The End of the Age of Euphemism : The Graphic Quality of Daily Life

As a young boy, I remember racing through our morning paper, on my way to the sports section, when my eye was caught by a small item. It involved a controversy over the movie, “Anatomy of a Murder.” The film used the word “rape,” thus offending delicate sensibilities and sending local censors into session to determine whether they would allow the film to be shown. I had no idea what “rape” meant, but I recall the item these many years later because whatever the word meant, I knew it was illicit--a term not permitted in general discourse.

My children, now roughly the same age I was then, will have no such memories. Today, there are no forbidden words because there are no longer any taboos. Virtually every day this past year we were inundated by sexually explicit material--everything from Michael Jackson’s alleged child molestation to Amy Fisher’s affair to Heidi Fleiss’ call-girl ring to John Wayne Bobbitt’s severed member. For the first time, words like “masturbation,” “anal intercourse,” “orgasm,” “vagina” and “penis” were appearing regularly in the mainstream press and on prime-time entertainment--making 1993 the year that the age of euphemism finally came to an end.

Not that the end hadn’t been coming. For decades, we have been subjected to ever more graphic depictions of sex on the movie screen, in literature, in music and in art. For nearly as many years, we have exhibited greater frankness in our public discussions about sexual matters. As nearly everything else in America has become awash in image, sex has been a lonely island of candor. The wider we feel the sea of hypocrisy grows, the more graphic the sexual depictions become.

But until recently, certain protocols were still observed in the general media. Sex, especially deviant sex, was treated gingerly, clinically. Some words were just not used. Some actions had to be inferred. Even the tabloid press, which traded freely in sensationalism, spoke in code or rationed its explicit descriptions of sexual conduct.

In the last few years the protocols have been falling. Almost every TV talk show from Sally Jessy Raphael to Geraldo to Donahue to Oprah now features women, and occasionally men, baring their deepest sexual secrets. Syndicated shock jock Howard Stern has pioneered graphic sexual language on the radio. Rap music is largely dedicated to the raunchiest sexual expressions. Political talk, from President Bill Clinton to Sen. Bob Packwood, is soaked with sex. But it wasn’t until 1993 that the protocols fell entirely and we got what seemed a daily diet of sexual stories told in terms once reserved for pornography.

Why has this happened? Though conservatives blame permissiveness for a declining sense of propriety--as they blame it for every social malfunction--it is not easy to impute the media’s obsession with sex to any sudden burst of licentiousness. If anything, the AIDS crisis has curbed promiscuity, so the new explicitness might be partly a product of the new chastity--denied real sexual gratification, people are driven into vicariousness as the safest sex of all.

There are also powerful pressures within the media that give vent to explicit sexual coverage. It is strange to think of the news as titillating--but newsmen and media mavens are certainly thinking that way. Sex sells, and while that might not have been a consideration for news executives in years past, it has become a consideration as straight news edges into and competes with entertainment.

Yet, whatever the impact of AIDS on sexual thinking and whatever the economic imperatives to sell sex in the media, the end of euphemism may ultimately have less to do with our preoccupation with sex itself than it has to do with how we use sex metaphorically.

Sex has always been a metaphor. To write about sex, to discuss sex, to use sexually graphic words and descriptions, as Henry Miller and Anais Nin did, were ways of flaunting what they saw as the calcifying, old social order. Both the provocateurs and the custodians of that social order understood this. They knew that what was at stake in the censorship battle wasn’t sex at all--but rather control of the culture. Sex was merely the gauntlet the provocateurs threw down; it was their metaphor for honesty and free expression in a world governed by what they regarded as bourgeois hypocrisy.

But the literary avant-garde was not alone. While it was hammering at the social order from the top, the foot soldiers of mass culture were opening a second front at the grass roots. These warriors weren’t intellectuals and didn’t have the imprimatur of art, but they did share the avant-garde’s distaste for the old cultural commissars who had long determined what was and what was not acceptable.

Like the provocateurs, proponents of mass culture used sex as one of their battering rams. Movies, popular music, pulp novels and other mass media introduced sex into the general culture. Gradually, this bombardment of sexual imagery, most largely circumspect and euphemistic, would chip away at the old official culture and breach its walls.

Still, the protocols held. Even as the general media doted on Mae West or Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield or even Christine Jorgenson--all walking euphemisms--the most sexually explicit material was held to the margins, in pornographic magazines and novels. Certainly none ever made its way into the traditional press. For that to happen, as it has now, the metaphor of sex had to acquire a new energy so virulent that the protocols could not withstand it.

Over the last few years there have been several sources that have fueled, as well as changed, the sexual metaphor. One of them is our own sense that American society, beset as it is with a host of intractable problems, is now somehow less governable. Explicit reports of sex, especially deviant sex, are a way of reinforcing the idea that no one is really in control anymore.

At the same time, sex has become a metaphor for intimacy in an increasingly atomized and mobile society where there is little enough intimacy of any other kind. That may be why sex is a staple of the afternoon talk shows. By telling us about their sexual fantasies, the pathetic women of the talk-show circuit are trying to create some bond with us, however transient.

But finally, the end of euphemism and the new sexual explicitness may really be products of the old metaphor of “sex as honesty” now revived in a different, more urgent context--one in which honesty is given the highest possible premium. That is because we are more aware of the techniques of duplicity: spin doctoring, infomercials, PR campaigns, dirty tricks. We feel a pervasive lack of authenticity in politics, art, religion, athletics, even human relations. We no longer believe.

Amid the fakery, we want something real. And just as the sex act itself rips through layers of inauthenticity to something fundamental, so, metaphorically speaking, does sexually explicit language rip through the layers of prevarication, manipulation, image and euphemism to something basic, primitive and genuine.

Peeking beneath the sheets of some housewife on Geraldo or of Michael Jackson promises us truth. So does Howard Stern telling us in vivid detail about his sex life. So does every new graphic sexual revelation about priests molesting choir boys or fathers abusing daughters. If sex isn’t hidden, then nothing is. That is why euphemisms finally had to go--because euphemisms are just another form of concealment. Only the shock therapy of brutal language, graphic language can shake us from the perfidy of deceit.

And so the battering ram of sex now pounds away each day, providing a kind of social ground zero. We know everything. We hear everything. And if it sometimes feels as if we are living within one endless pornographic movie, it is the price we pay for candor.

Anything else would seem dishonest.