David Friend - The Naughty Nineties

The Meaning of Life

More Reflections on the Meaning of Life

Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11

[Independent counsel Kenneth Starr was] not just prosecuting Bill Clinton; he was prosecuting the entire culture that gave birth to what Bill Clinton represents.

Wall Street Journal, editorial
(September 11, 1998)

There is a cultural war at the heart of this political war. Since Watergate, there has been a pendulum of partisan revenge. And right now Republicans want their payback for Watergate, for [Robert] Bork, for Iran-contra, even for Woodstock. Like Kenneth Starr, the Republicans are attempting to repeal the 1960s.

Maureen Dowd, New York Times
(December 13, 1998)

I believe that we probably have lost the culture war.

Paul Weyrich, open letter to fellow conservatives
(February 16, 1999)

Marx has been turned on his head. Class struggle, of course, continues. But the boil and froth of primary elemental history is now the account of the struggle between sexuality and public lifethe struggle of sexual classes.

Lionel Tiger, The Decline of Males
(1999)

November 15, 1995, at first glance, was a rather eroticized day in Washington, D.C.

At 10 a.m., the Justice Department announced that fashion designer Calvin Klein and his companys ad agency had not violated U.S. law, even though they had hired inordinately youthful-looking models for a suggestive new jeans campaign.

Later that morning, supporters of Hootersthe restaurant chain known for its bosomy, T-shirt-clad waitstaffstaged a rally in D.C.s Freedom Plaza. They had come to protest a federal sex-discrimination ruling that called for male employees to be phased into the ranks of its women-only service crew. In response, dozens of Hooters Girls assembled, citing political correctness run amok. Some lofted signs with such messages as Men as Hooters GuysWhat a Drag.

Outside the capital, too, there seemed to be Eros in the air. Throughout the day, newscasts ran accounts of Britains Princess Dianas adulterous relationship with James Hewitt, an officer in the Household Cavalry Regiment. Theaters showed trailers for the new James Bond film, GoldenEye, in which a sultry assassin named Xenia Onatopp crushes men to death with her thighs (and reaches orgasm as they expire). On the R&B charts, R. Kelly was rolling out You Remind Me of Something, with lyrics comparing his babe to a Jeep, which he said he wanted to wax, ride, and get inside. ABC-TV aired The Naked Truth, featuring Ta Leoni as an accomplished photojournalist who works at a tabloid where shes asked to do things like pilfer a sample of Anna Nicole Smiths urine to determine if the model is pregnant. And atop the New York Times Best Seller List, General Colin Powells autobiography, My American Journey, was supplanted by Miss America, a provocative memoir by radio renegade Howard Stern, who appeared in drag on the books front cover.

Back in Washington, a government shutdown was in effect, a tactical ploy by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who had sought to force the presidents hand in a nasty budget battle. As a result, most federal employees had not reported for workand at the White House a scaled-down staff was on duty. Shortly after 10 p.m.as outlined in the official report of the independent prosecutorPresident William Jefferson Clinton and a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, then twenty-two, repaired to a windowless hallway adjacent to the study off the Oval Office and shared the first of what would be many intimate encounters over the course of the next two years. Their ensuing relationship would ultimately contribute, by the end of the decade, to the presidents impeachment.

But was that particular Wednesday, in hindsight, really out of the ordinary? One could make a persuasive case that it was a fairly representative twenty-four hours in the nations erotic lifea day in a decade that followed thirty years of evolving exploration, from the sexual revolution of the 60s through the womens and gay rights movements of the 70s and 80s. The 1990s, as it turns out, were marked by several milestones that would force Americans across all sectors of society to reexamine their views on sexual politics, on physical attraction, on their tolerance for others sexual orientation, and on innumerable other subjects related to human intimacy.

Sex had gone mainstream in, of all places, the historically puritanical United States. Long discussed sotto voce, individuals sexual desires and hang-ups and biases were now an integral part of a larger social conversation. Indeed, the fractious debate about private sexuality and public life would begin to color many facets of the national psyche well into the twenty-first century.

Call it the Naughty Nineties.

The decade began with blaring tabloid headlines about real estate mogul Donald Trump and his inamorata Marla Maples, a young model and actress. (Over the winter holiday break, 1989, the pair had been confronted by Trumps wife Ivana on the slopes at Aspen. The Trumps would soon divorce.) The decade ended on the eve of the 2000 election with an America in suspended agitation, doubtful that presidential hopeful Al Gore could emerge from the shadow of his predecessors sex scandal and impeachment (he couldnt) and uncertain that computer programs could evade a global Y2K meltdown (they did, even though tech fortunes would evaporate a few months later when the dot-com bubble burst).