From the Department of the Chronically Clueless, we learn that Romney lost the election because of the Slut Vote. I thought I’d heard everything, but this is a new candor I’d not quite expected.
I’ve been saying for years that the major driver behind much of the deep core, far right, religiously self-identified GOP agenda is an obsession over Other People’s Sex Lives. This past year and change, they’ve been making it explicit in surprising, sometimes funny, but usually jaw-droppingly amazing ways, and this is just a continuation of it. If anyone is inclined to cut them slack over this anymore, it is an exercise in strained tolerance.
As far as I’m concerned, we had this argument in the Sixties and in terms of how people actually live, it was settled in favor of personal choice and a rejection of what I term Levitical Law. In other words, all that stuff about the evils of sex is just the neurotic shaming some people who are by virtue of nurture (they were raised that way) or even maybe nature (they are perpetually self-conscious and easily offended by, you know, personal stuff) insist on putting on the rest of us.
For the record, I like sex. I don’t think there is anything innately wrong with it. As a friend of mine once said, “It’s all good, some’s better.” (Also, for the record, I am talking about consensual sex, not rape, not coercive insistence, not child abuse, but mutually beneficial, consensual sex.) I do not believe sex should be put in a box or straitjacketed by social convention born out of other peoples’ inability to be comfortable with it.
In other words, it’s none of your business who I fuck or how and I refuse to accept guilt or shame you think I should feel because you can’t get past your own “Eww!” reflex.
(Because also clearly, that’s not quite it either, since some of the biggest proponents of the anti-sex league are themselves congenitally indulgent. As long as “no one finds out” they do everything they tell the rest of us we shouldn’t do. Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, go down the list. Also, apparently, the active anti-choicers who find personal redemption by parading in front of Planned Parenthood clinics seem not to understand the concept of other people having rights, as close to 20% of the women with picket signs seem to end up in those same clinics availing themselves of the services they so ardently wish to deny every other woman! I abhor the politics of hypocrisy.)
Many years ago I stood in line outside a theater showing an X-rated film. An earnest young woman was handing out fliers decrying the awfulness of the sinful film being shown. She got to me and starting haranguing me not to go in. I asked her, what is it you find so offensive? It emerged that she herself had never seen the film in question. I insisted she do so, I would buy her a ticket, after all if you’re going to protest Speech you should know what speech it is you’re trying to suppress. Scared her to death. She ran away. I have no pity. It wasn’t the film she was protesting, it was, in my opinion, a compulsion to deny an idea—that sex is okay.
People abuse sex all the time. Hurting people to get your rocks off is never okay. I do not for a minute excuse rape. But I make a distinction between healthy sex and hurting people. It is the hurting part that we should pay attention to. Instead, it seems, some people can’t separate the two. (It is unfortunate and sad that for some folks, sex is never anything but hurtful. Something should be done to address the circumstances that lead to that. But taking away the rights and abilities of others to engage in mutual, consensual, wholesome sex is not the way.)
So I think my response to the apologists for the GOP who have decided this is why they lost is—fucking right. Fair, perhaps, is fair—the Right doesn’t want the Left to take away their guns, then the Right should stop trying to take away everybody’s sex.
Maybe that should be a new Third Party—Sluts for Liberty.
I think I prefer the Slut agenda to the Prude Platform.