Parts One and Two combined.

Part One - Paying For It

This will mark the fifth attempt I’ve made at beginning this year’s “Sex Issue.” I’m hoping there is not a sixth. My argument for this year’s article hasn’t changed since March, however much of the content has. Every time I’ve sat down in an attempt to unravel this year in Coitus Reporting, some new scandal or otherwise unbelievable tidbit would rise up and stall the project. A steady stream of pop-culture sex stories overwhelmed the whole of the media in the past few months, so much so that the stuff I had prepared was getting buried over and over again. You’d think that with all this fuck-talk we were opening up a bit; entering a new collective maturity about sex roles and practice and how that functions in the media.

And if you’d think that, you’d be an idiot.

2011, awash in smut, and yet titillation has had nothing to do with it. Instead, we live in a culture that has defined itself by its willingness to sell sex while simultaneously strapping on the chastity belt. A walk through the neighborhood Wal-Mart will find you up to ass in eroticism - or our particular strip-mall idea of it – while the same retailer regularly refuses to carry best-selling books and magazines, DVDs, and CDs (remember those?) that their in-house censors consider inappropriate. You can stop off at the Wal-Pharmacy for your generic Viagra prescriptions, but you ain’t never gonna find a Jack-Rabbit upgrade in the aisles of plastic Chinese nirvana. America has always had these sexual identity problems and laughable inconsistencies, but when did it all get so political?

I’m certainly not that naïve. Sex has always been political (and a key economic pillar), especially when considering that for several hundred years of Western culture, the only time we’ve talked about sex in public was in a courtroom, pulpit, or the resulting news program. But these are not real conversations. They are more likely to be dictatorial monologues, regardless of who’s delivering it and what they believe. The “liberal” can be just as fascist as the “conservative,” as the ever devolving feminist movement has proven. Finding a middle ground between prude and hedonist can be tricky when you have a billion voices shaping willing to debate. But let’s be honest: it’s rare that the Right has anything good to say about sex.

There’s an argument to be made here - with sound reason and little irony - that the Right hates sex. Not fears, not misunderstands or misrepresents, but hates sex. It’s not the first time you’d accused me of hyperbole – but the recent wave of conservative absurdity reveals a strange thread of paranoia that goes well beyond the typical puritanical group-think that has pervaded the Republican and Tea Bagging parties for years. We’ve come to expect a certain amount of this silliness at this point in the political cycle as the Republican trolls come out from under whatever bridge they’ve slept under since Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008. But the typical religion-fueled anti-abortion/anti-gay rhetoric that usually propels the basest candidates in the infancy of his or her presidential bid has had a new bite, and it has diversified. While said rhetoric may be divisive and therefore self-containing in the broad scheme of political success, the fanaticism embedded in this year’s bumper crop of Tightie Righties has adopted a new language of absolutism that reveals a real sexual sickness that’s being mistaken for acceptable policy. The danger that this extremism can transcend radical conservative demagoguery and become accepted party practice isn’t imagined or inflated. Powered by economic woes, these typical prejudices have gained credence in a “dialogue” with bullies who will stop at nothing to keep Big Government out of our bank accounts, but firmly entrenched in our bedrooms.

Sex is a tremendous ethical gray area for a lot of people, exponentially so if you are a politician or clergyman who has to weigh out a universal desire against irrational regulations and your own peculiarities. When these people get caught in a scandal (and how often does said scandal directly contradict their most fervent public moral personas?), we’re often left to wonder what they were thinking, what bizarre deviation led them to chance on the sordid little indiscretion of momentary pleasure. In America, one is supposed to have personal control (part of that rugged individual thing) as it pertains to social politeness and Christian dignity, even though every fiber of our national being is steeped in indulgence and overload. Fast food, gambling, sports industries… fuck it, the entirety of the free-market myth is based on satisfying ridiculous, irrational urges with little or no consequence. Except when it comes to sex. Sex has rules, though some of them are more clearly defined than others.

The Right is constantly reminding us of their version of the rules and the past twelve months have been a particularly rich time for what amounts to media fodder and propaganda. But again, the threat here is the relationship between sex and economic policy. The heated budget debates that will no doubt carry well into the 2013 inauguration have centered more around social programs than evaluation of the Wall Street debacle, military spending, and - dare I say it? - the failure of Reaganomics. The Right does not want a single taxpayer dollar trickling into what they consider immoral institutions. So while Michelle Bachman’s unaccredited husband collects government funds for a program that seeks to cure homosexuality (powered with a decidedly Christian message which, essentially violates constitutional law), Planned Parenthood faces a endless string of attacks from the Right under the assumption that all they do is kill babies. If you recall, they’re even willing to lie about it, exaggerating the numbers in a way that “was never meant to be misunderstood as factual.”

Because Planned Parenthood collects government funding and provides several constitutionally protected programs that conservatives don’t like, the Right went to great lengths to introduce budget cuts that would essentially cripple the non-profit which supplies free or deeply discounted healthcare to almost 40% of the adult American female population. But rather than angle this as a war against women, primarily those of poor, middle, and the “oh-shit, hide this from the country club members” classes, the Republibaggers have decided that, alas, hard decisions about our country’s financial well-being have to be made. How cowardly to manipulate an economic crisis into a moral agenda that ultimately puts the health of millions of women in jeopardy.

But of course, abortion isn’t the only issue that conservatives have with Planned Parenthood. The idea that a non-profit would point out the mega-failure of George W. Bush’s wide-ranging abstinence-only sex-education programs was enough provocation to earn Cecile Richards a Public Enemy Number One rating when the Right reclaimed the House last fall. Under the banner of actually saving lives, the House sought to withdraw over 50% of Planned Parenthood’s budget. When it comes to morality and saving money, ending abortion saves lives. However, allowing poor women to die of cervical cancer and AIDS is not a moral lapse, it’s an uncomfortable side-effect of a constricted budget. That lapse is in the person who chose to have sex, after all, regardless of whether she was properly educated about the potential consequences.

Without dipping my testicles into the mouth of rhetoric here, I need to ask: how can any woman of any political leaning be okay with that reintroduction of time-honored misogyny?

The conservative understanding of liberalism is that traditional moral and ethical conventions are wantonly trampled by a minority of free-wheeling bohemians and atheistic hedonists at the expense of the conscientious majority. Of course, the majority in question here is not necessarily an equivocation of all collected opinions and lifestyles that combine to fill a consensus of expectations and values. This majority is the wealthy, activist Protestant Christian base. “It” is predominantly white in a country that is increasingly brown and “it” is often eager to make mistakes when quoting the printed words on which our country was founded - biblical, constitutional, or otherwise. That is not my personal, liberal attack on conservatism. “It” is just what “it” is. If you ask these people (or more likely, even if you didn’t), they’ll explain to you that America’s recent woes are the result failed Democratic policies (which were actually Republican policies, from rampant spending and the EPA to social security and housing subsidies) and a collapse of traditional values. This can be translated into “we hate the gays and think abortion is evil.” There is no convincing them that we can trace abortion and homosexuality back to the dawn of mankind. Nope. These are purely modern corruptions that should be evaluated by government. Incredibly small, inactive government that should stay out of our lives.

What the Right stands to lose from homosexual marriage is beyond me. Yet here we are, in 2011, debating what is clearly an uncomplicated civil rights issue. But how can we even approach the marriage debate if we still live in a country in which an openly gay man or woman isn’t even allowed to die for his or her country? We can’t even sign these fags up for cannon fodder.

The laughable Don’t Ask Don’t Tell debate was and is a clear line in the sand for both of 2008’s presidential candidates. Unfortunately, when the dust cleared this winter, both Obama and his opponent John McCain ended up on the same side of that line. McCain, who had previously stumped for the abolition of the policy gave into his conservative base and very publicly rejected the repeal. Obama - who ran on an often pandering progressive GLBC platform - refused to take a stand on the policy as well. Perhaps Obama could spot the shadows in the water that would become the Planned Parenthood controversy sharks, but in a horrific coincidence, the president’s failure to push the repeal of DADT (a campaign promise) looked even more pathetic when a string of young GLBC suicides and anti-gay violence landed in the media.

In Rush Limbaugh’s moral sphere “there is no correlation between teenage bullies who beat up homosexual kids – if a 16 year old can even know that he’s gay – and the policy of having gay people serve in the military.” We expect these kind of intolerant statements from a raconteur like Limbaugh, however it was shocking to watch the Right go silent for a week, choosing to simply ignore the stories as if they did not exist.

Where sexual preference meets national policy is at the intersection of religion and politics. Nowhere else. There is absolutely no other explanation for why sexual preference would limit the rights of an individual under the BIG “C” Constitution or the Bill of Rights. To make a law that outlaws specific kinds of fucking is a law against fucking. But if the policies relating to homosexuality are not defined by Judeo-Christian rhetoric entirely, then the flabbergasting paranoia over “sharia” certainly smacks of conservative Christian malice.

There’s a popular argument that there are “true Christians” and then there are those misguided souls who wholly misrepresent the teachings of Christ, yet these same folks would faint in the aisles if Pastor Bob were to deliver a sermon on Jesus’s sexuality. If the Bible is all about “interpretation” or “literal readings,” it’s an easy leap into the reading that Jesus encouraged getting down with anything that moved. The brother roamed the desert with sailors and prostitutes, speaking about love and equality. Jesus never uttered a word about the sexual practices of the Romans (more on them later), though he spoke plenty about their violence, social intolerance, and financial dealings. And he didn’t seem to be very concerned about polygamy. Historically, there were plenty of Jewish, Christian, and Roman polygamists on record. The practice wasn’t any more uncommon than homosexuality, which, by the way, there was A LOT of in Greece, Rome, and Egypt (yeah, more on that later, too). But as the old saying goes: one (wife/husband) is enough. In fact, one of the only times in which Jesus makes direct reference to sex is when he is condemning the concept of divorce. Go figure.

The buzzword “sharia” is the latest in a line of sly bigotry, intertwining the fear of sexual impotency with terrorist violence. America, neutered by 9/11 - by an enemy with arguably even bigger religion-driven sexual hang-ups – can only respond by launching a million explosive phalluses off into the night for some ole midnight shock n’ awe. That guttural but no less seductive enemy hides at the edges of our tolerance, infiltrating our culture by playing off of our best intentions and simultaneously cuckolding our rough and ready cocksmen with the promise of a thousand thirsty virgins in paradise. How can we hope to defeat an enemy who is getting busy with forty women at once, individually producing a whole army of like-minded zealots eager to bring the nation to it’s knees? Before it was the blacks and the Hispanics. In Germany in the 1930’s, it was the Jews. That it’s biggest critics don’t even understand the basic tenets of Islam, let alone that “sharia” has little to do with sexual conduct (with polygamy little more than a footnote), is dangerously irresponsible. The idea that “sharia” disregards the rights of women - coming from folks who wanted to dissolve Planned Parenthood – should be identified as hysterical.

Stay on course with me here, even as my imagination wanders: the Right wants a smaller government that is most effective when it stays out of people’s private lives and reduces spending, yet that same government should form committees and pass special legislation to curb specific biological behaviors that essentially define the perimeters of said private lives. And that’s exactly what landed in the midst of the spending debates in April. While the Right was championing budget cuts that would eliminate monies for liberal resources like arts and sex education, public radio, and social/health services and ultimately poo-pooing the wasteful, committee-driven mentality of Washington, those same conservatives (specifically Orinn Hatch and more than a few shameful Democrats like Dianne Feinstein) were pushing the federal government to expand the perimeters of obscenity laws and increase pornography prosecutions despite the protection of said materials by ruling of the Supreme Court.

Part Two - Teabaggers 3: Porn and Politics

To say that Americans have a complicated view of sexuality is an understatement. Inter-culturally, there’s no clear-cut consensus on what even constitutes sex, as we were made painfully aware a few years ago by President Bill Clinton. How then, do you legally regulate sexual behavior without sounding like a slack-jawed hypocritical idiot? There are those folks who only think in terms of penises and vaginas, therefor oral and anal sexual contact doesn’t even exist in a manner in which they can debate. Like the classic deist argument: even acknowledging the word is accepting the possibility of a God. Homosexual contact wasn’t legal in the United States until 2003, and outside of the bedroom, 21 states still hold that it is legal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in the workplace. While I have never had gay sex in the breakroom, that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here: in almost half of the country, your boss can fire you just because you like blowjobs (giving or receiving).

We can recognize that this is not only silly but downright draconian. And of course, there is a steady stream of media exploitation of sex for political purposes, right and left. For every dumb ass high school teacher who makes national headlines for calling a student a fag, there’s the Looney Lefties who want to crucify Tracey Morgan (and I agree, for slightly different reasons) and silence Dan Savage (also, I can somewhat agree) for making comments that challenge base political correctness, even if these creepy comments were made in jest. We take this stuff so seriously that we’re left dumb-founded when sex actually does coincide with real news. The unsettling Dominique Strauss-Kahn case was being reported as a cross-cultural wake-up call for the world, ushering in a new era of sexual considerations for a continent that virtually advertises sexual harassment as one of it’s greatest exports. Call me a prude, but if I were a woman being groped by hoards of smelly, hairy French, Italian, and Spanish men in the employee lounge, I wouldn’t necessarily equate that with liberation. But just as Americans were about to claim victory for the mass-marketed International Chastity Belt (complete with crucifix key), some even stranger details broke in the case. With just a splash of tabloid journalistic persistence and miscued statements to police, the Ben Roethlisberger of the IMF has watched the probability of conviction wither. Is DSK innocent? It depends on whether or not you believe that politicians are honest, virtuous, trust-worthy people who always do the right thing…like have “consensual sex” with their hotel housekeeper. If you want to know how mature we are as a political nation, consider that a large number of accusations have been made the DSK case is a response from prosecutors to the Roman Polanski case.

Polanski, after all, had sex with a child and made a few movies about it. And we all know how permissive those French movies can be. I think we can all agree that the sexual coercion of minors is a pretty disturbing and justifiably illegal thing, as is the production of materials that depict or document such encounters. While the real problem is that this happens (and let’s be honest, will continue to happen) at all, it’s not the most scientific or logical argument that child pornography and sexual abuse is the result of art, or cinema, or the logical progression for someone who experiences arousal from legal pornography. Unless you’re a Senator from Utah, California, or Nevada, the three states that seems to have cornered the market on wacky sex habits.

Yet that’s just what an open letter co-signed by 41 senators and sent to Attorney General Eric Holder argued. An ill-begotten death-rattle that attempted to drum-up public support for porn prosecutions, the letter now seems to have been a ploy prompted by some inside information that the budget cuts would be shutting down the preposterous Obscenity Task Force, a leftover from the Bush (and really, Reagan’s Meese committee) administration that sought to rid the world of all pornography, er..uh… they meant ….

What did it mean? What were the objectives of the Obscenity Task force if not to use government funds to protect the people from stuff that they wanted. We’re not talking nuclear weapons here. We’re talking legally documented and distributed pornography made by adults for adults. The committee was formed to target, arrest, and prosecute child pornographers and identify sexually violent materials that had no “cultural or artistic merit.” A slippery slope, constitutionally, but generally agreed to be a decent thing.

The letter, however ineffectual (the task force was shut down in May after Republicans demands for cuts deemed it unnecessary, go figure), identified a consistent hypocrisy: why do the people that claim to not watch porn believe that others should not have the right to watch it? And why are they willing to lie, cheat and steal to make sure that others cannot exercise that right? Sure, religion has something to do with it. And certainly, there are valid questions and concerns about the contradictory messages of porn and the depiction of both men and women in stereotypical, arguably degraded scenarios. But are these arguments about porn, or arguments about human sexual behavior. Hatch and his 41 dwarfs really can’t say. So instead of opening up a dialogue, they just made up some facts:

“Last June, an important briefing in the Capitol outlined how pornography has changed, becoming more harmful, addictive, and available, and linked to other crimes.  Researchers, scholars, and other experts explained, for example, how today’s hardcore pornography is typified by extreme violence against women and how pornography consumption can contribute to sexual harassment and sexual violence.  Another expert warned that Internet adult pornography normalizes sexual harm to children, while another addressed the growing connection between pornography and sex trafficking…

Simply put, we know more than ever how illegal adult obscenity contributes to violence against women, addiction, harm to children, and sex trafficking.  This material harms individuals, families, and communities and the problems are only getting worse.”

Now hold on. 42, it turns out, is not the answer to everything. ‘Simply put,’ none of that argument makes sense, nor is it remotely defensible when you use real studies, not simply those promoted by the Church of Latter Day Saints and Morality in the Media. There is ample evidence to suggest that, since the proliferation of internet porn in the mid-90’s, most of the harmful things they report on as side-effects of a porned-up culture are actually declining. Since they do not cite their sources, I’ve made sure document mine:

A Princeton Brookings study states that reported sex crimes against children fell more than 50% from 1992 to 2006. The U.S. Justice department has also reported a 500% increase in the number of successful child pornography prosecutions since 1995.

Statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice state that reported forcible rape dropped to 29 in 100,000 in 2009, the lowest that’s ever been recorded.

The U.S. Justice Department reports that reports of domestic violence dropped by more than 50% since 1993, and that divorce is at its lowest rate since 1970.

The CDC reports that, in 2009, teen pregnancy has hit an all-time low.

And here’s the kicker. The Guttenmacher Institute’s most recent survey on abortion (the mother of all sexual evils) has some shocking numbers in it, the kind of which don’t seem to ever be reported in the mass media at all:

The rate of abortion in 2005 was at it’s lowest point since 1974, the year after Roe vs. Wade. It has risen .2 % under the Obama Administration.

While 49% of all pregnancies are unintended, only 22% are terminated by abortion.54% of all abortions were the result of failed contraception.

Teens are less that 20% of all abortions and 70% of all abortions are by mothers who already have at least one child.

Less than 40% of women who have abortions live below the poverty line. 79% of all women who have abortions state that they cannot afford to have the baby. 38% of all abortions were given to white women.

One third of all women under the age of 45 will have an abortion.

If pornography is the meter for degrees of social depravity, we seem to have done pretty good by it, especially when talking about prevention of sexual evils.

The one truly distressing fact to confront is the expansion of the human trafficking, which again, is more a side effect of the world economy than it is the proliferation of pornography.

You may not be able to defend much of pornography on an intellectual level with these folks, but the numbers don’t lie. As the access to free and diverse pornography has increased, bad stuff has decreased. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the nation’s staggering homicide numbers, which we can only believe will continue to increase as the effects of the economic catastrophe of 2008 bear down.

Citing the ubiquity of porn is certainly no logical defense. After all, the nation had a fantastic chuckle when it was revealed that Osama Bin Laden has a sizable porn collection in his little bunker. What can be more damning of a religious and financial zealot who ordered the murder of thousands of people on the basis of their Western decadence and perversity? It seemed fitting, the perceived fall from grace, because of the sick hypocrisy imbedded. By my initial response to the story was one of sadness. Here was another justification for the culture-vultures to deride porn without any real justification.

The discussion that needs to be had is not a one-sided, black and white argument for or against pornography, because both sides come out looking silly.

Porn is as old as art. In fact, porn was the first art. 25,000 years ago (that’s 19,000 years before God created man for all of you Creationists reading along), some horny caveman teenager sat down and carved the Venus of Willendorf, either as a glorious exaltation of the beauty and power of women or because he just wasn’t having any luck finding a mate. Whatever the case, a few trillion big-titted statues and ridiculously large stone, wood, and bone phalli later, the Egyptians apparently started having a lot of sex with the animals of the Nile … and their sisters, servants, and slaves. All well documented. It was, of course, the Greeks a few thousand years later who formalized pornography for dinnerware and weaponry, hailing in a New World order of public debauchery, pederasts, one hell of and army and -l et’s see…lewd sex, military, debate … oh yeah – politicians! Then came the Romans who sought to make the world Rome and then graffiti a large dick of the side of it. The Romans fucked everything and went out of their way to document it loudly and proudly. You’ll recall too that the Jesus fellow really didn’t seem to have many problems with the graphic perversity of the Roman world. His concerns were never about which Jewish prostitute worked on the Sabbath or the giant cock scribbled on the side of the Temple. In the words of Jesus: “It was the economy, Stupid.” Namely that his own people would forget their own rules as a tradition if it meant winning some money on a cock (different kind) fight.

Yep, the Romans loved porn, even after they decided that Jesus was just alright and made him their national spokesman (a move that proved that Constantine was even crazier than previously imagined). In fact, most of the earliest Christian sects were fertility and sex cults. Even under the reformed church and well into the 6^th century CE, churches were being built with lavish sexual imagery and what would no doubt be considered pornographic depictions covering their exterior and interior walls as a means of attracting new parishioners.

Christianity did not do the Romans any good. Already in disarray, the empire collapsed a hundred years later. While there was still plenty of porn around, it now served a dual function of promoting Christian mythology or referencing the Classical world before it. Painting a picture of the naked Virgin Mary or of a swan raping a woman was high art, often commissioned by the church itself. But the Church was a harsh mistress, especially as plagues and wars started people looking for some easy answers to why God hated them all so much. Why, because you’re all perverts, of course. By the mid-1400’s, figures like Savonarola and later, Pope Paul III started destroying art in an attempt to rid the world of filth, a trend that continues until the printing press makes smut profitable…and it’s creators and consumers prosecutable. Strange thing, though: throwing Oscar Wilde in prison didn’t stop porn.

Somehow, we went leapt from the creation of the written word, mathematics, science, literature, medicine, philosophy, astronomy, and the city-state to the Dark Ages, plagues, and book-burnings in the blink of a Christian eye. Some of the greatest works by very Christian artists like William Blake were destroyed because of their erotic content, and still how many more unwritten because of intolerant beliefs. But pornography never went away, and who could stop it once the camera was mass-marketed? The first thing people did with cameras was shoot themselves doing it.

The argument against porn doesn’t make any sense. But as Alan Moore suggests, the devil is in the details; the eroticism that we as a culture have lost as modern pornography strips the act of sex down to its most guttural essentials.

Modern porn is degrading only because we have degraded ourselves, having imagined humanity to be something more meaningful than basic biological urges and the slightly more sophisticated urges to observe them. When we define ourselves as above those particular laws, we have to be careful to uphold them, and that is where the Right fails to understand, even hate sex. What makes sexual expression vital to psychological and spiritual health is greatly linked to the imagination. The conservative response is to seek to curb something they are not especially good at expressing, whether it be physically, emotionally, or graphically. This is certainly tied to religion and consequently, as a repression of antiquated ideas about making the world Rome, or in this case, Church.

But as I said before, the Right are not entirely wrong in their appraisal of the porn industry, and the Left are no better at an open discussion of porn and sexuality. There seems to be no indifference in the debate: your either against it or you’re a misogynist pervert. While liberal anti-porn activists would scoff at the idea that a man who has sex with other men is a sexual deviant, that same activist would not hesitate in decrying that homosexual man if he enjoyed watching pornography that featured women. The mode of thought that all pornography lessens and debases it’s subjects is on its way out the window as new generations of porn consumers age. And you certainly can’t win an argument by calling the other side names.

Am I an advocate for porn? Not really. Quite a bit of porn and the potential for it makes me a bit squeamish myself. Again, referencing Moore, the state of the industry strips away the erotic and replaces it with the mechanical rote response to human connection. I’m more fearful of the ways in which porn interacts with technology, not in the sense that the internet is destroying sexual intimacy, but simply that the increased technological connectivity does have a dehumanizing effect on its subjects. How often have any of us had an erotic moment ruined by the intrusion of technology? I’m not necessarily talking about coitus here. When was the last time you glanced across the candle-lit dinner table and saw your partner texting their sister’s girlfriend’s cousin and thought to yourself: I should have just downloaded Who’s Nailin Palin Too?

At least your $150 dinner helped stimulated the economy, even if you’ll be going home to seek your own stimulation from a free streaming service. But let’s be honest: about the only industry in America that really is turning out an marketable international product at a huge profit is porno. If the Teabaggers are all about deregulation, you think they’d see the relative value in charging $50 bucks for a DVD of Orin Hatch’s predictably bizarre sexcapades, whether actual teabagging occurs or not.