nola
02-04-2005, 11:17 PM
Don't get your knickers twisted - morality isn't just about sex
By D.K. Roberts
When it comes to sex, Americans act like adolescents, simultaneously confused, titillated, scandalized, drooling, obsessed, and grossed-out. Maybe it's because we are comparatively young nation. Maybe it's because our mythic founders – the Puritans – were the most unfun people in Europe.
It doesn't take much for us to get our knickers in a twist. A promo for the nighttime soap "Desperate Housewives" appearing on "Monday Night Football" treated viewers to a creamy-skinned blonde, dropping her towel in front of a fully-padded player in a steamy locker room. The family values nation bowed up, peppering ABC with complaints. They weren't offended that this low-rent seduction scene played into retrograde "Mandingo" style stereotypes about big black bucks and randy white misses. They just don't like NEKKIDNESS. Children could be watching!
Of course, it is a scientific fact that the mere sight of a nice set of female thoracic vertebrae can corrupt the minds of the young. Better to focus on the game, in which a bunch of steroid-crazed, wife-beating, semi-literate millionaires do grievous bodily harm to another bunch of steroid-crazed, wife-beating, semi-literate millionaires while fans with faces and torsos painted blue or else giant pieces of styrofoam cheese on their heads cheer them on. Football is good clean all-American fun. Sex is dirty; violence is OK.
The hissy fit over Nicolette Sheridan's bare back on "Monday Night Football" isn't surprising in a country where the Attorney General ordered the statue of Justice covered up because she sported a bare bosom, the hussy. Gay marriage, abortion, pornography, sex education – these were among the issues "values" voters in the presidential election cited as important to them. Most are evangelical Christians and most went for George W. Bush. A lot of them were still mad about such attacks on the chastity of their senses as Bono's feckless use of the "F-word" on a televised awards show and Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl. The scary prospect of glimpsing a nanosecond of nipple far outweighed the commercials with the farting horses, the booze bingeing, and the one where the voice intones, "Erections lasting more than four hours require immediate medical attention."
Values" voters claim to be all about "spirituality." In truth, they are fixated on the body. The Religious Right regards sexuality as dangerous, anarchic, an enemy of the orderly state. For progressives, expressions of sexuality (like religion) among consenting adults are a matter of individual liberty. In other words, not that big a deal.
But throughout American history, conservatives have used sex to tar liberals and liberal ideas. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president against John Adams, he was accused of being a crypto French Revolutionist, hell-bent on promoting non-stop partying and sanctioned adultery. The 1800 equivalents of the NEW YORK POST and Fox News ran endless (and quite prurient) stories about his affair with his slave Sally Hemings. Pro-slavery ideology in the 1850s argued that if "the African" were emancipated, "our civilization and its institutions would be destroyed." "Free love" would replace domesticity, uppity women would demand the right to vote, the family would disintegrate and Christianity would wither and die.
Now we are told that if homosexuals are allowed to marry, the institution of heterosexual marriage will be wrecked. As one congressman breathlessly threatened, next thing you know polygamy will be legalized. People could marry dogs or goats.
Given that straight people divorce over fifty percent of the time, the idea that gay marriage somehow undermines traditional marriage is flimsy as the outfits the "Desperate Housewives" wear to do the dusting. Surely even men who believe in "wifely submission" don't really want to marry a dog, no matter how obedient. And goats? How desperate do you have to be to want a long-term relationship with a goat?
This beat goes on and on. Sex education which mentions anything other than abstinence will somehow make teens start rutting like rabbits. Allowing women the right to an abortion promulgates sin because nice girls don't do it till they're married. But the central question is this: when did sexual morality become equated with morality in total? What about the morality of tax cuts for the rich and extra burdens for the poor? The morality of insisting that children be born then refusing them health care and a decent education? Capital punishment? Colonialism? Torture? Lying about reasons to send young men and women to their deaths in war? Morality isn't just about reproductive organs.
George W. Bush and his cadre of True Believers have successfully tapped into the deep need in American culture for definition and certainty: you're either with us or against us. You're our kind of Christian or you're no Christian at all. You are pure or you are polluted. Just watching the movie about Alfred Kinsey will, according to the Family Research Council, lead you into perversion or at least wild unprocreative sex.
Even the medieval Catholic church, an institution hardly known for its tolerance, considered lust the least of the Seven Deadly Sins – pride was number one.
By D.K. Roberts
When it comes to sex, Americans act like adolescents, simultaneously confused, titillated, scandalized, drooling, obsessed, and grossed-out. Maybe it's because we are comparatively young nation. Maybe it's because our mythic founders – the Puritans – were the most unfun people in Europe.
It doesn't take much for us to get our knickers in a twist. A promo for the nighttime soap "Desperate Housewives" appearing on "Monday Night Football" treated viewers to a creamy-skinned blonde, dropping her towel in front of a fully-padded player in a steamy locker room. The family values nation bowed up, peppering ABC with complaints. They weren't offended that this low-rent seduction scene played into retrograde "Mandingo" style stereotypes about big black bucks and randy white misses. They just don't like NEKKIDNESS. Children could be watching!
Of course, it is a scientific fact that the mere sight of a nice set of female thoracic vertebrae can corrupt the minds of the young. Better to focus on the game, in which a bunch of steroid-crazed, wife-beating, semi-literate millionaires do grievous bodily harm to another bunch of steroid-crazed, wife-beating, semi-literate millionaires while fans with faces and torsos painted blue or else giant pieces of styrofoam cheese on their heads cheer them on. Football is good clean all-American fun. Sex is dirty; violence is OK.
The hissy fit over Nicolette Sheridan's bare back on "Monday Night Football" isn't surprising in a country where the Attorney General ordered the statue of Justice covered up because she sported a bare bosom, the hussy. Gay marriage, abortion, pornography, sex education – these were among the issues "values" voters in the presidential election cited as important to them. Most are evangelical Christians and most went for George W. Bush. A lot of them were still mad about such attacks on the chastity of their senses as Bono's feckless use of the "F-word" on a televised awards show and Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl. The scary prospect of glimpsing a nanosecond of nipple far outweighed the commercials with the farting horses, the booze bingeing, and the one where the voice intones, "Erections lasting more than four hours require immediate medical attention."
Values" voters claim to be all about "spirituality." In truth, they are fixated on the body. The Religious Right regards sexuality as dangerous, anarchic, an enemy of the orderly state. For progressives, expressions of sexuality (like religion) among consenting adults are a matter of individual liberty. In other words, not that big a deal.
But throughout American history, conservatives have used sex to tar liberals and liberal ideas. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president against John Adams, he was accused of being a crypto French Revolutionist, hell-bent on promoting non-stop partying and sanctioned adultery. The 1800 equivalents of the NEW YORK POST and Fox News ran endless (and quite prurient) stories about his affair with his slave Sally Hemings. Pro-slavery ideology in the 1850s argued that if "the African" were emancipated, "our civilization and its institutions would be destroyed." "Free love" would replace domesticity, uppity women would demand the right to vote, the family would disintegrate and Christianity would wither and die.
Now we are told that if homosexuals are allowed to marry, the institution of heterosexual marriage will be wrecked. As one congressman breathlessly threatened, next thing you know polygamy will be legalized. People could marry dogs or goats.
Given that straight people divorce over fifty percent of the time, the idea that gay marriage somehow undermines traditional marriage is flimsy as the outfits the "Desperate Housewives" wear to do the dusting. Surely even men who believe in "wifely submission" don't really want to marry a dog, no matter how obedient. And goats? How desperate do you have to be to want a long-term relationship with a goat?
This beat goes on and on. Sex education which mentions anything other than abstinence will somehow make teens start rutting like rabbits. Allowing women the right to an abortion promulgates sin because nice girls don't do it till they're married. But the central question is this: when did sexual morality become equated with morality in total? What about the morality of tax cuts for the rich and extra burdens for the poor? The morality of insisting that children be born then refusing them health care and a decent education? Capital punishment? Colonialism? Torture? Lying about reasons to send young men and women to their deaths in war? Morality isn't just about reproductive organs.
George W. Bush and his cadre of True Believers have successfully tapped into the deep need in American culture for definition and certainty: you're either with us or against us. You're our kind of Christian or you're no Christian at all. You are pure or you are polluted. Just watching the movie about Alfred Kinsey will, according to the Family Research Council, lead you into perversion or at least wild unprocreative sex.
Even the medieval Catholic church, an institution hardly known for its tolerance, considered lust the least of the Seven Deadly Sins – pride was number one.