advertised "debate" between Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (pronounced bo-TAY-ah; "Shmuley" is pronounced in the usual way) at L.A.'s Wilshire Theater, where the fast-talking rabbi claimed to "out," through Flynt's own words, Flynt as a "closet romantic."
And in other news, dog bites man.
Boteach, the author of eleven books, including "Kosher Sex," and "Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments," opened his talk with a joke about a moyle (one who performs circumcision) whose decoration above the door to his shop is a giant pocket watch. When a hapless would-be customer comes in and asks to have his watch repaired, learning in the process what the store owner's true profession is, the man asks, "Why do you have a huge watch hanging outside your storefront?"
Replies the store owner, "What do you suggest I hang outside my store?"
This garnered a few titters from the audience, but betrayed the central flaw in Boteach's argument: In a society that was sane about sex, the man would have a picture of a circumcised penis hanging over the store's entrance - assuming there's anything sane about circumcision. But that's a debate for another day.
The lesson Boteach took from his own story was something about the "value of subtlety" - not a concept that Boteach himself had taken to heart, as he spoke for more than 20 minutes straight on both porn and on his own profession, which seemed focused on matchmaking Jewish singles. Attempts by panel moderator Robert Scheer were to no avail.
According to Boteach, there are six basic elements to pornography: 1) It's about sex, arousal and titillation; 2) It's aimed primarily at men, with Boteach claiming that only 3 percent of women watch porn; 3) It's a "passive... visual medium" that's "about converting people into voyeurs" (as if that's a bad thing); 4) It "utilizes" women to "obtain its objective" (dog bites man again!); 5) It's all over the place, including 40 percent of the Internet's bandwidth; and 6) It's immediate - "Pornography promises immediate sexual gratification" - and that biting dog's been pretty busy.
In explaining the above points, Boteach castigates porn as about "fundamental boredom" because "Once you've seen Miss January, you're about as interested in seeing her again as you are in lifting weights or exercising." Whoa; somebody call the collector's market in Playboys and tell them to sell, sell, sell! Not to mention all the retailers that write to AVN asking where they can get classic porn movies...
To his credit, Boteach comes out in favor of tease and foreplay, two subjects usually neglected in all but the better porn productions... and, all too often, in some relationships. However, he claims that the lack of a "real connection" between sex partners leads to sexual addiction, which, "because it's fundamentally empty, it becomes like a drug."
Boteach also claims that married couples have sex only twice a week, for an average of seven minutes at a time; a statistic which, if true, is sad... but has nothing to do with porn. According to Boteach, however, porn has turned intimacy into a visual medium, requiring wives to give their husbands directions on how to pleasure them - but, again sadly, many men were (and are!) pretty clueless in that area even before the proliferation of porn. That might just have something to do with the lack of real sex education in American (not to mention Israeli) society, which lack, oddly enough, is fostered by the world's major religions, including Judaism.
Inevitably, Boteach claimed that porn dehumanizes women, turning them into sexual objects, which he termed a form of "racism" and "a slander against women." But if it is, and those familiar with the industry would disagree on that point, it's well-paid slander, and the participants enter into it voluntarily.
And equally inevitably: "Let's make no mistake about it: I believe that the most romantic and perhaps erotic book in the world is the Bible." (Perhaps that's why Penthouse is currently running a graphic novel based on the Book of Genesis...)
Boteach also seemed to find some significance in the idea that women are the only animals that have breasts on their front (someone later pointed out that he'd ignored apes), which the rabbi interpreted to mean that God intended sex to be used as a form of face-to-face communication. Apparently, the ability to more easily see a woman's nipples harden in sexual desire plays no part in all that.
Boteach might make a reasonable stand-up comic, even if he couldn't bring himself to say the word "fucking" - he used "f'ing" - but it only took a few moments for Larry Flynt to "out" Boteach as very confused on the subject of sex.
(As one questioner later pointed out, Boteach had advised one married couple whose sex-life was failing to go to a local bar, pretending not to know each other, and for the husband to get turned on by watching various barflies try to pick up his wife. Boteach claimed that was so the husband could see how desirable his wife was to other men, but how that differs from watching porn was never made clear.)
"There's one thing I agree with," said Flynt, "that sex is always better if you're in love with your partner. But we're living in the real world, and everybody's not in love with each other. So you must learn to respect other people's attitudes about sex, about what they want to fantasize about and about what they may want to do to enhance their sex lives, whether to watch an adult video [or] an adult magazine." And later, referring to the various censors in society, he charged, "If they can control our pleasure centers, they can control us... It's all right to have values if they work for you and your family, if they help you get through your daily lives. I think it's a big mistake when you attempt to impose your moral values on other people." (This last garnered voluminous applause.)
Flynt's remarks took less than five minutes, and his presentation was followed by the evening's surprise guest, comedienne Roseanne Barr, who was quite obviously more in sympathy with Flynt's porn and sexual freedom views than Boteach's, but took a jaundiced view of both gentlemen.
"In my opinion, you two guys keep each other in business," she charged. "Every place you see a church, right across the street, you see a porn store. I think they go hand in hand."
Barr also revealed that she'd discussed with Flynt the idea of her making the first "feminist" porn movie. (Apparently she's never heard of Candida Royalle.)
"I'm so excited because everybody gets killed in the end," Barr said of her prospective plot. "And I think that everyone that I'm going to murder in this movie is going to be someone in show business, and I'm going to change their names like they do in the porn movies."
The final half hour was devoted to questions from the audience, including one from cop-turned-prostitute Norma Jean Almodovar.
After congratulating Barr for "being on our side," Almodovar asked Boteach, "I'm just wondering why you think that arresting and incarcerating prostitutes is somehow a solution for the perceived problem that you stated about marriage, when as Larry Flynt said earlier, in the real world, there's a lot of people out there who don't have access to passionate love, romance, even close personal friends with whom they can have sex once in a while?"
Before Boteach could answer, Barr chimed in with, "Yeah, why aren't there more male prostitutes?" To which Almodovar replied, "There are, but I can't give you that information because that's pandering, a felony, and I'd go to prison again, and I don't want to do that."
Boteach claimed he didn't want to take her freedom away, but claimed that society had the right to restrict certain activities, which Boteach was sure she would agree with, "like drug addiction." Oops, wrong choice, as shown by the audience's applause when Almodovar responded, "I don't agree with that either, but that's beside the point... I'm a libertarian and I believe my body belongs to me, not the government.... I can have sex with 10,000 men and if they're not paying me, I'm not a criminal, I don't go to jail, but if one of them leaves a dollar on my dresser, I'm a criminal and I've got to go to jail. I don't understand it."
Boteach never really answered the question, but his evasion about how it wasn't a religious question did inspire Flynt to ask, "Can you tell me one church that wants to legalize prostitution?"
"Religion has been guilty of many sexual sins throughout the ages," Boteach admitted before the moderator decided the question had been answered. It wasn't, but unlike the continuing discussion of this and many other sexual subjects, the debate this evening ended shortly thereafter.
