In response to the indefensibly stupid media circle jerk over this week’s Congressional crotch shot, the indispensible Amanda Marcotte came out guns blazing, not only defending the idea that dudes can send out pictures of themselves given the right circumstances, but also attacking the hypocritically prurient assumptions that underpin the entire fake controversy. In the latter piece, titled simply “Against prudery”, she notes more than a dozen recent incidents, tropes, and public hand wringings that are just as stupid and pointless as this week’s. She’s worried that we, as a culture, are becoming more prudish, more willing to tolerate people glaring over their church lady glasses at others for having fun:
My gut feeling on this is that Weinergate really is confirmation of a suspicion I’ve had for awhile that America has quietly become more prudish in the past few years, and this is a very bad thing.
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Because it’s one thing not to be sexually adventurous, but quite another to sit in judgment of people whose sexual curiosities ick you out, whether done out of meanness or defensiveness. And lately, I’ve just generally noticed a trend towards more openly bashing people for seeking pleasure, even and often especially if they harm no one else in doing so.
In support of this sad contention, Marcotte cites her off the cuff yet lengthy list of examples, everything from Miley Cyrus’s legion of concern troll pseudo-parents to odiously dumb terms like “baby bump” and “vajayjay”. But while the things she mentions are indeed examples of the nosy and fatuous morality we’d be better off without, she’s mistaking smoke for fire, bark for bite, the preaching about pleasure for the practice of it.
Marcotte does yeo(wo)man’s work exposing herself to the fire hose of horseshit that passes for mainstream cultural discussion. Ninety seconds of CNN or half a story from the style section of The New York Times is enough to send me screaming into the hills, but not only does she absorb this stuff, she fires back at it, and even engages some of its vapid authors. That’s not easy to do, and I think wallowing in that crap on a daily basis has caused her to cede more importance commentariat ephemera than it deserves.
Prudery may indeed be on the rise in the realm of the hyper engaged, but taking a step back and looking at the great silent, fucking majority of Americans sees it retreating on all fronts. Pre-marriage cohabitation is now utterly banal, the acceptance of gays and lesbians as ordinary continues its juggernaut course through American culture, and on-line dating sites offer daily proof that people can rationally evaluate potential partners instead of trusting fairy tale notions of romance to make sex and relationships work. Even the crudely named “sexting” that got this snowball rolling in the first place is something that millions of people have done and enjoyed without suffering any consequences.
So if prudery itself isn’t on the rise (three words: Craigslist casual encounters), what accounts for the increased expression of it? The internet. Specifically, there are two mechanisms in action, the first is the way the internet facilitates agreement, the second is the way it provides more opportunities for the prim to disapprove.
First is something I’ve said many times and will undoubtedly say many more: the fundamental attraction of the internet is agreement. No matter how kooky your opinion on something, there’s someone else online who feels the same way. In this case, it’s an agreement that other people are having the wrong kind of fun or simply too much of it. Where once that kind of disapproval had to be shared over tea or Bibles, or one to one over a telephone line, now thousands of people can be alerted to the shocking depravity of others with a few strokes a keyboard. It’s a much more efficient system, and it has a multiplier effect that makes opinions seem more prevalent than they really are.
Secondly, the limitless menagerie of humanity that’s accessible through http gives the prudes of the world an inexhaustible source of gossip fodder. In days of yore, even just twenty years ago, the pearl clutchers had only a few potential targets, mostly people who moved in their social circle and few celebrities. Now even ordinary people half a world away can quickly become monocle shattering sources of outrage for anyone with a computer.
Put that powerful feedback loop – more to be outraged about and more people to be outraged with – into a culture that has seen an enormous number of topics go from taboo to unremarkable and you have that long but far from exhaustive list of dickheaded examples Marcotte cites. But all that shouted disapproval doesn’t mean the shouters are winning the war. Just going by the things you can say on television in 2011 that you couldn’t in 1991, the opposite seems far more likely. Whichever the case, media hype or actual cultural retrenchment, Marcotte’s conclusion applies:
During the heyday of fighting over abstinence-only, I really came around to the idea that we shouldn’t argue, “Hey, kids are going to have sex whether we like it or not, so let’s at least minimize the damage.” I was more in in the camp of arguing, “Kids should be taught to honor their sexualities, to demand the right to feel pleasure (with the enthusiastic consent caveat!), and to value sexual diversity, because sex is a good thing. It’s part of being human. Pleasure is how we know we’re alive.” A more radical, pro-liberty, pro-pleasure approach is the only way to win this argument. Once we start to put the burden of proof on the arguments for pleasure and privacy, instead of on the arguments against it, then we’ve lost the battle. I know many of us are the types to err on the side of the libertines. What I ask is for us to get bolder in doing so.
Amen to that. So remember kids, rabbit vibrators and French ticklers aren’t just for you, drop them into casual conversation and make things better for everybody.
