Suddenly, video of me and links to my work are all over the internet. My blog’s been picked up by alternet and buzzflash, lots of people saw the Penn & Teller teaser, and now I’m on Reason.TV.
No false modesty or pretend shyness here—I love it!
The topic of all these pieces of course, is sex. More specifically, it’s sexual expression—which of course includes pornography.
America is obsessed with porn. It seems like half of us are watching it, while the other half are trying to stop the first half. That’s interesting, because the half that watches porn is not trying to force the non-watching audience to watch. There’s a fundamental asymmetry about that.
In the four-minute ReasonTV clip (don’t you love quoting yourself?), I talk about how the War On Sex involves “decency” groups pressuring government to take away rights that we already have: rights to watch, read, learn, and do what we want in private sexually.
As we cruise past July 4 and head into bikini and mojito season (and therefore steamy one-night-stand season), this is important to remember: the Constitution and Bill of Rights give each of us the rights of free expression and freedom from state-sponsored religious oppression. Two centuries later, we shouldn’t be meekly requesting that our Constitutional rights apply to our sex lives. We should be angry that people are succeeding in taking away those rights—specifically because they’re about our sex lives.
There’s also a fundamental disconnect between the continuing claim that a small number of “pornographers” and “radicals” are trashing the culture—while we all devour American Idol, give our daughters belly t-shirts, eagerly gossip about celebrities showing off their giblets getting in and out of cars, and buy enough porn to energize several planets.
How could people make this stuff so popular, while supporting a government that’s trying to limit and even outlaw it? And how can government claim sex-related material is so damaging, when daily life is completely interwoven with it?
The average person is not the one out of control. It’s the censors, the bluenoses, the morality police, the Americans who are so afraid of their own sexuality that they want to shut down everyone else’s.
If in Montana a true American is a guy with a rifle, and if in Tennessee a true American is a woman with 5 kids, I say a true American in all 50 states is someone whose life involves sexual images, feelings, products, entertainment, healthcare, and occasionally even behavior.
As we’re told the we and our sexuality are America’s problem, let’s remember that.