Posted by Amanda Marcotte
I don't want to keep hammering at this, but here's a link to my Alternet piece on why I'm so concerned about this whole Anthony Weiner scandal. I won't revisit it at length here; please read the article. My biggest problem is that the pretense of public interest was completely abandoned, and this was just a matter of the "ick factor". Now that this door is open, and simply making people uncomfortable is considered reason enough to condemn someone and demand their resignation, I'm really worried. My gut feeling on this is that Weinergate really is confirmation of a suspicion I've had for awhile that America has quietly become more prudish in the past few years, and this is a very bad thing.
Now, I get that some people are sexually unadventurous, and god knows that's their right. I find it silly when sexually unadventurous people get belligerently defensive that they're not as interesting in this way as adventurous people, which is like having picky people get angry that their stories of eating the same three things garner less attention than the stories of the gastronomically curious. Or having people who stubbornly stay at home get defensive when people who travel a lot get more attention. Or people who haven't bought a new album in 20 years lash out at "hipsters" for being so bold as to think they're cool. I could go on, but you get the picture. All of us have areas of our lives where we're not that interesting. Sex can be one of them. The whole "prude pride" thing just seems silly to me.
Silly, and unfortunately dangerous, as recent events demonstrate. Because it's one thing not to be sexually adventurous, but quite another to sit in judgment of people whose sexual curiosities ick you out, whether done out of meanness or defensiveness. And lately, I've just generally noticed a trend towards more openly bashing people for seeking pleasure, even and often especially if they harm no one else in doing so. Hipster-bashing is actually a good example! Between prudes and libertines, there's a major imbalance, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that libertines just aren't nearly as interested in getting into the business of prudes as vice versa. And in a way, it's a lot easier to be prudish, to stick your nose in the air and claim that you're too good for base interests in humping and sucking and just giving yourself over to pleasure. The fact that we are conducting sex scandals that don't actually have any public importance is only part of it. I compiled a mental list of examples over the course of the day, and hope I can even remember them all:
*Trend stories about women who are just so tired of sex.
*The surprisingly little amount of pushback that the Republicans have gotten for suddenly, as a party, moving towards an anti-contraception stance. They're still hedging their bets---they're only against it if you're too poor to afford it on your own---but the fact of the matter is this is a radical anti-sex position that they would have been afraid to have a few years ago. Even a few years ago, most conservatives wouldn't have been so eager to close down Planned Parenthood and screeching that you need to just shut your legs if you don't want to have babies, but now that's becoming a mainstream sentiment that is getting very little pushback from inside the Republican party. From the outside, there has been resistance, but the vast majority of it has been rooted in the "necessary evil" argument---i.e., that we have to have these services because of public health problems if we don't---and very little has been geared towards saying, "Sex if fucking awesome, and anyone who's against it can suck my left one." And part of the reason is that even liberals are afraid to defend sex.
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http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/against_prudery
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