Purity In Midtown

As a reluctant subscriber to The New York Times' print edition, I'd like the answer to a simple question: When will its editors stop treating readers as if they're incapable of accepting "barnyard epithets" in its holy pages? Most magazines have long crossed that once sensitive Rubicon (about the same time Alan Alda was the elite's preferred "sensitive male"), including The New Yorker, Newsweek and Vanity Fair.

Here's a particularly absurd example, found in Peter Applebome's blowjob profile of liberal Republican Rep. Chris Shaysfavored by the Times because he's enlisted in the paper's crusade against House majority leader Tom DeLayon April 17. The delicate reporter writes: "Mr. Shays professed his independence and consistency [at a high school appearance in Fairfield, CT] and even used a common expletive beginning with 'bull' to scoff at any notion that he's changed his political complexion over time."

If Shays, shamefully a prime sponsor of the unconstitutional campaign finance reform that Congress enacted in 2002, can say "bullshit" to adolescents in his district, why can't the Times follow suit? Please spare me the "family newspaper" line of defense; that's as weird a notion as Frank Rich fairly predicting conservative Christians storming the Upper West Side to hold a mass book-burning of anything written by Seymour Hersh or Anna Quindlen.

(The Times, in fairness, isn't alone in this practice: The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and Washington Post, among others, all cling to the "bull" nonsense.)

The New Yorker, the weekly regularly showered with journalism awards, isn't so squeamish. Rebecca Mead, in an April 18 "Talk of the Town" piece reported on a recent book party for Jack Welch at the Four Seasons restaurant. According to Mead, media bigwig Barry Diller said of the former General Electric C.E.O., "I fucking adore him. He's the C.E.O of my company when I'm in the room with him."

One of the few excellent contributors to the Times' Sunday magazine is Walter Kirn, an author and journalist whose politics are unpredictable. A memorable Kirn essay in the Times (Sept. 12 of last year) was an exercise in self-flagellation for not retaining the fury after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in Manhattan. He wrote: "What pained me most, though, was how unfocused I'd grown, how frivolous, how silly, how distractible I hadn't stopped going out to fancy restaurants and sent the money I would have spent in them to a charitable fund for Afghan orphans. More damningly, I hadn't stopped watching MTV, which I was too old to be watching anyway. The brain cells in which I'd vowed to store the names of the heroes of United Flight 93 were occupied now by the face of Jessica Simpson."

I can't imagine Maureen Dowd or Bob Herbert writing anything remotely similar, although both still make fun of Bush's media-distorted advice to Americans that they try to keep as normal a lifestyle as possible, even with the sudden new threat. In other words, Kirn was being honest.

He also writes on occasion for GQ, and I'd bet Kirn wishes his April essay for that glossy would pass muster in the higher-profile Times. The article was headlined "The Forbidden Word," a hilarious and accurate description of the double standard of "vulgarity" in today's language. The "forbidden word," of course, is "cunt," and as Kirn notes it's the one obscenity that drives women insane. He says that "bitch" lost its effect a long time ago, when "women adopted it as a feminist boast." Likewise with "whore" and "slut," words that are slung around like "just so much ultra-modern hip-hop trash talk." As for insults aimed at men, say, "pencil dick," "cocksucker" and "prick," well, they're easy to shrug off.

But "cunt" is completely different. Kirn continues, "In a way, it's astonishing that that the word still works [to destroy a relationship or friendship with a woman]. After all, that's all it isa word. It doesn't bruise. It doesn't leave a mark. Yet women treat its deployment as tantamount to an act of nonphysical domestic violence. Use it and you have every right to fear a call to the police within five minutes."

Although I've never called a woman a "cunt" to her faceKirn's description of it as the "C-bomb" is irrefutablethe word is certainly bandied about in men-only groups, and I'm similarly puzzled by its toxic effect. (Truth be told, there is a longtime friend of mine who's impervious to slang about her private parts. One boozy night in the East Village more than a decade ago, a mutual buddy ribbed her by saying, "Hey, smarty-pants, is it true those dried-up beef curtains of yours are so skanky your husband holds his nose when he bangs you?" She grinned, kicked him in the nuts, and responded with a devastating comment about his lack of female companionship.) It's truly a linguistic phenomenon and is fully appropriate for discussion in the Times, which prides itself on presenting such philosophical questions.

Walter Kirn undoubtedly never proposed this essay to the Times, figuring why risk blowing a paycheck, but it's one more example that the editors of that particular paper just don't have any balls.

What's Brooks' Excuse?

Joe Torre and Times op-ed columnist David Brooks both issued very dumb comments last week. The Yankee manager, reacting to Gary Sheffield's skirmish with a fan at Fenway Park on April 14, said: "These people shouldn't be allowed to walk the streets, much less come to a ballgame. The sad part about it is, it's a handful of people who screw it up for everyone."

Torre's a good guy and I give him a pass for this lapse of judgment, considering that his team's in a rut (as of my deadline) and must be wondering, along with general manager Brian Cashman, whether after all these years it's worth working for George Steinbrenner. I can't stand the arrogant Sheffield, but he kept his temper mostly in check. As for the Sox fan, even though he behaved like a yahoo, if all unruly spectators were locked up, as Torre suggested, there'd be a boom in prison construction.

Brooks, in his April 17 column ("Public Hedonism and Private Restraint"), came off as either a nave parent or, far worse, an unreliable monitor of today's cultural environment. Citing no specific studies (which seem to change annually, anyway), Brooks gives a Doris Day heads-up to Times readers, claiming, incredibly, that "As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious."

Right. Brooks says, "Half of all high school boys now say they are virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990," a statistic that sounds so absurd that I doubt that President Bush, Mr. Abstinence, would believe it. Brooks is fooling himself. He writes: "You could give credence to all those parental scare stories about oral sex parties at bar mitzvahs and junior high school dances. You could worry about hookups, friends with benefits, and the rampant spread of casual, transactional sexuality. But it turns out you're wrong."

I have no interest in Brooks' own high school romancesmaybe he was a stud, maybe notbut just as kids in the 1960s and 70s had more sex than their parents as teenagers, it follows that today's youth is even more active in that area. As for the surveys on the high school boys claiming they're virgins, surely Brooks knows that people respond to such questions depending on what the inquisitor wants to hear.