Americans learn to talk dirty

Bill Clinton's antics and the Viagra pill have encouraged a once- prim nation to start discussing erections, orgasms and oral sex, writes John Carlin

THERE IS a revolution under way in America. It's not about the dictatorship of the proletariat. It's not a revival of Newt Gingrich's eat-the-poor "Contract with America". It is about the birds and the bees.

Reading the newspapers these days, watching TV, listening in on conversations in bars, in lifts, what you get is a steady diet of sex, sex and more sex. Suddenly to talk - openly, maturely - of erections, orgasms and oral sex has become as American as apple pie.

If President Bill Clinton got the ball rolling, it is Viagra, the penile wonder pill, that has smashed the citadels of American Puritanism. The Pilgrim Fathers will no doubt be rolling in their chaste graves, but the point is that barely six months ago it would have been impossible to imagine one of the American TV network's Barbie anchorettes introducing a sound bite from a grinning mid-Western matron who tells the world Viagra has transformed her 65-year-old husband into Tarzan.

"We do it sometimes two, three times a night," the proud matron trills. Then it is cut back to the studio where Barbie raises an eyebrow, nods, flashes the merest hint of a naughty smile and moves on, briskly reassembling her features to fit the sober note of the next news item: White House reaction to the news that Monica Lewinsky may end up in jail if she does not cough up the whole truth about her relationship with President Clinton.

Turning to the newspapers, one begins to wonder how long Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt will be able to remain in business. Here is a quote from a satisfied Viagra customer that appeared in a widely-used Reuters report. "I love it," said a 57-year-old man who said he had become impotent following a colon operation. "These are erections like I had when I was 20 years old. It makes a terrific towel rack, or maybe a toilet paper dispenser."

The explicitness of the printed language has been turned up a notch in the past week after feminists started to complain that Viagra was somehow discriminatory, that they wanted their very own chemical arousal enhancer. Impotence, a condition which Viagra rampantly cures, might be viewed as a bane of both men and women. Indeed, the grateful response of the matron from the mid-West has been far from untypical following the sale of some 300,000 Viagra prescriptions in the past three weeks. But the feminist response has been, what about a pill that cures female sexual dysfunction? What about something that gives us orgasms on tap?

Having been legitimised by respected feminist spokespersons, the debate has been open season for the newspapers to explore the mysteries of the female sexual anatomy, comparing it in vivid detail to the brutal simplicity of the toilet-paper dispenser mechanics of the male libido. With suggestions, too, that Viagra may work for women as well as men, Americans open their newspapers these days in the full expectation that they are about to undergo an advanced, PhD-level sexual instruction class.

In the same way that Viagra expedites the blood flow into the male member's erectile chambers, so might it be, according to a number of eminent urologists (the media celebrities du jour), that the little blue pill will swell the vagina and the clitoris, assisting lubrication and sweetening sensitivity.

But America's sexual revolution is not only about the freedom to talk dirty. It is Americans' change in attitude towards sex that suggests the revolution will be here to stay.

Take the Lewinsky scandal, and all the others that have tumbled out in the media during the past 100 days. Far from clamouring for President Clinton's head, as the news media - stuck in the old thinking - had imagined they would, the American people are largely unconcerned by reports that their leader is a serial groper. With every new potential scandal, potentially impeachable offence, Mr Clinton's poll ratings rise. Amazingly, the same majority who say they approve of him say they believe he was lying through his teeth when, in all solemnity, he stood before the American people on national television and said he had never had an improper relationship with anybody, ever.

The American people have suddenly become as blase about adultery as the French. And if that sounds like an extreme thing to say, consider the following. Last week the tabloid New York Post ran a story about some air hostess who claimed Mr Clinton had proposed an in-flight rendezvous in an airliner toilet. But the Post did not run the story on the front page with exclamation marks and screaming headlines. They buried it inside the newspaper, almost as an afterthought.

Which would seem like a shrewd judgement on the part of the editors in the age of Viagra, when pills are already changing hands in the black market at five times the price charged by chemists. Already, word from the universities has it, students are planning "Viagra parties". And the students are the future, and the future will bring forth new improved Viagras, and the human species will descend, or ascend (depending on your point of view), to an orgiastic state of nature.

All of which suggests that TS Eliot was premature in his famous judgement. The world will not end with a whimper.