Kitty Lyons — The History
“The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” by Maggie Cutler ran as a biweekly (and later a monthly) column from November, 1999 through January, 2002 in the Web-based literary magazine (and subsequent dating service) nerve.com. The column’s premise was that Kitty, like the rest of America, could not pry sex and politics apart.
It was the height of the dot.com bubble. Kitty was spending her days trading online in the loft she shared with her documentary filmmaking husband, Max. At lunchtime, while cruising news and gossip sites, she would get so excited, she’d have to lie down on her red plush couch and fantasize graphically about being as close to power as a girl can be, which was usually closer than girls who have all their clothes on can ever get.
The column also ran in Nerve Magazine, nerve.com’s shortlived foray into print. When HBO made a documentary pilot about nerve.com, it included a two minute animated short starring Kitty as drawn by Ward Sutton, whose strip, Sutton Impact, is now widely syndicated. His version of Kitty appears in her logos. HBO’s pilot aired under the title, “Downloading Sex,” and was played frequently during the hours of the night when children and snakes are presumed to be asleep.
Kitty began her career at the height of Monicagate. Republican hypocrisy on the subject of fucking underlings was either hilarious or spikes-in-your-head-like, depending on your own personal way of handlng government duplicity.
Many people thought the column was simply pornographic, only I was never one of them. Kitty got me hot, but not in that way. All 40 some-odd of the Kitty columns were extensively researched via Nexis, and a surprising amount of the erotic content in them was extracted or extrapolated from the way media were framing events. The image of Dick Cheney as an octopus, for example, a fleshopod with slimy, over-active tentacles, came straight off of CNN. John Ashcroft’s ties were big and phallic enough to frighten horses without any help from me, and women who had any proximity to powerful men — whether as wives, daughters or appointees, were treated to endless speculation as to their sexual preferences. I saw sex being used by the mass media as a distraction from serious issues, and I was trying to turn that around.
Then, after 9-11, many people called a moratorium on humor. Kitty’s fantasy about Osama bin Laden, for example, was decreed “offensive” — and was published carrying a disclaimer by several editors at nerve. It didn’t seem to matter that Kitty fantasized capturing Osama after she had her way with him; to them she had stepped over the enemy line just by imagining him as human. Clearly, the terrorists had won.
For that, and various other reasons, the “fit” for Ms. Lyons at nerve.com was no longer juicy, and, (although all the columns are archived there, still accessible to members) she went into exile, surfacing only briefly in a theatrical review entitled “No Exit Strategy,” directed by Steve Williford at Makor in the pre-election fall of 2004, in which Cynthia Mace brought Kitty’s Ashcroft fantasy to a nightly pitch of ecstasy.
I’m not entirely sure why I’m bringing Kitty back at this particular moment. These are not sexy times, although sex seems to remain at the top of the political agenda, albeit in the topmost half of the missionary position. But I think it’s because Kitty is so clever at turning her pain and her helplessness into her pleasure — however momentarily or foolishly— that I still find her touching and germane.
I will gradually put selected columns from my archive up online in clumps of three or four. I’m grouping them by the type of her imaginary playmates rather than by chronology. The new episodes in Kitty’s life will appear irregularly in the main pages of the Shackle Report under the banner “Kitty Lyons Claws the Sofa.”
— M. C.
Click here for “The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” archive index
Click here for the new column, “Kitty Lyons Claws the Sofa”
