Thursday, February 28, 2008
Brian Alexander, "America Unzipped" author and MSNBC.com columnist: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know 20 years ago -- and I’m going to link to this from the Mr. Media site at some point -- 20 years ago, I did a story with a woman about swingers and swingers clubs in the Tampa Bay area where I am, and I approached it in a similar way that you reported this. We went to these things, and I have to admit I was uncomfortable. We went to a bar that was a swing club, and it looked fairly normal at first, just a big bar and a lot of people hanging out. As the evening wore on, everybody’s going and introducing themselves, and people are getting a little looser, and the clothes are getting a little looser, and there was a point at which I said to my wife -- because I went with my wife -- I said, “I think I want to go.” I kind of wondered, when you did this, and you’ve got sections on, I think, a fetish convention and swingers, where does that line between observer and participant come for you? Was there ever, in doing your research, was there anything that made you uncomfortable?
BRIAN ALEXANDER: There are things that challenged my comfort levels, but by then, I had gotten to know enough people who were in either the fetish world or the swinging world or whatever the world they inhabited was to know that outside of that world, they weren’t really very different than I was. And they always respected my perspective. I always wore my wedding ring, for example, so everybody knew I was married, which doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not going to do something, but if the subject came up, I would say, “I’m not here to necessarily be flogged,” for example, and nobody had a problem with that.
The only thing that really sort of made me uncomfortable occurs toward the end of the book when I’m at a sex club in Seattle. And I’m watching a woman in a cage, a naked woman in a cage, and I’m watching a guy be sort of slapped around and flogged a little bit by two people and he wants this to happen. It’s what he’s into. It wasn’t so much that I was disturbed on their behalf. I was sort of disturbed on our behalf and what our society is. And it’s not that I think that what they’re doing was bad. I think that what they’re doing is a form of escape from the broader culture in which we are living, which I think has kind of gone numb. And they are looking for a form of sensation, and so I felt bad for them. I wasn’t offended in any way. It worried me about why it is that people are seeking that out. I actually think that it’s really kind of a rational response, but I think that says a little something about the rest of us that that might be a rational response.
ANDELMAN: You mention that you’re married, and I was going to ask you about that. How did your wife feel about the trips that you made for the book, the research? Was she ever uncomfortable about it, and did you ever have to talk about this?
ALEXANDER: I think she would rather that I was in Baghdad.
ANDELMAN: Oh, man. That says a lot right there. And you know what, Brian? I can completely relate to that because I think that’s exactly the way my wife would feel if I had pursued this line of research.
ALEXANDER: I’ve covered a lot of different sort of things in my journalism career. I think that she understands what it is and what I do. And really what I try to do in my career is write about American culture and where we are, and this is, obviously, a very big part of American culture, and it’s one that, for all the talk we have in this country about sex, I don’t think we actually explore real sexuality in the real lives of people very much. It’s all very sort of surface, and I really, literally, wanted to unzip the country a little bit and provide some insight. I think she understood that. It did require a couple of discussions about what it is I was going to be doing and not doing and some reassuring on my part, but once that was done, she was okay.
ANDELMAN: Do you mind if I ask how old you are?
ALEXANDER: I’m 48 years old.
ANDELMAN: Oh, okay. That’s funny. We’re actually roughly the same age. Do you have kids?
ALEXANDER: A step-daughter.
ANDELMAN: Okay. So have you had to deal with the whole sex talk and all that other stuff, or do you manage to avoid that?
ALEXANDER: Well, she’s now an adult herself, really, and that was my wife’s job.
ANDELMAN: That didn’t overlap with all of this.
ALEXANDER: No, no, not at all.
ANDELMAN: I wondered about that in reading the book. There wasn’t too much relation to what you were doing to children, and I thought okay, he probably is not parenting at the moment that he’s going through all this. I’m guessing that I might’ve been on the right track there.
ALEXANDER: Yes, but that wouldn’t have mattered. I would’ve done the same thing anyway. It’s interesting. I’ve been asked the question about, “What about child porn” and so on. And my response to that is sex can be abused like everything can be abused. There’s a lot of fear in this country that’s been ginned up around the field of sexuality, but sex is no different than money or cars or guns or alcohol or drugs or anything else. Everything in our culture has potential for abuse. The people that I am focusing on in the book are grown-ups who are doing consensual activities with other grown-ups. In fact, there is a fairly strong self-policing attitude among the sexual explorers that I spoke with that says if there’s a hint of child abuse, child pornography, of forcing a grown-up to do something a grown-up doesn’t want to do, that is thoroughly rejected. They realize, especially people who like fetishes, swingers, people who go to sex clubs, they realize that they are on the spot and under scrutiny from people who would like to demonize what they do, and so they keep a pretty good eye out for any kind of abuses. I was actually quite impressed with that.
ANDELMAN: For the record, I wasn’t actually thinking of child porn whatsoever so much as I’ve found the last couple years, I’ve got an 11-year-old, and I find that whenever I’m doing anything, really it’s not even just if the topic is sexual or something else, I’m thinking, I have in the back of my mind a picture of my kid, and “Am I doing anything that will not reflect well there or cause a problem there?” To be honest with you, even in my choice of who I interview and what I interview them about, I’m a little more cautious these days than I would’ve been 15 years ago, just because. I don’t know. I’ve always thought I had fairly libertarian views about a lot of things, but maybe not.
ALEXANDER: I empathize with you. I suppose it’s tough for people in any field if they feel like there’s going to be any kind of a blow-back on their family, they have to give that some thought. I guess I just don’t care if people judge me one way or another because of what I choose to write about. I really choose to write about what I think is A) important to write about, what people ought to know something more about, and B) what I find fascinating and interesting. I find it very fascinating that we are a very sort of sexually experimental country. We’re seeking something, and what is it that we’re seeking? The book goes into what some of those things might be, but it’s not really just about sex. In fact, one of the smartest people that I spoke to was Candida Royalle, who was a pretty famous 1980s-era porn star who now directs and produces her own sort of couples-oriented erotic movies. She’s quite smart and interesting. She read the book in advance and provided a nice little blurb for the back, and she said to me, “Your book’s not really about sex at all, is it?” And on some level, it’s not.
ANDELMAN: Right. I agree with that.
ALEXANDER: Yes.
ANDELMAN: That actually surprised me. That was why I asked you about guilt first and that whole thing because it’s not a book about sex in the way that, well, like The Hite Report or The Kinsey Report. It’s not a Playboy-type of book about sex. I think you put your finger on it. It’s more about culture than anything.
ALEXANDER: I think it’s a way of looking at the culture or society that we’re living in through the prism of sexuality.
ANDELMAN: I got a laugh in the chapter about Fascinations when you worked at the adult retail store in Tempe. You make mention of something that was happening back in Gainesville, Florida, where a guy named Asher Sullivan was getting hassled for opening an adult retail store called Café Risque in tiny, tiny Waldo, Florida. And I thought: I know who Asher is, I know Café Risque, I know Waldo. I went to school at the University of Florida in Gainesville right next door, and I delivered mail through Waldo. And it’s a little hiccup of a town that’s best known for being a place where you would always get pulled over by the cops if you had out of town plates.
ALEXANDER: Right.
ANDELMAN: But the really interesting thing was, and you had no way of knowing this, although you may have heard about this since then, Asher Sullivan’s dad was famous throughout Florida for his 24-hour breakfast restaurants and his Skeeter’s Big Biscuits. And his son went in a completely different direction, and I thought, culturally, that was very, very interesting.
ALEXANDER: Yes, and his son probably didn’t think that it was necessarily a shameful thing to do. I don’t know what his father may have thought about it. But, well, here’s another example of that. The two brothers who founded a sort of miniature porn production empire, they live in California, but they were raised in an upper-class realm of Connecticut, went to private schools. One went to Stanford, one went to another liberal arts school. Their mother, and I picture their mother as being a very sort of genteel, country club, Connecticut woman, their mother gave them the money to finance buying this porn production company. It’s seen as a business. We just saw that a few weeks ago. Somebody paid half a billion dollars for Adult FriendFinder, which is a major hook-up site on the Internet where people go mainly for casual encounters or meet somebody who’s into whatever thing they’re into.
ANDELMAN: Oh, my God. People use the Internet for that?
ALEXANDER: People use the Internet for that, believe it or not. But the fact is The Wall Street Journal covers this stuff now.
ANDELMAN: Right.
ALEXANDER: Again, this is not the sort of proto-Mafioso guys anymore. They’re businesspeople.
ANDELMAN: There was a story in Portfolio magazine a month ago where they went behind-the-scenes in these companies that produce porn on the Internet and how YouPorn was…
ALEXANDER: YouTube.
ANDELMAN: No. There’s YouTube, but there’s one called YouPorn, which is all porn the way YouTube is all everything else. And I thought, I’m astounded to see this very white-collar, Park Avenue type of business magazine go into this. There was another example I thought of a moment ago. There was a show on Showtime, I don’t know if it’s still on or not, that was a documentary series about Seymour Butts, a porn producer. And they spiced it up with moments of porn that he produced here and there, but mostly, it was about this porn producer’s private life or lack thereof and how his mother was always trying to fix him up. It really is different than even five or 10 years ago the things that are mainstream, and I think you made that point.
ALEXANDER: Yes, the book is really about how all this is now really quite mainstream. When you get Ivy League businesspeople getting involved in this sort of stuff, it’s far past the way it used to be. Now you’ve got venture capitalists in Silicon Valley funding the expansion of a sex toy outfit. What I’m thinking about is a company called Jimmy Jane, and they’ve got some funding from some of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists to make new vibrators.
ANDELMAN: Don’t we need more new vibrators?
ALEXANDER: You can never have too many good vibrators.
ANDELMAN: And you can never have too many batteries.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know 20 years ago -- and I’m going to link to this from the Mr. Media site at some point -- 20 years ago, I did a story with a woman about swingers and swingers clubs in the Tampa Bay area where I am, and I approached it in a similar way that you reported this. We went to these things, and I have to admit I was uncomfortable. We went to a bar that was a swing club, and it looked fairly normal at first, just a big bar and a lot of people hanging out. As the evening wore on, everybody’s going and introducing themselves, and people are getting a little looser, and the clothes are getting a little looser, and there was a point at which I said to my wife -- because I went with my wife -- I said, “I think I want to go.” I kind of wondered, when you did this, and you’ve got sections on, I think, a fetish convention and swingers, where does that line between observer and participant come for you? Was there ever, in doing your research, was there anything that made you uncomfortable?
BRIAN ALEXANDER: There are things that challenged my comfort levels, but by then, I had gotten to know enough people who were in either the fetish world or the swinging world or whatever the world they inhabited was to know that outside of that world, they weren’t really very different than I was. And they always respected my perspective. I always wore my wedding ring, for example, so everybody knew I was married, which doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not going to do something, but if the subject came up, I would say, “I’m not here to necessarily be flogged,” for example, and nobody had a problem with that.
The only thing that really sort of made me uncomfortable occurs toward the end of the book when I’m at a sex club in Seattle. And I’m watching a woman in a cage, a naked woman in a cage, and I’m watching a guy be sort of slapped around and flogged a little bit by two people and he wants this to happen. It’s what he’s into. It wasn’t so much that I was disturbed on their behalf. I was sort of disturbed on our behalf and what our society is. And it’s not that I think that what they’re doing was bad. I think that what they’re doing is a form of escape from the broader culture in which we are living, which I think has kind of gone numb. And they are looking for a form of sensation, and so I felt bad for them. I wasn’t offended in any way. It worried me about why it is that people are seeking that out. I actually think that it’s really kind of a rational response, but I think that says a little something about the rest of us that that might be a rational response.
ANDELMAN: You mention that you’re married, and I was going to ask you about that. How did your wife feel about the trips that you made for the book, the research? Was she ever uncomfortable about it, and did you ever have to talk about this?
ALEXANDER: I think she would rather that I was in Baghdad.
ANDELMAN: Oh, man. That says a lot right there. And you know what, Brian? I can completely relate to that because I think that’s exactly the way my wife would feel if I had pursued this line of research.
ALEXANDER: I’ve covered a lot of different sort of things in my journalism career. I think that she understands what it is and what I do. And really what I try to do in my career is write about American culture and where we are, and this is, obviously, a very big part of American culture, and it’s one that, for all the talk we have in this country about sex, I don’t think we actually explore real sexuality in the real lives of people very much. It’s all very sort of surface, and I really, literally, wanted to unzip the country a little bit and provide some insight. I think she understood that. It did require a couple of discussions about what it is I was going to be doing and not doing and some reassuring on my part, but once that was done, she was okay.
ANDELMAN: Do you mind if I ask how old you are?
ALEXANDER: I’m 48 years old.
ANDELMAN: Oh, okay. That’s funny. We’re actually roughly the same age. Do you have kids?
ALEXANDER: A step-daughter.
ANDELMAN: Okay. So have you had to deal with the whole sex talk and all that other stuff, or do you manage to avoid that?
ALEXANDER: Well, she’s now an adult herself, really, and that was my wife’s job.
ANDELMAN: That didn’t overlap with all of this.
ALEXANDER: No, no, not at all.
ANDELMAN: I wondered about that in reading the book. There wasn’t too much relation to what you were doing to children, and I thought okay, he probably is not parenting at the moment that he’s going through all this. I’m guessing that I might’ve been on the right track there.
ALEXANDER: Yes, but that wouldn’t have mattered. I would’ve done the same thing anyway. It’s interesting. I’ve been asked the question about, “What about child porn” and so on. And my response to that is sex can be abused like everything can be abused. There’s a lot of fear in this country that’s been ginned up around the field of sexuality, but sex is no different than money or cars or guns or alcohol or drugs or anything else. Everything in our culture has potential for abuse. The people that I am focusing on in the book are grown-ups who are doing consensual activities with other grown-ups. In fact, there is a fairly strong self-policing attitude among the sexual explorers that I spoke with that says if there’s a hint of child abuse, child pornography, of forcing a grown-up to do something a grown-up doesn’t want to do, that is thoroughly rejected. They realize, especially people who like fetishes, swingers, people who go to sex clubs, they realize that they are on the spot and under scrutiny from people who would like to demonize what they do, and so they keep a pretty good eye out for any kind of abuses. I was actually quite impressed with that.
ANDELMAN: For the record, I wasn’t actually thinking of child porn whatsoever so much as I’ve found the last couple years, I’ve got an 11-year-old, and I find that whenever I’m doing anything, really it’s not even just if the topic is sexual or something else, I’m thinking, I have in the back of my mind a picture of my kid, and “Am I doing anything that will not reflect well there or cause a problem there?” To be honest with you, even in my choice of who I interview and what I interview them about, I’m a little more cautious these days than I would’ve been 15 years ago, just because. I don’t know. I’ve always thought I had fairly libertarian views about a lot of things, but maybe not.
ALEXANDER: I empathize with you. I suppose it’s tough for people in any field if they feel like there’s going to be any kind of a blow-back on their family, they have to give that some thought. I guess I just don’t care if people judge me one way or another because of what I choose to write about. I really choose to write about what I think is A) important to write about, what people ought to know something more about, and B) what I find fascinating and interesting. I find it very fascinating that we are a very sort of sexually experimental country. We’re seeking something, and what is it that we’re seeking? The book goes into what some of those things might be, but it’s not really just about sex. In fact, one of the smartest people that I spoke to was Candida Royalle, who was a pretty famous 1980s-era porn star who now directs and produces her own sort of couples-oriented erotic movies. She’s quite smart and interesting. She read the book in advance and provided a nice little blurb for the back, and she said to me, “Your book’s not really about sex at all, is it?” And on some level, it’s not.
ANDELMAN: Right. I agree with that.
ALEXANDER: Yes.
ANDELMAN: That actually surprised me. That was why I asked you about guilt first and that whole thing because it’s not a book about sex in the way that, well, like The Hite Report or The Kinsey Report. It’s not a Playboy-type of book about sex. I think you put your finger on it. It’s more about culture than anything.
ALEXANDER: I think it’s a way of looking at the culture or society that we’re living in through the prism of sexuality.
ANDELMAN: I got a laugh in the chapter about Fascinations when you worked at the adult retail store in Tempe. You make mention of something that was happening back in Gainesville, Florida, where a guy named Asher Sullivan was getting hassled for opening an adult retail store called Café Risque in tiny, tiny Waldo, Florida. And I thought: I know who Asher is, I know Café Risque, I know Waldo. I went to school at the University of Florida in Gainesville right next door, and I delivered mail through Waldo. And it’s a little hiccup of a town that’s best known for being a place where you would always get pulled over by the cops if you had out of town plates.
ALEXANDER: Right.
ANDELMAN: But the really interesting thing was, and you had no way of knowing this, although you may have heard about this since then, Asher Sullivan’s dad was famous throughout Florida for his 24-hour breakfast restaurants and his Skeeter’s Big Biscuits. And his son went in a completely different direction, and I thought, culturally, that was very, very interesting.
ALEXANDER: Yes, and his son probably didn’t think that it was necessarily a shameful thing to do. I don’t know what his father may have thought about it. But, well, here’s another example of that. The two brothers who founded a sort of miniature porn production empire, they live in California, but they were raised in an upper-class realm of Connecticut, went to private schools. One went to Stanford, one went to another liberal arts school. Their mother, and I picture their mother as being a very sort of genteel, country club, Connecticut woman, their mother gave them the money to finance buying this porn production company. It’s seen as a business. We just saw that a few weeks ago. Somebody paid half a billion dollars for Adult FriendFinder, which is a major hook-up site on the Internet where people go mainly for casual encounters or meet somebody who’s into whatever thing they’re into.
ANDELMAN: Oh, my God. People use the Internet for that?
ALEXANDER: People use the Internet for that, believe it or not. But the fact is The Wall Street Journal covers this stuff now.
ANDELMAN: Right.
ALEXANDER: Again, this is not the sort of proto-Mafioso guys anymore. They’re businesspeople.
ANDELMAN: There was a story in Portfolio magazine a month ago where they went behind-the-scenes in these companies that produce porn on the Internet and how YouPorn was…
ALEXANDER: YouTube.
ANDELMAN: No. There’s YouTube, but there’s one called YouPorn, which is all porn the way YouTube is all everything else. And I thought, I’m astounded to see this very white-collar, Park Avenue type of business magazine go into this. There was another example I thought of a moment ago. There was a show on Showtime, I don’t know if it’s still on or not, that was a documentary series about Seymour Butts, a porn producer. And they spiced it up with moments of porn that he produced here and there, but mostly, it was about this porn producer’s private life or lack thereof and how his mother was always trying to fix him up. It really is different than even five or 10 years ago the things that are mainstream, and I think you made that point.
ALEXANDER: Yes, the book is really about how all this is now really quite mainstream. When you get Ivy League businesspeople getting involved in this sort of stuff, it’s far past the way it used to be. Now you’ve got venture capitalists in Silicon Valley funding the expansion of a sex toy outfit. What I’m thinking about is a company called Jimmy Jane, and they’ve got some funding from some of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists to make new vibrators.
ANDELMAN: Don’t we need more new vibrators?
ALEXANDER: You can never have too many good vibrators.
ANDELMAN: And you can never have too many batteries.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: America Unzipped, Brian Alexander, Catholic guilt, Focus on the Family, James Dobson, love swings, MSNBC.com, PHE, Phil Harvey Enterprises, sex, sexploration, Sinclair Institute, Tim LeHaye
¶ 9:40 PM
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