Republicans and Sex

There's a Gallup poll out today that claims if Judge Scalito is a pro-life candidate, Americans would vote not to confirm him, by 53% to 37%. There is a clear majority in this country to allow women the Constitutional right to make their own decisions about medical care. If you don't like it, leave. (Isn't that what people said last November 2?)

But this brings me to a larger point about how a great deal of Republicans, certainly the most vocal ones, have a big problem with sex. This Puritanical strain doesn't mix well with the rugged individualism and social libertarianism of contemporary society. And it can produce a shocking mix of policy beliefs.

Cervical cancer is a killer, taking the lives of close to 4,000 women annually in this country, and it's typically contracted through HPV, the human papilloma virus. There's a vaccine with a 100% success rate that is nearly ready to be brought to market. But a large segment of social conservatives value abstinence and piety over human life:

A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teenagers could encourage sexual activity.

Because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted virus, many conservatives oppose making it mandatory, citing fears that it could send a subtle message condoning sexual activity before marriage. Several leading groups that promote abstinence are meeting this week to formulate official policies on the vaccine.

The jockeying reflects the growing influence that social conservatives, who had long felt overlooked by Washington, have gained on a broad spectrum of policy issues under the Bush administration. In this case, a former member of the conservative group Focus on the Family serves on the federal panel that is playing a pivotal role in deciding how the vaccine is used.

There's a twinge of "you get what you deserve for having sex" in this debate, the idea that impure sexual thoughts should be punished with vigor and reckless abandon. That such a notion could trump medical science, that it could be wielded to KILL people, is unbelievable.

It all goes back to a discomfort with sex and sexual thoughts. One way to sublimate these thoughts is apparently to write about them perversely. How many dirty little sex novels have sprung from the loins of the conservative movement? William F. Buckley, Lynne Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, and now Scooter Libby:

It took Libby more than twenty years to write “The Apprentice,” which is set in a remote Japanese province in the winter of 1903... like his predecessors, Libby does not shy from the scatological. The narrative makes generous mention of lice, snot, drunkenness, bad breath, torture, urine, “turds,” armpits, arm hair, neck hair, pubic hair, pus, boils, and blood (regular and menstrual). One passage goes, “At length he walked around to the deer’s head and, reaching into his pants, struggled for a moment and then pulled out his penis. He began to piss in the snow just in front of the deer’s nostrils.”

Homoeroticism and incest also figure as themes. The main female character, Yukiko, draws hair on the “mound” of a little girl. The brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter. Many things glisten (mouths, hair, evergreens), quiver (a “pink underlip,” arm muscles, legs), and are sniffed (floorboards, sheets, fingers)...

There is, for example, Yukiko’s seduction of the inexperienced apprentice:

"He could feel her heart beneath his hands. He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against his. He held her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger. . . . One of her breasts now hung loosely in his hand near his face and he knew not how best to touch her."

Other sex scenes are less conventional. Where his Republican predecessors can seem embarrassingly awkward—the written equivalent of trying to cop a feel while pinning on a corsage—Libby is unabashed:

"At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest."

And, finally:

"He asked if they should fuck the deer."

Hey, Scooter, more power to ya if you want to write about bestiality rather than act out on it (unlike the anti-abortion activist Neal Horsley, who just digs fucking mules). Just don't serve an agenda that loves to moralize and tell me how to live my life. Were I a psychologist, I would submit that the conservative deviancy is just classic repression, a denial of sexuality that leads to a perversion of it. The problem is that when the repressed are in positions of power, they can create entire legions of fucked-up kids who are taught that denying natural human instincts and desires (with abstinence-only education) is holy writ. They can create a permanent underclass by writing laws (as Judge Scalito does) which basically turn married women into chattel, property of the husband. They can in essence elect themselves the purveyors of morality when, in the deepest (and unfortunately, not-so-darkest) recesses of their mind they are as perverse as everybody else, more so even, since they've denied themselves for so long.

What's dangerous is that these are the people that toss the word "freedom" around so cavalierly, yet have no idea what the word means or how to bestow it.