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Cynthia Gorney and Stephen Harrigan

the breakfast table
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from: Cynthia Gorney

Shut Your Pie Hole!

Posted Monday, July 19, 1999, at 6:22 PM ET

Dear Steve,

First of all, I want a verbatim transcript of the newsroom discussion that preceded the decision to print that pie on that page. "Come on, we put pies in the food section all the time." "Not pies with three-inch holes in the top crust." "What if it were a piece about achieving the perfect pie crust?" "But it's not, is it?" Yeah, we are becoming fogeys in our dotage; I was interested to discover that I was appalled by that pie picture, which I suppose was the intent of the layout people, since the story was about the vast quantities of appalling material--"gross-out comedy" seems to be the term of the moment--now finding its way into movies and prime-time television. Has the Great Gray Lady ever before run a photograph of the, ah, how shall we phrase this, aperture left behind by a young man's occasion of self-stimulation? I am reminded of a fascinating and heated can-we-run-this argument that took place some years ago at the Washington Post, where I was working; I had written a profile of an abortion doctor who was a beautiful white-haired woman by then in her 70s, and the photographer had made a wonderful picture of the doctor's face, a mass of fine wrinkles and concentration, as she performed a routine aspiration abortion. The picture showed a curve of foot, indicating that the photographer was shooting from somewhere near the patient's head, but nothing in the picture itself displayed body parts or anything that might be thought of as offensive; nonetheless, one faction argued heatedly against running it in the usual large-format place below the headline because the very image of the doctor's face, given the context of the story, instantly summoned for the reader the thing she was looking at: the visual we would not have put in the newspaper. What we were keeping off the page, in other words, was not the image in the photo but the image the photo conjured by association in the reader's mind. Back then I was sorry when the keep-it-out faction won that argument (they found another less arresting and controversial picture to use), but boy, would I have switched sides on this one.

What I want to know: Did you see American Pie with any of your daughters? And if so, what on earth did you do when, you know, things of a certain nature took place on the screen? Put a bag over your head? Excuse yourself to move to another row? I still have an excruciating memory of sitting in some avant-garde San Francisco movie theater with my parents, I must have been 13 or 14 years old, and suddenly realizing that the trailer we were viewing was for an X-rated foreign movie in which people performed Acts in a naked conga line. I recall being so horrified, not at what was on the screen but at the fact that my mother and father were sitting beside me, that I covered my face with my hands and sort of folded up sideways into the seatwell. You said American Pie was the ultimate date movie: Was the theater full of teenagers laughing themselves sick, or people like us, old enough to be parents of teenagers, or what? Was anybody just looking sour and queasy and stomping up the aisle muttering, "This is terrible, what we're doing, the endless spiraling cycle of it-makes-money-so-we-do-it, somebody needs to throw a spoke in this wheel now"?

I guess that would have been me, the house curmudgeon. I spent the first four months of this year on a reporting job that required me to learn about what is currently referred to in the law as "student-on-student sex harassment," and one of the laments I heard from nearly everybody involved was: It's so much worse now, what teenagers and children say and do to each other on a regular basis, that it staggers the imagination. And why shouldn't it be? When I listened to the radio in my hotel room, on one of those reporting trips, the morning DJs were having a jolly conversation about circle jerks; in the drugstore where I bought my tape-recorder batteries, one of the kid's-eye-level magazine covers led with "Bed-Rattling, Teeth-Clenching, Curl-Your-Toes Orgasms"; the sweet-looking 10-year-old boys hanging out by the lakefront were laughing uproariously, as I passed them, about "really big hairy balls." They can't escape this stuff, unless they're Amish or somehow shielded from the culture by exceptional parental tenacity, and the person I want to hit over the head this afternoon is Mr. Gene DeWitt, identified in the Times article as "chairman of DeWitt Media, a firm that buys advertising time on television," who delivers the closing remark: "There's no point in moralizing whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Television is a business whose purpose is gathering audiences." You bet there's a point in moralizing, Mr. DeWitt, and it is a bad thing, and I have to work so hard to keep trying to shoulder you guys out of the way so my own daughter can get through her 13th year without being assaulted from all sides by flying sperm.

You're probably right; as soon as we let "butt" out, we were on that slippery slope to ... oh. Slippery. Gross. Never mind.

Yr dour pal (I'll scowl on the left, you stand to the right and hold the pitchfork, OK?),
Cynthia

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Cynthia Gorney

Shut Your Pie Hole!

Posted Monday, July 19, 1999, at 6:22 PM ET
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Cynthia Gorney, a reporter for the Washington Post from 1975 to 1991, will join the faculty at U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism this fall. She is the author of Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars (click here to buy the book). Stephen Harrigan is an occasional columnist for Slate, as well as a screenwriter and novelist. His recent books include Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef (click here to buy the book).
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