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By
the year 2000, the term "working class" had fallen into
disuse in the United States, and "proletariat" was so
obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics
with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician,
air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life
that would have made the Sun King blink. He spent his vacations
in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would
be out on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife,
wearing his Ricky Martin cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum,
the better to allow his gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs.
The two of them would have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling
water, from the state of West Virginia, because by 2000 the once-favored
European sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so tacky.
European labels no longer held even the slightest snob appeal except
among people known as "intellectuals," whom we will visit
in a moment. Our typical mechanic or tradesman took it for granted
that things European were second-rate. Aside from three German luxury
automobiles -- the Mercedes-Benz, the BMW, and the Audi -- he regarded
European-manufactured goods as mediocre to shoddy. On his trips
abroad, our electrician, like any American businessman, would go
to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in European hospitals,
which struck him as little better than those in the Third World.
He considered European hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection
in a European clinic voluntarily was sheer madness.
Indirectly, subconsciously, his views perhaps had to do with the
fact that his own country, the United States, was now the mightiest
power on earth, as omnipotent as Macedon under Alexander the Great,
Rome under Julius Caesar, Mongolia under Genghis Khan, Turkey under
Mohammed II, or Britain under Queen Victoria. His country was so
powerful, it had begun to invade or rain missiles upon small nations
in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean for no other reason than
that their leaders were lording it over their subjects at home.
Our air-conditioning mechanic had probably never heard of Saint-Simon's,
but he was fulfilling Saint-Simon's and the other nineteenth-century
utopian socialists' dreams of a day when the ordinary workingman
would have the political and personal freedom, the free time and
the wherewithal to express himself in any way he saw fit and to
unleash his full potential. Not only that, any ethnic or racial
group -- any, even recent refugees from a Latin country -- could
take over the government of any American city, if they had the votes
and a modicum of organization. Americans could boast of a freedom
as well as a power unparalleled in the history of the world.
Our typical burglar-alarm repairman didn't display one erg of chauvinistic
swagger, however. He had been numbed by the aforementioned "intellectuals,"
who had spent the preceding eighty years being indignant over what
a "puritanical," "repressive," "bigoted,"
"capitalistic," and "fascist" nation America
was beneath its democratic façades. It made his head hurt. Besides,
he was too busy coping with what was known as the "sexual revolution."
If anything, "sexual revolution" was rather a prim term
for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country
on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine stand was a riot of bare
flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets:
boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys, bare-breasted
female bodybuilders, so-called boys with breasts, riding backseat
behind steroid-gorged bodybuilding bikers, naked except for cache-sexes
and Panzer helmets, on huge chromed Honda or Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
But the magazines were nothing compared with what was offered on
an invention of the 1990s, the Internet. By 2000, an estimated 50
percent of all hits, or "log-ons," were at Web sites purveying
what was known as "adult material." The word "pornography"
had disappeared down the memory hole along with "proletariat."
Instances of marriages breaking up because of Web-sex addiction
were rising in number. The husband, some fifty-two-year-old MRI
technician or systems analyst, would sit in front of the computer
for twenty-four or more hours at a stretch. Nothing that the wife
could offer him in the way of sexual delights or food could compare
with the one-handing he was doing day and night as he sat before
the PC and logged on to such images as a girl with bare breasts
and a black leather corset standing with one foot on the small of
a naked boy's back, brandishing a whip.
In 1999, the year before, this particular sexual kink -- sado- masochism
-- had achieved not merely respectability but high chic, and the
word "perversion" had become as obsolete as "pornography"
and "proletariat." Fashion pages presented the black leather
and rubber paraphernalia as style's cutting edge. An actress named
Rene Russo blithely recounted in the Living section of one of America's
biggest newspapers how she had consulted a former dominatrix named
Eva Norvind, who maintained a dungeon replete with whips and chains
and assorted baffling leather masks, chokers, and cuffs, in order
to pre-pare for a part as an aggressive, self-obsessed agent provocateur
in The Thomas Crown Affair, Miss Russo's latest movie.
"Sexy" was beginning to replace "chic" as the
adjective indicating what was smart and up-to-the-minute. In the
year 2000, it was standard practice for the successful chief executive
officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to three decades'
standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing was
deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like
a shot-putter's -- in short, she was no longer sexy. Once he set
up the old wife in a needlepoint shop where she could sell yam to
her friends, he was free to take on a new wife, a "trophy wife,"
preferably a woman in her twenties, and preferably blond, as in
an expression from that time, a "lemon tart." What was
the downside? Was the new couple considered radioactive socially?
Did people talk sotto voce, behind the hand, when the tainted pair
came by? Not for a moment All that happened was that everybody got
on the cell phone or the Internet and rang up or E-mailed one another
to find out the spelling of the new wife's first name, because it
was always some name like Serena and nobody was sure how to spell
it. Once that was written down in the little red Scully & Scully
address book that was so popular among people of means, the lemon
tart and her big CEO catch were invited to all the parties, as though
nothing had happened.
Meanwhile, sexual stimuli bombarded the young so incessantly and
intensely they were inflamed with a randy itch long before reaching
puberty. At puberty the dams, if any were left, burst. In the nineteenth
century, entire shelves used to be filled with novels whose stories
turned on the need for women, such as Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary,
to remain chaste or to maintain a façade of chastity. In the year
2000, a Tolstoy or a Flaubert wouldn't have stood a chance in the
United States. From age thirteen, American girls were under pressure
to maintain a façade of sexual experience and sophistication. Among
girls, "virgin" was a term of contempt. The old term "dating"
-- referring to a practice in which a boy asked a girl out for the
evening and took her to the movies or dinner -- was now deader than
"proletariat" or "pornography" or "perversion."
In junior high school, high school, and college, girls headed out
in packs in the evening, and boys headed out in packs, hoping to
meet each other fortuitously. If they met and some girl liked the
looks of some boy, she would give him the nod, or he would give
her the nod, and the two of them would retire to a halfway-private
room and "hook up."
*Endnotes have been omitted.
Excerpted from HOOKING UP (c) Copyright 2000 by Tom Wolfe. Reprinted
with permission from the publisher, Picador USA.
All rights reserved.
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