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December 22, 2004
Don't get your knickers twisted...
This newspaper article was just so awesome, I had to reprint it here. You can find the original also at this website: The St. Petersburg Times.
Don't get your knickers twisted, morality isn't just about sex
By DIANE ROBERTS
Published December 18, 2004
When it comes to sex, Americans act like adolescents: simultaneously confused, titillated, scandalized, drooling, obsessed and grossed-out. Maybe it's because we are a 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 rose up, peppering ABC with complaints. They weren't offended that this low-rent seduction scene played into stereotypes about black men and white women. 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 harm another bunch of steroid-crazed, wife-beating, semi-literate millionaires while fans with faces and torsos painted blue or with giant pieces of plastic foam cheese on their heads cheer them on. Football is good clean all-American fun. Sex is dirty; violence is okay.
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 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 a breast far outweighed the commercials with the flatulent 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," but they are really 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 nonstop 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. Proslavery 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 and the family would disintegrate. 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 50 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.
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.
Diane Roberts is author of Dream State, a book about Florida.
Posted by Bastique at December 22, 2004 4:57 PM