hotel room. Joe likes TV. He’ll catch
Boston Legal
anytime