By K. A. Laity
Derisive news outlets jumped with relish onto the statements of Sen. Tom Coburn's chief of staff Michael Schwartz who, taking his lead from the sexual insecurity of ten-year old boys, declared that, "All pornography is homosexual pornography, because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards" and the best way to scare boys away from it was to tell them that porn makes you gay: "if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants!"
You have to admire a man so focused on time management that he wants to instill homophobia and body shame all in the same moment [you can watch his earnest declaration on YouTube.
On the one hand, it's just the latest card played in the American Puritan legacy, still hanging onto popular consciousness with a death grip fueled by Christian panic, like the wholesale investment in abstinence programs under the Bush regime (all of which, predictably, failed). Even on the supposedly progressive side we have aberrations like the MacKinnonites, who believed that the very existence of pornography was an assault on women.
It also seems to be part of the anxiety arising from admittedly ambivalent developments in recent year: the pimp/'ho' culture promulgated by music videos, the Girls Gone Wild/do it 'cause it's fun/flash your tits for money ethos, and the new intellectualisation of porn studies, the latest growth industry in cultural studies. While many applaud the demystification of the flesh and the acceptance of bodily pleasure, it seems to come only with the commodification of the same.
I suppose it's like anything: one step up and two steps back. Women have traditionally been seen as those most ready to police explicit sex whether it was Prohibitionist funsters or stay at home Mamies in the 50s (stereotypes more evident in popular culture than in reality). One of the areas where this tension between explicitness and veiled mysteries manifests vividly in our times is in romance fiction AKA the most solid market in a recession. While romance titles on the whole have gotten steamier and more explicit, there are still those readers who steadfastly eschew any kind of sex for a variety of reasons. But the message is still clear: for many readers it is "no sex please".
Perhaps it will always be that way—some people preferring innuendo and euphemism, others going directly for the real thing. I can't help but think the latter is healthier, but do I say so because I am just a product of my culture, too? No, the words of poets echo across the centuries, like Donne's elegy to his mistress:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
Amen.
Image via Ravenous Romance