Details' "Sex Issue" doesn't pump it up.
By GARY KAMIYA
"Sex," the French philosopher Michel Foucault once said when asked if he intended to keep writing about it, "is boring." Although his fondness for being disciplined and punished in San Francisco's S&M dungeons appeared to cast some doubt on that statement, Foucault had a point: having sex and writing about it are two different things. For readers who struggle their way through Details' May "Sex Issue," the distinction will be painfully clear.
Because it requires risk, tackling sex head-on is tricky for any writer -- but most of all for those who practice the Vegas-lounge-band craft of churning out semi-smart pieces for slick magazines. Those magazines are governed by certain tacit codes of seemliness, codes internalized by editors and writers alike. Small, safe doses of honesty, writerliness and ambiguity are allowed, but no more: The gravitational pull of the almighty Bland Imagined Reader must never be broken, lest the tiny, smirking satellite of the magazine go whirling out of its orbit.
Comes now drifting attitudinously into the carnal hot zone Details, whose imagined reader is somewhere between a terminally-hip Young Dude with ironic pants and a 20-something guy on the yuppie track who wants to be down with the latest bands, threads and trends but also wants to check out, with little or no irony attending the act at hand, Pamela Anderson Lee's upper body development.
This odd situation results in an intricate editorial dosey-do. It is essential that Details act as if all of its readers were the former, while simultaneously offering fleshly celebrity sustenance to the latter. So Pamela Lee, late of "Baywatch," and Elizabeth Berkley, late of "Showgirls," have their day in the sun -- regardless of the fact that there is no reason why anyone outside of their close friends and family, least of all a plaid-wearing hepcat, would want to know anything about them.
The nemesis of a mag like Details is surely a fusty old stroke book like Playboy, with its outmoded look-at-those-hooters sensibility. But once you go down the Pamela Lee road, you're in the Land O'Hef -- he owns that turf. And the humiliating shadow of 30 years of chirpy Playmate copy ("turnoffs: people with bad attitudes") looms large over Details' profile of Lee. When the writer opens his piece by nudge-nudging that Lee's coming baby "may be the luckiest little guy in the world" because his mother plans to breast-feed him, we are not on the high road. And by the time he is reduced to writing sentences like "she is smarter than she needs to be" and "hers is a particular kind of intelligence, one that accepts without shame what she has become and uses what she knows to mess with people's minds," it's time to break out the silk bathrobe and the can of Pepsi.
Still more telling is Mim Udovitch's piece on the much-maligned Berkley. Udovitch is a writer of superior gifts, but her skill only makes the utterly gratuitous nature of her subject even more painfully obvious. Reading her profile is like watching an intricate high-tech machine that, after whirring, buzzing, and computing, turns out a paper clip.
Udovitch makes one good point -- "'Showgirls'...was a spectacular, unforgettable loser, and it brought down upon Elizabeth's curly, blonded head all the snarling contempt that America holds in reserve for the woman who takes off her own clothes for her own purposes and refuses to get all tragic about it" -- and then there is really nothing left to say. But the vulgar (yet ironic!) photographs must be accompanied by words, nonexistent psychological depths must be explored, and so even Udovitch ends up playing those Vegas changes: "There is something strangely dual about her, an aura of contradiction. She is forthright, but emanates a cloud of secrecy; she is driven, but whatever drives her is shrouded from sight." Nothing personal against Ms. Berkley, who seems to be just another hard-working actress trying to make it, but this sounds just a tad, uh, inflated. I mean, isn't what drives most people shrouded from sight?
High-class cheez, however, is not Details' only take on eros. After all, the magazine is aiming at modern guys, guys who, yes, have actually had sex and can even think about it. So the editors venture into the "Dude, can we talk?" realm of confessional journalism.
They deserve credit for the attempt, but once again the invisible slick-magazine governor seems to be at work: few of the pieces in this issue are nearly honest or personal enough. Oddly, in some ways, these facile confessions are more depressing than the celebrity pabulum.
For example, one wants to like a story like Paul Lyons' piece about how he overcame his penis-size anxiety. Yes, it takes guts to write a story like that, but all the story offers is guts: it's a formulaic confession that doesn't go anywhere interesting. In similar fashion, there's a formulaic "I had incredible sex with this wild mysterious woman" story, a formulaic "I chatted up a lap dancer and she called me" story, a formulaic drugs-and-sex story, even an egregiously formulaic "my love of brassieres and what they contain" story.
There are a couple of good pieces -- a personal memoir by Stephen Beyle in which some actual psychological blood is shed, and a mildly provoking forum about relationships. But overall "The Sex Issue" proves that in matters sexual, a little honesty is a deflating thing.