Class Time For Johns

“I know what the eggplant emoji is,” says one of the detectives in the twin-bed room, referring to an oft-used sexting symbol, “but do we know if the prosecutors will take it as an agreement for sex?”

As we wait, they give me a chance to write my own guesses on the operation whiteboard: the number of johns they’ll bust today, and of those busted, how many will cry, possess drugs, carry unlicensed guns, and have outstanding warrants. But before I finish, I’m interrupted by cheering plain-clothed officers. Bowhunter’s Mike Carney has nailed a musk ox in the heart.

He’s coming,” crackles a police radio moments later, and the room comes alive.

I follow the officer in charge, Sergeant Paul Mahoney, into the bathroom, where he and his largest officer strap on their gun holsters and select a pair of handcuffs from a neat row. Two other detectives wait silently behind the hotel-room door, which is soon opened by a female cop, a tiny, bird-like woman in jeans and ill-suiting makeup, looking vaguely like the blurry online photo they posted offering her sexual services.

“Come in,” she says with a huge smile. The john puts his second foot inside the room and is jumped on and cuffed by four police officers.

Within seconds, I hear one of the officers mutter, “Fuck, he’s pissed himself.”

The other johns arrested that day would yell and struggle, or holler that they weren’t going to fight, but Fernando stands quietly as the cops search his pockets, his fear spreading across the front of his work trousers.

Gene, the male cop Fernando had been unwittingly sexting with, asks him why he’d been so stupid. In response, Fernando says softly, “I got to live with what happened,” his wet pants sticking to his legs. He goes on to calmly, politely answer questions about his wife, two jobs, and two toddlers back home.

Pissing himself will be the first in a series of humiliations for Fernando, and thousands of guys like him caught in john stings around the country. His mug shot, name, and engagement in “sex crimes” are splashed on the local news that evening, and will live on the internet forever. Fernando is another casualty in the war on sex, the fallout from a moral panic that is destroying lives in order to save them.

A week after Fernando’s arrest, I’m in a church basement in downtown Waco, Texas, with 11 more johns busted while attempting to procure sex. They avoid each other’s gaze, just as they avoid, even more carefully, the eyes of the man standing before them.

“This won’t be a hug-athon,” says Brett Mills, coordinator of an anti-prostitution program—a “john school”—to a field of lowered baseball caps. “We’re kind, but we’re not faint of heart.”

Mills has been running this john school—a mandatory education program for men convicted of first-time solicitation offenses—since 2014, part of the Jesus Said Love (JSL) not-for-profit organization he runs with his wife Emily.

Mills reads out the class rules: sleepers and phone checkers get one warning before being asked to leave. Same goes for anyone drunk, high, or late. Mills then instructs the johns to “own their story” by sharing how they were arrested, but without protesting their innocence.

Each john had to pay $525 for the privilege of attending this class, part of their misdemeanor charge for online solicitation of a prostitute. They were arrested during multiple police stings across several Texas counties. Of the johns in the room, seven are Latino and one is Asian; all eight are blue-collar workers. The three white guys are active-duty military personnel.

Brett Mills commands the room, smoothly shifting from cool youth-group leader to drill sergeant. Speaking forcefully, he says, “There are eight women in our [JSL] office right now that have been perpetrated on by guys like you!” JSL is primarily focused on helping “janes” leave the commercial sex industry, and its john schools, which teach that women should not be bought and sold, have become a core part of that mission. It doesn’t hurt that these schools have become a lucrative business and attract significant political support.

Unable to shrink any further inside himself, Tanner is called on to share his story. He’s a tall, thin, 24-year-old from suburban Dallas. While others fidget and down energy drinks, Tanner only clenches his fists around the sides of his T-shirt, his eyelids at half-mast.

“I just wanted to talk to a female face before being stuck in a box,” he says of the day he was arrested, mere hours before he was due to be deployed overseas. “I tried to call and got a text back. I thought it was weird, but I just wanted to see a woman. Then these two guys are comin’ at me. I tried to fight back; they didn’t ID as cops. There was no video or audio surveillance—it all seems kind of sketchy to me.”

Mills asks the johns who had their mug shots posted on local TV news. They all raise their hands. “And on Facebook, everyone saw it on Facebook,” Tanner adds quietly.

“I don’t give a fuck about your face on the news, I care about these women!” Mills barks, telling me later that he calls these “front-end alignment moments.”

If Mills had his way, the class would cost twenty times more so that the johns would feel the true weight of their crime. The average DUI costs in excess of $10,000 when impounding, fines, court, and attorney fees are taken into account. Even then, Mills says, the crimes are not equivalent: driving drunk is nothing like trying to buy a human being.

“And don’t tell me that legalization is the way to go,” he adds. “The only one who wins there are the regulators, ‘cause they get the money. Go to a bar and meet someone!”

Before we break for lunch, we meet Sheronda and Jackie, two of JSL’s presenters, who share stories and information. Some of what they relate is shocking. Sheronda used to rob johns, we learn. She ran away from home after being sexually abused by her stepfather and later used to pose as a prostitute and make off with would-be johns’ money and cars.

Jackie is a state health-department nurse, and wheels out a projector for a stomach-churning slideshow of the worst effects of untreated STDs in men and women. She offers free swabbings to the johns as they filter outside. Several of them complain they’ve lost their appetite for lunch.

A number of the guys share cigarettes and laughs, but I notice Tanner walking anxiously around the parking lot, painfully alone. He doesn’t want to talk about what happened, but soon the words rush out anyway. “I just want it all behind me,” he says. “I hope that this is the end.”

Tanner was arrested with 30 others in a sting at a motel near the Fort Hood military base. Local media ran his mug shot and a report that he was found in possession of a knife, six lengths of rope, duct tape, and a body bag. He told deputies he brought the rope to the room because he had a bonding fetish. The other items were found in his car later.

“There was no investigation,” Tanner says. “The sheriff told the media that I was a serial killer.”

Motel

Not long after talking to Tanner, I arrive at the Waco office of the McLennan County sheriff, Parnell McNamara. I’m here to talk to him and his human-trafficking team. Sheriff McNamara greets me with a hug and asks if I want anything to drink. Within minutes, I’m being shown a media highlight-reel of the sheriff’s greatest law-enforcement triumphs. When we’re done, he asks me to pose for photos with his collection of Tommy submachine guns, and hands me an autographed photo and merchandise promoting his reelection campaign, all of which carries the slogan, “Parnell’s Posse: 2020 Vision.”

“Some of these guys should have been shot,” the sheriff tells me. “Johns are the root of the evil, creating the demand. It’s a big effort—the pimps, the johns, the molesters are all in it together.” Sheriff McNamara pauses and asks me to write down the following quote: “Child molesters should be tied to a post and horse-whipped every day.”

Moving on to a gateway theory of what johns involve themselves in, Sheriff McNamara argues that soliciting women is like the marijuana of sex. “I think prostitution leads to child molestation,” he continues. “[Johns] get bored and escalate to something weirder, kinkier.”

*        *        *

Sheriff McNamara describes himself as a lawman who “just inherited the job.” His family on his father’s side had been Waco law-enforcement mainstays going all the way back to 1902. His office is a shrine to three generations of the badge—one cabinet alone holds 17 framed photographs and seven guns beneath a scales of justice.

He is something of a Waco legend, Parnell McNamara. That’s what happens when you do things like form a posse of old-school lawmen to track down a thief dumb enough to steal a horse belonging to your daughter. That much-publicized event took place in 1996. More recently, the 70-year-old sheriff was cited as the inspiration for Jeff Bridges’ character Marcus Hamilton in the 2016 Academy Award-nominated film Hell Or High Water. Bridges plays an ornery U.S. marshal not ready to face mandatory retirement at age 57—which is exactly what happened to McNamara after 30-plus years as a Texas deputy marshall.

“You gotta get the right-lookin’ hat,” McNamara told Bridges, who shadowed the Stetson-loving sheriff to prepare for his role. “If you get a stupid hat, you’ll wind up lookin’ like Howdy Doody.”

To seal their friendship, McNamara “put him in the posse,” making Bridges an honorary deputy sheriff, before traveling with the actor to the Oscars, an experience he recalls almost as fondly as he recounts tales of his law-enforcement career.

McNamara hasn’t visited the Jesus Said Love john school, but says of Brett Mills and his wife: “[They’re] good, good people, and it’s a wonderful program they have. There’s a place for them, at least as an attempt to straighten people out.”

*        *        *

It’s debatable, though, whether john schools—or “stop-demand programs” as they are sometimes called—have any effect beyond humiliation. The first program of its kind was launched in 1981, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, followed by subsequent competing models, one developed by Minneapolis therapist Steve Sawyer, and another, higher-profile model pioneered by former San Francisco sex worker Norma Hotaling.

“Norma was extremely shrewd as an advocate,” says Michael Shively, an independent researcher who has evaluated john schools extensively for the Justice Department. Norma Hotaling developed a close working relationship with Kamala Harris, then California’s district attorney, now a U.S. senator, and considered one of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“Ideologically, john schools are all over the map,” Shively says. “Well under half have any sort of faith-based element. One of their partners is often a charitable organization or something that is really survivor-focused.”

In 2011, Texas passed a state law allowing any county or city to create a john school as an alternative to fines or incarceration. As with drunk driving, it is the local prosecutor’s decision whether attendance at a john school is required under their misdemeanor charge.

“It’s the Wild West, totally unregulated,” Shively remarks. “It is almost impossible to find out whether they work, and there is almost no accountability. The criminal justice system is heavily discretionary—there’s a lot of latitude on restitution versus punishment.”

Shame is driving so much of this activity. Convicted johns live with the very real possibility of losing their jobs and families, and so they rarely fight their cases in court, unable to bear the cost and desperate to put the event behind them. Of course, many of them stand trial regardless on the evening’s news, and their shame lives in perpetuity online.

There are roughly 50 john schools in existence nationwide, although it’s difficult to say precisely how many are fully operational at any given time. Like other startups, the ”moral entrepreneurs” behind these schools have to contend with the flow of supply and demand. Without a doubt, though, it can be a money-maker—fees paid by johns to attend are seen as a key component of the restorative justice philosophy that underpins the movement. And perhaps it goes without saying that it helps if stop-demand operators are backed by local politicians and law enforcement. 

Jesus Said Love is a charity financed solely by private donations and revenues from its monthly john school. The year it started the program, revenue jumped from $12,000 to $370,000. Now it averages around $500,000 a year. JSL’s annual fund-raising weekend getaway, Wild Torch, is attended by a who’s who of local business leaders, church leaders, and political figures, including Sheriff McNamara.

“Marketing is a strength of ours,” says Brett Mills in JSL’s Waco office, a converted warehouse decorated with chic lamps, lounges, and cowhide rugs in every room. “We’re in talks to do a corporate program. A local company approached us after their foreman was arrested in a sting. It had affected their business.”

If Mills likes to be the balls of the operation, then his wife Emily is the heart. She felt called to work with women in the sex industry 15 years ago or so. She now spends much of her time organizing gift-bag runs to Texas strip clubs (which are hubs for prostitution), providing women with high-quality toiletries as well as resources if they want to leave the business of sex.

“I believe we’re divine beings, not for sale. But it doesn’t matter in secular terms, and I get that,” she says. “Sex is a $3.2 billion-dollar industry—look at the economics, look at whose backs it’s built on. This country fought a war over slavery as economics. Is that why we’re not doing anything? Is it just about money and white-male power?”

Waco is on the I-35 between Austin and Dallas, well within the “Texas Triangle,” which Emily and her husband, along with other activists fighting human trafficking, say is one of the nation’s hot spots for modern slavery. Using the carefully formed language of social justice, advocates avoid talk of borders and illegals, but the Triangle discussion retains a charge in the current political conditions.

“The mortality rate for trafficking victims is seven years from entry—usually through suicide, violence, and drugs,” Emily says, using a frequently-cited but false statistic. “People don’t realize that they are victims. We tell them that they are a walking miracle. The victims have to learn to say that they are victims.”

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Brett Mills adds: “Our philosophy is that we can’t condemn. Holding up a bloody fetus is shaming, and it’s weird. We treat people with kindness no matter how awful they are to women so that we can get in their ear.”

Jessica Sicora, head of training at Unbound Waco, told me that they believed the incoming Republican district attorney, Barry Johnson, is “going to be a good asset,” and “has the right attitude, but needs more education to be accurate.”

Sicora gave a 45-minute presentation on human trafficking at Waco’s Jesus Said Love john school. “I was on the phone last week with a director of the governor’s demand-decrease unit,” she told the johns. “They are sitting, waiting, to get a strong enough case to make what you did a felony. It hasn’t yet happened in our state, but everyone wants to make it happen. Scaring the hell out of buyers is the best way we can end this industry.”

When I ask her after class about her claim that Texas wants to change first-time solicitation charges from a misdemeanor to a felony, Sicora said she was “just spitballing.”

Demand Abolition, another organization fighting human trafficking, is looking to work this felony angle on a national scale. The group’s founder, Dallas native Suwanee Hunt, is a leading Democratic figure, who has raised millions for anti-prostitution activities and programs, including john schools in 11 American cities.

Remarkably, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services lists the contact details of no fewer than 30 different anti-human-trafficking organizations operating in their state—and that’s without including Jesus Said Love or Demand Abolition.

“There is [sex]-trafficking going on, no question about it—but the stats have been grossly exaggerated, particularly in the United States,” says Alison Bass, a West Virginia University journalism professor and author of Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law.

Bass recently uncovered financial ties between prosecutor’s offices and Demand Abolition’s multi-city anti-trafficking initiative, CEASE (Cities Empowered Against Sexual Exploitation). In Seattle, the group provided almost $200,000 in funding to the King County prosecutor’s office over four years. In return, law enforcement carried out regular john stings, and the prosecutors framed the activities of those johns as sex-trafficking.

“If we want to look after women, we need to put our resources into social services resources and housing, not into having them arrested,” Bass says, adding that sex work can often provide a living wage—which can’t always be said for women working in restaurants or cleaning houses, particularly in big cities.

“Everyone says they’re going after the big guys, as they should be, but it’s the small fish that are being targeted—both the sex workers and the clients themselves,” Bass explains.

Ayesha, a 30-year-old sex worker who has been working the Texas Triangle for 15 years, says she was recently arrested for the first time. “I got caught in a sting in Dallas,” she tells me. “They didn’t want to let me go. It was the FBI’s human-trafficking squad. They were trying to make me say that I was a victim. I’m like, look at me, check my demeanor—I don’t look like I’m being forced.”

A Texas native, she ran away from home at 14 because she didn’t get on with her grandmother, who became Ayesha’s caretaker after her parents were both incarcerated for low-level drug offenses.

“I’m done,” she remarks. “It’s not how it used to be—stress-free—with the police and all.  And there’s a lot of violence, there are girls getting raped—those are the guys they should go hard on.”

Ayesha counts a former sheriff among her mostly older, white clientele, but points to mug shots of her colleagues and clients to illustrate who is actually being arrested. For her, full legalization of sex is the only way forward—not least because fucking is only a small part of her work. “A lot of my guys can’t perform,” she says. Many of them just want company, as Tanner said he did.

The operation that nabbed Tanner shows that beyond not-for-profit organization pushing anti-prostitution policies nationwide, local law enforcement agencies are reaching out across jurisdictional borders to crack down on commercial sex.

Stings are increasingly focused on johns rather than janes, usually by police posting ads on foreign websites that were set up in the wake of the U.S. government shutting down Backpage, the major online sex-advertising site.

Tanner’s arrest—and subsequent trial by television—was part of a Bell County show-and-tell operation, an on-the-job training exercise for officers from other counties. Sergeant Mahoney, whom I accompanied on a sting that day in Braze County, was there.

“We arrested a lot of johns that day, but I remember Tanner,” he says. “I was on surveillance. I saw that he had put his big bowie knife on his hip. They dunked him pretty hard ‘cause they knew about this knife.”

“He was a squirrelly dude,” Mahoney continues. “I remember after they arrested him, he wouldn’t tell them his name, wouldn’t say he was buyin’. Maybe he wasn’t going to kidnap her. I don’t know.”

Sheriff McNamara was jubilant after Tanner’s bust, telling local papers, “I’m so proud of Bell County for jumping on the bandwagon.” The Bell County Sheriff’s Department had learned everything they knew from McNamara’s McLennan County team, which began conducting stings as a part of the first “Johns Suppression Initiative” in 2014.

Speaking to cameras at the end of the initiative, McNamara used the phrase “weird sickos,” which was picked up nationally, and a law-and-order star was born. Today, he invites television crews to his many busts, and has been working on his catchphrases. During our chat, he appears to riff on Tolstoy when I ask him why people buy sex: “There are all sorts of excuses, like unhappy homes. But there’s no excuse for someone like that.”

In 2015, buoyed by the effectiveness of cross-county prostitution busts, McNamara started another posse of a kind, called FAST—Fugitive, Apprehension, and Special Tasks. What he calls his “personal SEAL team” is “runnin’ and gunnin’ day and night,” powered by homeland security clearances that allow them more or less free rein to conduct operations all over the country.

The FAST unit spends much of its time chasing down pimps. Their work has taken them all the way to Las Vegas and New York City. Recently, they tracked down a Waco brothel owner in Dallas.

A 90-minute drive from Waco, the Big D, though no Austin in terms of its politics, is less deep-red than most other parts of the state. Republicans such as Sheriff McNamara see the city as a blot on the moral landscape of Texas, a place where pimps, prostitutes, and illegals run the streets and threaten old-fashioned values.

The day had barely broken over the city, but Kimberly Duran didn’t care. She was too busy administering a wake-up call to 13 johns, her voice stronger than any coffee. Duran is the programming clinician at the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, and waking johns up is part of her job.

“I wanna fuck you up for your next buy,” she begins. “I know some of you will go back, but I hope I’ve fucked you up.”

If the church-basement john school was airless, this place just feels grim. We’re next door to the morgue in a row of dull bureaucratic buildings.

“Dallas is a mess, the john class is terrible,” Brett Mills had warned me. “Theirs is $250 on a Saturday with a payment plan. There shouldn’t be no payment plan—and johns should have to take a day off [from work].”

The johns are a familiar bunch—four African-American and nine Latino, with some of the men wearing factory uniforms. I see a lot of tattoo sleeves. Their stories are notably similar, too, most involving this basic scenario: They were at a gas station and a pretty girl offered her services for $20, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Fifty-something Joe, a soldier turned trucker, says his bust was entrapment. A detective from the human-trafficking unit, who is there to answer questions, begs to differ, saying it is only entrapment if the female cop put a gun to his head, demanding he complies. To which Joe replies, “No, that’s a fucking robbery!”

Duran softens a little and says that she wants the johns to think of the day as a behavioral therapy session. Her class presenters lack the TED-talk snappiness of the ones in Waco. It isn’t quite the hug-athon Brett had prepared me for—it’s just incredibly boring.

The Dallas school mostly mirrored Waco’s program in terms of instructional agenda until the end of the session. That’s when three white guys from Sex Addicts Anonymous—all named Brian—take the johns through how the 12-step program saved their lives.

“We’re not here for addiction, we don’t need treatment,” Luis, 43, protests. Adding his own comment, Joe shouts, “The treatment was when I came in here and paid $250!” Everyone laughs except the Brians.

After the laughter dies down, Duran tells the johns, “You know, the governor is trying to get y’all on the sex-offender registry.” At this point, the Brians leave, but the johns stay behind to ask questions, including whether they would be able to see their kids if they were to be put on this registry.

Duran didn’t say that for rhetorical effect. Earlier this year, Texas governor Greg Abbott began an anti-prostitution law and order campaign, saying that “anyone who commits these crimes should be behind bars.” Under his proposal, “sex criminals” would be incarcerated and forced to register as sex offenders upon their release, while the minimum age for workers at sexually oriented businesses like strip clubs would be raised from 18 to 21.

“We’ve seen a lot of bills introduced in line with the end-demand philosophy, which also prop up civil forfeiture, and this is already a really sketchy business, and technically illegal in the United States,” says Christa Daring, executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Program, founded in the Bay Area in 2003. In civil forfeiture, the government takes possession of property suspected to be part of a crime. Adds Daring:

“Legislation we’re seeing being introduced could result in people having their cars seized if they [don’t] pay their john-school fines of only $250.”

It’s clear to me that police operations are targeting a certain type of john. In 2012, Rachel Lovell of DePaul University studied mug shots taken by the Chicago Police Department in the preceding two years. Lovell found that almost all of their stings took place in poor, African-American neighborhoods, targeting clients of street-based sex workers. Over 85 percent of the men arrested were African-American or Latino.

Luis, who objected to one of the john-school Brians telling him he was a sex addict, agrees. “I grew up in south Dallas,” he tells me. “I know it’s where they do most of their surveillance and stings. Prostitution is more discreet in higher-class neighborhoods, but it goes on. There are just more palms being greased.”

To escape having to sit through another STD horror show, I made my excuses at the Dallas john school and went for a drive to clear my head. As I traveled the city streets, my thoughts kept circling back to the realization that end-demand policies and programs like the ones I’d witnessed in recent days appeared to be the next big thing in law and order.

Moral panic takes many forms, and sex is its current obsession. With marijuana legalization, the prison industry can no longer rely on weed-smokers to fill their cells, so it’s looking to sex offenders—and that’s the classification johns will increasingly be tagged with—to pick up the slack.

Right now, there’s not much public outcry over this. But the fact is, people are having their lives turned upside down for doing things like unwittingly sexting cops. John-school alumnus Tanner is effectively in hiding, jobless and living with his parents, understandably struggling after being publicly branded a would-be serial killer.

Meanwhile, Brett Mills is searching for a repentant john to round out his school’s curriculum. That is, an ex-john repentant enough to join his JSL team. There is no one better equipped to counsel the sex-addicted than a former addict, and the number of jobs that sex addicts are welcome to apply for is few. The only option, then, is for humiliated johns to turn pro—to become part of the system that destroyed them.

*The names of johns have been changed.

 

Hip-Hop Pop

If you’re a budding copywriter, chances are you dream of one day writing a campaign as attention-grabbing at Nike’s recent surprise spot featuring Colin Kaepernick. Another of those industry big dogs is Coca-Cola and its beverage empire, and every year scores of new, hungry graduates try to land jobs there.

But in 1991, during one of the company’s routine recruitment sessions, an MBA student named Darryl Cobbin turned heads when he told recruiters he wasn’t all that interested in the Coca-Cola account. No, Cobbin had his sights on one of the brand’s less-glamorous products: Sprite.

Why? Well, partly because of the challenge. At the time, Sprite was responsible for just three percent of Coca-Cola’s overall sales. It was still lugging around outdated terminology like “lymon” (a clunky portmanteau combining “lemon” and “lime”), and its primary market was mothers and young children. Cobbin wanted to change that, and in a big way. He wanted Sprite to go after teenagers, one of the most mainstream and highly coveted demographics out there, by aligning it with the values and aesthetics of hip-hop.

And that’s the other reason Sprite actually made sense for Cobbin’s vision. It was one of the few brands that was willing to dip its toe in the waters of rap, with past commercials featuring Kurtis Blow, Heavy D, and Kid ’n Play. These efforts had proven successful in African-American and Latino communities, at least relative to their modest budgets. Cobbin was betting there was plenty more where that came from. He got the job.

It might have seemed like an odd pairing. After all, there wasn’t any inherent connection between lemon-lime soda and hip-hop. But Cobbin figured out early on that they did share a vocabulary: descriptors like crisp, clean, cool, and especially clear, which meant, as author Dan Charnas puts it, “No additives, no bullshit.” Suddenly, a lane emerged. If a soda could be said to be keeping it real, well, Sprite had as good a claim as any. Cobbin brought the concept to the agency that handled the Sprite account, who gave him back a three-line slogan: Image is nothing. Thirst is everything. Obey your thirst. From there, everything changed.

The “Obey Your Thirst” campaign debuted in early 1994 and immediately took off like a rocket, as Cobbin and his collaborator Reginald Jolley, a creative at Burrell Communications in Chicago, came up with a series of commercials featuring rappers like Pete Rock, Large Professor, and Common, which faithfully represented hip-hop culture in a way that had never been seen before in mainstream advertising. Rap fans clamored to tape the commercials off the TV so they could re-watch them again and again. Magazines like The Source were effusive, too. By the end of the year, Sprite’s sales had leapt nine percent, and for the next two years, it would be the fastest-growing soda brand in the country.

The campaign worked in part because Cobbin saw the future before any of his peers did. He knew that hip-hop in the early ’90s was no longer a niche genre—it was the new pop music. “Just as the lemon-lime soda wasn’t going to stay in its lane but rather compete directly with colas, hip-hop would be matched against pop music on its own terms,” writes Charnas in his book The Big Payback. “Both Sprite and hip-hop would win. Not by crossing over. But by taking over.”

In the following years, Cobbin and Jolley went even further. They brought in Nas and AZ to recreate the famous stoop rap from Wild Style, the pioneering hip-hop film. They even convinced their corporate higher-ups to approve an ambitious, five-part, anime-style commercial where rappers from across the U.S. came together to form a new version of the super robot Voltron and defeat the evil King Zarkon—a nod to the Asian pop culture that was, in turn, influencing groups like the Wu-Tang Clan. A parallel campaign, “Grant Hill Drinks Sprite,” built around the affable NBA player, gave the soda further in-roads into black culture.

Which is pretty much how we got to now. These days, Sprite commercials still regularly feature rappers like Drake and Lil Yachty, as well as current A-list athletes like LeBron James (playing a baseball pitcher named “Big Taste,” for some reason). While no longer the official soda of the NBA, Sprite was still ranked on Forbes’s “World’s Most Valuable Brands” list in 2015, with an estimated value of more than $6 billion. Not bad for a humble lymon.

Director Politics: Hard To Peg

Where the left gets to claim support from Oprah Winfrey, Ben Stiller, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, George Clooney, and Brad Pitt—basically anyone spoofed in Team America: World Police as a liberal member of the “Film Actors Guild”—the right has to make do with straight-to-streaming stars like Kevin Sorbo and Antonio Sabato Jr., past-their-prime conservative converts like James Woods and Jon Voight, and off-their-meds outliers like Roseanne and Kanye West.

Directors, however, especially the ones who’ve been navigating the Hollywood system for decades, often have a funny way of defying easy categorization. All kinds of big-time filmmakers who have probably never voted for a GOP candidate in their life have — sometimes accidentally — made movies with messages that Republicans adore. (Ron Howard, for instance, may be a self-proclaimed Democrat, but he’s also the guy who adapted not one but three Dan Brown novels for the big screen.)

Here are four other prime examples of directors who have managed to straddle both sides of the culture wars.

Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Steven Spielbergn

CLINT EASTWOOD

Eastwood is undeniably one of the right’s biggest pop-culture icons. “Go ahead…make my day”—a garbled version of a line Eastwood spoke in 1983’s Sudden Impact—has been adopted by supporters of “stand your ground” statutes, and even President Reagan quoted it as a way of underlining his plans to veto any and all Congressional attempts to increase taxes. The 88-year-old director denounced Barack Obama from the stage at the 2012 Republic National Convention and favored John McCain during his 2008 presidential bid.

But Eastwood’s on-screen politics are harder to pin down. Critic Pauline Kael famously denounced the Dirty Harry series as fascist. On the other hand, his biographer Richard Schickel claims the film Eastwood felt the greatest personal attachment to was his 1980 flop Bronco Billy, in which he plays the manager of a traveling circus troupe that serves as a shelter for ex-convicts, hippies, army deserters, and other conservative undesirables. He’s made movies that prop up the myth of the Old West gunslinger (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly), but many others, like Unforgiven, ruthlessly tear that myth down.

He’ll make Flags of Our Fathers, which honors the patriotic men of the U.S. Marine Corps, then just three months later, he’ll turn around and release Letters From Iwo Jima, which compassionately presents the perspective of the Japanese enemy on the same events.

It’s not surprising that one of the best critical takes on Eastwood’s work is titled Persistence of Double Vision.

STEVEN SPIELBERG

Spielberg is one of Hollywood’s most high-powered Democrat fund-raisers and has taken on a long string of film projects that promote solid liberal values. Few fiction films portray the horrors of fascism and anti-Semitism more vividly than Schindler’s List, while Amistad and Lincoln document two of the nation’s most significant early civil-rights battles and The Post celebrates the press’s role in helping expose the lies of the Nixon administration. Even the less overtly political Minority Report smuggles in a warning about the dangers of government surveillance run amok.

At the same time, it’s no accident that Spielberg enjoyed his greatest commercial success during the 1980s. Between the childlike affection he shows for middle-class suburbia (E.T.) and his politically uncomplicated nostalgia for the 1940s (Raiders of the Lost Ark)—not to mention his immense commercial success—he was the perfect Reagan-era filmmaker. Saving Private Ryan did more to cement the notion of “the greatest generation” than any other work of art. When Trump promises to “make America great again,” this is the image he’s evoking.

OLIVER STONE

Part East Coast preppie, part Purple Heart-awarded Vietnam vet, and part drugged-up 1970s dropout freak, Oliver Stone assembled one of the more singular filmographies of the eighties and nineties, churning out bold and ambitious “epic visions of America” at an insane clip of more than a film per year. He was here to tell moviegoers, often at lengths of three-plus hours, that the Vietnam war was a tragedy (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July), that the government is lying to you (JFK, Nixon), that corporate greed is undermining the nation (Wall Street), and that, yes, Jim Morrison is one of the great poets of the twentieth century (The Doors).

Lately, though, Stone’s stances on world events have softened. People expecting World Trade Center to be another stew of conspiracy theories and hallucinatory imagery instead got a surprisingly low-key tribute to the bravery of the 9/11 first responders. People hoping W. would give George W. Bush one last kick in the pants before he left office instead got a sympathetic take on a simple man bullied around by a stern father and a heartless vice president. Nowadays, Stone seems content jetting around the world conducting equally credulous interviews with Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin.

BRAD BIRD

Was Walt Disney a Nazi? Maybe not technically, although he certainly seemed to harbor plenty of Nazi sympathies. Similarly, Pixar auteur Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) might not technically be an Objectivist, but he does have an odd way of using colorful stories about superhero families and talking rats to express ideas straight out of the Ayn Rand playbook.

In Bird’s world, society consists of people with extraordinary talent, and people who need to get out of those people’s way (or assist them, even if that means putting up with your city being regularly reduced to rubble or allowing a rat to live under your chef’s hat and control you like a marionette). His live-action 2015 film Tomorrowland, in which the world’s most imaginative scientists and dreamers secretly attempt to build an ideal society in an alternate dimension, is a whimsical riff on Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. That said, if we absolutely have to place our trust in some superhuman entity, Bird has created candidates even a liberal could warm to, from the giant robot in The Iron Giant to Tom Cruise’s even more indestructible government superagent in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Hot List: The New Puritans of America

Since Donald Trump floated down his golden escalator screaming about Mexican rapists, the left and right have prioritized a public pillaging of people’s histories and reputations, often with scant concern for little things like evidence, due process, truth, and reality. The left and right may not agree on any given policy, but they both have concluded that public shaming is the way to get things done.

The phrase “New Puritans” has made a few select appearances in the past 40-plus years, with its meaning and application varying. Texas senator Barbara Jordan used it while keynoting the 1976 Democratic National Convention. British trends forecaster Jim Murphy used it a decade ago to describe a shift in British young people away from hyper-consumerism and indulgence. Over at the right-wing conspiracy site Infowars, the phrase has been used to tar progressives as free-speech-hating, censorious inquisitors. Continue reading “Hot List: The New Puritans of America”

Mike Cernovich

Right-wing internet celebrity Mike Cernovich was soaking in the hot tub at his Orange County, California, home. One of his hired hands—Cernovich calls them “weaponized autistics”—had dug up director James Gunn’s racist tweets. In a few months, Cernovich was planning to premiere the documentary Hoaxed, his cinematic debut, which predictably covers “fake news,” and he worried mainstream reporters would comb through his own old tweets.

To combat potential attacks, Cernovich says he had put out a $10,000 bounty targeting tweets more offensive than his, written by someone more famous than him. He had already bushwhacked several high-profile men—among them, MSNBC pundit Sam Seder, fired then rehired after Cernovich misrepresented Seder’s old tweets about pedophilia, and longtime Michigan congressman John Conyers, who resigned in November 2017 after Cernovich fed BuzzFeed documents alleging Conyers sexually harassed his employees—but Cernovich needed someone huge. Gunn could fit the bill.

But the racial stuff won’t go anywhere, Cernovich recalls thinking. In his hot tub, he ran Twitter searches for “James Gunn” alongside words like “pedo,” “pedophile,” and “baby.” Bingo. Among a bunch of old, politically incorrect tweets, Gunn had tweeted, “For the record I’m against rape and baby eating in real life (unless you’re really, really hungry).” Gunn had also tweeted, “I’m doing a big Hollywood adaptation of The Giving Tree with a happy ending—the tree grows back and gives the kid a blowjob.” And there was this, too: “Three men and a baby they have sex with.” Gunn had typed the tweets when he worked for the edgy media company Troma Entertainment, but if Cernovich took them out of context, these tweets would sound worse than Cernovich’s old tweets denying the existence of date rape. He’d found his winning strategy.

Later that evening, Cernovich shared his plan with his wife Shauna.

“But this guy is a big deal,” Shauna replied, according to the couple’s recollections. “Please lay the fuck off. This is a high-target scalp. I don’t want to deal with this guy!”

“He’s just a blue checkmark,” Cernovich countered.

“Marvel fans are insane!”

Shauna pointed out that Gunn had spearheaded the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, which had grossed over $1.5 billion—news to Cernovich. He deliberated, then smirked.

“Nope,” Cernovich said. “I’m all-in.”

Disney owned Marvel, and in May the company’s television network, ABC, had fired conservative comedian Roseanne Barr from her eponymous sitcom for tweeting, “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes has a baby=VJ.” Barr was referencing former president Obama’s African-American advisor Valerie Jarrett. Cernovich reasoned the company would can Gunn, or else face boycotts from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh—serious repercussions for a corporation with a family-friendly brand, and whose theme parks partially rely on Midwestern tourists. On July 19, Cernovich circulated Gunn’s old tweets. The next day, Disney fired the director. A $152 billion company had caved to a right-wing, vest-wearing Orange County dad who built his celebrity, such as it was, via the internet.

The Gunn story was covered by everyone from the New York Times to Fox News (which, by the way, had banned Cernovich for his offensive tweets), but the scandal turned out to suck for the Cernovichs. Mike claims he was doxxed, his home address and other information revealed, by comic book nerds. When we get together at a coffee joint near their home this past Columbus Day, the couple still appears shaken.

“I’m now more sympathetic to feminists who get rape threats,” Cernovich says, balancing his one-year-old daughter on his lap. “There are crazy people on the internet, and it’s not fun when they go after you.”

As his daughter watches cartoons on an iPhone, Cernovich hops to his laptop. Shauna, several months pregnant, dressed in a maternity onesie, sits across from them, eating an egg croissant sandwich.

“My daughter’s a daddy’s girl,” Shauna remarks.

Cernovich gestures at his child, then says, “I don’t bully people on the internet anymore!”

That would depend on your definition of bullying. Although he once tweeted statements like, “I went from libertarian to alt-right after realizing tolerance only went one way and diversity is code for genocide,” Cernovich asserts he has avoided getting banned from Twitter, unlike Alex Jones, because he recently has refrained from targeting women or people of color. He says he made an exception for MSNBC anchor Joy Reid because, years ago, she had written homophobic blog posts. (Reid denied writing the articles, at one point suggesting time-travelers had hacked her website.) For Shauna’s part, out of concern for her family and life with Cernovich, she prays her husband will one day fuck up online.

“I hope Mike gets banned from every social media platform,” Shauna says.

“[In action movies] the hitman is retiring,” Cernovich replies, “and then he’s given one more mission, and he’s sucked in. That’s where I am.”

Mike Cernovich Political Activist

After he releases Hoaxed, Cernovich promises to quit. This documentary, between its rapid editing and dramatic music, resembles predictable right-wing fare, like Dinesh D’Souza’s cinematic propaganda and the flop Democrats by African-American Trump supporters Diamond and Silk. While Hoaxed features appearances from conservative media regulars, like “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams, it also includes feminists. Toward the end of the film, Cernovich hints that he himself has propagated fake news, before pivoting away from a full-blown confession. It’s his swan song to internet fame. Or maybe, Cernovich says, he may produce one more movie. “My job is to help people,” he adds.

It’s impossible to trust anything Cernovich says. In the age of Trump, he has epitomized the concept of “bad faith actors”—media personalities who sully others’ reputations while expressing false outrage. During our conversation, Cernovich admits he has lied to reporters about receiving $50,000 a month in alimony from his ex-wife. Then he tells me he received $1.5 million in a divorce settlement. The only thing he stays consistent about is the source of his methods—a fact that he likely promotes to aggravate his opponents.

“[Reporters ask], ‘Dude, what’s your trick?’” Cernovich says. “I learned it from reporters. I learned it from them!” He points to the liberal nonprofit Media Matters, which exists to find dirt on conservative media organizations, and Andrew Kaczynski, aka “KFile,” formerly of BuzzFeed and now with CNN. Kaczynski helped  build his career doxxing Democrat Anthony Weiner’s sexting partner, Sydney Leathers, and recirculating controversial statements made by Rand Paul and Mitt Romney.

Since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the online liberal activism group Sleeping Giants has taken this to the next level, successfully targeting companies that have paid to advertise on conservative media outlets.

“The left wrote the rules,” Cernovich says. “I’m just holding them to their own rules. I would be happy to call a truce, but they never would.” Cernovich points to liberals who still have jobs after scandals, like MSNBC’s Reid, NBC’s Brian Williams, who lied about events he saw as a war reporter, and ESPN’s perennial naughty tweeter Keith Olbermann.

“Mike Cernovich’s greatest accomplishment is that he’s turned everyone on Twitter into Mike Cernovich,” says Jon Levine, media critic for The Wrap. “Everything is weaponized, context is dead, apologies are not taken at face value but used as a scalp to encourage more trolling. This behavior is prevalent on all corners of English-language Twitter. Those who rightly criticize his bad faith are often guilty of the same behavior.”

Cernovich didn’t always care about politics. After attending Pepperdine law school, the 40-year-old Kewanee, Illinois, native wrote a legal blog in the mid-2000s. He wanted to earn a living as a writer, but who reads legal blogs? He rebranded himself as a pickup-artist guru after his 2011 divorce, dispensing advice on a website called Danger and Play. It spawned a self-published book and meetups with fans, where Cernovich taught men dating techniques. During 2015’s lead-up to the presidential election, Cernovich pivoted to Trumpism because he thought, The guy’s gonna win.

“Then people started arguing with me,” Cernovich says. “I got sucked into it and here I am.”

“Do you regret it?” I ask.

“Absolutely. My life was great. If I could go back to a blog that 30,000 people read, I would go back to it. It was a great life. [What’s happened since] has raised my profile, but not in a way that’s fun for me.”

As we speak, Cernovich is tweeting about how Christopher Columbus was a “Stalin-like murderer.” Shauna, of Persian descent, says her husband wanted to alienate the racists who had gravitated toward him. Cernovich may just be manipulating the media and segments of the public again to reposition himself. The right-wing online ecosystem where Cernovich blossomed has shifted since Trump took office. Alex Jones has been booted from all social media platforms. Breitbart’s traffic has cratered. And although her previous stunts went viral, Laura Loomer, after melting down during Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s September 2018 appearance before a Congressional committee, failed to break through the Trump-dominated news cycle.

Cernovich’s enterprise nearly collapsed in the wake of “Pizzagate.” Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, he helped promote a wild conspiracy theory alleging that Hillary Clinton and other liberals operated a child-sex ring beneath Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. After a random Pizzagate believer drove to the nation’s capital from North Carolina and shot up the restaurant with an assault rifle in December 2016, Cernovich claimed his boosting of the nutty conspiracy was just “hashtag surfing”—tweeting with the Pizzagate hashtag to promote himself.

Nobody believed this. The machine he’d built was foundering. And then Cernovich changed the narrative surrounding himself in November 2017 by leaking to BuzzFeed documents alleging Conyers had sexually harassed employees. After verifying the information, BuzzFeed published an explosive, widely circulated story. John Conyers resigned. The media went into a tizzy, wondering how the Pizzagate conspiracy blogger had received information so powerful it helped end the 52-year career of a Democratic congressional lion.

“That’s story arc!” Cernovich says. “It became a different storyline—‘Oh shit people talk to him.’ Everyone’s in a movie of their own creation. You have to be in the mindset of, ‘What’s my storyline?’ You’re a character in a Tom Wolfe novel. What would this character in a Tom Wolfe novel do? He’d be a journalist.”

Referencing a 2017 book on the Trump-Steve Bannon partnership, Cernovich continues, “The reason I leaked it to BuzzFeed was because I read Devil’s Bargain, and Bannon said he would leak to the New York Times. I think [BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief] Ben Smith is the only person in media I respect. He understands media—or new media anyway.”

Says The Wrap’s Jon Levine, “Things like James Gunn or [Cernovich’s] involvement with the John Conyers story showed that he could still move the needle on national news in ways most of the others around him can’t.”

Mike Cernovich Head Shot

After my breakfast with the Cernovich family, we drive to Disneyland for a visual reminder of the scale pertaining to one of his top takedowns. Shauna, who holds a Disneyland annual pass, jokes, “I’m Orange County, ride or die!” Around 6 P.M., her husband stops outside California Adventure and gazes at the hulking orange and silver tower housing the Guardians of the Galaxy ride.

“Crazy that a dad from Orange County took down a franchise that big,” I say.

“It looks like a cool ride!”

Earlier, waiting in line outside the park, Cernovich revealed he had experienced a revelation. To promote Hoaxed, he planned to apologize for Pizzagate. He’s thinking of saying something like, “I never really thought it through.” He would issue the apology around the time of the film’s release.

“Is that a genuine apology?” I ask.

“Nothing is genuine in this world.”

Mike Cernovich with More Fire

Mike Cernovich’s Most Notorious Hoaxes

Like a cheesy pop star, Mike Cernovich has reinvented his media persona multiple times. Whenever the role has grown too controversial, he has distanced himself, hoaxing his audience into believing he was never involved in his previous hoax. Here’s a timeline of his most notorious roles and disavowals.

Pickup Artist or Men’s Rights Activist?

Cernovich first came to prominence teaching dweebs how to get laid on a blog called Danger and Play. Whereas books like The Game and other pickup-artist guides recommended negging, Cernovich posted advice that read like Men’s Rights activist Reddit threads. “Choking works because it’s a show of dominance,” he wrote. “Women only want to have consensual sex with men they know could rape them.” His current stance? He was writing a satiric Fifty Shades of Grey for straight men and only deleted his blog because he knew liberals would take his words out of context.

 Proud Boy or Fellow Traveler?

Cernovich told me associating with white nationalists is “really retarded,” but at his Night for Freedom Party (aka “Mike Cernovich’s Deploraball”) in January 2017, Proud Boys and Vice Media founder Gavin McInnes gave a speech, saying, “If going outside tonight and beating the shit out of radicals means I’m a radical, then I’m a revolutionary.”

Pizzagate Conspiracist or “Hashtag Surfer”?

Near the end of the 2016 election, right-wing Twitter celebrities began promoting a theory that Hillary Clinton operated a child-sex ring beneath Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizza joint. “Pizzagate is not going away, this story will be huge!” Cernovich tweeted. A few months later, a conspiracy believer shot up the restaurant. At which point, Cernovich denied ever promoting the theory, claiming he was just hashtag surfing. “Hashtag surfing,” he explains, “is where if there’s a big trending hashtag, you just post what you want. Just like when it’s International Men’s Day, and women tweet with the hashtag, they’re not supporting International Men’s Day—they’re promoting their message.”

BuzzFeed Source or Media Hoaxer?

After the Comet Ping Pong shooting, Pizzagate conspiracy theorists were forced underground. But in November 2017, Cernovich fed BuzzFeed legitimate documents alleging longtime Democratic congressman John Conyers had sexually harassed female employees. By providing legit material to a news outlet, Cernovich says he was hoping to manipulate journalists into thinking, “Oh shit, what happens if the Pizzagate guy has actual stories?” Cernovich was right that BuzzFeed couldn’t resist the bait, and he’s flourished ever since.

Moral Crusader or Opportunist?

Cernovich sees pedophiles everywhere. After his BuzzFeed rebound, Cernovich published Disney director James Gunn’s old jokes about pedophilia. A few months earlier, Disney had canned conservative comedian Roseanne Barr for an offensive tweet. The corporation caved after Cernovich’s maneuver, firing Gunn from the third segment of the billion-dollar Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. “I was bringing awareness to the international pedophile crisis,” says the man who once gave tips on choking women. Or, as he later says, he was just holding the left to their rules. If the left would stop dragging up conservatives’ past, Cernovich claims he would call a truce. Who knows if that’s true?

Penthouse Travel Tips: Up and Away

Instead of taking the obvious vacation to Florida or Hawaii this year, how about traveling to the land of Picasso and Penélope Cruz? Spain has more to offer than most places you could visit, and whether you’re after somewhere to park your ass with a stack of books or see a place in its entirety from behind the wheel of a rental car, here are some of the finest hotels you can stay if you’re heading anywhere between Gijón and Gibraltar.

El Palauet, Barcelona

The Catalonian capital is one of the most famous cities in the world, and prompts eye-rolling in just about anyone with a friend who visits when they return home claiming their new favorite city is “Bah-theh-low-nah.” But just ignore this and treat yourself to a few days of R&R at El Palauet.

Housed within an art nouveau building constructed in 1906, El Palauet features a rooftop spa that overlooks the vast city, and each suite is assigned its own personal assistant, so that you can take the brainwork out of your trip and hand the reins over to a local who knows the mean streets and can happily set you on your way, no matter what you’re after.

Rooms start at around $600 per night. elpaulet.com

Belmond La Residencia, Mallorca

For the ultimate middle finger to the outside world, turn your cell phone off and travel to an island. There are several to choose from, but Mallorca is undisputedly one of the lushest spots to let your winter woes melt away.

It’s reported that the nightstands at Belmond La Residencia don’t have adjacent power outlets, so you can’t charge your phone next to your bed (in other words, let the damn thing go dead and get some sleep). If this is the kind of vibe you’re seeking, then look no further. This place is more like a small village than a hotel, with just about every amenity you can imagine (including daily treats delivered to your room, which you may not be inclined to leave). Get one of the staff to give you a tour when you arrive, because it’s that kind of place.

Rooms start at around $500 per night. belmond.com

Hotel Londres Y De Inglaterra, San Sebastian

A visit to Basque Country will blow you away with its beauty any time of the year. While the weather can be temperamental, one look at the spectacular coastline backed by mountains and it’s easy to forgive an afternoon shower. Plus, you can always hit a café and drink large amounts of wine like Jake in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

Hotel Londres puts its best foot forward not trying to be anything more than old-school luxury in one of the most stunning settings imaginable, smack-dab on San Sebastian beach, where Europeans go to escape the more popular vacation destinations. Eschew fancy spa treatments, kick off your shoes, and enjoy the laid-back atmosphere, matched only by the unparalleled service.

Rooms start at around $160 per night. hlondres.com

Burt Reynolds

The death of Burt Reynolds on September 6 marked the end of an era, not only in American film but American masculinity. Since then, countless tributes have commemorated the actor’s legacy, but we decided to go back — way back — to the interview Reynolds did for this magazine in 1972, conducted by radio personality Fred Robbins, a close friend of the actor. At the time, Reynolds was appearing in the play The Rainmaker, and Deliverance had just hit theaters (though here there’s hardly mention of the film, which became a huge hit, and is still considered one of the best action movies of all time). Reynolds had also been guest hosting The Tonight Show for Johnny Carson, and, most notably, Cosmopolitan just published the now infamous photo of the actor lying naked on a bear skin rug.

Penthouse’s nine-page exposé painted a portrait of Reynolds, then 36, that people may no longer recognize — candid, virile, and full of confidence and excitement for a career that was about to explode. Here are our favorite naughty bits.

If the enthusiasm of the audience during your current tour of The Rainmaker is anything to go by, you seem to have experienced a new surge of popularity following your nude centerfold in Cosmopolitan.

Helen Gurley Brown is certainly the best businesswoman in the world. She printed 400,000 extra copies. Hell, if she’d known what was going to happen, she’d have printed two million extra copies. The reason it sold is that women have a lot better sense of humor than men give them credit for, and they’re tired of coming home and looking at Penthouse and Playboy pictures with all that cleavage and having the husband say, “Why the hell don’t you look like that, Martha?” — after they’ve had eight babies, you know. So it was a chance to take something and stick it in the husbands’ ears. Jesus, to be a part of that was a terrific fun thing. But it could have been a disaster. I could be playing to empty theaters right now.

A lot of women were disappointed that they didn’t see the whole thing.

Yeah. I got a lot of that, too. But I judged it by the way I judge photographs of women — to me, the sexiest thing is something that leaves a little to the imagination. Plus the fact that I wanted to be funny. And I’ve never found anything funny about a man’s cock.

Were you asked in the beginning to do it completely nude?

We tried both ways. They took a million pictures, and I’m sure, right now, in the underground in New York, there’s a lot of pictures circulating of me with everything hanging out. It was a cold day. I’m sorry they got those.

One female reaction was that the picture wasn’t exciting because it’s a soft picture — no athletic motion, with muscles stretched taut.

You and I both know that what turns you on may not turn me on, etc. I’m sure that’s just as true with women.

A lot of women are turned on by fat chubby little guys. A lot of women are turned on by jocks. Very few are turned on by the Charles Atlas muscle-bound egg-shaped guy — mostly because most of them are so busy working on their bods, they never have time to work on their personalities. I think it’s sexier if it’s a face you recognize because then you fantasize all kinds of things. Open a magazine, and there’s Ursula Andress or Raquel Welch or somebody in her underwear — you think, “Gee, that’s terrific. Never saw her in her underwear before.” And then you can conjure up all kinds of things. Probably the most stimulating thing to guys is to see somebody who doesn’t do that kind of thing ordinarily, I would think. If I see Raquel, I’m really not that turned-on, but if I open up a magazine and see Carol Burnett — that would turn me on. If a woman thinks she’s sexy, she is.

Were you surprised by the wild letters you got?

I didn’t expect to get thousands… I also got thousands saying it was fun and terrific, and “I’m glad you did it and my whole family loves you, and my grandmother loves you and my husband loves you” — you know I even got one from a chick who’s on a roller derby team and has it in her locker. The freaks’ letters were what you would imagine some guy with a raincoat beating off would write to some chick — downright sex letters: “I want to fuck your brains out,” etc. Where do you go from there?… A lot of them sent Polaroids of themselves in the nude. One girl from Canada sent me pubic hair wrapped in wax paper.

Wasn’t there one who papered her wall with the centerfold?

Yeah, she called up from Chicago and asked for, I guess, 500 magazines. It ended up costing her $700. She papered her entire bedroom with them… I had a funny experience a few years ago with two girls named Franny and Zoey, still very good friends of mine, whom I ended up in the sack with after a telethon… I mentioned this sort of casually on the Tonight Show and I had a lot of letters signed “Franny and Zoey,” with photographs, too.

How many letters contained pubic hair?

Just the one. If it was ever mentioned on the air, I’m sure there’d be lots of bald broads.

You’ve been called the No. 1 sex symbol — Super Stud. Have you tried to analyze why you appeal to women?

First of all, I don’t think it’s true that I’m Super Stud. But I thank you. If I had to analyze why I think [women] are attracted to me, I would have to say it’s because most of them say to me, “I really don’t want to go to bed with that Cosmopolitan thing, I want to go to bed with you. You look sexy with your clothes on. I love your crazy personality.” I think it’s a related kind of attitude that women are attracted to.

The Playboy image of what a man should be I send up constantly. I mean, having a bunny decal on his glass says to me he ain’t gonna make out at all. If you have to go around saying “I am a stud,” then you ain’t.

I think women are attracted to a guy who doesn’t wear big belt buckles and talks with a deep voice and smoke Marlboros and say, “I’m tough.” They want a guy who is going to treat them like a lady and is going to respect them, and who likes women.

If it wasn’t you right now, which other guy would you say would fill the [sex symbol] image?

There are a lot of guys who would qualify, but who happen to be married, which makes it very difficult for them to go on a show and say the things that I say. Not that being married can stop you from being a sex symbol, because Paul Newman is married and he certainly is a sex symbol. Clint Eastwood, I think, probably could be because he has a tremendous sense of humor, as very few people know, mostly because Clint is a kind of recluse and prefers it that way. He’s a great-looking guy, a very physical guy — but he also happens to be very happily married and has just had a second baby.

Does it ever worry you that you might meet a chick who has seen the Cosmo thing and has fantasized all kinds of expectations that you’re now expected to live up to?

I’ve never worried about something like that. It’s probably one of the plusses for going out with starlets. They’re hoping for a three-star rating, so they [screw] your brains out. Knowing Hollywood, the way it is — everybody thinks everybody knows what everybody else is doing, so God knows you don’t want to be called a bad lay. If some chick had fantasized something about me, I think she would be terrific in the sack, just by the mere fact that she had fantasized about it.

How do you react toward the nudism trend in general?

I am not turned-on, quite honestly, by the nude look. To me, there is still nothing sexier than a great-looking broad in underwear. Also, I like to see a chick fully dressed but in one of those blouses where you can just see the nipples. That’s very sexy, but not if she’s got size 48s and the nipple is right around her bellybutton…

As far as society is concerned — society is going to go as far as we let it go. You can get some very nice, polite people in a room… and all of a sudden these people turn into animals. I don’t want to be involved in a situation where every night you go to somebody’s house and jump everybody’s bones. That’s not my idea of a lot of fun. I enjoy the hunt.

Are we in the U.S. catching up with other countries in permissiveness?

No, we’re not anywhere near Denmark in terms of pornography — nor Amsterdam, which is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but has a great red-light district. If we had a great red-light district in New York it would make it possible to walk down Sixth Avenue without getting tripped every other store. I think we’ve got to be able to have pornography in one specified section of town. A lot of freaks run over there and get those magazines, run home and jack off, and then they don’t attack anybody. It seems to me that that would release a little pressure.

There has been pornography around ever since I can remember — playing cards and those funny little Dick Tracy magazines. The problem is that it’s done in such bad taste. I think you can just about do anything if you do it with taste. If you walk down a street with your kid and there’s some broad holding her tits in a guy’s mouth, that’s not too cool.

Your kid’s nine years old and he says: “What is she feeding him, Daddy?” Why not have a store where it just says what it is on the outside and that’s all, and all the goods are hidden inside?

Similar to the shops in Hamburg, Germany — which are like markets, and you can go in and buy whatever you want with no sweat?

And the women don’t give you that funny look when you buy them, either. “What would you like, sir? 19-inch vibrator? Wonderful.”

What’s the sexiest thing you’ve ever done?

Probably the sexiest moment I’ve ever had was when I met a lady I’ve never seen since. I was on a ship, on a cruise, to Ensenada — and no one was paying any attention to her, probably because she had the biggest breasts I’ve ever seen in my life. They were so big that they intimidated everyone. Also, she had a belligerent attitude to everyone. She was about six feet tall — incredible-looking broad… She was reading something like Milton’s Paradise Lost, sitting on this sun deck, and I happened to look over at her, and she dropped her leg, and she had no underwear on. She was reading this very heady book but looking over the top of the book at me… So I walked over and sat down and said: “Any woman that looks like you and has a body like yours has heard every line that’s ever been said, so I’m just going to say it straight out… I want to fuck your brains out.”

She said: “What took you so long?” And she closed the book and we left and we never came out of that room for 48 hours. I never saw her again but that is one of the things in my life that I’ll remember always. She was a teacher at a college, but she wouldn’t tell me which one. In the room, she said: “Look, I don’t want to know your name. I don’t want you to know mine. This is strictly physical.” And of course, it ended up not being, because we talked about so many things, got into so many areas. I’ve often wondered if she ever sees me on television.

You’re a Penthouse subscriber, aren’t you? What do you like about it?

It’s much more honest than Playboy. It is a magazine totally devoted to studs, and it doesn’t try to be anything else. It has a fun kind of crazy, English sense of humor about it — which I think is the best sense of humor in the world. They were the first ones to have pubic hair, and it was so ridiculous not to before. I personally don’t think it’s as sexy as seeing pubic hair behind a pair of pants, but that is my own fetish. I just found the magazine to be… pardon the pun, beautifully laid out. Penthouse girls just look like they think their bodies are so beautiful… I don’t know whether the photographer happens to be a freak like me, or just happens to get the right girls, but that’s the right idea.

Needles and Trains: An Interview with Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh broke through big-time with the publication of Trainspotting in 1993. The book shocked readers with its raw depiction of young, working-class Scottish friends shooting heroin and searching for kicks in an oppressive, Thatcher-era U.K. When the 1996 movie came out, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole accused it of glorifying drug use and celebrating moral depravity. Twenty-five years, 15 books, and five movie adaptions later, the Edinburgh-raised Welsh is still doing his thing. His new novel, Dead Men’s Trousers, which revisits the Trainspotting crew as middle-aged men, is as power-packed as his debut.

Penthouse talked to Welsh about his literary career, his punk bands, and his new book.

You began as a musician, right?

It wasn’t much, really. Just a lot of fucking around. With the punk scene in London, everybody wanted to be in a band. It was just kids playing instruments and writing songs and making noise. I got involved because I was interested in music, but there wasn’t a lot going on in Edinburgh. Not a lot of people interested in making music. A bunch of people who were pretty much the same as me. We were on the scene. We used to congregate around these bars. Scotland was just like any other place.

I started off playing guitar and kind of sang, but I wasn’t a good guitarist and I wasn’t a good singer. I switched to bass and I wasn’t a good bass player. If we had a good drummer, I could never keep time with him. It’s like if you play soccer. I’m the kind of guy that wants to play in the World Cup. I don’t want to play in the pub league. As a musician, I wanted to play in the Hollywood Bowl.

I came to the conclusion that if you wanted to make an impact, you have to be good at it. I always wanted to do something artistic and make that impact. The music was for pure enjoyment, but it wasn’t reaching anybody. In a way, it was just about trying to imitate the music that I liked. Eventually, I switched to writing, and here we are. The creativity was there — I was just trying to find the right vehicle for me.

What made you leave Edinburgh in 1978?

We heard about the punk scene in London and I finally went down there. Meeting people, going to gigs, doing stuff together. I was in a couple of punk bands with a couple of friends. I was always fucked up and got kicked out of a lot of bands. It was because of that that I never really played music professionally. I could never quite get it to come out how I wanted it to.

I was lucky because my auntie was down there. She doted on me. It was like a second home for me. I was spoiled in a way. It wasn’t like I was living on the mean streets of London, squatting and the like. It gave me a way to go out and get involved with the bands. It was always a collaboration, and I was always the person that people wanted to collaborate with. I had a lot of ideas. I wasn’t very capable musically, but my ideas were strong. I used to write ballads. It was stories set to music. That was how I became a writer. Writing ballads and eventually getting rid of the music.

What did music mean to you back then?

When you grow up in Scotland, it’s a very political culture. Music is such an emotional thing. It made me want to express myself. That’s why I started playing in bands in the first place and eventually started writing. Music is about beautiful songs and these amazing principles. It goes through this whole range of human emotions. It reflects on the cultural ideas and beauty of the people who are making it. That is very important, from my point of view.

It’s interesting because technology now takes away a lot of these things, and that kind of takes the barriers down. You can have concepts and ideas and make them a reality. It’s so much easier to realize your ideas and get them out there than it was back when I wanted to do it. If I was a kid now, I probably would be involved in something like that because of the technology.

Do you have a favorite artist?

David Bowie is obviously the main influence for my generation. What he did is make a road map of what’s cool. It wasn’t just entertainment and good music — he really kind of liberated us all. He got me into the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop. He got me into soul and more. He shared his enthusiasm. By sharing his life experiences in his music, he defined what my generation and culture has become. He influenced punk rock and performance rock — even Lady Gaga and Madonna and all that. He’s a huge influence on me and who I am.

Can you talk about the role of music in your books?

I try to replicate how music sounds in my writing — with the characters and how they interact with others. The characters kind of come alive through the music. I have playlists for certain characters. In my writing, I always wanted to have the impact music had on me. Particularly in the early days. The characters make all kinds of references to music in these books. I would make playlists and play these songs as I wrote, and it really helped to bring it all together.

What’s it been like to branch out into musicals and plays?

I did a musical called Blackpool with Vic Godard of the band Subway Sect, and also Creatives with [composer] Laurence Mark Wythe in Chicago. It’s just fantastic to condense the ideas that you have into a musical. Nobody can be an expert in every art, but the idea is kind of independent of form. When you realize the idea can take shape and flourish as a film, a novel, a play, or even a musical, it’s amazing. If you can find someone to collaborate with that can help you to bring that idea to life, it’s great.

The nature of your books has made you a literary rock star. Ever feel pressure to live up to the hype?

Everybody wants to get fucked up with me. They give me drugs and drinks all the time. When I go out to the clubs, everybody always wants to party with me. When I was younger it was awesome, but then I got a bit fed up with it. It’s always nice to be asked to party and the like, but sometimes you don’t feel up to it.

What are you most proud of in your career?

I think when I look back, it’s about meeting people. When you’re under a lot of pressure, you don’t always come across as good as you can. It’s very rare that I’ve acted like a total asshole. That’s the thing I’m most proud of. It’s quite easy to be standoffish or whatever, but I’ve always tried to make time for people. And in my position, it’s not always easy to do that. I didn’t always deal with that so well, but I’ve gotten a lot better. These are the things that stick with you, and these are the things that define who you are.

Any regrets in life or professionally?

Not really, no. I don’t regret the things I’ve done, but sometimes it’s the things that I haven’t done. There are places I haven’t traveled to and stuff of that nature. Certain things that I would have liked to get involved in. But other than that, I don’t really have any regrets. I’m not the kind of guy that’s big on that. You can only be the way you are. I don’t consciously try to get attention with comments and whatnot. I just fire things out, and that’s the way it comes out.

What music are you listening to today?

I started DJing again. I listen to a lot of techno and house. It’s a weird thing — most of the guys into DJing house music are older. All these old-school house parties, it’s kind of crazy. It’s nice to do that again. I’m usually one of those guys at the club listening to the music all night.

Who’s your favorite Trainspotting character?

I think maybe Spud or Tommy because they’re basically good guys. Renton is probably okay, a decent guy. Sick Boy is very self-centered, egotistical, and manipulative. Begbie in his own way is as well.

How do you keep all the story and character timelines straight with your overlapping books?

I’ve had the same editor for a long time. He knows a lot of my stuff very well and he’ll tell me, “Well, this guy actually died.” It becomes like the Marvel Universe. You see characters basically as tools to do their job. You think, Oh, I want to write this around this theme, and I’ve got my toolbox that can help me do this. Sometimes you forge new tools and then you have to bring the other ones back, but you do create a universe and you have to be aware of what’s going on in it.

As soon as I finish a book, I’ve forgotten it in a month. I’m not really thinking about anything I’ve done previously, so sometimes I may get a little memory jog: Well, this guy’s been in this book. I’ll probably go back to the book and find out what happened to him. It’s just trying to remember and trying to sort of patch up where you’ve seen this character before, who their associates are, and relying on that as well to have some knowledge of it.

How did it feel to make the Trainspotting guys middle-aged?

I think you will see these guys changed. If Trainspotting was about friendship and betrayal, then Dead Men’s Trousers is kind of a redemption thing. They’re looking back on their lives, not necessarily with regret, but looking back at the mistakes they made and trying to get some kind of resolution, some kind of redemption. They’re still very optimistic in a certain way, but it doesn’t quite work out the way they really want it to. The book has matured in a lot of ways — I’m much more mature and responsible now — but these guys aren’t quite that way. If people are mature, it gets a bit boring. They’re more persons of their own vanities and vices.

Dancing Mania Vol. 1

The first one I remember seeing in person was the Macarena, which showed up out of nowhere and conquered my elementary-school dances swiftly and without mercy. My classmates and I were powerless against it. Even if you hated it, you had no choice but to join in. Today, things are basically the same: If you have kids, odds are one of them has done the Dab or the Floss since you started reading this.

But none of our modern moves are anything compared to the original dance mania — a literal compulsion that swept Europe, off and on, throughout the Middle Ages. For reasons nobody has ever been able to fully explain, large groups of people were suddenly taken with the desire to start dancing, and nothing could compel them to stop. People danced for so long their feet bled. Their ribs broke. Many died from their injuries. All the while screaming in pain and begging for someone, anyone, to figure out what was going on.

The earliest recorded instance of what became known as “the dancing plague” dates back to eleventh-century Germany, when a priest grew angry at a group of people partying outside his church during mass and cursed them to dance without stopping for an entire year as punishment. (They did.) A couple of centuries later, a group of some 200 revelers in the Dutch city of Maastricht started compulsively dancing across a bridge, until said bridge collapsed and drowned them all. Similar spontaneous episodes were recorded in France, Switzerland, and across the Holy Roman Empire.

The most well-known — and best-documented — case of dancing mania, however, took place in the city of Strasbourg (today part of France) in 1518. On a summer’s day, one Frau Troffea stepped out into the middle of the street and, apropos of nothing, started cutting a rug. She kept going and going like that for several days in a row, and it wasn’t long before others joined in. Within a week, there were nearly three dozen people added to the fray, and within a month, roughly 400 people were out dancing in the streets. Local authorities were understandably confused and decided that the only cure was to let the dancing work itself out naturally. They shuffled the dancers into empty guild halls and even hired bands of pipers and drummers to give the event some semblance of normalcy. It didn’t work. Over time, the dancers wore themselves out, and dozens died as a result of strokes, heart attacks, and all-around exhaustion.

It bears repeating that this isn’t an urban legend. Dancing mania has been documented by many reputable sources, and the Strasbourg epidemic, in particular, is supported by local sermons, doctors’ notes, and even contemporaneous writing from its city council. “These outbreaks,” agreed historian John Waller, “represent a real and fascinating enigma.” There were common threads, too. Nearly all of the outbreaks, for instance, took place near one of two rivers: the Rhine and the Moselle. And the dancing plague had all but disappeared by the seventeenth century. So what the hell was going on?

People danced for so long their feet bled. Their ribs broke. Many died. All the while screaming in pain and begging for someone, anyone, to figure out what was going on.

Different theories have circulated over the years. One held that the victims had eaten a particular kind of mold known to grow on rye stalks, which can induce spasms and hallucinations in whoever eats it. Another suspected that the dancers were members of a cult. Another still came out of Italy, where those afflicted were thought to have been bitten by the same species of poisonous wolf spider, causing them to dance in an effort to prevent the venom from fatally mixing with their blood.

These days, historians like Waller believe the dancing plague was actually the result of a trance state, which is known to occur in people exposed to extreme stress, as was certainly the case for the poor, starving, and chronically ill citizens of Strasbourg. At the same time, these populations believed in supernatural forces that could possess their bodies and, say, force them to dance uncontrollably. Put those two factors together and you’ve got a recipe for trouble. It wasn’t until the Reformation came along and challenged Catholicism that the dancing plague suddenly died out, “because the supernaturalist beliefs that fed it gradually disappeared.”

The Macarena doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?

Building Character

Fallout 76 (Bethesda Softworks, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

If there’s any series that can put a silver lining on the mushroom cloud of a nuclear apocalypse, it’s the Fallout role-playing games, which mix zany anything-goes gameplay with 1950s atom-bomb hysteria in an open world crawling with mutant nightmares. This sequel is the largest and zaniest yet, offering a new option for postapocalyptic survival: multiplayer cooperative gameplay.

You are a survivor of Vault 76, a subterranean prepper community, tasked with scouring the surface realm for supplies 25 years after the mushroom clouds have cleared. Although lone-wolf types can still trek solo, you’ll find the game easier with a little help from your non-mutated friends. Squad up online with three fellow vault dwellers to undertake missions for the survival of your colony.

While previous entries let you explore irradiated versions of New England and Las Vegas, Fallout 76 unleashes players in a region that’s wild even by today’s pre-nuked standards: West Virginia. The state’s mountains, towns, and landmarks have been faithfully reproduced in post-nuked form and split into six regions. Each landscape crawls with nuclear horrors: cannibalistic humans, radioactive bears, dragon-size bats, and beasts inspired by backwoods folklore. A new combat system lets you confront foes in real-time as in a typical first-person shooter while using the tactical elements of the slower-paced past installments. In other words, you can play tactically or just shoot shit.

The game packs a broad payload of guns and ammo, from muzzle-loading pistols to flesh-broiling laser cannons. Hard-core role-playing fans can tweak hundreds of character-development perks. You’ll build a unique survivor and assemble settlements that you can manage with an iron fist. Eventually, you and your squad will find nuclear codes that unleash atomic hellfire on enemy settlements, perpetuating the cycle of mutually assured destruction and spawning more powerful mutants in the contaminated hellscape of West Virginia.

Hitman 2 (Warner Bros., PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Peer through the heightened senses of Agent 47, the genetically-bred assassin, in this sequel that accurately portrays the trials and triumphs of the world’s second-oldest profession. You’ll need to sniff out betrayals, pack the right tools, and choose the path of least resistance as you track down six high-profile targets around the world while trying to avoid early retirement yourself.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War Definitive Edition (Warner Bros., PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Set between events depicted in those Hobbit movies and Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On,” Shadow of War gives you free rein to stymie the evil Sauron’s APB for the One Ring. Spared foes hold grudges and use your own tactics against you, so don’t be afraid to use scorched-Middle Earth tactics. This deluxe edition includes four massive expansions and a trove of bonus loot.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Ubisoft, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey transplants its scowling antihero from the recent past to ancient history. You’re once again tasked with taking out historical figures as efficiently as possible, except now the character-building aspects of the series are ramped up to match the Hellenistic hyperbole of Greek mythology. Forge relationships and build a myriad of abilities both real and mythical.

Underworld Ascendant (505 Games, PC)

The spiritual sequel to Ultima Underworld, one of the most celebrated role-playing games of all time, Ascendant takes the tropes of ye olde dungeon-crawling adventures and adds the play-it-your-way style of modern sandbox games. Your mission is simple: sojourn to the darkest depths of a dungeon and slay a great evil with any combination of swords, sorcery, and/or sneakiness.

The Gospel According to Social Distortion

The first was when I heard rumors of lead singer Mike Ness sending signed photos of himself sucking his own dick to girls he’d slept with, and I, like a worshipper of a golden calf, spread those rumors farther, regardless of their validity, blinded by their garish allure.

The second time I denied Social Distortion was when I went all in on being a Murder City Devils fan, reveling in the small differences as I pretended that a tattoo of the number 13 surrounded by flames was less corny than flaming dice, and that pomade as a tool for dishevelment was superior to using God’s cream to shape a beautiful pompadour — as though chaos was somehow better than carpentry. Looking back, I hate myself.

The third denial was, on the surface, the most benign. But if we subscribe to the ecclesiastical notion that indifference to God, not rebellion, is the worst sin, denial No. 3 was arguably the most insidious: I simply forgot about Social Distortion. Life got in the way, and I actually went a stretch without once thinking about America’s premier purveyors of hard-luck hairdo rock. For that, like Peter upon hearing the rooster crow after the Last Supper, I repent like a motherfucker.

Social Distortion — formed in 1978 in Orange County as a better-than-average punk band made distinctive by Ness’s strung-out, bummed-out vocal fry — is an easy band to hate and love in equal measure. An earnest cliché factory that made a personality out of cigarettes, without ever getting that sweet Tom Waits cachet, Social D makes tough-guy music for car nerds (except actual tough guys tend to prefer hardcore or, like, freestyle).

The band mainly appealed to the sort of guys who wanted to date girls who looked like Bettie Page but settled for girls with Bettie Page tattoos, and girls who wanted to date Ness but would leave with the drummer, any drummer. Most of the Social Distortion fans I grew up with just settled on racism and, eventually, death. I’m not better than any of these people; Social Distortion just made me want to be a badass, and I’m lucky enough to have moved to a town that rewarded posers.

Besides writing songs as catchy as anything by the Ramones, Social Distortion’s glory lies in the way it exists entirely outside of time. With their deep attachment to a historical period that never existed, they can’t help but be an eternal anachronism. Despite all the gestures to James Dean and Sun Studios, no prior band ever sounded like Social Distortion. They’re like time-traveling aliens trying to blend into 1950s society, but in 1994. Their closest counterpart in this devotion to an America that never was is Lana Del Rey. Or the Republican party.

Like the face of God and grilled cheese, Social Distortion never changed once they found their true voice on Prison Bound, a 1988 album of sexy junkie regret. If there was any evolution, it was just to become a more perfect, truer, and streamlined version of what they were before. They wear cowboy shirts over wifebeaters and play three-chord blues and countrified punk rock. That’s all they do, and if EDM or rap ever happened, they certainly weren’t made aware.

It’s a purity of vision that might lead some people, including some of their fans, to believe that Social Distortion is conservative. They are not. While their choice of Rolling Stones covers (“Back Street Girl,” “Under My Thumb”) probably won’t get Ness invited to any campus women’s studies groups, the man does love to punch Nazis.

When Ness was recently in the news for roughing up a MAGA-type show attendee (not necessarily a proponent of National Socialism but, for the purposes of this discussion, close enough) who took issue with the insufficiently racist stage patter, I was delighted. But those whose love of Social Distortion has never wavered poo-pooed the whole kerfuffle by saying, “Mike Ness has always punched Nazis.”

When your fans can be blasé about your penchant for knocking out cretins, you’re doing something right.

Not one to ignore portents, especially when delivered by rockabilly cherubs, I have turned my heart back unto the light of Social Distortion. I started talking about them to my friends (Mike Berdan from pig-fuck noise-rockers Uniform is a longtime fan, which… surprised me). I played all seven of their albums, in chronological order, in the bar I work at. The place filled up nicely for a Sunday night and even the Europeans tipped, a rare miracle I lay directly at the feet of our grease-stained troubadours. I even played Ness’s solo albums, which should suck, but instead rule.

I felt wild and free, a bad enough man with a heart of gold, whose hair was slicked if not growing back. I didn’t feel like I did the first time I heard Social Distortion — thank God — as I now know what I didn’t then: that I will, eventually, have sex. But there was a shadow of that electricity of desire and possibility just offscreen, like I was some sort of hero in some sort of movie while that music was playing.

And if the truth is that, like Saint Peter, I’m more a character actor in someone else’s noir, well, shit, at least some bad trouble and hard loving was going down for someone’s rockin’ daddy. I don’t know if the cock crowing three times at the end of JC’s final rave-up is analogous to last call at a dive bar on MacDougal Street, but it felt like a real cool time to be redeemed all the same.

Has Consent Culture Become A War on Sexuality?

But as we watch innocent, clumsy, unwanted sexual advances get lumped into the same category as rape, where women weaponize a movement — an important and much-needed movement — to garner sympathy and claim victimhood, I think about the real victims of sexual assault, not those claiming they were traumatized by a coworker trying to kiss them. Their stories are getting lost in the mayhem as the angry mob storms on, looking for the next high-profile target they’ll mark for eternal punishment.

Third-wave feminism has gained immense power, and where there is power, there is corruption. Women now have the power to ruin any man’s life with one accusation. It doesn’t have to be substantiated or proven. Due process no longer exists because we have trial by Twitter. Lately, it doesn’t matter what the “crime” is, there’s a demand for lifelong consequences. No questions are asked, and if you do dare to question, you are deemed an apologist and misogynist.

People, companies, brands are all operating on fear rather than reason. Women are believed automatically. I don’t think anyone should have that type of power based on their gender; just because we’re women does not mean we won’t abuse it. We have already seen examples of women using this movement for personal gain and revenge. Those despicable women are hurting all of us by doing this. They are damaging a much-needed awareness concerning a very real threat that women face every day.

Along with the excesses and overreaching — and the co-opting for selfish reasons — we’ve seen as the #MeToo movement expands and morphs, there’s also a viewpoint on human sexuality at work that I find naive and unrealistic. It’s a perspective that oversimplifies sexuality, rationalizing it, demanding it be neat and tidy.

Last month, the New York Times published an essay written by 30-year-old Courtney Sender for their Modern Love section. In the piece, Sender tells a story of a 24-year-old man she met on Tinder, a guy she invited over in the middle of a snowstorm and they ended up having sex. Her Tinder date complied with all the rules of modern politically correct culture, asking for consent before every touch or kiss, a self-policing that began to frustrate Sender and suggested to her that her date, though just six years younger, had learned some different rules when it came to hooking up. But she liked him. And thought things were going well, especially when, during their second hookup, he told her he’d cook her dinner the next time he saw her. That never happened. He stopped contacting her.

Though initially almost irked by her Tinder date’s consent questions, by the way it seemed to imply she wasn’t able to simply say no herself if she didn’t want to do something, she came around to his solicitous style, and viewed it as thoughtful. However — and this is the thrust of her essay — she had a big problem with being ghosted after two hookups.

“I was left thinking that our culture’s current approach to consent is too narrow,” Sender writes. “A culture of consent should be a culture of care for the other person, of seeing and honoring another’s humanity and finding ways to engage in sex while keeping our humanity intact. It should be a culture of making each other feel good, not bad.”

According to Sender (who should really be refraining from any sexual relationships due to her lack of maturity), she now thinks she is entitled to be cared about by whomever she chooses to have sex with. It’s like Gilead, except men are prisoners held captive by needy women. But wait a second. Haven’t women desired the freedom to hook up like men with no emotional strings attached? Haven’t we been partaking in Slut Walks and fighting for sexual liberation? Isn’t this what we wanted?

As Camille Paglia once wrote, “With freedom comes risk and responsibility.” This overbearing consent culture, with its excessive intervention into sexual relations between men and women (powered by a feminism calling not just for equity, for societal and legal fairness for women, but for women to be viewed as fragile victims-in-waiting, incapable of agency), begs the following question: Can casual hookup culture coexist with #MeToo and the new gospel of consent?

Toward the end of her piece, Sender writes: “I wish we could view consent as something that’s less about caution and more about care for the other person, the entire person, both during an encounter and after, when we’re often at our most vulnerable.”

Consent culture is not preventing rape, it’s not promoting healthy sexual relationships, and it’s not stopping sexual harassment in the workplace. In many ways, it’s ruining sex and confusing people. Rape is real, as is sexual abuse. Those things need to be addressed. But this oppressive, politically correct regime is like a religion, monitoring the way we express ourselves in all walks of life, but especially in the bedroom. The irony is that these so-called rules are coming from individuals who claim to be “progressives.”

An outlook on sexuality this stifling, rigid, and regressive is the furthest thing from enlightened and liberated. It is totally authoritarian. It’s a complete regression from the sexual freedom I enjoyed as a teenager and young adult in the late nineties and early aughts — the freedom that was fought for by second-wave feminists who were attempting to free themselves of the parental supervision and restrictive fifties culture that treated women as perpetual victims. How have feminists come full circle?

Sexuality is a part of every human’s life, and it’s vast, complex, and layered. Sometimes it’s gross, and sometimes it’s painful — emotionally and/or physically. Sometimes it’s like wading into a mosquito-infested swamp in the pitch-black darkness, and sometimes it’s like being catapulted into the fourth dimension with your soul connecting to your lover. We use sexuality to connect with people, to control people, to escape. Even to hurt. Some sex is illegal and completely immoral. Sexuality is an animal instinct. And it’s not always easy to navigate.

In our current puritanical climate, there’s an obsession with the articulation of boundaries during sexual interaction. There’s a call for defining every sexual nuance, but that’s impossible. Sexuality cannot be put into a perfectly wrapped box with a bow on top. It’s far too complicated for that.

Musical Jocks

One afternoon in July 1995, pitcher Jack McDowell gave the finger to his own fans at Yankee Stadium. McDowell was a great hurler — the 1993 American League Cy Young Award winner and a three-time All-Star — but he just didn’t have it on this day and got rocked for nine runs and 13 hits in four and 2/3 innings. As he left the mound after getting pulled, Black Jack — nicknamed for his gunslinger stare, the black look he gave hitters — got lustily booed. Feisty as ever, the tall, goateed McDowell raised his pitching arm and gave the crowd a one-finger salute. Then he twirled his hand around for good measure.

JACK ASS shouted the Daily News. THE YANKEE FLIPPER blared the New York Post. Later we learned music had something to do with McDowell’s poor performance. He’d been drinking into the wee hours with two music buddies, Mike Mills and Scott McCaughey of R.E.M.

A musician himself, Black Jack was friends with a number of rockers, including guys in the Smithereens and Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder. In fact, two years earlier he’d been partying with Vedder in New Orleans and got knocked out by a bouncer during an altercation. Vedder was arrested for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. Black Jack walked away with a black eye.

I’ll always associate those 1995 Yankees with music. I had just moved to New York City and it seemed like every other day there was a print, radio, or TV story about the chops of both McDowell and center fielder Bernie Williams, a classically trained guitarist.

By this point, Black Jack had toured with the Smithereens and had a new band, stickfigure, whose first album, Just A Thought, compiled memorable songs in a jangly, alternative-rock vein, written and sung by Black Jack. The band would go on to release three more solid albums, with bass from Mike Mesaros of the Smithereens and drums from Frank Funaro and later Josh Freese. (Funaro left to drum for Cracker; Freese had earlier drummed for Paul Westerberg of the Replacements.) As for Williams, who led the Yanks in hits, runs, and total bases that year, and batted .429 in the playoffs, he wasn’t trying to put out records at the time, but it was clear he kept up his skills. I watched him strum a couple Latin-inflected tunes during a local-news segment and thought, Damn, Bernie can play.

One of the greatest Yankees to ever don pinstripes, owner of four World Series rings, his No. 51 officially retired, Williams went at music hard as the new century began. Playing and composing songs in different styles (jazz, Latin, classical, pop), he released a pair of major-label albums, both of them cracking the U.S. jazz charts top-five. These records included collaborations with Bruce Springsteen, Rubén Blades, banjo wizard Béla Fleck, and other greats. After leaving professional baseball in 2006, Williams studied guitar and composition at a state university, and just a couple of years ago received a bachelor’s degree from the prestigious Manhattan School of Music.

Black Jack and Bernie — two of the most legit music-making sports stars we’ve ever seen. But who’s their competition? Who else has excelled as a professional athlete while also achieving musical excellence, as opposed to mere novelty-act notoriety?

I did some digging. I did some downloading. I listened to champion boxers Manny Pacquiao and Grammy nominee Oscar De La Hoya sing. I listened to tennis legend John McEnroe shred. I listened to Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza play drums and contribute “death growls,” as the liner notes put it, to a metal album by Black Label Society. I watched clips from Woodjock, a charity event organized by pitcher Jake Peavy where ballplayers get on a stage during spring training in Arizona and play music before Cactus League fans.

I watched Peavy do a fine cover of the Amos Lee song “Learned A Lot.” I discovered that former All-Pro offensive lineman Kyle Turley moved to Nashville and put out an album of “power country” songs. He shows off his pipes on a tune called “Another Whiskey.” I was impressed with the singing of retired All-Star shortstops Omar Vizquel and Ozzie Smith. Vizquel covers a Goo Goo Dolls song and Smith pulls off a goosebump-inducing (seriously) rendition of a Sam Cooke R&B classic, “Cupid,” on a record featuring warbling ballplayers titled Oh Say Can You Sing?

And then there’s retired pitcher Barry Zito. Last year he became the first former Cy Young Award winner to hit the Billboard charts when his self-released EP No Secrets briefly appeared on the Country and Americana/Folk top-40 lists. Zito’s been singing and playing guitar since 1999 and hopes to do more charting in the future.

But he doesn’t chart on my own totally subjective, no doubt faulty top-5 list!

Along with Bernie and Black Jack, these former ballers bring it, musically.

Mike Reid, a Pro Bowl defensive lineman for the Cincinnati Bengals in the 1970s, went on to forge a big-time music career, writing more than 30 top-ten country and pop hits, including two Grammy-winning songs for Ronnie Milsap, and Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” “Walk On Faith,” a single from his own 1990 debut album, climbed to No.1 on the Billboard Hot Country chart. Reid’s the only human in history to be inducted into both the College Football Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Wayman Tisdale, the late, great power forward from Oklahoma, a 1984 Olympian, retired in 1997 after a sterling NBA career to focus on music, his first love. A gifted soft-jazz bassist, Tisdale would put out eight albums before his death in 2009, with his 2001 album Face to Face climbing to the top of the Billboard contemporary jazz chart.

Tim Flannery, a San Diego Padres infielder for a decade (his best season at the plate was 1985, when he hit .281), spent seven years as third-base coach for the San Francisco Giants, and has World Series rings from 2010, 2012, and 2014. Okay, so he wasn’t an MLB superstar, but he’s a great singer-songwriter, and a fine guitarist. A bluegrass ace, he’s put out a dozen albums and played with Jackson Browne.

Alexi Lalas, the flame-haired Olympic and pro-soccer player turned commentator also points to music as his first love. In the late nineties, he sang and played guitar in a band, Gypsies, that toured Europe with Hootie and the Blowfish. Since then, the always-vocal Lalas has released three solo albums of tuneful rock ’n’ roll, the last in 2014.

Shaquille O’Neal and his rapping might seem to fit the description of a novelty act, but I vote legit. The Big Aristotle — league MVP in 2000, four-time world champion, 15x All-Star — has a way with words, as we know. And as an MC his low-voiced, mid-tempo flow makes for enjoyable listening. Check out his work with Phife Dawg on “Where Ya At?” Wait, you’re not buying it? Okay, how about this? He’s a better rapper than point guard Tony Parker.

Moreover, you can’t take this away from Shaq: His 1993 debut album, Shaq Diesel, went platinum. Boom.