Jill Soloway - Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants: Based on a True Story

The Porno-ization of America

Im done writing about sex.

If you bought this book because you thought there would be sex in it, get in your car, drive to your local bookstore, and throw it in the face of the cashier. You will find NO SEX here. None.

Something happened to me the other night that changed everything. I was at a restaurant with a bunch of people and my friend Sarah asked, Have you guys heard about these rainbow parties?

Whats a rainbow party? I asked.

Rainbow parties are these things fourteen-year-olds are doing.

Oh, like a sleepover where for dessert you make Jell-O in different colors and stack it up with Cool Whip on top? Called a rainbow parfait, right?

Noooooo, she answered.

Oh, I know, I offered. We had them when we were little, my mom would be doing one of her activist mailings for the Rainbow Coalition? And we would all get together and lick stamps?

Youve got the licking part right, Sarah said with the kind of smile that meant I was now the butt of the joke.

Um, everybody goes outside after a storm, and look for the pot of gold at the I trailed off. Now everyone was laughing at me.

You, Jill Soloway, of all people, dont know what a rainbow party is? Sarahs sister, Becky, asked.

A rainbow party, Sarah said, digging her hard little piece of bread into the tapenade, is a party where fourteen-year-olds get together and have lots and lots of oral sex. Each girl wears a different shade of lipstick, and after all the boys get their blow jobs, theyve all got rainbows on their penises!

I felt the buffalo mozzarella coming up in my throat. Fourteen is too young for that many penises. And moreover, why, why why, if these children insist on having oral sex, must it be always be all about the guys? This couldnt be true. But when I got home and googled, I found confirmation.

Or maybe the world had already changed. Ive noticed the Porno-ization of America everywhereat the mall, on The Bachelorette and on both of my Girls Gone Wild tapes. All of the young modern women of the world look the same. Their hair is blond and flat-ironed, their eyebrows are waxed into inquisitive worms, and their skin is the tawny color of an apple fritter. Either they have implants or wear things in their bras that make them look like they do. With their glossy lips and sullen, black-lined eyes, every last one of them looks fresh from the set of Meet the Fuckers III. Lately, everyone I see looks like a hoor.

What happened? When I was a kid in the early seventies, bra-less, gray-haired women appeared to have a lock on things. They had finally unshackled themselves from the shiny girdles, bullet bras, and flippedy hairdosthe Marilynization of Americaand they were free. Billie Jean King was whuppin Bobby Riggs ass and my moms friends were marching in the street, calling out for change in deep voices. I believed in the Equal Rights Amendment, and that soon, the black and the white would live together in peace and harmony. I believed War Was Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things and that by the time I was an adult everyone would be biracial, gender-neutral, and tolerant.

I was too young to know that eras moved in circles, not straight lines, and that once things progressed to a certain point, they would go around the bend and head back, bringing us to where we are todayslaves to our plasmas and SUVs, disciples of our Royal White Family of George and Laura Bush with their Sexy White Offspring, Nick and Jessica Lachey-Simpson.

How did we get back here? It doesnt matter what the good people at Vogue and Jane have tried to do lately by suggesting that the homeless peasant look is nigh. Real fashion and mall fashion have never been so far-flung. Young girls simply refuse to stop dressing like hoors. Their tube tops and tank tops and jeans are the tightest Ive ever seen, way tighter than we wore in the eighties. Ass cracks show, thongs show, as do pierced bellies and hip bones and camel toes, all leading down to a pair of stilettos. Yes, stilettos! Young women of today are wearing stilettos with their denim!

I used to love me a hoor. Ive got all manner of second- and third-wave feminist books on my shelves, even including Whores and Other Feminists. I was right there when activists switched from picketing sex workers to throwing brunches for Annie Sprinkle. I proudly counted strippers as my friends and touted the idea that the strongest feminist was one who was political and who knew how to shake her ass to take men for everything theyre worth.