Senatorial Bathroom Blowjob Bust

So they caught Idaho Senator Larry Craig supposedly offering some vague sex act to someone in the men’s room.

The police report—all over the internet—is a primer on how guys apparently do this: you put your left foot in, you put your left foot out…

It’s easy to take shots at Craig, who has made a living demanding that the law curtail same-gender activity—and is caught inviting the same thing. In fact, Craig has a history of surreptitious male-male sex. And a history of wanting his disgust for gay people enshrined in American law. He recently urged a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, saying it is “important for us to stand up now and protect traditional marriage, which is under attack by a few unelected judges and litigious activists.”

Craig joins an enormous list of people who behave like hypocrites—ranting on about “morality” when his own behavior and impulses fall outside his own definition of morality.

Clearly, the guy is tormented. Apparently, a lot of people demanding that everyone conform to their narrow “morality” are conflicted. This is old news. In fact, reasonable people are asking, “is anyone who rants on about morality NOT afraid of their own impulses?”

But what we should be asking is, why is it against the law to offer a quickie to a stranger? What kind of sick country criminalizes an adult’s non-coercive, non-commercial offer to another adult—just because it’s about sex? Everyone who plays tennis has gone to a public court, walked up to a stranger, and asked, “want to play?” Everyone with a telephone is periodically asked, without invitation or warning, if they want to buy something, or listen to something, or reveal stuff about themselves.

The proper response to a single, non-coercive invitation to do something—anything—is “no thank you.” Not “you’re busted.”

There’s the lewd, obscene, disgusting behavior: busting someone for an invitation. Our nation has again exposed its horrendous ambivalence about its own erotic impulses. In doing so, it has shamed itself, and explained its obsessive concern with enforcing “morality”—i.e., limiting sexual fantasy and behavior.

Yes, Senator Craig should be thrown into the Potomac—not for expressing his sexuality, but for preventing the rest of us from doing so.

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When Language Is More Important Than War

Sixteen million Americans fought in WWII. A half-million of them died in it. That’s equal to the entire population of Washington, DC. Or of Wyoming.

Very few of those 16,000,000 are still alive, and a dwindling number of Americans actually knows one of them. To create and preserve a record of what actually happened, Ken Burns has made a 14-hour documentary for PBS. It has exactly four instances of words you might hear—or say—if someone were trying to kill you.

The Parents Television Council plans to scour those fourteen hours for the four words they don’t want anyone to say or hear. They will again pressure the FCC—that’s your government at work—to punish stations carrying the program if they think the nation’s children shouldn’t see it, regardless of what their parents want.

The PTC is going to look at a 14-hour program about a war that killed 72,000,000 human beings, and they are going to focus on two “fucks,” one “asshole and a “shit.” How juvenile is this response? How obsessed are these people?

Why do they have a seat at America’s public policy table? Why, in a world of 21st century telecommunications, is the FCC now in the business of counting magic syllables?

How can it be good for America’s families when the government decides what programs parents are allowed to show their children about the most serious subject in the history of humanity—war?

PBS stations across the country are wondering if they need to show a version of the documentary stripped of the four—count them, four—“offensive” words. Each station risks fines starting at $325,000 if the FCC decides they have violated some nebulous, arbitrary, and thoroughly unconstitutional rule about “inappropriate” content. To local stations in Atlanta and San Francisco, much less Little Rock and Kansas City, 1/3 of a million dollars is a lot of money. You can’t use integrity to pay rent and salaries. You need cash.

The PTC is unmoved by any adult discussion about art, literacy, history, parental responsibility, or basic decency. “It’s hard to believe that removing four words are going to significantly damage the program,” says PTC president Tim Winter.

He is clueless about what those half-million Americans died for. And he is clueless about the dangers of writing history to pacify consumers of that history. Ask people who lived in the Soviet Union, where history changed with each new regime. “In most countries, the future is unpredictable,” the joke went. “In the USSR, the past is unpredictable, too.”

Are those four words of any importance whatsoever?

Only if an American can’t say them, and an American can’t hear them, and an American can’t decide whether or not his kid can hear them—because the government is deciding for us.

Goddam it, isn’t this what those half-million Americans died for in that war?

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Singer Stefani Censored In [where?]

Quiz: Where did this happen?

You may know Gwen Stefani’s music. Formerly with the group No Doubt, she’s now a huge pop star. Incredible voice. Powerful stage presence. Movie-star face. Gorgeous body. An altogether thrilling artist.

Quiz: Where did this happen?

Stefani’s local stadium concert is announced. A religious student group demonstrates, demanding that the sexy star dress more modestly and turn down the heat on her stage show. Conservative critics chime in, claiming that her typically revealing costumes corrupt the country’s youth.

Stefani agrees to make changes. In a magazine interview, she says she’s making a “major sacrifice,” mourning the “opposition from people who have misunderstood me.”

On August 21 she performs in front of 7,000 cheering fans. In outfit after outfit, she reveals virtually no skin, covering herself with various dramatic layers including leotards and long gloves.

So where was the incident—Cincinnati? Little Rock? Dallas?

When you can’t tell the difference between Malaysia and the U.S., the U.S. is in trouble.

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Sexuality—Missing in Action At the Iowa Caucuses

Everyone who wants to be president of the most powerful nation on Earth has to go to Iowa. Candidates go to local diners, nursing homes, and high school gyms for weeks, telling hundreds of people every day why they deserve a seat on Air Force One.

Iowa. In a few months, a half-dozen candidates from each major party will fold their tent because they didn’t get enough votes in Iowa.

If New York or California had this much power, people would complain bitterly. Like Putney Swope, Iowa is no one’s first choice for anything, and so it gets to decide who runs for president. Tradition. Iowa.

Who are these powerful people? According to the New York Times, they are “largely older rural voters who have power greater than their actual numbers.”

America’s presidential candidates are being selected by people who have never seen the ocean. Who don’t own a computer or an ipod, who don’t have kids in school, who have never watched Comedy Central, who don’t have herpes.

This doesn’t mean these aren’t good people, or that they lack judgment. It means they value some agendas more than others. Sexual rights, sexual health, sexual information, and sexual entertainment are not high on their list. Compared to the rest of America, they’re less likely to have met a gay person (as far as they know), and more likely to be monogamous (trudging miles through the snow to get to the next farmhouse will discourage you). They’re less likely to own vibrators, less likely to enjoy oral sex, and much, much, much less likely to get pregnant.

And so issues of sexual justice (except, for the first time, gay marriage) simply do not come up in the Iowa caucuses, which select the candidates for president. No one asks about the fairness of eliminating strip clubs, the immorality of denying emergency contraception to those who need it, the persecution of people who make the porn watched by 50 million Americans, the continuing federal support of religiously-oriented abstinence programs that are proven failures.

No one asks, “will you be the president who gets the government out of my bedroom?” And so no candidate has to answer the question.

Iowa, you’re blowing it for the rest of us.

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Americans Search for a Sexual Center

People in the media ask me all the time—sexually, is the country getting more liberal or more conservative?

This is similar to the question George Lakoff discusses about politics, most recently in his article in Truthout. In it, he says there are no “centrists,” because “There is no left-to-right linear spectrum in American political life.” Instead, Lakoff talks about “biconceptuals”—“progressive on certain issue areas and conservative on others.”

The importance of this, says Lakoff, is that progressive values—“protection and empowerment”—are simply American values. The idea that there is a ‘center,’ he says, “marginalizes progressives and sees them as extremists, when they simply share fundamental American values.”

Smart guy.

We can say the same about Americans and their sexuality. What people do, how people feel about what they do, and how people feel about what others do are three separate issues for many Americans.

And so while there’s an enormous increase in the number of people who have oral sex or use sex toys, there’s also a huge increase in the number of people complaining about sex on TV. More Americans have sex before marriage than ever before, but support for teaching abstinence-only in school is at an all-time high. Americans are watching more porn, going to more swing parties, and engaging in more anal sex than ever before. At the same time, groups like Morality in Media, Parents TV Council, and Focus on the Family are at their most influential, and municipalities are spending more than ever attempting to shut down strip clubs and adult bookstores.

Some people are consistently conservative or progressive on sexual issues across the spectrum, but many, many people are not. They want to keep doing what they do, while limiting what others can do.

Hypocrites like Ted Haggard, David Vitter, Randall Tobias, Mark Foley, Bill O’Reilly, and Newt Gingrich are not, it turns out, anomalous. Rather, they represent something very American about sex—discomfort with who they are, an apparent refusal to admit and accept their sexuality, and a desire to limit others’ sexual expression while struggling with their own.

The profound unfairness is un-American. The sexual ambivalence, sadly, is not.

And so it’s a mistake to ponder whether America is moving left or right sexually. The answer is both and neither. As lovers, we’re becoming less inhibited, more experimental, and using more gadgets, games, and social institutions. But as citizens, we’re becoming more frightened, more angry, and more repressive.

This surely reflects neither personal growth nor spiritual development. It represents torment. And many tormented Americans are saying they wish the whole sex thing would just go away—no eroticism on TV, no porn on the internet. Lock up predators for life plus 1 year, and destroy everyone’s constitutional rights to buy a lap dance or naughty magazine in their own town.

So the question isn’t how to get Americans to be more liberal about sex. Americans are plenty liberal about licking and spanking each other while telling hot stories. The question is how to get Americans less frightened and angry about other people’s sexuality. In this project, the media, most religious organizations, and government at all levels are part of the problem, when they’re desperately needed as part of the solution.

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Ode to Skimpy Summer Clothes

There are so many things to like about summer—the great weather, all that fresh fruit, home-grown tomatoes (they actually taste like tomatoes), Sunday night baseball on ESPN, the twilight that seems to go on forever…

And the skimpy clothes.

Revealing, unintentionally daring, did-you-look-in-the-mirror-
before-you-left-the-house clothes.

Speedos so tight you can tell if the guy is circumcised. Bikinis that cover the front of the breast or the side, but not both. Baggy shorts that let a ball or two lazily poke out when a guy sits down. Thin white cotton skirts that need a slip to be proper—worn without a slip.

Attractive people who show off their bodies enrich the visual landscape as surely as beautiful trees, classic cars, and a full moon.

The rest of us, not blessed with perfect bodies, do our part, too, in even more important ways. We validate each others’ right to have the imperfect bodies we do. We confirm the crucial idea that imperfect bodies are sexual and sexy—even if only to their owners and their partners.

So here’s to beer bellies, hairy backs, blindingly white legs, and stretch marks, butt cracks, and breasts that relaxed from their original position years ago. Summer’s the time they’re on display, and they’re all glorious.

And here’s to 40-year-olds who look like 40-year-olds, and 60-year-olds who look like 60-year-olds. They let us know what we can expect, that aging doesn’t mean that life (or sex) is over, and that people can retain their sense of personal style and entitlement no matter how old.

When you catch a glimpse of 60-year-old boob, ball, or butt and it’s, hey, not bad looking at all, be grateful. Keep looking. Look at every body that interests you—summer is one long passagiatta, a three-month festival of voyeurism and exhibitionism.

Do it politely, of course. Everyone knows how to do that. When you make someone uncomfortable with your stare or glare, you ruin it for the rest of us. So do it gratefully, not greedily.

Summer is when we remind each other that we all have bodies. We all have gender. We’re all just animals with credit cards.

It’s good to be reminded. And it’s good to look, to enjoy looking, and to enjoy being looked at. No matter what you look like.

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“Morality” Juveniles Quiver Over Exposed Breasts

Jordache Jeans has launched an entertaining set of print and TV ads featuring model Heidi Klum. On TV we see Klum’s topless back; in print we see her looking into a full-length mirror, her out-of-focus breasts sort-of visible, nipples strategically covered with hair.

Predictably, those obsessed with hiding women’s breasts from unmarried Americans went berserk. Robert Peters of Morality in Media, for example, suggested that this represents the end of civilization as we know it.

As a bonus, his press release also insulted sex education and readers of Playboy. Peters is especially miffed because the ad appears in “The N.Y. Post, [is also] one of the few major city newspapers whose editorial and op-ed pages reflect politically and socially conservative points of view.” One of the few conservative papers? He apparently doesn’t get outside New York very much.

He must be joking when he righteously sniffs about polluting the “daily newspaper, which most people still purchase because they want to stay informed about what is happening in the world.” Perhaps he hasn’t looked at the Post since Rupert Murdoch took over. “Stay informed?” Saying that people read the Post to stay informed about the world is like saying that people take elevators to stay informed about music.

People who freak out about women’s breasts need to grow up a little, not talk about “morality.” Like any reasonable 13-year-old boy, Peters keeps careful track of boobies—“it is to my knowledge the first time a half-page photograph of a topless woman has appeared in that paper two days in a row.”

Similarly, Peters lovingly describes a recent photo of “Courtney Love sitting in her birthday suit, with breasts fully exposed except for a few beads” (Is that a complaint or a sigh of relief? Doesn’t the coverage of “a few beads” contradict the outraged/thrilled “fully exposed?”)

This is the same attitude that leads these people to count “damns” and “hells,” and the number of milliseconds you can see Janet Jackson’s nipple or someone’s butt crack on TV. Your federal government can fine a radio or TV network for each use of a forbidden word, and it funds the Parents Television Council to count them. There’s a dignified use of democracy.

How juvenile is it to approach something as complex and gloriously messy as sexuality with the consciousness of a high-school accountant? These “morality” preachers make the Merchant of Venice look like a humanist.

Exactly how damaging are women’s breasts on TV, film, magazines, and newspapers? With nude beaches, topless TV ads, and magazines that mix nudity with gardening tips, a half-billion people have already done this experiment, and the results are clear. They live in a place called Europe, a place that American “morality” crusaders conveniently ignore.

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PS: Please let’s not stoop to “But the ad exploits women.” All ads exploit people—they feature men in dresses, suggest that a car is a “lifestyle purchase,” and use product names like “Nutri-Pals” that feature “natural” ingredients like brown sugar. Klum has three kids, so let’s hear it for topless mothers.

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Caution: Karl Rove Was Hazardous To Your Sex Life

Karl Rove has built his career on terrifying people. An equal-opportunity offender, he has directed our government’s successful attempts to panic Americans about terrorism, international diplomacy, taxation, mainstream media, and the judicial system.

And homosexuality, stem cell research, promiscuity, pornography, teen sexuality, and naughty words on TV.

Karl Rove has reminded us that very little can motivate people more than fear. Those of us who believe in sexuality—and democracy, reason, and science—haven’t found a reliable alternative yet.

Karl Rove conceived the brilliant strategy of putting “gay marriage” initiatives on state ballots to drive conservative voters to the polls—who then voted for conservative candidates as well. Karl Rove took two-bit self-described “ex-porn addict” Phil Burress and elevated him to a political force in Ohio—who now directs the multi-million dollar effort (called CCV) to eliminate strip clubs and pay-per-view hotel-room porn from the state.

Karl Rove not only “Swift-boated” John Kerry. He “Swift-boated” gays (dangerous to your marriage), adult entertainment (a gateway drug leading to child porn), family planning (undermines families and morality), and sex education (leads to “promiscuity” and pregnancy). He helped turn science and the Constitution into opinions—which everyone is entitled to have, of course—alongside other opinions, like creationism, the Rapture, and gays-seduce-straights.

Blaming George Bush for Karl Rove’s ideas is like blaming the dummy for the ventriloquist’s bad jokes. Of course, 62 million people voted for the dummy. They gave us the ventriloquist as well.

Paradoxically, the right to express our sexuality—that irrational, ephemeral, metaphysical, quasi-spiritual, aggressive, submissive energy—depends on public policy based on rationality and rigid devotion to a dry, revolutionary document that protects all private behavior.

Karl Rove damaged that precious contract as often and as aggressively as he could. We can’t say goodbye gleefully, because he leaves behind catastrophic damage that makes Katrina look like a gentle breeze.

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“So Help You God?”

“Do you promise that your testimony will be the truth, the whole truth—so help you God?”

I was sworn in as an expert witness at a trial last week (I’m asked to do so several times each year). Once again, I was asked to swear to a God I don’t believe in. I said yes (it’s part of the job), but doing so always makes me cranky (and having to wear a suit while saying it doesn’t help my mood).

Some U.S. courts ask you to simply swear or affirm to tell the truth, but I’ve always been asked to swear to God. The Constitution specifies an oath you can take if you don’t want to mention a deity (for Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example). But if you ask for a different oath, or answer evasively, you call attention to yourself and the issue. This can undermine your credibility, especially with a religious judge or jurors.

That’s because of America’s God-ism—the assumption that believing in God is the norm, while anything else has to be asserted. God-ism is like racism and sexism—believing that the norm is to be white or to be male. People who say that such assumptions are no big deal should recall the fuss about challenging the traditional use of “he” or “men” to refer to “people” in the 1970s.

A common complaint back then was “Why do you have to add gender or race to every conversation?” As if assuming a normative gender or race wasn’t doing so.

The same is now true of religion. Non-believers wouldn’t have to keep asserting our non-belief if society didn’t constantly assume that belief is normal, and that religion deserves a privileged position whenever possible (think taxes, zoning, and exemptions from anti-discrimination law, for starters).

Of course people are free to believe what they want, but enshrining these beliefs in a secular government (and mass media, educational system, and entertainment industry) compromises the entire enterprise.

And just like whites didn’t understand how hurtful pervasive racist assumptions are for blacks, people of faith don’t appreciate how often non-believers are confronted with the aggressive expression of religion in (supposedly secular) public life:

· God is featured on all paper money
· Government officials and media spokespersons vow that people in trouble (e.g., soldiers, victims of Katrina) are in “our prayers”
· Government meetings and public functions are started with prayers; prayer breakfasts are held in government or corporations
· All corporate and government employees are allowed to wear religious jewelry while serving the public; try that with a silver vulva pendant or a pin satirizing Christianity
· Taxpayers fund chaplains and religious services in the military; religious proselytizing is the current norm in America’s military academies
· The religious rituals of athletes, and religious placards of fans, are televised without tolerating equivalent non-religious behavior or expression
· Religious leaders are included in government or community committees without similar invitations to humanists, atheists, etc.

The most painful part is that this is all considered normal. It isn’t. And it shouldn’t be—whether you’re a believer or not. Because America was built as a radical, secular nation in which no religious belief would be favored or disadvantaged. And that includes the lack of religious belief altogether.

A surprising number of Americans believe that God is mentioned in the Constitution. Not so. Despite this, recent Presidents (even “strict constructionist” conservatives like Ronald Reagan) have now added “so help me God” to their inaugural oath—by personal whim (which is how they dismiss judicial rulings they don’t like).

So what’s the big deal? After all, the court wants me to tell the truth, I’m committed to telling the truth, so what does it matter how I convey my assent? That’s simple. Ask your average Christian witness who plans to tell the truth to swear by Satan. That’s the level of disrespect “so help you God?” has for millions of non-believers.

And that’s the truth.

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Abortion Is Not A “Woman’s Issue”

Since our Constitution forbids the establishment of an official government religion, and guarantees the right of personal decision-making regardless of one’s actual choices, it’s clear that government has no authority to criminalize abortion.

If the religion you choose to follow forbids you from having an abortion, don’t have one. If you feel upset that other people have abortions, you have the right to comfort yourself with any private behaviors you wish, religious or material.

Of course, this being a country that guarantees freedom of expression, everyone has the right to try to persuade others not to have an abortion.

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The Supreme Court recently upheld the right of states to criminalize certain types of abortion. The reasoning of the 5-4 majority included its desire to protect adult women from making choices they might later regret, placing the Court squarely in the mainstream of 19th-century thinking.

Many people were outraged at this theft of the basic American right to control one’s destiny free of government interference (something Conservatives claim they desire). And I still read opinions resenting a group of men (the five male justices) telling women what they can do with their own bodies—as if the judges’ maleness interfered with their reasoning, or as if women needed some special sympathy in order to secure their rights as Americans.

I cringe at any suggestion that male judges have less wisdom, or less right, to rule on abortion. The idea that these Justices might have decided differently if they’d ever been pregnant is bad for our courts. The right to an abortion should not depend on compassion for women whose lives are destroyed by government interference. It should derive, instead, from the recognition that the American covenant gives each adult enormous privileges, and that everyone’s rights depend on each of us tolerating everyone else’s private decisions, whether we like them or not. That’s one of the things we need government for—guaranteeing everyone’s rights by making sure that everyone tolerates everyone else’s private decisions.

The anti-choice movement knows that abortion isn’t a “woman’s issue.” They see it as a moral issue—which is fundamentally wrong—but as such, they perceive the issue as affecting men and women equally. Not only is that concept intellectually richer, it’s more powerful politically.

Unwanted pregnancy obviously affects millions of women every year, and is a heart-breaking cry for comprehensive education about sexuality, and cultural acceptance of what sex is like in real people’s lives.

But unwanted pregnancy dramatically affects millions of men every year. Shotgun weddings, forced parenting obligations, loss of relationships, destroyed dreams—these are the common results. American men also need the option of terminating their unwanted pregnancies. The question of what to do when a couple disagree about whether to have an abortion is complex—and not the point. Every couple has the right to the option, whether they choose it or not.

Responsible adults know that contraception isn’t just a woman’s responsibility. And it’s now fashionable to say “we’re pregnant” instead of “I’m pregnant” or “she’s pregnant.”

Similarly, the availability of abortion is not just a woman’s right. It’s the right of every American involved with a pregnancy that she or he wishes to terminate.

Thinking of abortion as a “woman’s issue” helps obscure the Constitutional issue involved. It trivializes the sexual behavior that creates the need for an abortion, and vastly understates the consequences of depriving people of this medical care. It suggests that people who are old, infertile, gay, or asexual have no stake in the issue. And it accepts the idea that reasonable people would care more about rights we might ourselves exercise than about our other rights.

Whether you have an abortion or not, that idea is bad for democracy.

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