Original context.
This piece is semi-contrarian, and I feel the strong need to be contrarian against it. Well, not against the general idea that a sex scandal just to have one is a bad thing—I still maintain that garden variety adulteries and kinks are nobody’s business but their own, and the media needs to butt out of it, barring other factors that make the story news. But let’s face it, everyone agrees to those rules these days, barring the Clinton sex scandal, where the whole “perjury” trap was set up just so there could be an excuse for a pointless, salacious sex scandal that helped distract our nation’s capital right when more attention needed to be paid to the movement of terrorists that, you know, wanted to kill us all as we soon found out.
But outside of that, most of the sex scandals that have rocked the political world as of late might better be called “patriarchy scandals”, and since they involve the very same politicians who make a living preening around as great patriarchs, ripping their mask off and showing the squirmy insides is a favor to us all. Which is why I blanched at this:
Instead, what stories like this really do is to damage the reputation of sex. Whenever there’s a sex scandal, I feel sorry for sex. I felt sorry for sex during the Larry Craig brouhaha last summer. What if he liked being married and procreating and giving anonymous head? What if that was his sexual preference? What if he really was not gay, as he claims, but had sexual desires that seemed incoherent? Some of the response to Craig was like the response to moralists like Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard and now Spitzer–moralists deserve to suffer the same force of negative judgment they wielded on others. Shame on us? Shame on you, ha ha! But lots of the response was sheer homophobia. And all of it was sheer erotophobia.
For some, maybe, but let’s be honest. The assholes have it coming, and instead of squealing about how taking a look is erotophobia, let’s look at how these scandals can be used in service of dismantling erotophobia.
The one unavoidable string that ties all these cases together is that the men in question were eager to punish others down the economic or power scale from them for the same behavior. Craig , Haggard, and Baker aren’t just men caught with their pants down, but performing behaviors that they’d have you or I thrown in jail for, or at least burn in hell. Spitzer was worse, as I’ve noted before, fucking the very kind of women he’s had thrown in jail before, a neat little loop that shows the power trips and sadism woven into our not-so-beloved patriarchy. They should be ashamed, not because of their sexual proclivities, but their contempt for our democracy and the notion that all citizens are equal. It’s not who they were fucking (putting their dicks in) but who they were fucking (putting their boots on) that makes many of us cackle in schadenfreude when they go down. Maybe we aren’t erotophobes, but inequalityphobes, and I for one am not ashamed of that.
To look away when this happens to the powerful men who write our laws, push our politicians around, or enforce our laws is to reinforce the patriarchal double standard, where the patriarchs get to do whatever they want, but the rest of us have to toe the line or be damned. And sometimes the latter happens even when we do toe the line. (Prostitutes, obviously, have no good choices in this system that leave them undamned by the patriarchs.) I’m hardly a prude—I think you should be hanging from the rafters if that’s what gets you off and hurts no one else—but I’ll admit while garden variety perversion doesn’t hold my attention too long, a giant hypocrite with mountains of power getting caught with his pants down is endlessly fascinating.
It’s not like the people who are following this Spitzer story, or the Craig story before that or the Vitter story before that, don’t know where to look if we just want to find stories of people fucking to engage our fear and loathing, if we did in fact feel fear and loathing when faced with non-apologetic, non-hypocritcal sexual kinkery. No, it’s not the sex, it really is the giant egos that draw our attention. The fall of our hubris-laden patriarchs was tragedy in the era of kings, but in our democratic era, it’s just desserts.
Erotophobia does exist, and these scandals expose its patriarchal function, and that’s to separate the little people from the big people. We little people have arbitrary rules put on our sex lives. Sex should be about pleasure, fun, and connection, but in a patriarchy it’s about power: men over women, heterosexuals over homosexuals, white over black, the rich over the poor. And a good sex scandal is regular Feast of Misrule, with those who maintain these unfair hierarchies caught being held accountable to the rules they usually enforce on the rest of us.
Does it do any good? Beats me. I hope each little sex scandal, with the cascade of people saying it only counts because of the hypocrisy, does drive home the larger point—in a democracy, we have rule of law, not rule of man, and our leaders are accountable to the standards they hold for the rest of us.
36 Responses to “For Sexual Scandal”
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Agreed. We just have to stay focused and refuse to be scandalized next time a hypocrisy-free, not-so-patriarchal sex scandal erupts: Barney Frank, Pee Wee Herman. In that kind of situation, I think we have to step up and defend the target.
FFS. Yeah, and what if he got off on demonizing people like his anonymous sexual partners when he was in public? What if he sat in his office gleefully jerking off at the thought of all the sad same-sex couples who won’t get to marry? Who are we to tell a man what he can and can’t enjoy?
I don’t like the word “erotophobe” because it seems to be used as a stick to beat people (particularly women) who have sexual limits that the anti-erotophobe doesn’t approve of. Larry Craig’s adulterous ways are not, in and of themselves, an appropriate subject for public shaming, but the passage you quote makes it sound like the writer thinks people have some inalienable right to have sex in whatever configurtation they want, as dishonestly as they want, without fear of criticism or consequences of any kind.
The bottom line is the hypocrisy. Queer theorize THAT.
Yes, absolutely.
Incidentally, Wikipedia informs me that it was Larry Craig who lead the crusade against Barney Frank…
Hear, hear. To argue that the Spitzer thing, or the Craig thing, or the Haggard or Foley things, were just about naughty sex is to willfully miss the point.
“Larry Craig who lead the crusade against Barney Frank…”
Wha?! That’s crazy.
“Pee Wee Herman. ”
I’m unaware of anything about Paul Reubens’ political leanings, even after googling for a while (I watched Pee Wee’s Big Adventure at least a dozen times as a kid, too, so I should know this?) So I don’t know how he fits with political figures any more than any other Joe off the street who’s been in those adult theater/photograph situations, unless people saw the stories and assumed “librul Hollywood!!11!!”
I’m unaware of anything about Paul Reubens’ political leanings, even after googling for a while
I think the point is that Reubens was not a hypocrite like Larry Craig or Spitzer. The scandal about his public act of masturbation ruined his career even so.
calvinhobbes, I was trying to encourage a steady focus. The media lump together scandals involving sex as if they were all about the same thing. When they do that, they obscure the real evils: abuse, control, hypocrisy, misogyny, treating another person like a toilet. If the evils are absent and there’s nothing there but Teh Sex, decent people should defend the person implicated.
I might have missed what was said earlier, so this question might already have been answered.
Was Spitzer that hard on prostitutes? He was very hard on prostitution rings, but you can’t generalize how he treats the hooker from how he treats the pimp.
This doesn’t mean he’s not sitting in a steaming pile of hypocrisy, of course, since he was patronizing the kind of people that he used to put in jail. But it’s a bit better than “he loved fucking them over, whether with his dick or with the legal system”.
(And you know, maybe it doesn’t really matter. Odds are, ain’t neither of us are going to have to deal with the man, so what we think of his behavior doesn’t really matter.)
If Larry Craig had run for office saying that there is nothing wrong with anonymous gay sex then there would have been no story when he was caught doing it (or at least attempting to do it). But Craig ran for office saying gays are bad and gay sex is bad. So his real crime was hypocrisy. And for that I truly enjoyed seeing him embarrassed before all of America.
Spitzer was worse, as I’ve noted before, fucking the very kind of women he’s had thrown in jail before, a neat little loop that shows the power trips and sadism woven into our not-so-beloved patriarchy.
I think I agree, but part of this is just the “power trips and sadism woven into our not-so-beloved” Eliot Spitzer. His contempt for the rule of law and treatment of others as means rather than ends was apparent in his prosecutorial career, where he extracted guilty pleas not by accumulating evidence but by threatening them with public humiliation and going after them for all the dirt he could find, relevant or not.
Then as governor he displayed a similar Giulianiesque contempt for the opinions of insignificant people like, for instance, the State Senate majority leader.
So while some of this is garden-variety misogyny, Spitzer’s in many ways just an egomaniacal asshole in general.
I remember when the Ruebens story hit, and my mother was scandalized, cuz I was a huge fan of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse as a child. I know there was a lot of “FOR THE CHILDREN” moralizing going on at the time.
But, while it may have ruined his career as a children’s character(though, if I remember correctly Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, while billed as a family movie, was somewhat “adult” in its humor) I don’t think it hurt his overall career. I have seen him in some cool stuff, like Blow and Reno 911, and a new Pee-Wee movie is in production.
Reubens is still working? Wow, that’s great, I’m glad he recovered. Maybe I should watch TV occasionally….
Before the writers strike as well he was in Pushing Daisies, what will probably be a reoccurring character.
He’s been keeping pretty busy. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000607/
His character in Pushing Daisies is really interesting.
Folks NONE of these were ’sex scandals’.
They were hypocrisy scandals. With the exception of Pee Wee, they were about the potential abuse of power, the very real possibility of powerful political figures becoming wholly owned blackmail targets - not that that is much different than what we have now with our system of elections and contributions.
TOM
I thought I could help you SENATOR.
GEARY
Hagen.
[TOM nods.]
Listen, I did not —
TOM
I know, you’re alright.
GEARY
I didn’t do anything.
TOM
It’s okay. You’re very lucky — my brother FREDO operates this place, he was called before anyone. If this had happened someplace else, we couldn’t've helped you..
GEARY
I — when I woke up, I was on the floor — and I don’t know how it happened.
TOM
You can’t remember?
GEARY
I passed out.
[He stands up and moves over the bed where we see a bloody dead girl.]
I — I’ll fix it.
[He unties the girl’s hand from the bed post.]
Just a game.
[He takes a towel and begins to wipe up the blood that is all over her. He looks at the towel and wipes off his hands.]
Jesus, Jesus.
[He begins to cry. As he does, TOM looks over at NERI who is wiping his hands in the bathroom.]
Jesus, God — Oh, God. I don’t know — and I can’t understand — why I can’t remember.
TOM
You don’t have to remember — just do as I say. We’re putting a call into your office — explain that you’ll be there tomorrow afternoon — you decided to spend the night at Michael Corleone’s house in Tahoe — as his guest.
GEARY
I do remember that she was laughing…we’d done it before — and I know that I couldn’t've hurt — that girl
TOM
This girl has no family — nobody knows that she worked here. It’ll be as if she never existed. All that’s left is our friendship.
Imagine if you will just how easy it would be to manipulate say, prosecutions, contracts, appointments…
No, as much as it tickles the teenage prurience of the masses, these scandals are not really about sex. Sex is just an ingredient.
Amazing post. Took my breath away and gave me a headache from nodding and nodding in agreement.
And Banquo, “garden-variety” powerful assholeishness is deeply rooted in patriarchy. I don’t think they can be separated.
Longhairedweirdo, who gives a fuck if he wasn’t personally mean to prostitutes who were busted in his great crusade? Most of the time the prostitutes, and not the Johns, are arrested and go to jail.
Ah, thanks for the clarification on Reubens. (good point about the “for the children” angle especially.)
Actually Paul Reubens is an obsessive collector of pornography and has a huge collection. If that matters to you.
calvin: That’s the point. Reubens isn’t a political figure, and therefore the attacks on him were straight up slut-shaming and inappropriate.
Asha, I’m not even going to let this get taken over by the pointless porn vs. anti-porn debate. That one even ends up being definitional, after the anti-porn people (mostly) admit there’s nothing wrong with fantasies, with masturbating to fantasies, and with masturbating to pre-packaged fantasies, and end up trying to make impossible to narrow down distinctions between “erotica” and “porn”.
Asha- I don’t care what Paul Reubens does, or did. The reason: he does not make decisions for other people, or demonize others for things he does. Does that make sense? PR is not a politician, so I don’t care.
When PR is granted the authority to make rules, I’ll start caring about what he’s up to.
Re: the Paul Ruebens thing– I’d say the scandal came also largely from the fact that he was both ostensibly a children’s entertainer, but also gay.
> Actually Paul Reubens is an obsessive collector of pornography and has
> a huge collection. If that matters to you.
True, and the Feds tried to bust him for “child pornography” a few years ago… but the charges wouldn’t stick. He has a large and respectable collection of vintage erotica, and they were essentially hassling him, raiding his home, finding a nude photo of a 16-year-old boy that was taken in 1890, and labelling him as a child pornographer. didn’t look good in the papers, but he came out of it OK.
That’s how a porn consumer sees it, label porn vs, label erotica and fantasies, fantasies, fantasies (you said it three times).
Feminists see that 89% of pornography scenes don’t include condoms, and I can’t imagine why Spitzer trying, and apparently failing, to coerce unprotected sex from a woman is so much more of an outrage than millions of fuckumentaries displaying women getting unsafely fucked vaginally and anally before getting unsafe ejaculate squirted in their mouths.
Re: Reubens
He would buy pornography by the truckload, thousands of videos at a time, and some of it included rapes of children. His defenders say that buying in bulk like that means he couldn’t be responsible for knowing some of the content was illegal, but that says more about toxic capitalism than this one man.
Great photo- like the Debauchery Version of “Where’s Waldo?” (hint: he’s being sodomized by the leather-garbed and masked midget under the table)
Made ya look!
I think that’s a valid point but it’s kind of off topic, especially wrt individual public figures who consume pornography.
This has been a great discussion and I’m not even sure it’s appropriate for me to respond (a friend sent me the link). I basically agree with Pandagon about almost everything (except that the tone of my piece was squealing! Hardly! ). But a few points of divergence remain that I’d like to mention here:
1. That “everyone agrees to those rules these days”: I don’t know what world you live in, but I am always taken aback at the extent and degree of pleasure in moralism re adultery and prostitution in the MSM and by ordinary humans from all classes after a revelation like this.
I have lots of evidence for this. There reigns for many an idea that adultery = lying= a fundamental tendency toward immorality= a tendency toward illegality = incompetence to citizenship. This is an entirely normative chain, and doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny (except when it does! but that’s exceptional).
There reigns for many an idea that people should be held to a standard of sexual moral coherence. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t a sexual hypocrite, but often it’s for reasons of care as much as reasons that feel compromising.
Then there’s the idea that one’s response to adulterous events reveals one’s moral scaffolding. I know more than a few progressive people who won’t vote for Hillary because she stayed with Bill after his revelations of adultery, since it shows that she is morally damaged and emotionally weak and dependent. I know more than a few people who think of his sexual appetites as pathological because he’s restless, animated, and non-monogamous in inclination.
All of these distortions, of the persons and their audiences, have to do with a sexual ideology that places the performance of sexual self-control and fidelity to promises to be “good” and sexually transparent at the center of their judgments about what make people worthy, and I think that’s just wrong. Why should sexuality be the key mark of one’s competence at personhood, when a whole host of other qualities of ethical human sociality also matter?
2. People who think that “people bring these things on themselves,” as though popular media or community scandal and illegality are some kind of natural justice, are giving into the most unimaginative kind of normativity. It’s true, they bring it on themselves. It’s also true that most law and norms that model the good life around monogamy are ridiculous.
My main point here is that there is no agreement, there is massive incoherence, about what transgressions of a couple’s public monogamy can mean (we have no way of knowing).
2. I agree with the commenter who pointed out that Spitzer was not interested in porn as moral crime (even if he said that) but that his reformist rage was all about how men abuse massive amounts of money. He was much less interested in crimes insofar as they were also against people.
3. Both Pandagon and I are interested in the roots of erotophobia. We’re just looking at different roots. It’s an overdetermined situation. I never said we should look away when powerful anti-sex moralists turn out to be practitioners of what they moralize against (a ridiculous charge, since I called attention to the situation by writing about it) but that we should think about what we can make from it apart from that a structurally-enforced hypocrisy appears as abuse of power and that patriarchy had been getting its battery recharged. No one could disagree with those claims.
So one thing is that some people people who discipline sex in the political sphere feel overmastered by it in the private, and compensate in the private by lots of fucked up acts, including, let’s say, Spitzer’s (although I actually don’t know, and neither does anyone, what precise kinds of fuckedup-ness). Agreed.
But another thing, and this is my point, is that as long as sex is seen mainly as power and not as pleasure, and as long as sex is seen as a bad danger to individual sovereignty rather than one of the few places people really work out the pleasures in trust and play, sex will continue to play the public and private role of index to power and submission and not a lot else. It’s important to stand up for a pro-sex imaginary in a puritan public. It’s important to shape the meanings of sexual scandal so the discussion doesn’t turn to paint the numbers bad-men-victimize-women-through-sex analysis. It’s not that it’s not often true, but it is also true that hardly anyone is given the tools to control, to manage, and to like what’s destabilizing and confusing about sex. I was speaking up for that.
I know you don’t disagree with this, mainly. We’re both speaking dialectically! Cheers! In solidarity, LB
This has been a great discussion and I’m not even sure it’s appropriate for me to respond (a friend sent me the link). I basically agree with Pandagon about almost everything (except that the tone of my piece was squealing! Hardly! ). But a few points of divergence remain that I’d like to mention here:
1. That “everyone agrees to those rules these days”: I don’t know what world you live in, but I am always taken aback at the extent and degree of pleasure in moralism re adultery and prostitution in the MSM and by ordinary humans from all classes after a revelation like this.
I have lots of evidence for this. There reigns for many an idea that adultery = lying= a fundamental tendency toward immorality= a tendency toward illegality = incompetence to citizenship. This is an entirely normative chain, and doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny (except when it does! but that’s exceptional).
There reigns for many an idea that people should be held to a standard of sexual moral coherence. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t a sexual hypocrite, but often it’s for reasons of care as much as reasons that feel compromising.
Then there’s the idea that one’s response to adulterous events reveals one’s moral scaffolding. I know more than a few progressive people who won’t vote for Hillary because she stayed with Bill after his revelations of adultery, since it shows that she is morally damaged and emotionally weak and dependent. I know more than a few people who think of his sexual appetites as pathological because he’s restless, animated, and non-monogamous in inclination.
All of these distortions, of the persons and their audiences, have to do with a sexual ideology that places the performance of sexual self-control and fidelity to promises to be “good” and sexually transparent at the center of their judgments about what make people worthy, and I think that’s just wrong. Why should sexuality be the key mark of one’s competence at personhood, when a whole host of other qualities of ethical human sociality also matter?
2. People who think that “people bring these things on themselves,” as though popular media or community scandal and illegality are some kind of natural justice, are giving into the most unimaginative kind of normativity. It’s true, they bring it on themselves. It’s also true that most law and norms that model the good life around monogamy are ridiculous.
My main point here is that there is no agreement, there is massive incoherence, about what transgressions of a couple’s public monogamy can mean (we have no way of knowing).
2. I agree with the commenter who pointed out that Spitzer was not interested in porn as moral crime (even if he said that) but that his reformist rage was all about how men abuse massive amounts of money. He was much less interested in crimes insofar as they were also against people.
3. Both Pandagon and I are interested in the roots of erotophobia. We’re just looking at different roots. It’s an overdetermined situation. I never said we should look away when powerful anti-sex moralists turn out to be practitioners of what they moralize against (a ridiculous charge, since I called attention to the situation by writing about it) but that we should think about what we can make from it apart from that a structurally-enforced hypocrisy appears as abuse of power and that patriarchy had been getting its battery recharged. No one could disagree with those claims.
So one thing is that some people people who discipline sex in the political sphere feel overmastered by it in the private, and compensate in the private by lots of fucked up acts, including, let’s say, Spitzer’s (although I actually don’t know, and neither does anyone, what precise kinds of fuckedup-ness). Agreed.
But another thing, and this is my point, is that as long as sex is seen mainly as power and not as pleasure, and as long as sex is seen as a bad danger to individual sovereignty rather than one of the few places people really work out the pleasures in trust and play, sex will continue to play the public and private role of index to power and submission and not a lot else. It’s important to stand up for a pro-sex imaginary in a puritan public. It’s important to shape the meanings of sexual scandal so the discussion doesn’t turn to paint the numbers bad-men-victimize-women-through-sex analysis. It’s not that it’s not often true, but it is also true that hardly anyone is given the tools to control, to manage, and to like what’s destabilizing and confusing about sex. I was speaking up for that.
I know you don’t disagree with this, mainly. We’re both speaking dialectically! Cheers! In solidarity, LB
This has been a great discussion and I’m not even sure it’s appropriate for me to respond (a friend sent me the link). I basically agree with Pandagon about almost everything (except that the tone of my piece was squealing! Hardly! ). But a few points of divergence remain that I’d like to mention here:
1. That “everyone agrees to those rules these days”: I don’t know what world you live in, but I am always taken aback at the extent and degree of pleasure in moralism re adultery and prostitution in the MSM and by ordinary humans from all classes after a revelation like this.
I have lots of evidence for this. There reigns for many an idea that adultery = lying= a fundamental tendency toward immorality= a tendency toward illegality = incompetence to citizenship. This is an entirely normative chain, and doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny (except when it does! but that’s exceptional).
There reigns for many an idea that people should be held to a standard of sexual moral coherence. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t a sexual hypocrite, but often it’s for reasons of care as much as reasons that feel compromising.
Then there’s the idea that one’s response to adulterous events reveals one’s moral scaffolding. I know more than a few progressive people who won’t vote for Hillary because she stayed with Bill after his revelations of adultery, since it shows that she is morally damaged and emotionally weak and dependent. I know more than a few people who think of his sexual appetites as pathological because he’s restless, animated, and non-monogamous in inclination.
All of these distortions, of the persons and their audiences, have to do with a sexual ideology that places the performance of sexual self-control and fidelity to promises to be “good” and sexually transparent at the center of their judgments about what make people worthy, and I think that’s just wrong. Why should sexuality be the key mark of one’s competence at personhood, when a whole host of other qualities of ethical human sociality also matter?
2. People who think that “people bring these things on themselves,” as though popular media or community scandal and illegality are some kind of natural justice, are giving into the most unimaginative kind of normativity. It’s true, they bring it on themselves. It’s also true that most law and norms that model the good life around monogamy are ridiculous.
My main point here is that there is no agreement, there is massive incoherence, about what transgressions of a couple’s public monogamy can mean (we have no way of knowing).
2. I agree with the commenter who pointed out that Spitzer was not interested in porn as moral crime (even if he said that) but that his reformist rage was all about how men abuse massive amounts of money. He was much less interested in crimes insofar as they were also against people.
3. Both Pandagon and I are interested in the roots of erotophobia. We’re just looking at different roots. It’s an overdetermined situation. I never said we should look away when powerful anti-sex moralists turn out to be practitioners of what they moralize against (a ridiculous charge, since I called attention to the situation by writing about it) but that we should think about what we can make from it apart from that a structurally-enforced hypocrisy appears as abuse of power and that patriarchy had been getting its battery recharged. No one could disagree with those claims.
So one thing is that some people people who discipline sex in the political sphere feel overmastered by it in the private, and compensate in the private by lots of fucked up acts, including, let’s say, Spitzer’s (although I actually don’t know, and neither does anyone, what precise kinds of fuckedup-ness). Agreed.
But another thing, and this is my point, is that as long as sex is seen mainly as power and not as pleasure, and as long as sex is seen as a bad danger to individual sovereignty rather than one of the few places people really work out the pleasures in trust and play, sex will continue to play the public and private role of index to power and submission and not a lot else. It’s important to stand up for a pro-sex imaginary in a puritan public. It’s important to shape the meanings of sexual scandal so the discussion doesn’t turn to paint the numbers bad-men-victimize-women-through-sex analysis. It’s not that it’s not often true, but it is also true that hardly anyone is given the tools to control, to manage, and to like what’s destabilizing and confusing about sex. I was speaking up for that.
I know you don’t disagree with this, mainly. We’re both speaking dialectically! Cheers! In solidarity, LB
I believe you may have lost some perspective here: while the specific hypocrisy of Spitzer — jailing women for the acts he paid them to engage in — is deplorable, to say the least, they do not measure up to the global suffering caused by Craig and his ilk. Craig has consistently lobbied and voted against reproductive rights, funding for AIDS research, and contraception education in Africa. Within the scale of human suffering, Spitzer may deserve a place in the second circle of hell, but Craig, and his ilk, assuredly are deserving of their place in its eighth circle.
“after the anti-porn people (mostly) admit there’s nothing wrong with fantasies, with masturbating to fantasies, and with masturbating to pre-packaged fantasies,
I have never heard or read anyone who defines themselves as anti-porn say they believe that; I have read one feminist say she believes that. She’d be you. You defend jerking off to porn Amanda.
One of the longest threads on the porn anti-porn issue ever was with Delphyne and some other anti-porn feminists fighting that purile point of view from you and a couple of your regulars.
“and end up trying to make impossible to narrow down distinctions between “erotica” and “porn”.”
Impossible…only for you Amanda.
I don’t care one way or another about politicians. But, please, let us not drag the genius of Pee Wee Herman into the slug orgy. Pee Wee Herman died - or was cancelled - for all of our sins. The guy was a fuckin’ genius, and his comedy prepared the way for the Simpsons and a whole new tone of comedy. He was brought down by feebs and Snopeses, who simply hate art. They don’t want it to touch their children for obvious reasons - it is bad for your children to know that you are basically an idiot. This is always a sore point at the GOP householder’s dinner table. That, in the seventies and eighties there existed real porn theaters, not your home entertainment places where it is all piped in, where people, mostly men, jacked off is one of those historical curiosities - they are gone now. Paul Reuben did nothing that should have gotten him singled out. It was a bad day for American culture when they ended his run.
What’s attractive when you’re aroused looks gross and embarrassing when you’re not.
Sex is both beautiful and repulsive.
I don’t think it’s quite so easy to separate for dismissal the “ick factor” from the issue of patriarchy and privilege.
I know, the good liberal is supposed to affirm the beauty and normalcy, never the mania and the ick. Ick is supposed to be remnant of more uptight, hiearchical and misogynist times. Mania is a myth of the unenlightened (or the unhip).
But sometimes ick is just ick, base impulse just base impulse.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts
Madeleine Dash, Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK), 877-776-2004 x 2 swank@riseup.net
Audacia Ray, 718.554.1714
Sarah Bleviss, Sex Workers Outreach Project NYC (SWOP-NYC), swop.nyc@gmail.com
Prostitutes of New York (PONY), pony@panix.com
Desiree Alliance, http://www.BoundNotGagged.com
Sex Workers Blow Spitzer a Farewell Kiss
New York, NY - In the wake of former Governor Spitzer’s resignation, sex workers and human rights advocates remain concerned about the representation and future of “Kristen” and other sex workers, who do not have the legal and social privileges that will be afforded to Mr. Spitzer. The identity of the sex worker implicated in this case has already been made public, a situation mirroring many a sex worker’s worst nightmare. “Kristen’s” exposure may entail not only bring her legal repercussions, but invasion of privacy, financial hardship and social opprobrium.
Rather than continuing to sensationalize Spitzer’s actions and those directly involved, we urge the press and the public to shift their focus to the legal climate under which sex workers operate, while respecting “Kristen’s” agency to have chosen sex work as a viable source of income. “Everyone wants to know how high her rates were, all the salacious details, but the real issue at stake here is that the hypocrisy of criminalizing sex work has been exposed! It’s a part of our society, of every society, and we need to take this opportunity to stop with the value judgments and start coming up with policies that respect the human dignity of all people, sex workers and all workers. ” says Dylan Wolfe of SWANK (Sex Workers Action New York).
Former Governor Spitzer took a lead role in developing the NY State Anti-Trafficking Law as well as other initiatives that stigmatize sex workers and their clients. It is the stigma of sex work that leads many individuals like “Kristen” to keep their occupations a secret, creating further isolation and opportunities for exploitation. This same stigma compromises the safety and well-being of people like “Kristen” when their private lives become public knowledge. Sex workers are then forced to work further underground, rendering them more vulnerable to abuse, while denying them access to the basic civic participation, health and social services available to other people. “Hopefully Mr. Spitzer’s unfortunate public decline will send a message to all like him who pass laws that endanger the safety of sex workers while indulging in the service themselves,” Sarah Bleviss of SWOP said, “Sex workers clearly provide them a very valuable service; it’s time for lawmakers to return the favor.” Too little attention has been paid to what the repercussions of this case will be for those most directly concerned, sex workers, and more generally to the impact of laws and attitudes that marginalize them. It is time for a change.
Spitzer pushed through penalty enhancements against clients of all sex workers. Sex worker advocates fought against such provisions because these policies drive people who need help further underground. Often prostitution is wrongly conflated with trafficking and vice-versa. People are trafficked for many kinds of work, be it domestic labor, farm work or other jobs, and this kind of exploitation undoubtedly needs to be addressed. The majority of men, women and transgendered people working in sex work, however, are ’normal’ members of society who have used their own intellectual agency to decide to make a living in a sexually-oriented way. Laws, like the Mann Act (against inter-state transportation for the purposes of commercial sex), are too often used for punishing sex workers and their clients rather than those who profit from their exploitation.
Sex workers make a living in an industry with the potential for high risks and little by way of protection from abuse. The stigma surrounding our work can be lethal at its most extreme: we are often the targets of notorious serial killers, like the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway who targeted prostitutes because he thought he “could kill as many of them as [he] wanted without getting caught.” If sex work were decriminalized and legitimized as a form of paid labor like any other, or seen simply as an intimate exchange between consenting adults, the associated harms would be greatly diminished. Furthermore, sex workers could access their basic human rights and social services without fear of legal reprisal or personal upheaval. “Eliot Spitzer has represented himself to the public as a law and order man, and ironically, has been in the vanguard of further criminalizing sex workers and clients. . . However, it’s a shame that so much time, energy, and tax payer resources are being spent to criminalize consensual sex between adults. It’s time to decriminalize prostitution.” says Sarah Blake of Prostitutes of New York (PONY).
Incoming Governor Paterson and other law-makers need to create policies that actually reflect the realities of their own lives and those of their constituents, including sex workers, rather than the harmful legislation of morality, whereby private matters become public scandals.
Are there not more and less damaging kinds of hypocrisy?
I think I understand what you’re saying about the requirement that indicate their allegiance to a monogamous (usually straight) ideal of sexual behaviour in order to be considered acceptable citizens, suitable for public office. At the same time, I don’t see how sex can be totally separated from intimacy, from emotion, hence from power, hence from morality. And while it may be absurd to demand total coherence, I still feel sorry for Craig’s and Spitzer’s wives. I feel sad for these woman who were (I would strongly suspect) lied to, betrayed, and humiliated. I don’t care to be “pro-sex” if that means I have to totally discount such women’s pain or even blame them for feeling it.
tinfoilhattie,
I’d go as far as to say that someone looking for ways to be an asshole is more likely to choose socially accepted targets. Maybe it’s not even meaningful to assert that one causes the other.