Nothing Is Forbidden Fruit

The Boston Herald 

The 22-year-old came home from work sick the other day, collapsed on the family room couch, turned on Maury Povich then yelled for me. 'You've got to come here, Mom. Now. You're not gonna believe this.’

I didn’t. 

The subject of the day was phone sex. Phone sex, in case you don't know and I didn't until now, is the big thing for the '90s. It's safe. You can't get diseases from words. It's convenient. Wherever there's a phone, there's an opportunity. It's simple. You don't have to dress up or even wash up for the occasion. And it's trendy. Everyone is doing it.

Or so Povich tells us. 

Povich had as his guests on the show women who charge men big bucks for listening to and encouraging their sexual fantasies. These women were Dr. Joyce Brothers' sound-alikes. They all said they were helping society. They all said they were counselors of sorts, preventing AIDS, preventing perverts from acting out their bizarre fantasies, preventing all kinds of sexual abuse. I had the feeling, after listening to them, that I should send them a donation.

Talk is therapeutic, they said to themselves and to the audience. And the people in the audience agreed, nodding their heads and smiling in approval.

It was weird, to say the least. And a little disconcerting. I know a guy for whom phone sex was far from therapeutic. He thought it was. He thought it was harmless, too. He wasn't hurting anyone. He'd call from work and he'd call from home, but only on his lunch break and only when no one was around and he didn't have anything else to do. It was fun. Stimulating. It gave him something to think about. It added excitement to his life. He wracked up thousands of dollars in phone bills, bills he couldn't pay, bills he was forced to tell his wife about. She -- didn't think his habit was harmless at all. She thought it was sick. She thought he was sick. She got a lawyer. They got a divorce. All the women on Maury Povich said the reason men call them is because their wives don't understand them and they're not being satisfied at home.

This man's wife thought she understood him. She thought he was satisfied. She believed they were happy. How do you know? All the women on Maury Povich said there was absolutely nothing wrong with what they were doing. They were just making an honest living. They weren't hurting anyone. They were making men happy. The audience seemed to agree with all this. But I kept thinking of my friend and his wife and how if the women in the audience knew that the men they loved were dialing up women to talk to them about sex from their car phones, they might be a little less tolerant and amused.

That's the trouble with television, with life, with everything today.. Everything's on the table for everyone to try. There is no forbidden fruit because nothing is forbidden. Nothing is inherently wrong.

The only guy on the show who looked like Mr. Average, a Richard Dreyfuss type, was a little stocky and a little bald. He appeared to be so totally normal that it was unnerving to hear him talk about his favorite phone sex girl, Michelle, who, he said, really stimulated his fantasies. He talked about those fantasies and laughed about them, and so did the audience. He told about making the best use of his time when he was on the Santa Anna freeway, (now you know why people have those tinted windows, he joked) and about the importance of being ambidextrous. And the audience laughed harder. All this on a Wednesday afternoon. In the middle of school vacation week. On network TV.

I should lighten up, I suppose. It's all a big joke, isn't it? Maury Povich did invite a woman to dispute the claims that phone sex is harmless, but she looked ridiculous up there on the stage surrounded by six other people for whom anything goes. She was positioned to fail. The audience was too amused to support her. It's amazing what we laugh off, isn't it? We get our knickers in a twist over things like secondhand smoke but secondhand smut we wallow in.