NEW YORK The contest that counts is not between the Patriots and the Panthers. As always, the Super Bowl's commercials will very likely prove the main event, and the show Sunday features a high-stakes ad-agency bout: For the first time, two prescription drugs for erectile dysfunction, Levitra and Cialis, will square off in the quest to grab a piece of the Viagra action. Who doesn't want to Monday-morning quarterback their double entendres?

We've come a long way from Bob Dole, baby. Total sales for the three drugs approached $1.3 billion last year - a market that indexes not just erectile but marital dysfunction. The commercials America has seen thus far tend to depict vaguely forlorn middle-aged couples in need of a second honeymoon. One little pill and bingo! Suddenly the Levitra guy is tossing a football smack through the middle of a tire swing.

But American marriage may be beyond the redemption of GlaxoSmithKline or anyone else. We live in a country where the on-again, off-again J.Lo-Ben nuptials got more attention than the Mideast road map. The reality TV craze, from "Joe Millionaire" to "Average Joe," works nightly to recalibrate the definition of marriage into a glitzy form of legalized prostitution. Britney Spears signs on to a 55-hour Vegas marriage "just for the hell of it," and someone else sells pictures of the festivities, including one of the groom sticking his hand down her pants, for up to $100,000 to supermarket tabloids. After the marriage was annulled, Spears told MTV, "I do believe in the sanctity of marriage, I totally do."

Now comes the coup de grace: In a campaign year likely to be poisoned by a culture war over same-sex marriage, politicians feel compelled to play marriage counselors. Last month the president from the small-government party proposed a $1.5 billion program that will mount its own advertising push, among other federal elixirs, to promote "healthy marriages." Some might argue that taxpayers' money would be better spent on drug plans that cover Viagra for husbands who leave their wives for the N.F.L., or, better still, on job programs that would increase the ranks of the potentially marriageable. Cynics might say that the president's "healthy marriage" initiative is merely political posturing anyway. Congress will never sign on to such a scheme - or so one might hope - and meanwhile the president can claim credit for, as he put it himself, taking "a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization."

But what civilization, exactly, is he talking about? Since 1970, the percentage of American adults in this enduring institution has dropped from 68 to 56, the percentage of households containing married couples with kids from 45 to 26. As Bush substituted Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Laden, so he seems confused about the enemy here. Even as he gets bogged down battling gay couples who want the same civil rights as other Americans, the real culprit goes about its business. That culprit is a heterosexual culture determined to reduce marriage to a voyeuristic spectator sport as brutal and commercial as pro football but not nearly so entertaining or harmless. It says a lot about how out of touch Bush and his speechwriters are with this culture that he repeated Spears's "sanctity of marriage" language in the State of the Union only days after she had made the phrase a national joke.

It's against this backdrop that Diane Sawyer's "Primetime Thursday" interview with Howard Dean and Judy Steinberg Dean, just 48 hours after the president's speech, was as depressing in its way as the president's threat of a constitutional amendment to discriminate against gay couples. No matter who gets elected president, the Deans' marital trial by prime-time newsmagazine will linger as one of the uglier cultural signposts in a season that has already brought us the new TV series "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé" and David Gest's filing of a "domestic violence" lawsuit against Liza Minnelli.

Though I have no vested interest in Howard Dean, it was refreshing that he initially refrained from using his wife as a prop on the campaign trail. (Take Joe and Hadassah's shtick, please!) The Deans didn't want their marriage to be a proto-feminist, anti-feminist or even "Everybody Loves Raymond" role model. They simply refused to pose for the contrived and usually fictionalized marital snapshots that the political press demands and then analyzes to death. If I've learned anything from my own two marriages, it's that no one knows what goes on in another couple's marriage anyway - not even the Clintons'.

When post-Iowa panic drove Dean to reverse himself, it was sad, even though his wife gave her assent. The Sawyer interview was painful to watch not just because it was one long chain of "When did you stop beating your wife?" questions on the subject of the candidate's temper, but because Judy Dean was clearly shy and unpracticed in the art of spin. The only image she cared about passionately was the one she projects to her children and her patients. She seemed genuinely ignorant of the whole media game. "I don't like watching TV that much," she told Sawyer.

Like everyone else, Sawyer likened the Deans' joint appearance to the Clintons' Super Bowl Sunday "stand by your man interview" on "60 Minutes." (Celebrate its 12th anniversary Sunday night.) But the Deans were not defending themselves against charges of marital turbulence and infidelity. Quite the contrary: They were defending themselves against charges of having a marriage that was if anything too deficient in the melodrama that might lend it entertainment value and too private to be repackaged as a circus.

The implication of the questions was clear: Where do the Deans get off refusing to turn their marriage into a spectator sport? It was downright un-American. As it happens, the Deans were not the only celebrity marriage that Sawyer covered for ABC News of late. Just two months ago she interviewed a couple far more famous, Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter. On Dec. 10, Trista and Ryan, as they are known, were married in prime time on ABC in the most-watched wedding in American TV history, second in audience by only a hair to that of Diana and Charles. God knows it was something to see, an epic display of everything that has gone wrong with American marriage, all packaged and sold as "the wedding of your dreams."

For those who had the good fortune to miss it, Trista is a physical therapist and former Miami Heat dancer who had previously tried and failed to snare a guy on the ABC reality show "The Bachelor." ABC brought her back for "The Bachelorette," a gender-reversed retread of the same series, and after much prime-time deliberation she chose Ryan, a firefighter, as the winner over 24 other men seeking her hand. The network turned the marriage into a four-hour extravaganza (over three nights) in which the couple gleefully surrendered their privacy. (The consummation of the marriage went unseen, but you never know what might be auctioned off on eBay.)

The betrothed were paid $1 million for allowing the cameras to facilitate our voyeurism. The wedding itself cost nearly $4 million, also paid for by the show. Much of the endless televised foreplay that preceded the ceremony was therefore devoted to shopping, with Trista taking to the wares of Rodeo Drive as joyously as the hooker played by Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman," another Disney entertainment.

Yet neither the $1 million cash nor the $4 million ceremony that sealed their marital contract were mentioned when Trista and Ryan were interviewed by Sawyer on "Good Morning America." While the Deans were treated like freaks, the stars of "The Bachelorette" were treated as a perfectly normal all-American couple. And perhaps these days they are. Trista and Ryan's wedding broadcast was the top-rated show in virtually every major television market, the one exception being Washington, where it was beaten by a rerun of "Law and Order." If only more of our politicians had tuned in, maybe someone would have figured out that it could be harder to restore the sanctity of marriage than to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The New York Times

< < Back to Start of Article NEW YORK The contest that counts is not between the Patriots and the Panthers. As always, the Super Bowl's commercials will very likely prove the main event, and the show Sunday features a high-stakes ad-agency bout: For the first time, two prescription drugs for erectile dysfunction, Levitra and Cialis, will square off in the quest to grab a piece of the Viagra action. Who doesn't want to Monday-morning quarterback their double entendres?

Source : http://www.iht.com