Michael Blowhard’s barnstorming tour of U.S. cities has led him to question the cultural assumptions of New York City:
“From people who have approached us after our shows, The Wife and I have learned about local swing scenes, have been invited to local S&M clubs, and have received homemade DVDs of local people enjoying themselves in the most salacious ways. Meanwhile, many of our bigcity culturebuddies look anything but lusty and confident. Instead, they look haggard and dull, like people who haven’t enjoyed sex in years.”
The feminist and gay activist movements of the 1990s were incredibly Puritanical. New York City changed fundamentally as kids from the stix who had been indoctrinated in PC made their way to the city. By the mid-1990s, feminists had become completely obsessed with rape and sexual abuse, with the worst of them (Andrea Dworkin) claiming that all heterosexual intercourse was a form of rape. Things got so bad that “sex-positive” feminists had to be invented to ward off the curse of those who were, apparently, “sex-negative.”
The gay activist movement of the 1990s turned gay culture in a dramatically different direction. In my formative years in San Francisco and New York City, gay men competed over who had the biggest biceps. By the mid-90s, I began to meet gay men fresh into town who boasted about being complete sissies and physical incompetents. They were, of course, responding to the feminist rape and sexual abuse hysteria. Fag hags had been praising them throughout high school and college for being sissified, and for not touching women with that dreaded and poisonous penis.
The philosophy of the sexual demimonde of New York City changed dramatically as a result. Sex became larded down with ideological duties. Just getting off was not enough. By the mid-90s, I routinely met young men who claimed to be gay, while I was quite convinced they were actually hetero. The era of the closeted heterosexual had arrived.
My late wife, Myrna, instinctively knew what was going on in every sexual scene. She had been prostituted as a child and she struggled well into her mid-20s to escape sexual enslavement. For a good time, she preferred just about any place in the U.S. to New York City. A keen observer of sexual behavior, she remarked often that “those who talk about it aren’t getting it.” Of course, Myrna liked old fashioned macho men, and she had no truck with those who wanted to ideologize sex.
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