Arnold, Madonna, Doonesbury and an internet porn scam.

Maybe I should start selling "I Told You So" t-shirts. Five years ago, I published this item: "Here's a story about the arrogance of power even the tabloids won't publish. At a dinner party, Arnold Schwarzenegger told a young woman he would give her $1000 if she would stick her finger up her ass and then let him smell it. She refused. Later, he followed her into the bathroom and forcibly stuck his own finger up her ass. He did not pay her. She is an actress and has not brought a lawsuit because she fears it would hurt her career in Hollywood."

But now Arnold has replaced Bill Clinton as America's generic sex-joke reference. The morning after California's recall election, on The View, Meredith Vieira demonstrated to Joy Behar the new governor's special handshake. Vieira simply placed her right hand on Behar's left breast.

Amidst laughter and applause, Behar asked, "Can I please have my nipple back now?"

It was a perfect example of television's ever-expanding sense of permissiveness.

Even if you didn't happen to catch the open-mouth kiss between Madonna and Britney Spears during the MTV Music Video Awards?"It wasn't a publicity stunt," explained Britney, "we just did what felt right"?you certainly must have seen a photo of that smooch, which appeared on the front page of newspapers around the country.

This incident evoked the most public discussion since Michael Jackson kissed Lisa Marie Presley on the MTV Awards to prove that their marriage wasn't a public relations gesture, and Al Gore kissed Tipper at the Democratic convention to prove that he wasn't like that wife-cheating Bill Clinton. Indeed, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was deluged with complaints from readers about the Madonna-Britney photo, and their managing editor apologized, saying that it should not have been published on the front page, but rather on the inside.

On News Watch, a weekly media discussion program on the Fox network, moderator Eric Burns criticized the tv news and entertainment programs for showing clips of the kiss "over and over again," though I counted a total of 10 lingering displays of the kiss on News Watch itself.

"Where's the next step?" wondered conservative columnist Cal Thomas. "Full frontal nudity?" Or, worse yet, presidential candidate "Joe Lieberman kissing Howard Dean?" Thomas was particularly concerned about newspapers arriving on the front doorstep and children bringing them into their homes.

The controversy was brought into focus by former Saturday Night Live cast member Jon Lovitz when he was a guest on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He complained that the televised kiss wasn't long enough, because by the time he pulled his pants down to his ankles, it was already over.

But Lovitz could easily have gone on to pleasure himself simply for the sake of his own future health. The British magazine New Scientist reported on a study in Australia that concluded the more men ejaculate between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to develop prostate cancer. Apparently, ejaculation prevents carcinogens from building up in the gland. As if men need such encouragement to jerk off.

The New Scientist article was reported on in England, India, South Africa and New Zealand, as well as wire service coverage in the United States, not to mention providing fodder for morning radio shock jocks and late-night monologues.

On a recent Sunday, Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury depicted Rev. Scot Sloan reading a newspaper at breakfast: "Incredible... There's a new study that suggests that regular masturbation prevents prostate cancer."

Boopsie responds, "Hey!...Enough of that!"

"Enough of what? It's in the paper."

"I don't care! Talk like that makes me uncomfortable! People shouldn't sit around talking about sex like it's the weather! It's just not appropriate!"

"You're dating yourself, Boopsie."

Zonker enters: "Hey, did you guys hear self-dating prevents cancer?"

Doonesbury has previously caused controversy. Trudeau pulled a 1985 series about abortion and a 2001 strip poking fun at President Bush a few days after 9/11 (drawn before the terrorist attacks). In 1998, some papers refused to run a strip about accusations that President Clinton had sex with a White House intern and, just before the 2000 election, a strip that accused Bush of cocaine abuse. This was the first time Trudeau allowed his syndicate to offer a substitute strip?one that was one year old, but carrying the current date.

Trudeau said the strip, censored by 400 out of 700 papers, "isn't really about masturbation or cancer, but about the shifting nature of taboos and the inability of two adults to have a certain kind of serious conversation. It's a South Park world now, and younger readers are unlikely to be shocked or confused by anything they find in Doonesbury. Besides, our general experience is that most children don't understand Doonesbury in any event, and thus sensibly avoid it."

However, any children who were innocently trying to log on to a website?such as Disneyland, Teletubbies, Anna Kournikova or Backstreet Boys, among many others?but who misspelled a name, would have been automatically misdirected to hardcore porn sites that they could not avoid, courtesy of "typo squatter" John Zuccarini. He was arrested for registering several thousand internet addresses and earning $1 million a year from porn sites that paid him when he sent web users their way.

This will be the first prosecution under a new clause in the Amber Alert law, making it a crime to use "misleading" domain names to lure children to porn. But the Amber Alert legislation was originally intended only to combat physical abduction by sending out immediate information to aid in the safe recovery of a child. It was intended only for time-critical child-abduction cases, where the victim is in imminent danger of bodily harm or death.

In a culture permeated by misleading potential customers, Zuccarini is among the sleaziest. He registered 15 variations of the children's cartoon site, cartoonnetwork.com, and 41 variations on the name of pop star and Madonna kisser Britney Spears. A child who typed cartoonjoe.com instead of joecartoon.com would wind up at an explicit sex site. Zuccarini has been charged with "enticing children to pornography."

"Although this man's method of making a bunch of money is abhorrent," said porn star Jenna Jameson, "I fail to see how he is responsible for enticing children into pornography. Why not charge the teachers and parents for not properly beating their children into correctly spelling 'Barney'? Hell, why not charge the child too? The man is scum...that's for sure, but should he be charged as enticing children into porn? No. False advertising, yes. I'm tired of people using the umbrella of 'It's for the children' to cover everything they find morally reprehensible."

There's an irony here that must be acknowledged. Somewhere a child has a homework assignment to write a composition about President Bush but, instead of typing whitehouse.gov, this child types whitehouse.com?the very same porn site where Jenna's statement appeared.

Paul Krassner can be reached at [www.paulkrassner.com](http://www.paulkrassner.com).