It might not hold the same shock value today, but the on-stage smooch between Britney Spears and Madonna, and then Christina Aguilera and Madonna, at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards was designed to provoke—and it did. Conservatives squirmed, gay-rights activists wondered if the public display of “affection” was progress or a publicity stunt, and 18-year-old straight boys across the country found themselves suddenly interested in the Material Girl. The kiss ensured that year's VMAs would be replayed on TV over and over again; at one of these recaps, on Access Hollywood, Aguilera said of Madonna, "she's got very soft lips and there's nothing like kissing a woman."
Julie Jacobson / AP Photo
It was an all-American scandal: It had nudity, celebrity, millions of dollars at stake, and was broadcast live to the world from the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII. The 2004 incident occurred during Janet Jackson's performance with Justin Timberlake, and resulted in what was officially described as a "wardrobe malfunction" that allowed Jackson's nipple to be exposed for approximately half a second. The reaction was hysterical—parents cried foul, Europe had a good laugh at American prudishness, and the FCC fined CBS a record $550,000. After "Nipplegate," dozens of old TV shows and music videos were re-edited to make sure they didn't also risk heavy fines.
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Joe Francis took a simple idea—convince drunk girls to flash their breasts for the camera—and built it into a multimillion dollar empire that became, for better or worse, a cultural touchstone. But in the past 10 years, Francis has become nearly as iconic as his oeuvre, and not in a good way. Since the first GGW video was released, he's been sued multiple times by the girls in his movies—including once by Ashley Dupre, pre-Spitzer scandal. (She later dropped the suit.) And his rap sheet reads like a hardened criminal's: He's done time for child abuse, prostitution, and tax fraud; while in jail he was convicted of bribing a guard to bring sushi and barbecued chicken to his cell. Today, Francis continues to wrestle with the IRS—as recently as last month he was slapped with a $33,819,087.14 tax lien, according to TMZ.
Dan Steinberg / AP Photo
Rarely has the public had such direct access to the gritty details of a politician's sex scandal as when Rep. Mark Foley's lewd instant messages were leaked and posted online. The sprawling saga of the Florida congressman’s awkward attempts at cybersex with former congressional pages read like a car accident unfolding in super slo-mo. The story broke less than two months before the 2006 midterm elections at a time when the GOP was already reeling from doubts about its ethical stewardship. Foley's scandal was another nail in the coffin: When Election Day arrived, the Democrats swept, seizing control of both houses of Congress. The scandal also toppled House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who resigned after being accused of covering up for Foley to protect the party's image.
Richard Drew / AP Photo
The love triangle formed by three of Hollywood's most beautiful people sold untold numbers of tabloids and reduced all other celebrity sex gossip to second-tier status. Upon returning from the Caribbean in January 2005, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, America's golden couple, announced they were splitting up. Speculation immediately swirled that Angelina Jolie was the reason, and sure enough, a month after Aniston filed for divorce, paparazzi shots of Brad and Angie frolicking on the beach seemed to confirm the rumors. Today, Aniston is playing the field, and Brangelina, though they remain unmarried, have thoroughly settled down to create an ever-expanding family.
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The proliferation of high-speed broadband over the past 10 years transformed the Internet into, among other things, a conduit for massive amounts of free, well-organized smut. Aside from the obvious benefits, this provided an irresistible scenario for sociologists, who rushed to measure the effects of the porn-is-everywhere phenomenon on everyone from horny adolescents to sexless couples. By the end of the decade, "porn addiction" had become a buzz phrase, and Web sites were allowing ordinary people to upload their own dirty videos—which an astonishing number of us did. It was all a bit shocking, but, we're convinced, nothing compared to what the next decade will bring.
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A media circus in every respect, Michael Jackson's criminal trial in 2005 pitted him against 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo, who, along with his mother, accused Jackson of child molestation and abduction. Throughout the proceedings, Jackson insisted he was the innocent target of a family seeking money and fame. And in the end, the jury agreed—Jackson was acquitted of all charges, and returned to a life of relative seclusion. But the trial consumed the final decade of the performer's life, and provided a lurid final reminder of all the other bizarre and cringe-worthy incidents that punctuated an otherwise brilliant career.
Kevork Djansezian, Pool / Getty Images
The ‘60s and ‘70s had The Dating Game. This decade, we had Flavor of Love, I Love New York, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, and a smattering of similar reality shows. Guilty pleasures all, VH1 and MTV used the shows to redefine the television dating show genre, spawning sequel after spinoff and running their ratings through the roof in the process. Did any of the couplings last? A handful—but perhaps 15 minutes of love is better than never having loved at all.
Danielle Levitt / VH1; Scott Odgers / VH1
It's the decade's forgotten biggest scandal, but when it broke, the Gary Condit affair was a bombshell. A 24-year-old federal intern from Condit's district named Chandra Levy disappeared in May 2001. Shortly thereafter, the California congressman admitted he'd slept with her, and was suspected by many of having killed her. But by the time her remains were discovered in a Washington park the next year, the story, like all others, had been buried by the September 11th attacks, and the case went cold. It wasn't until earlier this year that police finally charged a Salvadoran immigrant with Levy's murder. The incident ended Condit's political career, and he moved to Arizona and opened a Baskin Robbins— reportedly Levy's favorite brand of ice cream.
Joe Marquette / AP Photo
Admittedly, Lindsay Lohan has proved to be a bit of an embarrassment, and yes, her romance with DJ Samantha Ronson certainly had its ugly moments. But wasn’t it also a little bit… adorable? The pictures of Ronson teaching Lohan how to use a mixing board, of Lohan dragging Ronson through Disneyland—it was all kind of normal, or at least as normal as semi-screwed-up celebrity couplings get, and the tabloids, to their credit, reported on it as such. The breakup was messy, but whose isn’t? Ten years after Ellen’s “ Yep, I’m gay” cover, Lohan placed lesbianism into the gossip world without it being the story, which it certainly would have become had she tried to hide it as her parents encouraged her to do.
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How did we get to the point where meeting someone at a bar feels more reckless than chatting up a stranger through the comforting filter of a matchmaking Web site? The early adopters of online dating were considered cutting-edge but crazy. Ten years later, finding a date online is standard operating procedure for everyone from your teenage son to your recently divorced Aunt Ellie. The number of people meeting online actually peaked around the middle of the decade and has been declining ever since, according to a Pew Research survey. Perhaps it was a victim of its own success.
Ten years ago, gay marriage was a pipe dream. Then suddenly, in 2004, Massachusetts decided to let same-sex couples say "I do," and give them all the state-level benefits that go along with it. From that moment on, the fight for marriage defined and dominated the gay-rights movement's decade. Advances in New England and Iowa were tempered by a blistering loss in California with Proposition 8, but the fuse had been lit. Today, same-sex couples have embraced the notion that marriage is their inalienable right—an attitude that will surely keep it at the forefront of the movement until gay marriage is legal in all 50 states.
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"Is the world ready for a pregnant man?" was the question asked over and over again after Thomas Beatie, a female-to-male transgender person, announced that he was with child. And somewhat surprisingly, it appears we were. Aside from some scattered conservative handwringing (Bill O'Reilly: "You imagine a poor kid getting born into that family..."), the news was largely absorbed by the public with bemused fascination. "Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire," the lightly bearded Beatie wrote in an essay for The Advocate in 2008. Even Oprah Winfrey appeared to agree—the daytime queen sat Beatie down for a sensitive, well-informed interview, and even affectionately felt his baby bump.
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During the 2008 election, John Edwards was a quintessentially sympathetic figure: He had a cancer-stricken wife, a tragically deceased son, and a focus on the least fortunate. Then the National Enquirer exposed his affair with his campaign's videographer, Rielle Hunter, and suddenly the smiley senator from North Carolina didn't seem quite so sparkly. Edwards' scandal was particularly unsavory, with accusations of hush money redirected from the campaign to the mistress, an alleged love-child, and a staffer named Andrew Young who initially tried to take the fall. Young has since claimed that Edwards promised his mistress that he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York—after his wife, Elizabeth, died of her terminal illness.
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If anyone can outdo a politician when it comes to sex scandals, it's a man of the cloth. Pastor Ted, as he was known, served the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs. Each week, he preached to 12,000 true believers, and as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals he wielded influence over some 45,000 churches. But judgment day arrived in November 2006, when a former male prostitute named Mike Jones claimed he had sex with Haggard multiple times and helped him obtain crystal meth. Haggard admitted to "sexual immorality" and resigned from his leadership positions to focus on "curing" his homosexual side. The New Life church faced an exodus of members that it is still struggling to replace to this day, and Haggard now works out of his home as an insurance salesman—alongside his wife.
Phil McCarten / Reuters
There’s an exception to the new consensus that online dating is no longer creepy. Craigslist, that lo-fi online swap meet that trades in everything from trucks to jobs to anonymous hookups, has managed to retain its sleazy veneer. This fact was thrown into ghastly relief this year when a young med student named Philip Markoff allegedly met a Boston woman on the Web site's "erotic services" section and then brutally murdered her. Dubbed the "Craigslist killer" in the press, the sexually lurid charges against Markoff made the case a sensation. Markoff has been indicted for first-degree murder and is now awaiting trial.
Mark Garfinkel / AP Photo
No matter how often they leak, stars keep making them—and the world cannot look away. The craze unofficially began in 1998 when Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's NSFW honeymoon video was stolen and posted online. But it was the past decade that will be remembered as the golden era of celebrity sex tapes: Paris Hilton and Rick Salomon, Eric Dane and Rebecca Gayheart, Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean—even Screech from Saved by the Bell tried one. It's easy to imagine the stigma dissipating enough over the next 10 years that stars will release sex tapes routinely as part of the PR push leading up to their latest releases.
Leo Vogelzang / Retna; Michael Loccisano / Getty Images
Rivaling Mark Foley for tawdriest political scandal of the decade was Larry Craig, the conservative Idaho senator who was busted in 2007 for an attempted airport men's room tryst. Craig helped drag the story out for weeks by issuing denial after denial. In the meantime, the public got a detailed primer on public-restroom sex etiquette. At one point, Craig famously claimed he wasn't soliciting sex by tapping his foot under the stall divider—apparently a universal signal for consent—insisting that, instead, he simply had a " wide stance." In the aftermath, Senator Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and announced he would resign from the Senate, then tried to retract his guilty plea and decided to serve out his term instead. Today, he works as a consultant on energy issues.
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Though a vaccine continues to elude researchers, advancements in HIV treatments were dramatic this decade, and a major breakthrough in 2006 was hailed as a long-sought symbol of those efforts. A rare collaboration between rival drug companies produced the world’s first once-a-day pill for HIV sufferers, heralding an end to the grueling 50-pills-a-day “cocktails” of the 1990s. The new drug, Atripla, came nearly two decades after the release of AZT, the very first anti-HIV pharmaceutical. The downside: Medical experts blame recent increases in risky sex on the disease’s new manageability.
Haraz N. Ghanbari / AP Photo
Hollywood couldn't have scripted it better. The crusading New York attorney general, a moral authority who made his name busting white-collar criminals and corporate fraudsters, rises to the highest office in the state. Then, a year later, in 2008, Governor Spitzer is outed as "Client #9," the patron of several hookers, including one busty 22-year-old, $1,000-per-hour call girl named Ashley Dupre. Federal investigators caught the governor on wiretap while he planned the assignations, and Spitzer's meteoric rise was instantly reversed. (Though he never faced criminal charges, prompting cries of hypocrisy.) Spitzer has since refashioned himself as a financial pundit, and is reportedly considering a run for state comptroller (he denies this), prompting the madam who procured him some of his prostitutes to announce that if he runs, so will she.
Heidi Gutman / AP Photo
Following the most sexualized presidency in American history, perhaps it’s no surprise that we got one that crusaded for lower libidos. But the decade's passion for abstinence wasn't confined to the Beltway. “No sex till marriage” became an unlikely rallying cry for many high-school students, encouraged by trendy fashion accessories, and teen idols from Jordin Sparks to the Jonas Brothers. But as the decade waned and studies cast mounting doubt on the method’s effectiveness, the great abstinence experiment began to lose its luster. In the end, even Sarah Palin’s 18-year-old daughter, who’d recently given birth to her first child, called abstinence “not realistic at all.”
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Sex appeal has played a minor role in presidential elections here and there, but John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 put sex right on the ticket. Many saw the move as a transparent appeal to horny NASCAR dads, given Palin's limited experience. "She's a fantasy come to life," wrote one liberal blogger. "And trust me with her winking, giving shout outs to Joe Six Pack and wearing her librarianisque outfits, she's tossing those vibes out there." Did it work? You'd think so, but no. McCain lost, and many wondered in the aftermath if all the winks and "you betchas" went a step too far, turning middle America off rather than on.
Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
The 19-year-old self-proclaimed redneck from Wasilla did something no one could have foreseen: He emerged from the decade relatively unscathed, and today comes off as the mature one when compared to his cranky almost-mother-in-law. After knocking up Sarah Palin's teenage daughter Bristol, Johnston was dragged awkwardly into the spotlight by the campaign's damage-control experts. After it was over, he got a manager, did some talk shows, dished about the would-be VP, and slowly grew into his new role as a media spectacle and sex symbol. Even his recent decision to pose nearly nude for Playgirl didn't seem all that laughable. Levi Johnston in 2024, anyone?
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As if single women of a certain age needed one more slight from society, the vaguely insulting buzzword "cougar" entered our lexicon. Cougars had been in vogue before the decade began, led quite stylishly by the character of Samantha Jones on Sex and the City. But the phenomenon was revived in 2005 with Demi Moore's high-profile marriage to younger man Ashton Kutcher, and the phenomenon hit its peak (or nadir) this year, with the premiere of the Courteney Cox TV series, Cougar Town.
James White / ABC
America’s new favorite fake crisis, “sexting,” has helped bring down Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Tiger Woods, and embarrassed celebrities from Rihanna to Miley Cyrus. But it’s not all tabloid fun and games. Sending semi-racy pictures of themselves through their phones has inadvertently led to Kafkaesque kiddie-porn charges levied against elementary school kids. The sexting craze doesn’t seem to be losing steam—last week Katie Couric ominously blogged that 30 percent of 17-year-olds have received explicit pictures on their phones.
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Most politicians hide from the limelight after being exposed as adulterers—Mark Sanford couldn't seem to get enough of it. After it came out that he was not, in fact, hiking the Appalachian Trail over Fathers' Day 2009, but instead visiting his Argentine mistress, the South Carolina governor held a teary press conference to tell us more than we ever wanted to know about his infidelities. But he didn't stop there. Rather than letting the story run its course, Sanford later called the Associated Press to publicly express how glad he was to have found his "soul mate" in his mistress. His wife, Jenny, has since filed for divorce, and has been held up as a feminist icon for her refusal to stand behind her cheating husband a la Silda Spitzer.
Mic Smith / AP Photo
In 2009, Adam Lambert brought gay male sexuality to the forefront of one of America’s most wholesome TV shows, American Idol. But his boldest expression of his sexual orientation came after the show ended, and six years after Britney and Madonna caused a stir by kissing at the VMAs. The American Idol runner-up sparked a scandal with an on-air guy-on-guy kiss during a performance on ABC’s American Music Awards in November of this year. Viewers were far more put off by Lambert’s lip-lock than they were by Britney and Madge’s, and the gender-bending Lambert seized the opportunity to point out the contrast, calling it "a form of discrimination and a double standard." Nevertheless an interview on Good Morning America—also on ABC—was canceled because, the network claimed, Lambert was too “unpredictable.”
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The man who had everything—a legendary career, a gorgeous wife, and a billion in prize money and endorsements—lost much of it recently, when first one mistress, then a seemingly endless parade of others, began claiming affairs with golf’s biggest star. Tiger Woods, arguably the most famous athlete on the planet, closed out the decade with a sex scandal that rivaled his career in magnitude and intensity. Sponsors from Gillette to Accenture turned their backs on him. Even Golf Digest put his column—reportedly a $3 million gig—on hold. L'affaire Tiger made Page 1 of the New York Post 20 days in a row, making it the paper's longest-running cover story ever, surpassing the 9/11 attacks. It remains unclear whether Tiger and his Swedish model wife, Elin, will divorce but if they do she could walk away with up to $500 million.
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