美国你为何变得如此粗俗
'
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.
“爸爸，什么是名人性爱(celebrity sex)?”问这个问题的是我七岁的儿子，他正从我的肩头看向电脑屏幕。他把“celebrity”(名人)发错了音，但说“sex”(性爱)这个词时就像是已经用了一辈子一样。我迅速关掉AOL的屏幕，说道：“六个名人(Celebrity six)(译者注：英语中“六”与“性”发音相近，因此作者故意将二者混淆，以向儿子解释)，是名人们以三人团队形式玩的一种游戏。”我把他带出我的办公室去楼下客厅，我认为那里是安全的。
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.
结果证明我想错了。他三岁的妹妹已把她那过早发育的小手放到了我妻子的iPhone上，当时手机正放在沙发旁的桌子上充电。她乱点着屏幕上的图标，“变出”了一张碧昂丝(Beyonce)穿着暴露黑色皮衣的图片，我希望碧昂丝那颇具暗示意味的造型对女儿或她哥哥都不会产生任何暗示意味。
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!
这个普通的周末就这样度过了。孩子们在另一个房间玩耍，电视节目上出现了F开头的那个词，而我们原本以为这些节目已足够温和。房子里散落着的主流杂志上，印有几乎全裸男女的广告在向他们打招呼。孩子们从我的肩头盯着我查邮件，与性有这样或那样关系的无止境的诱惑激起了他们的好奇心。
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.'
美国文化什么时候变得这么粗俗了?问出这个问题，你会迅速被贴上不懂世故的土包子或是愤怒的文化斗士的标签。但我用我的硬盘发誓，我两者都不是。我最喜欢的电影是《巴黎最后的探戈》(Last Tango in Paris)。我赞同(在理论上)臭名昭著的浪子詹姆斯・戈德史密斯(James Goldsmith)，他说过，当一个男人跟他的情妇结婚时，他就创造了一个就业机会。我曾经想过写一本书向美国文化中以F开头的那个词致敬，最能体现这个词“崇高”地位的可能是本・金斯利爵士(Sir Ben Kingsley)在《黑道家族》(The Sopranos)某一集中用好几个音节把它讲出来的那一幕。
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:
我不介意，也没什么意见，但我想念激烈咒骂而非赤裸裸淫秽的时光――或者至少是有性影射的时光，由于是影射，应该是作为我们私生活和公共生活之间压力的美好释放。早在有电臀舞之前，就有了埃尔维斯(Elvis)的扭胯舞，人们对这种舞感到震惊，因为扭胯更多的是和女人联系在一起(臀部向前推则有一种男子气概的暗示)。但埃尔维斯在舞台上的动作都是暗示，就像他的歌词一样：
Touch it, pound it, what good does it do
触摸它，敲打它，能有什么用
There's just no stoppin' the way I feel for you
没有什么能阻挡我对你的感觉
Cos' every minute, every hour you'll be shaken
因为每一分钟，每个小时你都会
By the strength and mighty power of my love
被我强烈和坚定的爱所震颤
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.
含蓄的暗示会刺激人的想像，而随随便便的淫秽会将想像力淹没。即使正在侵害着社会规范，但这种暗示仍维持着社会规范的存在――这很性感。埃尔维斯的《我的爱的力量》(Power of My Love)的歌词给了他成为受人尊敬的公众人物的权威，从而让他对社会的各种暗讽愈加令人愉悦。
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:
后来，年轻的麦当娜(Madonna)也是如此：“成双成对的，他们的身体合二为一。”这是一个鲜活的画面，因为你在积极地完成它。这和上了年纪的麦当娜像孩子一样的废话形成了鲜明对比：
Some girls got an attitude
有些女孩喜欢摆架子
Fake t--- and a nasty mood
有一对假胸还有糟糕的情绪
Hot s--- when she's in the nude
脱光的时候性感火辣
(In the naughty naked nude)
(调皮地脱光光)
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.'
这就像是偷偷讲黄色八卦和赤裸裸勾引欲望的区别。正如罗宾・威廉姆斯(Robbie Williams)和“宠物店男孩”(Pet Shop Boys)几年前在《她是麦当娜》(She's Madonna)里所唱的：“她变得粗俗得让人难以置信。”
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.'
大家都记得滚石(Rolling Stones)的《Brown Sugar》，里面关于性和种族歧视的挑 语言堪称为1971年量身打造。很少有人能回想起两年后他们在《Star Star》中对露骨污秽内容的尝试。第一首歌是狡猾而放纵的，性暗示背后展现的是活力和能量。《Star Star》的直白是给郊区那些无趣、疲倦、压抑的土包子们听的，与之伴随的还有他们的性伴交换派对和“钥匙俱乐部”(key clubs)。
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.
就像没有欲望诱惑时，节欲宗教誓言便毫无意义一样――这就是为什么 奥古斯汀(St. Augustine)会花那么多时间在他的《告白》(Confessions)中详细描述他是如何屈服于“迦太基的奢侈生活”的――在社会规范缺失时，侵犯它也不会有真正的快感。好的挑 也是好的释放，因为它们和被挑 的禁忌是相辅相成的。一旦直白地讲出来，诱惑和禁忌之间的张力就消失了。
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.
用承认禁忌存在的语言――通过丰富的语义、机智或愤怒――来违反某个禁忌，公开的秘密在于它代表着某种道德说教。事实上，所有那些满嘴脏话的大人物――从D.H.劳伦斯(D.H. Lawrence)到诺曼・梅勒(Norman Mailer)，到the Beats乐队、摇滚歌手、原型朋克、朋克和后朋克，理查德・普莱尔(Richard Pryor)、山姆・金尼逊(Sam Kinison)、帕蒂・史密斯(Patti Smith)，再近一点有莎拉・西尔弗曼(Sarah Silverman)和《南方公园》(South Park)的制作人――都是说教者。已故的路・瑞德(Lou Reed)的《我想回去》(I Wanna Be Black)充斥着种族歧视语、污言秽语和令人厌恶的性画面，我甚至无法从中找到一句有意义的话在这里进行引述。这也是一首带有挖苦式愤怒的歌，猛烈抨击了自由主义者的种族主义，他们对黑人文化的崇敬是黑人文化的一副扭曲的讽刺画。
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.
尽管这些粗俗之徒中有很多人最终都在一定程度上被主流文化小心翼翼地接受了，但直到他们离世后很久，社会才对其进行吸收，依然是小心翼翼，有时甚至根本就没吸收。他们在有生之年大都存在于边缘地带或藏在深处;你得在社会的昏暗角落里找寻。在新的音乐类型出现时尤其如此。摇摆乐(swing)、咆勃爵士乐(bebop)、Sinatra、冷爵士(cool jazz)、摇滚――这些音乐都在声音和风格上更加专门化并且以年轻人为主导，它们让老一代人抓狂。
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.
如今，每隔几分钟就有一股新的文化浪潮在无数平台上传播、被评论、被分析、被模仿、被混杂和被遗忘，每个人时刻都能立即接触到所有东西，无论这些东西有多么粗俗或粗糙。以前得想法设法才能找到路・瑞德，而现在一旦某一首空洞粗俗的歌曲被录制，在服装店就能听到。
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.
早期粗俗内容之所以如此有冲击力，部分原因在于当时被压抑已久的冲动爆发进入了公共领域。而如今，Twitter、Snapchat、Instagram及其他社交网站已经让冲动变成了一种新的社会常规。没有谁会再为新的表达形式感到抓狂。当已为人父母的你听到坎耶・韦斯特(Kanye West) 唱“我给这个女孩发了一张我‘小弟弟’的照片。我不知道女人会感觉怎么样。但我跟那个贱人的感觉不怎么样”的时候，你表示不喜欢，那我真替你脸红。
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.
事实是，你会听到同样的语言，看到同样的暴力，会在电视、电台、网上甚至在无聊的怀旧频道上看到同样的性画面，近乎赤裸裸的性暗示和暴力迅速激烈地袭来。无论是上了年纪的人还是年轻人，高声还是低吟，说的话都一样。什么都一样。
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.'
对性的形象暗示曾经是赋予人权力的一种方式。不公的老板、不诚实的将军、无道德感的政客可能会把自己提到高于其他普通人的高度上并且滥用权力，但人人都有一个裸露的身体和扰乱社会规范执行者的性能力。这正是蒙田(Montaigne)在提醒读者“国王和哲学家都要排便”时所要表达的意思。通过淫秽粗俗或性唤起，将人类之动物本性这一事实永恒而赤裸地公之于众，是民主的一种神 能量。蒙田写道：“即使是世界上最高的宝座，也是被屁股坐着的。”
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.
然而“脏话”已经丧失了 化我们的能力。现在它们已变得随便、粗鲁、流畅和官方。每个人说话都像是霍华德・斯特恩(Howard Stern)。废话连篇的Jay-Z和坎耶・韦斯特都是超级有钱的商人，被保镖、媒体顾问和形象制作人团团包围。其他行业也是一样。曾经针对甜腻的、道德单纯化节目的电视革命现在成了“复杂的”、违背常理的、充满英雄色彩的坏人角色的公式化惯例，比如《绝命毒师》(Breaking Bad)里残忍的沃特・怀特(Walter White)和《嗜血法医》(Dexter)里讨人喜欢的连环杀手。无休止的网上八卦和愚蠢传闻被伪装成有用的信息，让最恶心的提及性和暴力的内容变成了正常。
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.
回首1990年代，流行文化中露骨和淫秽内容的增多导致了所谓文化战争的产生，左翼和右翼群体就自由言论的界限展开了争论。现在没有人会因为文化本身的演进而批评文化。这从根本上来说是一种积极的发展。文化并不是孤立于社会上其他趋势自主发展的东西。
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.
约翰・肯尼迪(JFK)被暗杀、查尔斯・曼森(Charles Manson)及其追随者的血腥屠杀、越南战争(Vietnam War)骇人听闻的暴力――曾经不为人知的令人震惊的事件，现在出现在了美国家庭的客厅里。通过新科技，尤其是电视机，人们每晚都能看到。文化加速赶上了直截了当记录时事的速度。
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.
当然，那些像诺思克利夫勋爵(Lord Northcliffe)和首批大规模发行的报纸一样古老的媒体，他们通过性和暴力来吸引业务的癖好有增无减。被电视及其他媒体正常化后，1970年代的反主流文化顺利地融入了1980年代的商业文化。回想当时15岁的布鲁克・希尔兹(Brooke Shields)出现在1980年Calvin Klein牛仔裤广告中，她张开双腿说道：“知道我和我的Calvin之间有什么东西吗?什么都没有。”从那以后便一发不可收拾。
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.
如今，我们的文化规范在很大程度上受到科技的推动，而科技常常源自文化中最低层次的冲动。互联网成功将淫秽图片变成司空见惯的东西，这背后是色情行业将互联网科技彻底改革的肮脏事实。流媒体视频、Flash等技术、还有验证信用卡有效性的网站都是色情业的创新产品。互联网和色情业就像是爱和婚姻的关系。难怪会有那么多的文化会渴望实现色情片的去人性化和绝对透明，不允许秘密的存在。
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.
这样一篇文章，一般会以列出一套解决前文所述问题的方案为结尾。但是当粗俗文化的产生源自诸多不同因素时――商业、经济、社会、美学――目前还看不到解决办法。我们只能希望，人们对现状的焦躁和不耐烦最终会战胜一切，天平会倾向另一边――并非是向审查和压制倾斜，而是向性的自我肯定的神 力量以及对法外之徒的谴责之情倾斜。在美国，人们常常只能抱有这样的希望。
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.
从麦莉・赛勒斯(Miley Cyrus)刻意重复塑造的耀眼健康形象――她似乎在说：“这才是当前文化的本质”――到艾米纳姆(Eminem)、蕾迪・卡卡(Lady Gaga)、坎耶・韦斯特及其他对自己的名气和财富表达厌恶的人，流行文化本身似乎也在怀念那个曾经的年代，那时污秽和性画面具备精神性的强大能量，而不仅仅能用来挑逗观众并从中牟利。所以或许还是有希望的，我们最终能部分摆脱粗俗低级的无休止吟唱。
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.
不过也很难说。无论使用什么设备，我都会准备着随时立刻关闭它们，以防我的孩子碰巧路过看到。我希望“六个名人”是一个他们永远都不会想要玩的游戏，即便长大成人后也不会。
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