IS A PUZZLEMENT!

Victor Bloom MD

When Irene Dunne came to the palace of the King of Siam ("Anna and the King of Siam," aka "The King and I"), she brought Western Civilization to an oriental ruler. He was puzzled by some of her questions about his customs, including the fact that he had a large harem and hundreds of children. He was puzzled by her questions about the roles of men and women, but it was clear to him that men were like the bee and women were like a flower. He explained that bees go from flower to flower, but flowers do not go from bee to bee.

A puzzlement to me was why or how it was that in the midst of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, with overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing by the president, in and out of the Oval Office, that his approval ratings soared. The liberals and Democrats were busy defending their choice, saying that sex was personal and had nothing to do with governance. Some of the rest of us were amazed, and yes, puzzled--- how this could be? Having turned this enigma over and over in my mind, trying to make sense of it, I realized that Freud was right, sex was a powerful instinct, and associated with great pleasure in the populace.

Apparently many men took vicarious pleasure in Clinton's audacious adventures, and also many women, who were 'liberated.' Exercising a new sexual freedom, they were worried about Roe v Wade and supportive of its champion, the unrepentent and unambiguous supporter of pro-choice, the woman's inalienable right to abortion-on-demand and freedom from governmental interference. After all, in this day and age of sexual freedom, initiated by the availability of THE PILL, abortion has become the ultimate last ditch birth-control method. Men and women who are not too careful or responsible about sex, want to have legal abortion to take care of unwanted pregnancies. Other people may call it 'murder,' but to them an unborn fetus is not a person and has no legal status.

Why is abortion such a hot issue? Why is it such a 'litmus test' for so many people? Facts have come to light, which were hidden before, and that is that pornography is big business. Why isn't this fact more well known? An answer has come from anonymous corporate leaders, who were not willing to speak publically on how heavily invested certain top corporations were in pornography. One corporate executive spoke on the condition of anonymity. "How can we?" said an official of AT&T. "It's the crazy aunt in the attic. Everyone knows she's there, but you can't say anything about it." Other major corporations heavily involved in pornography include General Motors, Time Warner, Echostar, Liberty Media, Marriott International, Hilton, On Command, LodgeNet Entertainment and the News Corporation, to name just a few.

The growing popularity of pornography has depended largely on technology making it increasingly available in the privacy of one's home. It's popularity suggests why Clinton maintained such high approval ratings.

The General Motors Corporation, the world's largest company, now sells more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire. 8.7 million Americans subscribe to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, and buy nearly $200 million a year in pay-per-view sex films from satellite transmission.

Echostar Communications Corporation, the number 2 satellite provider, whose chief financial backers include Mr. Murdoch, makes more money selling graphic adult films through its satellite subsidiary than Playboy, the oldest and best known company in the sex business, does with its magazine, cable and Internet businesses combined.

AT&T Corporation, the nation's biggest communications company, offers a hardcore sex channel called Hot Network to subscribers to its broadband cable service. It also owns a company that sells sex videos to nearly a million hotel rooms. Nearly one in five of AT&T's cable customers pays an average of $10 a film to see what the distributor calls "real, live all-American sex--- not simulated by actors."

For hotels, the sex films that can be obtained in rooms through television generates far more money than the beer, wine and snacks sold in the rooms' mini-bars. 40% of all hotel rooms in the nation are equipped with television boxes that sell the kind of films that used to be seen only in adults-only theaters. Hotel industry estimates that at least half of all guests buy these adult movies, which means that pay-per-view sex from television hotel rooms generate about $190 million a year in sales.

At home, Americans buy or rent more than $4 billion a year worth of graphic sex videos from retail outlets and spend an additional $800 million on less explicit sexual films, about about 32% of the business for general-interest video retailers. Chains like Tower Records now stock nearly 500 titles in their so-called erotic category, more than films about history or dinosaurs.

On the Internet, sex is one of the few things that prompts large numbers of people to disclose their credit card numbers. According to two Web ratings services, about one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visits one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least once a month--- more people than go to sports or government sites.

My puzzlement is over. Clinton's consistently high approval ratings came from the majority of Americans who enjoy sex. Disapproval for forbidden fruit, unconstrained lust and perverted sex comes from a moral minority. The present contest between Gore and Bush, a liberal and a conservative, might reveal whether the average voter has thought through his approval of Bill Clinton and his loyal supporter, vice-president Albert Gore, and whether time has allowed other people to rethink their values, and decide whether personality or "the issues" should be the determinant of who gets our vote in the upcoming election.

Dr Bloom is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University School of Medicine. He is a member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and on the editorial board of the Wayne County Medical Society. He welcomes comments at his email address--- vbloom@comcast.net.