SEXIS WRONG

although any such statement would have made Valente hit
the ceiling in a hopping, howling fit.
1920s anti-vice societies said of teaching poor women about
contraception, that it would cause irresponsible behavior. 28
Jelke and a confederate went to prison, an already declining
café society lost more glitter, and neither the stars, their
agents, nor their studios were subject to public scrutiny.
Nor, save one dress manufacturer with a salacious and kinky
photo collection, were the Garment District executives and
their clients. The latter routinely asked their hosts to set them
up with “dates” and therefore comprised most of the highrolling
johns. The manufacturer with the collection (a former
husband of famous designer Ceil Chapman) spent a night in
jail but apparently was never brought to trial.
Today, as in the twentieth century, politicians, lawyers, and
opinion-shapers use scapegoats, snarl words, and automatic
responses to get citizens to conceive of coarseness (indecency
and obscenity) as a social evil that true leaders can
eliminate, if not impeded by smutmongers who will do anything
for a buck. No one wants to admit that the sin is in his
own mind and heart. Our leaders tell us whom to punish. But
as far as the porn profits of Fox, Comcast, ESPN, ABC, CBS,
Adelphia, and other corporations are concerned, they and the
executives who conceived the relevant deals are almost invisible.
Fifty years ago, so were the Garment Center executives,
their clients, and the Hollywood agents and actors who disappeared
in the not-so-deep background of the Jelke case. For
a century now, the same can be said of real estate agents,
As long as we equate sex with dirt,
weakness, and guilt, a powerful
weapon exists for demagogues.
police officials, district attorneys, elected officials, major
movie studios, and TV networks, not to mention their banks
and investment counselors. Many resourceful professionals
in these fields either took “clean graft,” turned enormous
profits, or won municipal, state, and national elections by offering
simplistic and indignant attacks on the easily exposed,
publicly vulnerable, street-level corruptors of youth. Ah, the
power of sex...and money. The more things change....
One final word. Political discourse about sex need not be
a matter of us versus them, purity versus degeneration. It
need not be restrained by intractable dogma. Predictably, that
is what has been happening. An example is the case of the
emergency “morning after pill,” which FDA analysts approved
for use in 1999. The FDA Commissioner said in 2003 that he
would soon release the product. But it has not happened as
of April 2005; therefore, Democrats are holding up approval
of President Bush’s choice for a new FDA head. Conservatives
have condemned this pill as “always producing abortion”
and, thus, murder. They’ve also asserted, much as the
But on other sex-specific issues there has been a more hopeful
and democratic response. FCC Chairman Martin has declared,
in response to parental concern about sexual content
on cable TV, that he prefers not to use legal measures to
restrain it. 29 Even Senator Joseph Lieberman is capable of tolerance,
although his history would dictate otherwise. This is
the Democrat who rose on the Senate floor during the Lewinsky
scandal to reinforce the impression that Clinton’s sexual
behavior was grounds for impeachment. He joined C. Delores
Tucker and William Bennett in warning parents against
letting teenagers hear and thus think about what rappers
such as Snoop Doggy Dogg say in their “obscene music.” Lieberman,
Tucker, and Bennett, along with Bob Dole, shamed
Time Warner into selling its shares in the record company
that was distributing the gangsta rappers and thus “marketing...evil.”
30 But even Lieberman has recently acknowledged
that more studies are needed to ascertain if listening to violent
songs actually causes criminal behavior. 31
Perhaps we can even be sensible enough to give young people
credit for being able to distinguish fantasy and reality. (In
fact, despite the increasingly more explicit music and primetime
TV shows, teenage pregnancy, abortion, and intercourse
are down by as much as a third in the last decade. 32 ) Half a
century ago, Senator Kefauver himself baulked at declaring
that comic books were the sole source of juvenile
rape, sadism, and gang warfare, although
the author of Seduction of the Innocent had
convinced many Americans that this was true.
When Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin
got an ordinance passed in Minneapolis in 1984 equating
pornography with whatever might harm women, the mayor
understood that it ignored any objective definition of harm,
that it made hash of the Bill of Rights, and would have been
a nightmare to try to enforce. He knew it would never stand
the test of court challenge and vetoed it. 33
Not every issue involving personal behavior need be determined
by political interests in order to build constituent support
or by powerful business interests in order to make their
customers feel they can respect and trust the people from
whom they purchase goods and services. Or does it, in today’s
atmosphere? There’s a big payoff for expurgating popular
songs before young people can access them. It’s equally
lucrative to get urban renewal projects approved by removing
sex shops as blight without proving that, although they
are in commercial neighborhoods, they actually hurt, or are a
problem for, the shops surrounding them. There are obviously
disingenuous reasons for crafting ordinances dealing with
public morality so that they interdict premarital sex and gay
314 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG