The Friday Sex Blog [The Culture Wars]

Hola Everybody,
Many people are saying they’re sick of this election cycle and are so turned off, they can’t wait for it to be over. Think about that. I believe this election will create a more dangerous version of Trump. That’s what voting for the lesser of two evils does -- it creates evil.

On another tangent, I'm so tired. I’m not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, my friends.

The War on Sex

Speaking of elections, one phrase that continually pops up is “culture war.” This familiar expression is actually part of the problem. You see, the phrase suggests there are two sides of equal strength lined up, honoring more or less the same rules of engagement, wanting to conquer each other.

But what is called a “culture war” is nothing like that at all. Those who fear and hate sexuality (erotophobes) are attacking those who appreciate or tolerate sexuality (erotophiles). Erotophiles are not attempting to force erotophobes to live more sexually adventurous lives. In fact, erotophiles aren’t trying to make the erotophobes do anything they don’t want to do. However, erotophobes demand that both sides -- everyone -- live according to their anti-sex (erotophobic) values. For example, an erotophile might say, “If you don’t want to go to a nude beach, don’t go, but don’t shut it down to prevent me from having that choice.” An erotophobic response might be, “I don’t want to go to a nude beach, and I don’t want you to have the option of going either, so it must be closed.” In a similar way, erotophobes want to control and mitigate the sexual rights of those they fear. For example, erotophiles might say, “If you’re against gay marriage, don’t marry one.” Erotophobes respond by waging campaigns of hate against the LGBTQ community.

While erotophobes recognize there’s a huge range of opportunities for erotic stimulation, satisfaction, and imagination, they want to deny everyone, not just themselves. Ironically, erotophobes (like most conservatives and some liberals) claim to be the victims in this culture war.

They say they are the ones who are being attacked, their values undermined, and their way of life destroyed. From their paranoiac perspective, they see so-called indecent entertainment, changing fashions, recent court decisions, internet access, and a range of contraceptive technologies, as an intrusion -- as being force-fed sex. They can’t, they wail, turn on a TV, go to a mall, boot up a computer, or even go to work without being assaulted by sexual images. Furthermore, they claim, even when they are not being literally confronted, they are still forced to abide others’ sexual activity next door and all over the United States -- behavior that is immoral, disgusting, and sinful.

I have no doubt this is true for them. However it is irrelevant to the governance of the U.S. Nowhere in our founding documents is there mention of regulating anything considered immoral, sinful, or disgusting. On the contrary, the United States was founded on the idea that people should be able to choose what to do and with whom to associate based on their personal values and ideals -- not those of a king, feudal lord, or religious hierarchy. Nor even, as James Madison declared, the tyrannical majority in their own town, state, or nation.

When erotophobes demand that we eliminate entertainment, fashion, medical technology, bedroom activity, and businesses that are in their estimation “immoral” or “sinful,” they are calling for a dismantling of the core values our nation was founded on. Such changes would result in governance that would bring us closer to modern Saudi Arabia, the former Soviet Union, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Nazi Germany.

Historically, the U.S. has tried to balance the rights of individuals and community responsibility. Therefore, for example, while you enjoy the freedom of speech, you don’t have the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Another fundamental U.S. right is that the law should address actual crime and actual victims, and it should be drafted in ways that limit negative unintended consequences when solving a problem (in actuality, this is not true in practice).

Today’s culture war seeks to disrupt that balance, and it has already succeeded in many ways. Historically, it was against the law for someone to actually kill your cow, or doing something makes you worried about someone killing your cow. Attempting to criminalize abortion isn’t enough for conservatives, they also attempt to ban over-the-counter availability of emergency contraception, saying such availability would “encourage promiscuity.” Progressives respond with scientific data that clearly shows it won’t, and in that way, one more battle is joined. Erotophobes respond that (as is usual) they have no data, they have “concerns” and “feelings,” which are now considered seriously in public policy debates.

Although our country makes cars safer in case of accidents, has school athletes wear helmets in case they fall awkwardly, and establishes poison control centers in case toddlers get into cleaning supplies, these sexual jihadists don’t want to reduce the consequences of unauthorized, unprotected, or unfortunate sex. They say that doing so encourages bad sexual choices. That’s like saying seat belts encourage dangerous driving and poison centers encourage sloppy parenting practices.

Forget that children who are taught abstinence-only have as much sex -- only they use condoms less often. Erotophobes have manipulated the public into fighting sexual expression, not sexual ignorance or poor sexual decision-making.

Let’s be clear, a large part of the culture wars is really about the pathological need to control sex. Erotophobes fear sex. They fear sexual expression, sexual exploration, sexual arrangements, sexual privacy, sexual choice, sexual entertainment, sexual health and sexual pleasure. They want you to fear it as well. Today’s conservative/ fundamentalist political movements (and some progressives, I might add) present a horrifically distorted picture of sexuality. It’s a narrative of danger and fear; a narrative of evil and sin and, therefore, of self-destructiveness. While erotophobes typically describe their fear in socially acceptable terms (i.e., “protecting children,” “defending marriage”), what they really fear is sexuality as they understand it. Actually, this is the same type of fear that compel people who call themselves progressive, to vote for candidates who value repressive social policies.

The outcome of these battles will determine how our children will live for decades to come. It will determine what books they will be allowed to read, what they will be taught to fear, what they know about their bodies, and how much control they will have over their own fertility.

Millions of people in the U.S. are afraid of sex. Some admit it, some don’t. Millions more hate sex, and some have declared war on it. The pluralism of the United States is despised by fundamentalists around the world -- including those right here on our soil. If you’re interested in sex, you’re part of this war whether you like it or not. If you watch TV, use a sex toy, go to the movies, need an abortion, enjoy the occasional dirty online chat, want a physician trained in sexual medicine, or have a child in school, the guns of the culture war and the war on sex will be pointed at you.

It is imperative that we begin asking the right questions, right now, because the answers will matter.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [Childhood and Sexuality]

Hola mi Gente,

I’m headed out for an interview, so I can’t dilly dally. I wanted to sink my teeth into that whole Bill Clinton going off on a racist rant yesterday that had Trump green with envy, but that will have to wait. Wish me luck!

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Childhood and Sexuality

Truth, Fictions, and Myths

We do great harm to children when we withhold sexual information from them. Today, thanks to the dominant conservative voices, sexual education is a joke. Sex Ed, under the new Victorian era, has been reduced to reading from a two-line script: “Don’t do it.” “Get married.”

This is a crime...

Freud saw childhood sexuality as a relentless quest for knowledge. The desire for information didn’t play as a substitute for physical pleasure, it balanced it. From the very beginning, sexuality seeks a language to explain itself. Freud was treated as an outcast for daring to endorse providing children with that language -- with information about their body parts and how they worked, about how babies are made and born.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, as the AIDS epidemic persists and our children need information most, the pendulum has swung toward telling them less. A strategy of censorship has emerged and it wears a particularly scary disguise: advice to parents to speak more, to embrace their responsibility as children’s primary sexual teachers. This is a “family value” that the conservatives can get behind and very few can disagree with. However, a seemingly harmless parent-friendly idea can have a less than child-friendly effect.

I expect the sexual prudes who rally against school-based sexuality education are aware of what would happen if the task of sexual enlightenment were left entirely to parents: almost nobody would do it.

And the studies bear out my suspicions. Parents do talk the talk: most agree that sex education is their job. However, when it comes to talking the sex talk, few can bring themselves to do it. One survey by the National Communication Association showed that parents identified sex as the subject they were least comfortable talking about. Similar research with children shows that they rate their parents’ efforts less generously than their fathers and mothers. The first pattern that stands out is the difference between the perception of parents and teens, one study showed. When interviewing both generations of the same families, the kids consistently remembered talking about fewer topics than their parents did. One longitudinal study found that more than half of teens believed their parents understood them pretty well. The bad news was that almost half thought mom and dad got it somewhat or hardly at all.

Even someone such as myself, “Mr. Sexual Freedom,” didn’t have a problem-free sex pass. I remember once entering my son’s room full of 12-13 year-old boys and bringing up the subject of masturbation. My son never forgave me for that one! LOL! Which leads me to state that while teens might tell researchers that they wish their parents would discuss sexuality more, I believe given the choice, they would rather talk to a different confidante (an “aunt” or other trusted adult, for example). I chalk it up to the incest taboo: children don’t want to know about their parents’ sex lives (or masturbatory tendencies) and, from the minute they might conceivably have a sex life, they usually don’t want their parents to know about theirs.

What’s interesting is there is little talk about the dynamic of how trusted adults become substitute sex education teachers for children. I know that if I hadn't been able to get through my son, I would’ve welcomed a trusted friend or family member to step into that role. In fact, sex education teachers are the professionalized version of trusted adults.

Children absorb their attitudes toward love, their bodies, authority, and equality from their families. They are trained in tolerance and kindness or their opposite. Few live in families comfortable enough to discuss the nitty-gritty details of sex. And when we (we meaning all of us -- society) don’t teach our children, guess who they learn it from? They learn it from others who are themselves ignorant (i.e., their peers or people with a sexual agenda) or those who may not have their best interests at heart.

So, if parents aren’t talking to their children and federally funded sex educators aren’t being allowed to talk to their students, to whom will our children turn? I’ll tell you where, on the internet or the street. And most of the information from those sources is geared toward selling sex. In other words, sex on the internet is mostly treated as it is elsewhere in our society: as something to use to buy and sell -- a commodity

Then you guys bitch and moan about the supposed lack of moral character our children? Pfffft!

The myth that exposing children to sexual information before they are supposedly ready is detrimental to them was exploded for me when I took the time to actually listen to and talk with young people. Folks? They get it. Some of them get it better than you, believe it or not. Kids get the wide range of emotions embedded in concepts such as jealousy and desire, for example. Why not prepare them?

What consequences do we suffer as a society when we choose to leave the most important discussion about the most powerful force known to humankind to random chance?

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

The Friday Sex Blog [The War Against Chidren]

Hola mi Gente…

Unless you’re living under a rock (or had your cable unplugged due to non-payment J ), you have heard of the armed, right-wing, white extremists – the same demographic named as the most dangerous threat on U.S. soil by those pesky libruhls at the FBI – have taken over federal property in Oregon (for the basics about this, click here). 

As many have already pointed out, if it had been Black, Latin@s, or First Nation people they would’ve been dead by now. What’s more, the chattering class have done their best to portray this armed insurrection as just a bunch of good ole boys acting up. Shoot, 30 years ago, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a black liberation group, in the process destroying a whole city block, killing women and children, and displacing hundreds. And, of course, there is the crime committed against Tamir Rice, a young boy who was holding a toy gun.

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The War on Children: Sex Education in America, pt. I

Repression is not morality.

I assume that you wouldn’t want your child to cross the street until they understood the rules and the dangers of traffic. Yet, sex education in America today is a lot like telling a kid to never cross the street without letting them the know the dangers and arming them with the information necessary should they ever find themselves having to navigate traffic. Check that: adults in America are waging an anti-sex campaign in which we’re pushing our children into a no-man’s land full of hidden mines.

It’s obscene.

And the adults in this country repeatedly claim they’re doing this in the name of children’s safety. For the children, for the children… they caterwaul incessantly.

The battle over sex education, however, isn’t about what’s safe or healthy for children. It’s about what’s comfortable for seriously sexually repressed adults. In the War on Sex, it’s the children who are the victims. The welfare of children is being sacrificed so that religious fanatics can inject their beliefs into the structure of our government. The safety of our children is being sacrificed so that adults can feel better about themselves. It should be, of course, the other way around.

The battle over sex education is the battle over childhood and adolescent sexuality. Our government, controlled by corporations and their right-wing authoritarian pawns, has set a clear, tragic, and dangerous challenge: Preventing young people from having sexual experiences and ignoring their health needs as they do.

They’re forcing kids to join them in an unholy crusade to deny sexuality -- in the process creating a toxic synergy of teaching kids to fear sexual feelings, while adults fear sexual information. They’ve put kids on the frontlines of the War on Sex as shields and demanding they patrol a toxic landscape of a cultural conflict.

And they’re doing this with your money. Anti-sex educators were awarded more than hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into this war chest, in every state in the nation. Abstinence-only-until-marriage has been taught in more than half of American public schools and most private schools. Most lilely, it is being taught in your kid’s school.

Meanwhile, regardless of what parents do or say, the overwhelming majority of today’s kids pledging abstinence are going to have sex before they marry (duh) -- unless, of course, their parents can do away with TV, the internet, eliminate cell phones, bomb the fashion industry, and manage to shackle their kids to underground bunkers.

And so what we are left with is millions of children being systematically prepared for what they won’t experience: adolescence and young adulthood without sex. Of course, that also means that they’re being systematically being unprepared for what they will have: sex, sexual feelings, sexual relationships, sexual decision-making.

In the near future, I hope to be addressing the various issues embedded in this War on Sex and the harm it’s doing to our children.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Resources

Klein, M. (2012) America's war on sex: The continuing attack on law, lust, and liberty.

Levine, J. (2003) Harmful to minors: The perils of protecting children from sex.

Labels: human sexuality, sex education, sexual repression