'What's celebrity sex, Dad?' It was my 7-year-old son, who had been looking over my shoulder at my computer screen. He mispronounced 'celebrity' but spoke the word 'sex' as if he had been using it all his life. 'Celebrity six,' I said, abruptly closing my AOL screen. 'It's a game famous people play in teams of three,' I said, as I ushered him out of my office and downstairs into what I assumed was the safety of the living room.
abruptly：突然地，唐突地 usher：引导，接待
No such luck. His 3-year-old sister had gotten her precocious little hands on my wife's iPhone as it was charging on a table next to the sofa. By randomly tapping icons on the screen, she had conjured up an image of Beyonce barely clad in black leather, caught in a suggestive pose that I hoped would suggest nothing at all to her or her brother.
precocious：过早发育的，早熟的 conjured：召唤，想象 clad in：穿着
And so it went on this typical weekend. The eff-word popped out of TV programs we thought were friendly enough to have on while the children played in the next room. Ads depicting all but naked couples beckoned to them from the mainstream magazines scattered around the house. The kids peered over my shoulder as I perused my email inbox, their curiosity piqued by the endless stream of solicitations having to do with one aspect or another of sex, sex, sex!
beckon to：示意，打招呼 scatter：分散，传播 peer：凝视，盯着看 peruse：详细考察，精读 pique：刺激，生气
solicitation：恳求，教唆
When did the culture become so coarse? It's a question that quickly gets you branded as either an unsophisticated rube or some angry culture warrior. But I swear on my hard drive that I'm neither. My favorite movie is 'Last Tango in Paris.' I agree (on a theoretical level) with the notorious rake James Goldsmith, who said that when a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy. I once thought of writing a book-length homage to the eff-word in American culture, the apotheosis of which was probably Sir Ben Kingsley pronouncing it with several syllables in an episode of 'The Sopranos.'
brand as：标以记号 notorious：声名狼藉的，臭名昭著的 mistress：情妇 homage：尊敬，效忠 apotheosis：神话，崇拜
I'm cool, and I'm down with everything, you bet, but I miss a time when there were powerful imprecations instead of mere obscenity -- or at least when sexual innuendo, because it was innuendo, served as a delicious release of tension between our private and public lives. Long before there was twerking, there were Elvis's gyrations, which shocked people because gyrating hips are more associated with women (thrusting his hips forward would have had a masculine connotation). But Elvis's physical motions on stage were all allusion, just as his lyrics were:
obscenity：猥亵，淫秽 innuendo：暗示，讽刺 gyration：旋转，回转 allusion：暗示，提及 lyric：歌词，抒情诗
Touch it, pound it, what good does it do
There's just no stoppin' the way I feel for you
Cos' every minute, every hour you'll be shaken
By the strength and mighty power of my love
The relative subtlety stimulates the imagination, while casual obscenity drowns it out. And such allusiveness maintains social norms even as they are being violated -- that's sexy. The lyrics of Elvis's 'Power of My Love' gave him authority as a respected social figure, which made his asocial insinuations all the more gratifying.
allusiveness：引喻 asocial：自私的，不合群的 insinuation：暗示，暗讽 gratifying：悦人的，令人满足的
The same went, in a later era, for the young Madonna: 'Two by two their bodies become one.' It's an electric image because you are actively engaged in completing it. Contrast that with the aging Madonna trash-talking like a kid:
Some girls got an attitude
Fake t--- and a nasty mood
Hot s--- when she's in the nude
(In the naughty naked nude)
It's the difference between locker-room talk and the language of seduction and desire. As Robbie Williams and the Pet Shop Boys observed a few years ago in their song 'She's Madonna': 'She's got to be obscene to be believed.'
seduction：诱惑，魅力
Everyone remembers the Rolling Stones' 'Brown Sugar,' whose sexual and racial provocations were perfectly calibrated for 1971. Few, if any, people can recall their foray into explicit obscenity two years later with 'Star Star.' The earlier song was sly and licentious; behind the sexual allusions were the vitality and energy to carry them out. The explicitness of 'Star Star' was for bored, weary, repressed squares in the suburbs, with their swingers parties and 'key clubs.'
foray：侵略，攻击 sly：狡猾的 licentious：放肆的，放纵的 vitality：活力，生气 explicitness：直言不讳，明确性
weary：疲倦的，厌烦的
Just as religious vows of abstinence mean nothing without the temptations of desire -- which is why St. Augustine spends so much time in his 'Confessions' detailing the way he abandoned himself to the 'fleshpots of Carthage' -- violating a social norm when the social norm is absent yields no real pleasure. The great provocations are also great releases because they exist side by side with the prohibitions that they are provoking. Once you spell it all out, the tension between temptation and taboo disappears.
abstinence：节制，戒酒 fleshpots：奢侈的生活，物质享受
The open secret of violating a taboo with language that -- through its richness, wit or rage -- acknowledges the taboo is that it represents a kind of moralizing. In fact, all the magnificent potty mouths -- from D.H. Lawrence to Norman Mailer, the Beats, the rockers, the proto-punks, punks and post-punks, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Patti Smith, and up through, say, Sarah Silverman and the creators of 'South Park' -- have been moralizers. The late Lou Reed's 'I Wanna Be Black' is so full of racial slurs, obscenity and repugnant sexual imagery that I could not find one meaningful phrase to quote in this newspaper. It is also a wryly indignant song that rips into the racism of liberals whose reverence for black culture is a crippling caricature of black culture.
taboo：禁忌 magnificent：高尚的，壮丽的 racial slur：种族歧视 repugnant：讨厌的，矛盾的，敌对的 wryly：挖苦地，表情冷漠地
indignant：愤愤不平的，义愤的 crippling：造成严重后果的 caricature：漫画，讽刺画
Though many of these vulgar outlaws were eventually warily embraced by the mainstream, to one degree or another, it wasn't until long after their deaths that society assimilated them, still warily, and sometimes not at all. In their own lifetimes, they mostly existed on the margins or in the depths; you had to seek them out in society's obscure corners. That was especially the case during the advent of new types of music. Swing, bebop, Sinatra, cool jazz, rock 'n' roll -- all were specialized, youth-oriented upheavals in sound and style, and they drove the older generation crazy.
vulgar：粗俗的，平民 assimilate：吸收 warily：警惕地，谨慎地
These days, with every new ripple in the culture transmitted, commented-on, analyzed, mocked, mashed-up and forgotten on countless universal devices every few minutes, everything is available to everyone instantly, every second, no matter how coarse or abrasive. You used to have to find your way to Lou Reed. Now as soon as some pointlessly vulgar song gets recorded, you hear it in a clothing store.
mash：捣碎，调情
The shock value of earlier vulgarity partly lay in the fact that a hitherto suppressed impulse erupted into the public realm. Today Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and the rest have made impulsiveness a new social norm. No one is driving anyone crazy with some new form of expression. You're a parent and you don't like it when Kanye West sings: 'I sent this girl a picture of my d---. I don't know what it is with females. But I'm not too good with that s---'? Shame on you.
hitherto：迄今为止
The fact is that you're hearing the same language, witnessing the same violence, experiencing the same graphic sexual imagery on cable, or satellite radio, or the Internet, or even on good old boring network TV, where almost explicit sexual innuendo and nakedly explicit violence come fast and furious. Old and young, high and low, the idiom is the same. Everything goes.
Graphic references to sex were once a way to empower the individual. The unfair boss, the dishonest general, the amoral politician might elevate themselves above other mortals and abuse their power, but everyone has a naked body and a sexual capacity with which to throw off balance the enforcers of some oppressive social norm. That is what Montaigne meant when he reminded his readers that 'both kings and philosophers defecate.' Making public the permanent and leveling truths of our animal nature, through obscenity or evocations of sex, is one of democracy's sacred energies. 'Even on the highest throne in the world,' Montaigne writes, 'we are still sitting on our asses.'
amoral：与道德无关的 mortal：凡人，人类 oppressive：压迫的，沉重的，难以忍受的 defecate：澄清，净化
But we've lost the cleansing quality of 'dirty' speech. Now it's casual, boorish, smooth and corporate. Everybody is walking around sounding like Howard Stern. The trash-talking Jay-Z and Kanye West are superwealthy businessmen surrounded by bodyguards, media consultants and image-makers. It's the same in other realms, too. What was once a cable revolution against treacly, morally simplistic network television has now become a formulaic ritual of 'complex,' counterintuitive, heroic bad-guy characters like the murderous Walter White on 'Breaking Bad' and the lovable serial killer in 'Dexter.' And the constant stream of Internet gossip and brainless factoids passing themselves off as information has normalized the grossest references to sex and violence.
boorish：粗野的，粗鄙的 treacly：甜蜜的 counterintuitive：违反直觉的 murderous：凶残的，残忍的 gossip：小道传闻，八卦
Back in the 1990s, growing explicitness and obscenity in popular culture gave rise to the so-called culture wars, in which the right and the left fought over the limits of free speech. Nowadays no one blames the culture for what the culture itself has become. This is, fundamentally, a positive development. Culture isn't an autonomous condition that develops in isolation from other trends in society.
The JFK assassination, the bloody rampage of Charles Manson and his followers, the incredible violence of the Vietnam War -- shocking history-in-the-making that was once hidden now became visible in American living rooms, night after night, through new technology, TV in particular. Culture raced to catch up with the straightforward transcriptions of current events.
rampage：暴怒，乱闹
And, of course, the tendency of the media, as old as Lord Northcliffe and the first mass-circulation newspapers, to attract business through sex and violence only accelerated. Normalized by TV and the rest of the media, the counterculture of the 1970s was smoothly assimilated into the commercial culture of the 1980s. Recall the 15-year-old Brooke Shields appearing in a commercial for Calvin Klein jeans in 1980, spreading her legs and saying, 'Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.' From then on, there was no going back.
Today, our cultural norms are driven in large part by technology, which in turn is often shaped by the lowest impulses in the culture. Behind the Internet's success in making obscene images commonplace is the dirty little fact that it was the pornography industry that revolutionized the technology of the Internet. Streaming video, technology like Flash, sites that confirm the validity of credit cards were all innovations of the porn business. The Internet and pornography go together like, well, love and marriage. No wonder so much culture seems to aspire to porn's depersonalization, absolute transparency and intolerance of secrets.
pornography：色请文学 depersonalization：人性丧失
An essay like this typically ends with a set of prescriptions to solve the problem laid out in the previous paragraphs. But when the culture of vulgarity is produced by so many different factors -- commercial, economic, social, aesthetic -- there is no end in sight. One can only hope that, as happens so often in America, restless impatience with the status quo will carry the day and the pendulum will swing to the other side -- not toward censorship and repression but toward the sacred power of sexual self-assertion and outlaw imprecations.
prescription：医药处方 censorship：审查机构
From Miley Cyrus's brilliant, purposeful, repeated travesties of her wholesome image -- 'This is what culture is really about now,' she seems to be saying -- to songs by Eminem, Lady Gaga, Kanye West and others that express disgust with their own celebrity and wealth, pop culture itself seems to yearn for a time when obscenity and graphic sexual images were morally potent rather than merely titillating and profitable. So maybe there is hope, and we will find, after all, some relief from the relentless hum of casual coarseness and vulgarity.
travesty：歪曲，滑稽模仿 titillating：感到兴奋，被激发 coarseness：粗糙，劣等
Or maybe not. I'll still be keeping my finger on the off-button of whatever device I happen to be using in case my children happen by. Celebrity Six is a game I hope they never learn to enjoy, even as adults.