MARGARET WENTE

Saturday, October 28, 2000

My little sister's birthday, she'll remember
me
For a gift I had 10 of my boys take her
virginity
And bitches know me as a horny-ass freak
Their mother wasn't raped, I ate her *****
in her sleep.

Eminem

F***, f***, f***, mother******* f*****, f***,
f***, f***, f*** . . .

Limp Bizkit

Hit me baby one more time.

Britney Spears
Eminem (a.k.a. Marshall Mathers) was not available to the press on Thursday, but Limp Bizkit (a.k.a. Fred Durst et al.) was. I am unblessed by teenagers of my own. And so, in order to investigate what the moral panic was about, I bravely ventured forth to meet Mr. Durst, who shared the SkyDome bill with Mr. Mathers. The Limp Bizkit press conference made me feel like Margaret Mead on her first day among the Ubangi. I am, after all, old enough to be Mr. Durst's mother. My own musical rebellion stopped with the Rolling Stones, who, although quite misogynistic, never sang "Bleed, bitch, bleed."

I learned that Mr. Durst has tattoos all over his body. "I got 'em because I wasn't supposed to," he said. Which pretty well sums up the secret of his appeal. He drives the grownups absolutely nuts.

Without doubt, the bar for linguistic transgression has ratcheted way up since the Stones were young. These lyrics are stunningly gross. But that's the point.

The demographic appeal of Mr. Mathers and Mr. Durst is quite a bit wider than you might suspect. But the hard core of their audience is nice teenage boys from the suburbs. As usual, you can trust Camille Paglia to explain why. "It's clear from his huge popularity that Eminem has tapped into a rising tide of rebellion among middle-class white kids who are sick and tired of the canned, humanitarian schmaltz of their antiseptic, namby-pamby, culture-starved schools," she says. "Eminem is the enema for the stale, saccharine platitudes and pieties that kids are force-fed these days by their PC teachers and counsellors."

An Eminem event cuts through the banality of everyday life in Thornhill. It also addresses a major problem in Western culture, which is how to channel young men's natural aggression now that war and hunting are obsolete. Sports sops up some of it. But, mostly, the current approach is to declare that male aggression is deviant and try to suppress it. No wonder young men like to get together in large groups and yell dirty words.

Parents everywhere should be relieved that boys with attention deficit disorder and anger-management issues can, like Eminem, amount to something after all. And I honestly think he and his ilk are far more wholesome than Britney Spears, an invitation to pedophilia if I ever saw one.

The marketing of Britney makes child porn look cute. There was Britney in pigtails and knee socks, singing "Hit me baby one more time." There was Britney in Rolling Stone, where she posed in her underwear, in her pink bedroom, clutching her Teletubby.

Of course, that was last year. This year, her boobs have inflated and she's started dressing like Jennifer Lopez. The only one who claims not to notice this is her.

Britney has turned 18, but she still has a curfew. She jots her daily prayers in a journal she calls her Bible Book. Whether or not she's had implants is up to you, but if you stare, it's not her fault. "I have to say the older fans are creepy," she says. "The 40-year-olds, people who are in your face too much."

Our eight-year-olds are in thrall to a hypersexualized, hyperinfantilized overage nymphet who sings "I was born to make you happy." Yuck.

But the apogee of the pop-culture yuck-o-metre has got to be Queen Celine, the hysterical anorexic who announces every twinge in her ovaries and has revealed each step in the consummation of her grotesque Electra complex. How, at 12, she met her Svengali. How she fixed her pubescent erotic gaze upon a portly middle-aged man three times her age and slept for years with his photo against her tear-stained cheek. "I never dared tell him that I dreamed of him every night," she confesses in her memoirs. "He would come to my bed to take me away to a desert island where we made love. I never told him about the torrid movies he was starring in more and more often."

Poor René never had a chance. "I had become a woman, I'd become 18 soon, and I wanted René to take me in his arms, to kiss me and make love to me," she tells us. At last, she seduced him. " 'If you really want to, I'll be the first,' " she says he said.

And then, even as the poor man was recovering from cancer radiation therapy, she had his sperm sucked out so she could have a baby.

Eeuw.

Deploring pop-culture decadence is a time-honoured way for politicians to score points with the public. Eminem is a gift for Ontario's Tories, who are using every opportunity these days to condemn violence against women and announce new measures against it. This, they hope, plays to both the law-and-order crowd and to liberals. Eminem is also a gift for Toronto's police chief, who is trying to convince us that violent youth crime is way up, even though violent youth crime statistics are (inconveniently) way down.

But they don't get it. The truth is, Britney's girly masochism and Celine's weird vampiric motherhood fantasies make these guys look positively wholesome.

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