Making A Difference

Cocked And Loaded: Sex In The Time Of The Internet

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Cocked And Loaded: Sex In The Time Of The Internet
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IN April 1 this year, a US federal judge played a cruel joke on the American media. She threw out Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit against President Clinton. The groan of dismay that echoed from the keyed-up, gee-ed up media mob could be heard across the country. Near 1,000 journos had signed up to cover the trial in Little Rock, Arkansas. Television networks had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars erecting temporary studios. The cyberati had worked themselves to catatonia on bulletin boards. It was as if a movie had been canned even before the first shoot and the director had asked the sets to be dismantled. The next day, a columnist for the New York Post—a tabloid aptly infamous for its headline "Headless Body in Topless Bar"—wailed, "What in the world are we gonna talk now?"

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She musta prayed mighty hard. Because around the same time, a beefy woman named Linda Tripp had phoned one of Ken Starr's deputies and tattled about a young White House intern who claimed to have had access to the presidential jewels and more. The rapacious media got a fresh lease of life, and, unknowingly at that time, began its precipitous journey into an ethical eddy that would suck in more than just the central characters in the saga.

Looking back now amid the swirling and malodorous waters of the sex scandal that is engulfing everyone—the master politicians, the media, and even the message—it is hard to imagine it all began with a little trickle called Whitewater. For the media, it was a distinctly unsexy story then. Something about a land deal and failed bank and the Clintons. In the news age of O.J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt, it was a non-seller. I still remember the day the Monica Lewinsky story broke. News anchors of the major television networks were in Cuba, covering the Pope's visit. The minute the Monica story unfurled, they abandoned the Pope and scrambled back to their studios in New York, Washington and Atlanta. Wowie, this was explosive. Sexy. (And let me be fair here: on each of my last two visits to India, I too have returned to the US in time to resume coverage of developments linked to the scandal.)

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It's hard to pinpoint when the media began to hack it and coarsen. Even in the early '90s, when Gennifer Flowers first revealed Clinton's adulterous ways before a national audience, there was a certain reluctance on part of journalists to follow up the sordid tale. CNN had yet no competition. The Internet was still months away from connecting the world. Print journalism—outside the tabloid world—was still in the Nixon era, when transcripts of the Watergate tapes were published after the President's four-letter words were replaced with "expletive deleted".

By the time a housewife named Lorena Bobbitt excised her husband's manhood, competition and intrusiveness had heralded an in-your-face quality to American journalism. The word penis was inducted into public lingo. When the O.J. Simpson saga unfolded, CNN introduced us to saturation coverage. A real-life drama, full of sex, intrigue, murder, was replacing the afternoon soaps. By the time the Paula Jones saga gathered momentum, CNN had been joined by MSNBC and Fox news and oral sex had penetrated the national discourse.

It was the Age of the Internet when Lewinsky flashed the top of her thong underwear, breached the President's suspect defences, and spoke about her conquest to 11 people in not-so-hushed tones. Long before others were consumed by the story, it was blazing through the cyberworld, each development setting off a feeding frenzy of rumour, innuendo, quarter-truths. And much before the word semen peeped out from behind euphemisms like "bodily fluids" in the dailies, I saw the expression strain the Net, spreading from the website of a irascible cyberhack called Drudge.

You ain't seen nothing yet, I told myself. Some day, there will be a sperm with a minimini videocamera mounted on its back. And it will have its own website called www.weewilliewinkie.com.

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(The writer is a correspondent with The Indian Express.)

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