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Shakespeare and Merchant and Ivory. (Some filmmakers were angry about what they called “the New Puritanism.” “Sometimes I have an overwhelming temptation to grab one of those critics by the throat, head-butt them, and leave them bleeding in the corner,” said English director Mike Figgis.) When we weren’t creating our own personal, unfilmed porn movies in the sixties, we were watching the Mitchell brothers or Linda Lovelace or Marilyn Chambers or Ralph Bakshi, but we were terrified now about what our kids were watching as they surfed the Net.
    And now, suddenly, to have all this hedonistic sixties stuff, the cigar, the blow jobs, the whacking, plopped down on the kitchen table at dinner—by the man we’d voted for, by the man who shared our vision of a better America—we didn’t want any part of it. We didn’t want to hear it; we didn’t want to see it. Period! We were not nostalgic, at least not publicly, about those good old days of excess. Many of us, now Little League coaches and soccer moms, were downright ashamed. How could we possibly have acted like such little pigs and little sluts? Well, our kids—Dylan and Caitlin and Sky and Montana—weren’t going to act that way. We’d make good and damn sure of that, even if it meant blocking out what our president was very publicly teaching our kids.
    Perhaps the masturbation part wasn’t that bad, if you had pubescents. We weren’t like mom and dad, who told us that if we did it, hair would grow on our palms and we’d go blind. We told our kids that masturbation was just fine, dear, that everybody did it, even mom and dad. Now we could expand and strengthen the argument. Everybody did it, dear, even the president. See? He didn’t have any hair on his palms. So there was something nearly positive there, something almost role model–like in what Bill Clinton did. His habit might ease our kids’ guilts. Though, hopefully, none of our kids would ask, “Am I still going to be doing it, Mom, when I’m as old as the president?” Or “How old are you, Dad? Do you still do it?”
    Another reason why America didn’t want to deal with these black billows of toxic smoke from this historic cigar was because—of all the bizarre, cockamamy things you could ever imagine—Gloria Steinem and Jerry Falwell had climbed into bed together! The oddest mating, certainly, since Mick and David Bowie, since Portnoy and his piece of liver, since Marilyn Manson removed his rib to mate with himself. Gloria, always the hotchacha of the women’s movement, classy and iconlike, and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, with his triple spare tires, his oleaginous smile, and his lechery for our Lord and Savior. But they were joined together on one issue: what they viewed as porn. As far as Steinem was concerned, it demeaned women. As far as Falwell was concerned, it was a sin and we’d burn in hell.
    The Left and the Right had intertwined and the combined force of their moral fervor, their propagandists, and their media fellow travelers had already had a palpable, chilling effect on the motion picture and television industries. Those writers and directors who liked pushing the sexual envelope and who enjoyed being in battle with the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Donald Wildmon and the army of Reverend Others found themselves coldcocked, not by the Right, but by the Left, by liberal editorialists of their own generation, who called them not free-speech warriors pitted against the armies of narrowness and night, but sleaze meisters and pornographers exploiting women for financial gain. In other words, sinners just like the Reverend Jerry Falwell said, but not sinners who would go to hell and burn.
    Sinners whose movies would be picketed by angry women at the box office. The Reverend Donald Wildmon didn’t even have to go out there with his placards. He could rest up at home, preparing