To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment May 25, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/1999/05/25/ricky We love you Ricky, oh yes we do Move over, Mick: Ricky Martin is a modern Prometheus for the collective penis of pop. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Cintra Wilson Nobody's ever been quite able to successfully devise pornography for women. Playgirl magazine attempted to invent it in the '70s, utilizing the primitive theory that women got as sweaty and overstimulated by brazen, naked pictures of the opposite sex as men did, and introduced a magazine with a hairy, brick-jawed brute in the centerfold, earnestly displaying his semi-engorged Hollywood Loaf. Of course, the magazine was totally laughable and not particularly erotic to women, and Playgirl ended up being patronized more or less exclusively by gay men and sliding into obscurity. The pop sensation machine has finally found the answer, however, to the age-old marketing conundrum of What Makes Girls Randy, and now all media outlets are saturated with bedroom-haired, cologne-marinated, undergraduate-age dancing boys. Musician boys are invariably the first big crush of a preteen girl, her first big sloppy emotional response to the world. The creation of puppy-lovable teen sensations is now a multinational Moloch, and such phenomena as N-Sync, The Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys represent a whole vital stage in the sexual/emotional development of the preteen, i.e. the kind of biological confusion and obsessive hysteria that causes little girls to wallpaper their rooms with gratuitous posters of dreamy, hard-nippled thugs and tarty kinder-whores and throw high-pitched grand-mal tantrums until albums and T-shirts and concert tickets are bought. About 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window at Times Square in New York and screamed for teen masturbation-focus the Backstreet Boys last week, and a few days earlier, another 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window and wailed and wept and beat their breasts for multinational super-pasteurized Hispano-sensation Ricky Martin. America seemed slightly shocked, as if we expected all that weird screaming hysteria to die along with the Beatles. Chick-porn, thy name is Ricky. Ricky wears see-through sweaters and has hips like a lazy susan. He runs his fingers seductively through his own hair, with his eyes rapturously closed and his moistened mouth barely parted, like Rita Hayworth. He is often seen wet, shirtless, open-mouthed kissing and driving sports cars. Ricky is an emblem of virility and energy and good-guy ethics, while being a near-perfect fusion of male cliché sexual images: one part Cary Grant self-amused privilege, one part James Bond eyebrow raised at the way these birds just seem to tumble into my lap, two parts Julio Iglesias-cum-Ricardo Montalban-cum-Desi Arnaz-cum-Medellin drug-cartel-Latino mega-suave and three parts Elvis good-natured nuclear cock-power, all shrink-wrapped into one silk 'n' leather Milano-pimp outfit. He is a multicultural young Elvis for the new millennium, with hotter blood: Ricky, an ethnic minority, has actual traces of humanity. He's a little smarter than the old Elvis; he's already lived through the whiplash agony/ecstasy of flash-in-the-pan-ism as a boy who grew too many underarm hairs to remain in Menudo, so he has a sense of self-preservation and a healthy arrogance: He's not going to need shock-levels of Demerol and pork to bolster his comfort level in the end. He knows how to "keep it real," but in character at the same time. He appears to be a limitless, unstoppable font of self-enjoyment, professing an Internal Path and a Great Love of Music and all the other stuff he's doing. He has cracked the mystical code that makes the young girls cry. Ricky seems to be a successful boy-band veteran; he was able to take the faux-conscious pop-veneer of supermarket-accessible eroticism that the managers of Menudo taught him to radiate before he was old enough to drive and somehow implant his own adult consciousness behind it. The efficaciousness of boy-band pseudo-sexuality is nothing to wag a stick at: Somehow, to the wanton fan of any age, a charismatic stage presence means that the performer is possessed of a mature, diabolically supercharged uber-sexuality, and fans respond to the performer as such, even if both fan and performer are barely over 4 feet tall. New Kids on the Block, especially, had a peculiar, sexual, Jesus-like sway over the female species: At the peak of their success, I remember reading an actual newspaper column about how a 3-year-old girl who had been displaying nothing but autistic-like behavior for her entire life was watching a New Kids concert with her older siblings when she suddenly snapped into lucidity, grabbed her mother by the arm and drawled out her first words, her maiden voyage into the English language, a fiery demand: "I want Joe." Joe, of course, being Joe McIntyre, the youngest and shortest of the New Kids. In the early '90s, he was probably single-handedly responsible for more fire-hammers of sexual explosion in the 12-and-under crowd than Elvis and David Cassidy and Mickey Dolenz combined. Ricky has picked up where that teen nightmare left off, in a lot of ways, and has also claimed the abandoned scepter of John Travolta's Saturday Night Feverishness by pulling off a look that has up to now been regarded as either totally homosexual or ethnically slimy in a sexist way, i.e. get a load of Sergio Valente at the bar over there, ohmigod, who does he think he is? He has resuscitated obvious male sexiness from the way it disgraced itself in the '70s, when it wore open Quiana shirts and gold chains and pants so tight you could see all the veins in its schlong. Young American boy rock stars got too embarrassed to be sexy after Mick Jagger; Ricky has brought the sacred man-fire back to the pop stars in a way that those weepy, drum-beating-in-the-woods, encounter-group guys have been trying to bring it back to their own soft, gutless bellies for the last decade or so, and he deserves some kinda credit. However. I was all set to make this a pure Ricky Martin puff piece, and speak of his golden legitimacy and flawless panty-heat, but I just caught a little throwaway interview with him on MTV. Normally, when Ricky speaks, he's all chocolatey corporate cheerleading; for example, when he picked up his World Music Award in Monaco last week: "To all you leaders," he said, presumably meaning World Leaders, "you should take the music industry as an example -- it's all about creating, not destroying." Dumb, but heartfelt. Maybe forgivable. This time, on the other hand, he gave two spontaneous answers that made me think the Golden Ricky might be more hollow than solid. The love-struck fan-girl interviewer asked him: "Who is your favorite singer and biggest influence?" "Journey. Steve Perry," said Ricky without a beat of hesitation. Oooch. "Who is the most important person in the world to you, and why?" asked the interviewer. Ricky then got an un-funny, shrapnel gleam in his big puddly eyes and started mumbling about how he always wanted to invite "his enemies" to dinner, because he wanted to keep them very close. The most important people to Ricky are his enemies? Hmmmm. How much Ricky is Ricky and how much is Memorex? We may never find out, but the Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Tur-nin'. Wo-oh-oah. salon.com | May 25, 1999