by Mike Madrid
Today I saw an episode of Oprah that caught me a bit off guard. Oprah’s topic of the day was how mothers need to have frank discussions with their daughters on the subject of sex. We got to see a mother have an awkward sex talk with her 10 year-old daughter, complete with male and female biology diagrams, and a fairly detailed explanation of how intercourse works. While I was happy to see this kind of information presented, I was kind of surprised that there was no warning that the subject might not be suitable for all ages. When the young daughter asked her mother to explain what it meant for a man to get an erection, I thought, “Gosh, how things have changed since I was a kid.”
Anyone born before 1980 might find it hard to believe, but once, not that long ago, sex was still kept under a plain brown wrapper. There was no Internet, with its porn sites, explicit personal ads, and chat rooms. There was no “sexting” a fellow junior high student on your cell phone asking to see a nude photo of them. No brightly lit adult entertainment stores with giant images of big-breasted women on their facades. Karen Carpenter, Marie Osmond, or the girls from Abba never stripped or writhed naked in music videos, as the pop stars of today do. And there were no glossy magazines like Vanity Fair on the newsstands that might feature a nude photo of a top Hollywood star, just…because. No, there was the world where everyone lived, and then there was a dark, inaccessible corner where sex existed. Inaccessible, at least, if you were in junior high, like I was in 1974.
The young girls interviewed on Oprah said that junior high school students engage in a lot of oral sex. The only oral sex that I was familiar with in my day was “word of mouth.” That was how we got most of our sexual education, and information. Kids from more liberated families would relate highly improbable stories of racy movies that they had seen at a drive-in. They always featured big name stars like Kirk Douglas and Raquel Welch engaging in explicit sex. We all knew they were lying, but we listened for the entertainment value. Some kid at school would always describe a porn magazine belonging to an elder sibling that he had allegedly seen. Occasionally, one would actually produce a tattered centerfold from a men’s magazine as a sign that he had access to the adult world of sin. But it was all described by rumors and whispers, and bits of conversation overheard in the locker room.
In those more innocent days, there was a sexual provocateur that has fallen by the wayside in the intervening years—the dirty book. I remembered there had always been scandalous books that my mother and her friends had read, especially the steamy works of Jacqueline Susann. But in the 70’s, I remember there were some bestsellers that were heralded as records of the sexual revolution. Kids at school claimed to have read snatches of The Happy Hooker that they had found in their homes, and related the salacious details. I remember seeing a copy of The Happy Hooker on the paperback rack at our local Woolworth’s, and was surprised that this notorious work was within my very grasp. But I didn’t dare pick it up and thumb through it, lest some watchful cashier scream at me.
However, the book that held the most fascination for me was Fear of Flying. I suppose it’s because it had the veneer of being the most “adult.” It supposedly wasn’t mere titillation like Xaviera Hollander’s porn magazine memoirs. Erica Jong was regarded as a legitimate writer, and was profiled in mainstream magazines like People as a spokeswoman for the sexual revolution. For me, there was such an air of mystery about the whole thing. Despite being touted as such a racy book, it had such a baffling title. Fear of Flying. What could it mean? It didn’t even sound dirty, yet everything was telling me that it was. I assumed that it was somehow sophisticated and sexy, and part of the impenetrable world of adults, where people had lovers, and drifted through rooms with potted palms and Maxfield Parrish prints on the wall, Carly Simon playing softly in the background.
Fear of Flying taunted me with its forbidding sexual mystery on the rack at the B. Dalton bookstore at the local shopping mall. I recall its paperback cover, with a photo of flesh colored fabric with a diagonal slash across it, behind which the underside of a woman’s bare breast could be seen Around this time I started seeing reissued editions of Anais Nin’s books, and first became aware of the term “erotica.” I wasn’t sure what felt dirtier to me—that these books were sold in plain sight, where my mother might see them, or that they were written by women. I wondered what lay under those covers, but I knew I couldn’t dare touch them. I was too young, and we didn’t have access to such things. One could only look from a distance, and try and glean some bit of information, some scrap of sexual detail. Fear of Flying was off-limits to me, but I did get my grubby mitts on a porn novel called Sinquisition. It was a debauched tale that was set during the Spanish Inquisition. It wasn’t great literature, but it told me all I needed to know.
Much of my sexual education could also come from the newspaper. In the early 70’s, the last page of the San Francisco Chronicle’s entertainment was filled with big ads for adult movies. This was what is now considered to be the Golden Age of Porn, when movies like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were having their heyday. But the ads for the sleazy porn movies paled in comparison that stared back at me from the newspaper page one day, as I sat having breakfast in my parents’ kitchen on a Sunday morning. There I beheld a woman glowering at me, with what I would later learn were called “smoky eyes.” She was topless, with a pair of suspenders crossing her bare breasts. She wore long black leather gloves, and a Nazi officer’s hat. It was an ad for a movie called The Night Porter. I felt dirty just looking at the picture. This took me to a whole new place. If I wasn’t aware of what decadence was before, I knew now.
I can’t recall if I ever found out what The Night Porter was even about back then. Like Fear of Flying, it had a mysterious title that gave me no clue as to the storyline. But it didn’t matter. I knew it was dangerous and sexual at the same time. It was dirty, and it was about Nazis. What else did I need to know? In time, the very name of the movie simply became shorthand for me, representing the height of dark and kinky pleasures. For years the actress Charlotte Rampling seemed tainted to me just for having been in this movie, for having willingly taken part in what I was sure was carnal depravity. I had a friend in high school named Mike Atkins. He was a tall African American with a deep voice who had the bearing of someone older than high school age. He was able to pass himself off as over 17, and go see The Night Porter, even though he was underage. He fed my obsession by only revealing bits of information about the movie, silently taunting me for being too short, too boyish to be able to sneak into a dark theater to experience the sexual debauchery that I was sure this movie offered.
Well, within a few years, much of the mystery was over. I was sneaking into theaters to see Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, and reading Looking For Mr. Goodbar. And punk rock came from England, bringing with it images of sexually threatening young women with black eye makeup, some wearing Nazi armbands. The world was getting darker, I was getting older, and it was becoming harder to shock me. But still there was that book and that movie that I had never experienced. And in a strange way, that I was still too intimidated to try. The world had to change some more.
And it did. By the late 80’s, I finally got a VCR. And the very first movie that I rented, to watch in the privacy of my own home—The Night Porter. It still seemed too sleazy to go see it in one of the repertory movie theaters that still lingered around San Francisco in those days. I had to watch this movie behind a drawn window shade, as befit the depraved myth that I had built up around it.
Well, let’s just say that it didn’t disappoint. For those of you not familiar with The Night Porter, it tells the story of a young woman in a concentration camp during WWII, who becomes the sexual slave/lover of one of her Nazi captors. Years later, having survived the Holocaust, the two are reunited in a Viennese hotel, where the former Nazi works as a night porter. They pick up where they left off, resuming their twisted union of dominance and sexual obsession. While not as “dirty” as I thought it might have been, the movie was much more emotionally disturbing than I had expected. It went beyond any kind of German decadence kink to actually sexually fetishizing Nazis. And once again, I was surprised that a woman had written, and directed this movie. I was glad that I had watched it alone—it would have felt too sleazy to watch it with someone else. On a certain level, I was still that thirteen-year old sitting in my parents’ kitchen, feeling that flush of embarrassment come over me.
One hurdle left. Once I was talking to my friend Marlene, and Fear of Flying came up. “Oh, Isadora Wing,” she said, laughing, “the ‘zipless fuck’.” I chuckled, although I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. Over 20 years later, I still had never read Fear of Flying. I had even seen it at garage sales and flea markets, but I was too embarrassed to pick it up. But like the VCR had liberated me a few years before, now technology came to my rescue again. Our friend, the Internet, would finally give me the chance to read Fear of Flying. I ordered it from Amazon, without having to experience the shame of buying it from a human. It came to my home in a plain unmarked package. I read it in private, away from prying eyes.
Well, my experience with this book was still shame-based. Because, I thought it was bad. Not bad and depraved, like Marquis de Sade’s Justine. Just…bad. Unsympathetic characters, not well written, and most importantly, not sexy. Now I was glad that I had ordered it online for an entirely different reason—because it was just not a good book. But like any sexual experimentation, I could say that I had done it, and I didn’t need to try that again.
I recently watched The Night Porter again, in preparation for writing this story. It had been about 20 years since I had seen it, and it was still really sleazy. Maybe more so than I remembered. I still felt dirty for watching it, and happy that I was doing it alone. And happy that I could still be shocked and disturbed by something. The kids that I saw on Oprah, with their all-access passes to the world of sex, may not be able to say that when they’re my age. But I like having a touchstone form my youth that still feels taboo, and can make even this jaded soul recall his more innocent former self.
My copy of Fear of Flying, however, has left my possession. Like a leisure suit or platform shoes, it was a relic from another era that hadn’t aged that well. I chucked it in a bag of books that I was donating to a charity bookshop. There must be some shy, sexually backward 13 year-old left out there in this decadent world. And maybe they’ll come across my donated copy of Erica Jong, pick it up, and feel like they’re experiencing something grown up, and forbidden.