At this point, it’s just a matter of time. In some sense, the sexual revolution is over … and the forces of bourgeois repression have won.
That’s right, I said it: this is a landmark victory for the forces of staid, bourgeois sexual morality. Once gays can marry, they’ll be expected to marry. And to buy sensible, boring cars that are good for car seats. I believe we’re witnessing the high water mark for “People should be able to do whatever they want, and it’s none of my business.” You thought the fifties were conformist? Wait until all those fabulous “confirmed bachelors” and maiden schoolteachers are expected to ditch their cute little one-bedrooms and join the rest of America in whining about crab grass, HOA restrictions, and the outrageous fees that schools want to charge for overnight soccer trips.
I know, it feels like we’re riding an exciting wave away from the moral dark ages and into the bright, judgement free future. But moral history is not a long road down which we’re all marching; it’s more like a track. Maybe you change lanes a bit, but you generally end up back where you started. Sometimes you’re on the licentious, “anything goes” portion near the bleachers, and sometimes you’re on the straight-and-narrow prudish bit in front of the press box. Most of the time you’re in between. But you’re still going in circles. Victorian morality was an overreaction to the rather freewheeling period which proceeded it, which was itself an overreaction to Oliver Cromwell’s puritanism.
Megan McArdle, “Why Gay Marriage Will Win, and Sexual Freedom Will Lose”, The Daily Beast, 2013-03-26
March 26, 2013
QotD: “[T]he sexual revolution is over … and the forces of bourgeois repression have won”
March 14, 2013
Steve Chapman on modern-day Puritans
They haven’t disappeared, they’ve just changed topics:
The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can’t be created and can’t be destroyed — it can only be changed from one form into another. The same holds true of the puritanical impulse.
Puritanism in the historical sense is as dead as the Salem witches. The religious group that settled in New England outlawed theater, rejected any form of sex except marital intercourse, banned celebration of Christmas and spent hours in church listening to horrifying depictions of Hell.
[. . .]
But the underlying motive is to enforce one model of acceptable behavior on everyone. Obesity is commonly regarded as a grave personal failing, an abdication of healthy restraint and abstinence. Some of the virtuous feel entitled to demand virtue of all.
Sound like anyone who landed at Plymouth Rock? Truth is, sexual puritans can make equally plausible arguments on the practical need to regulate the exercise of bedroom behavior, which has major implications for both health and government budgets.
March 5, 2013
Toronto the oh-so-sophisticated: riding crop sales up in Toronto, but not in the rest of the GTA
The Toronto Star takes the opportunity to remind their readers that Toronto tastes are so much more refined than those louts in the 905 who haven’t even heard of the Fifty Shades books:
Feeling strangely sadomasochistic these days?
It turns out you’re not alone.
Just ask Concetta Tucciarone, manager of the Greenhawk Harness & Equestrian Supplies store in North York, where sales of riding crops have mysteriously doubled during the past year or so.
The question is: why?
And the answer, apparently, has nothing to do with horses but owes everything to a sexually adventurous university student named Anastasia Steele and her dark, brooding passion for the mysterious young entrepreneur Christian Grey, “a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating.”
Plus: pretty handy with a riding crop.
Or, as the Marquis de Sade once wrote: “It is always by way of pain that one arrives at pleasure.”
This is a story about pain, pleasure — and equestrian goods.
Steele and Grey, as many readers doubtless know already, are the central characters in the decadent Fifty Shades trilogy of novels, a chart-topping publishing phenomenon penned by American writer E. L. James, a woman who has brought bondage and sadomasochism — and riding crops — into the North American cultural mainstream.
The in-crowd in Toronto are apparently thrashing away at one another in the approved style, but the peasants in the rest of the GTA still haven’t clued in:
“We have not noticed an increase at all,” says a sales clerk at the Picov’s Horsemen Centre in Ajax, who identifies herself only as Diane. “I guess in Durham Region, they’re not aware of those books.”
The same seems to be true at The Equine Emporium in Mississauga.
“Generally, we just sell to riders,” says sales clerk Jennifer Babos.
Ditto Carmen Griscti, owner of Baker’s Harness and Saddlery in Markham, who hasn’t detected a recent spike in riding-crop sales, either — but wishes he had.
“I wish I was downtown,” he says. “Can you imagine? I’d make a killing.”
February 17, 2013
A shocking, lurid tale of depravity that transfixed Victorian London
In History Today, Richard Canning reviews a new book on the trial of Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, aka Mrs Fanny Graham and Miss Stella Boulton in 1871:
McKenna provides what is certainly the definitive account of the Boulton/Park story, drawn not only from contemporary journalism but also from the full legal transcript, a miraculous survivor housed in Kew’s National Archives. It is a miserable tale, if leavened both by McKenna’s dramatic verve and, during the show trial held in Westminster Hall, by Fanny and Stella’s black humour. The establishment account – that the pair’s persistent cross-dressing importuning was a scandal to public morals that must be stopped – soon breaks down. McKenna shows clearly how the men were effectively set up and, to some degree, even entrapped.
Police confidence in pressing the serious charge of ‘conspiracy to solicit, induce, procure and endeavour to persuade persons unknown to commit buggery’ (as opposed to the minor offence of outraging public decency) was nonetheless misplaced. Buggery had until lately incurred the death penalty and still carried a lifelong penal sentence. No such charge had been brought for 240 years. The problem which attended the endless, farcical medical examinations of Boulton and Park reflected sodomy’s millennial history as the nameless or invisible crime. Few Victorian doctors could claim to have seen evidence of the extreme anal dilation which purportedly occurred after the ‘insertion of a foreign body’. Of the half dozen who inspected the pair – both inveterate sodomites, as McKenna concedes – only one remained certain that the corporeal evidence supported conviction. They were acquitted and the notion that ‘the impurities of Continental cities’ had reached London was rooted in legal terms for a quarter-century – if paradoxically seeming somehow to be affirmed.
McKenna lays bare a fascinating tapestry of interrelated personal histories, only partially capable of reconstruction. Frederick’s elder brother Harry, already twice disgraced, was hiding in Scotland under an assumed name. Their father, a judge, was urgently shipped off to South Africa during the trial of his younger son. Impressively, Frederick’s mother – amusingly a literal ‘Mary Ann’ – took to the stand to defend his moral character. So successful was she that the identification of Frederick/’Fanny’ as a theatrical mother’s boy exonerated him entirely from the imputation of vice.
January 27, 2013
In Britain, ignorance of the law is a valid excuse (under certain circumstances)
The failure of an Islamic faith school in the UK to provide a pupil with any knowledge about sexual relations, other than to teach him that women were “no more worthy than a lollipop dropped on the ground”, led to the trial of an 18-year-old who was charged with raping a 13-year-old girl.
But, according to this report, instead of being jailed, the “naïve” Birmingham teenager, Adil Rashid, was handed a suspended sentence in Nottingham Crown Court by Judge Michael Stokes, who said:
Although chronologically 18, it is quite clear from the reports that you are very naive and immature when it comes to sexual matters.
The judge added that because Rashid was “passive” and “lacking assertiveness”, sending him to jail might cause him “more damage than good”.
Rashid admitted having sex with the girl, saying he had been “tempted by her” after they met online.
After they had had sex, Rashid returned home and went straight to a mosque to pray. He was arrested the following week after the girl confessed what had happened to a school friend, who informed one of her teachers.
He told police he knew the girl was 13 but said he was initially reluctant to have sex before relenting after being seduced.
Earlier the court heard how Rashid had “little experience of women”due to his education at an Islamic school in the UK, which cannot be named for legal reasons.
After his arrest, he told a psychologist that he did not know having sex with a 13-year-old was against the law. The court heard he found it was illegal only when he was informed by a family member.
January 18, 2013
For your “protection”, some new smartphones are configured to hide “mature” content
Willard Foxton discusses some eye-raising configurations on new smartphones in the UK:
When you get a new phone, there’s a very good chance it comes with automatic filters enabled. For example, it’s very common for you have to explicitly request the ability to call premium-rate phone lines. This is long established, but now, a sinister new trend has started, whereby phone providers are automatically blocking access to certain websites for “mature content”, rather than “adult content”.
Mobile provider 3UK is blocking access to political satire as “mature content”; Orange is preventing access to feminist articles as “mature content” through its automatically applied Orange Safeguard service; several providers are blocking perfectly legitimate sites like Pink News because they deal with gay issues, or Channel 4’s excellent Embarrassing Bodies website, because of the graphic discussion of body parts and sexuality.
This was bad enough when these services were blocking porn (I for one wholeheartedly support the right of teenagers to watch smut on their iPhones), but now it seems overzealous providers are blocking access to anything a Catholic Bishop might consider for adults only. This carries not only the problem of “overblocking” caused by lazy filter design — notably, it’s hard to get your website read if it refers to Middlesex or Scunthorpe — but also as these filters are automatically applied, most people don’t even realise they are losing access to certain parts of the web.
December 21, 2012
The funny side of the sex trade
In the National Post, David Granirer talks about a stand-up comedy therapy program he runs to help people suffering from mental illness find ways to cope with their issues. He also ran the program for women in the sex trade and provides a few jokes from a recent performance by members of the program:
* “I’ve been in detox. While I was there I took a lifeskills course. They taught me how to shop, how to manage money, and how to pay my dealer on time so he’ll keep fronting me drugs.”
* “When you’re selling drugs on the street everyone wants to trade clothes for drugs. You can get a $200 pair of jeans for a $10 rock. Why would you go to Winners after that?”
[. . .]
* “When I first started in sex trade, a friend and I went down to the stroll and I get into a car with 2 guys. At first I thought it was kinky that they were into handcuffs, but then I found out they were cops.”
* “But the sex trade is a business like any other. If a john can’t pay I turn it over to my collection agency – 2 guys with baseball bats.”
* “As a sex trade worker you have to be a psychologist. The only difference is a psychologist’s clients don’t ask to be peed on.”
December 1, 2012
The ACLU and the introduction of sex as a civil right
For Reason, Debbie Nathan reviews a new book by Leigh Ann Wheeler:
When it comes to Americans’ understanding of sexual privacy and public sexual expression, most of us are effectively members of the American Civil Liberties Union. This is so even for people who carry no card, pay no dues, and — if such a thing were possible — have never even heard of the organization.
That’s the takeaway from How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, Leigh Ann Wheeler’s dense but fascinating account of the ACLU’s wildly successful efforts, since its founding almost 100 years ago, to bring sex under the purview of the Bill of Rights. Wheeler, a Binghamton University historian, could have stuck with a wonky narrative about a long march of law and jurisprudence. Instead, she’s taken what she calls an “empathic” approach. She has combed vast archives, including personal correspondence of the ACLU’s founders and decades of files from the national office and local affiliates.
From these papers she has assembled a story about men and women working through their own sexual passions and contradictions as they shaped a legal and political practice for the entire country. She reveals how activists pushed, slouched, and pushed some more to arm their fellow citizens with sexual rights, even as those rights provoked further conflicts, including among ACLUers themselves.
November 20, 2012
A basic tenet of (male) human psychology seems to be misunderstood here…
Emily Esfahani Smith on “hook-up culture”:
The good news is that Sex Week is only around every two years. In 2008, the Harvard Crimson quipped: “Sex at Harvard is a year-round activity. At Yale, it lasts a week.” It’s a funny line, but not exactly true, which brings up the bad news: There is another part of the social-sexual landscape of Yale and other schools that is more lasting and endemic: the hook-up culture. In the hook-up culture, which is primarily driven by women, college students prefer to have sex with “no strings attached” — that is, they seek to have meaningless, casual sex outside of the context of a relationship. Some women consider this “empowering,” as Harden finds out by eavesdropping on a conversation between two female students, one of whom has this to say about her hook-up conquests, who are football players on campus: “If you go up to them at a party and just get them drinking, and start dancing with them, and kissing them, they will totally end up sleeping with you. They don’t even know they’re being played. They have no clue.”
Cue reality: “Could it be possible,” Harden writes, “That these girls don’t understand a fundamental fact about the human male? You normally don’t have to trick a man into having sex.” Young women today, influenced by Sex Week-style programming, have lost track of how the sexual marketplace really works.
October 15, 2012
October 2, 2012
The Baby Boomers are turning into the New Victorians
As usual, Gregg Easterbrook manages to squeeze in lots of non-football items into his weekly NFL column:
The entertaining aspect of the fizzled Newt Gingrich presidential campaign was that Gingrich still blames the 1960s for everything. The 1960s were half a century ago. In the year 2012, blaming the 1960s makes about as much sense as someone during the 1960s blaming events on the 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet.
Since Gingrich put the 1960s into play, note that during that decade the mainstream media advocated what was then called “free love,” and looked down with scorn upon those who backed traditional views of marriage and lovemaking. Yet today when people engage in free love, graying Boomers who run the MSM get all squeamish.
Here, The New York Times treats as shocking that an unmarried yoga instructor had “a penchant for women” and liked “partying and fun.” Man likes women — arrest him! The unmarried instructor faces “accusations of sexual impropriety,” which means “yoga’s enlightened façade” is tainted by “scandal.” And the scandal is what? That unmarried adults are having consensual sex. This “penchant” must be stopped — it can lead to fun.
Worse, yoga can “promote sexual arousal” by causing “emotional closeness” that leads to “increased blood flow” which makes “pelvic regions more sensitive,” resulting in “debauchery.” Who wrote this, Queen Victoria?
All news organizations, including ESPN, sometimes publish ill-thought-through articles. What’s compelling about this one is the sociological change reflected. When they were young, the Baby Boomers who now run big news organizations extolled free love and mocked the older generation’s conventional expectations about sexuality. Now that the Boomers have aged and are not getting any themselves, they evince shock that younger people are fooling around.
September 13, 2012
Falkvinge: Child porn laws are insane
People are generally sensible, but even sensible people can demand bad laws get passed by their governments. Child porn laws in the United States are an example of not merely bad laws, but insane laws. Rick Falkvinge follows up an earlier article:
A common protest to my article was that prosecution of people who record evidence of child abuse, or of teenagers doing things voluntarily, “would absolutely never happen”. The arguments went along these lines:
It would be absolutely insane for the law to say this, and since the law can’t possibly be that insane, you must be wrong. Therefore, you’re an evil person for writing this opinion.
The problem is that I agree with these people: it would be absolutely insane for the law to say the examples I gave, and that the law says exactly that, so the law is indeed that insane. I understand the disbelief, so I’ll be returning to that shortly and list how it has already happened. But first, let’s take a look at what happens when you document evidence of a couple of types of very serious crimes:
- If you film a police abuse situation to get evidence and show it to the world so the power abusers can get caught, you’re a hero to the level that your film can cause riots.
- If you document a genocide in enough detail that your evidence can bring perpetrators to justice, you’re a worldwide hero.
- If you film wartime killings, people will risk their lives — and sometimes die — to bring your evidence and documentation to news studios.
- If you risk being beaten up by covertly filming a street battery and assault, you’re welcomed with open arms by the police when you hand over the evidence you produced. (I personally did this, for the record.)
- If you film something as serious as a presidential assassination, people will watch the film over and over and over again and your name will go down in history for centuries.
- If you film a rapist of a minor to get evidence in order to bring the sick, twisted bastard to justice, you’re the bad guy and will get a worse sentence than the rapist you attempt to bring to justice and jail.
[. . .]
As I described in my last post, these laws were constructed by Christian-fundamentalist pressure groups with the intent of criminalizing normal teenage behavior, and the side effect of protecting child molesters from prosecution, under the pretext of protecting children. I find that completely unacceptable. Outrageous, actually.
September 7, 2012
Gender-identity: how (many) adolescents cope with the “what am I” problem
This is from a discussion that took place on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list the other day (list info here) that explored some interesting notions. I emailed Ms. Bujold to ask her permission to use a quote from one of her posts, and she asked me to provide a bit more context as she wasn’t sure the portion I’d asked to use was sufficiently informative. The topic of discussion was the anima/animus mental model of what is “right” about the opposite sex many (most? all?) young people use to determine what it is to be male or female. A subtopic of that was the use or misuse of that mental model to judge potential dates/mates and the problems that that might entail.
It seems to tie in with my own notions of gender-identity formation in adolescence being principally accomplished by heatedly deleting everything seen to be associated with the opposite gender, and maturity being the slower process of regaining or recovering same to once again become a complete human being.
[. . .]
I might direct your attention to the large preponderance of “alpha males” as romance novel heroes. Very much the embodiment of those very assertive or practical qualities that adolescent women delete (or repress, if you prefer) in themselves, much to their later sorrow when they have to cope with real life, alas.
Your typical bad-boy alpha-jerk high-achieving rich hero is pretty much a grocery list of survival qualities discouraged in women, in fact.
Granted, women need to be socialized as sharers to a high degree, or their infants would never survive un-murdered. It’s a near thing as-is. (Says the experienced mom.)
May 27, 2012
Fifty shades of suburbanizing stuff to make it boring
In the National Post, Darrin Rose laments the “mainstreaming” of BDSM, or badly written erotica, or something:
The erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has sold 10 million copies in only six weeks of sales, and in doing so has shed a lot of light on what suburban moms are looking for in the bookstore, if not in the bedroom. It has been banned in some U.S. libraries, generating controversy in equal measure for pornographic content and terrible writing. If you like books that read like a triple-X version of your Grade 8 diary, then you’re in luck. But trouble looms on the horizon.
The book has become part of the zeitgeist, leading to all kinds of new sexual ideas in the suburbs. I should confess that as a city dweller, I like to encourage the notion that urbanites lead sexy, dangerous lives already. But the suburban soccer moms who make up the majority of the book’s readership are discovering a sexy, dangerous world of bondage, discipline and sado-masochism, also known — by lazy people and perverts — as BDSM. While BDSM is currently a risqué, fun activity, the suburbs will do what they always do when they find a new sexy idea — turn it into an exercise you do at the gym, thereby simultaneously destroying its sexiness and enjoyability. They did the same thing to the Lambada and stripper poles.
[. . .]
The same thing happened to stripper poles, which you can find in the aerobics room of many gyms these days. It takes a really asexual person to see a stripper pole and think “that’d be great for low impact muscle development.” So stripper poles were installed in the sweat factories, and real life took a hit. If you go to a strip club and think the best part is the gymnastics, you’re really missing the point. They did the same thing to lap dances and stripteases, two related disciplines now doled out in 60 minute lessons at strip malls across the nation.
And now Fifty Shades of Grey has BDSM lined up next for the exercise treatment. That way middle-aged women can take flogging classes, where personal instructors literally beat you into shape. We’re probably a couple years away from spending 30 minutes on the elliptical machine while a personal trainer whispers in your ear “do you like that?” and “you’re such a dirty little jogger.” A workout seems much more intimidating if you need a safety word to make it stop, but I would rather be spared the sight of a gym full of moms being spanked while they do hamstring curls.
May 7, 2012
This is not how the typical Barbara Amiel column begins
Barbara Amiel reviews a popular book for Maclean’s:
The question of whether it is truly sexually gratifying to have a Wartenberg pinwheel roll over your nipples while handcuffed to a stretcher bar with a ball gag in your mouth is something I hadn’t really thought about in the sheltered life I lead. I haven’t even been beaten with a Perspex ruler. I did once go out with an Englishman who was reputed to have an extraordinary collection of canes and crops for flogging but, apart from asking if I rode, which I did not, nothing in our brief acquaintance seemed to unlock that door.
These arcane sexual matters now have a pass into normal conversation ever since the breathtaking success of the new trilogy of novels Fifty Shades of Grey set in an idealized world of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism) and all their sex toys. The author, under the pseudonym E.L. James, was on Time’s 2012 100 Most Influential People in the World list, which tells us something, I expect, but probably nothing good. The plot of the novels is bog standard Cinderella with a modern twist: a young virgin, Anastasia, meets an extremely wealthy unable-to-commit Adonis, Christian Grey, who has a thing for inflicting physical pain because of—here comes the contemporary bit — his abused childhood involving a crack cocaine-addicted mother. By the end of the second novel, Christian has reformed and he marries Ana in book three.
I was genuinely riveted for at least the first 20 chapters. One always likes learning about a new culture. Now I know that the beginning position for a submissive is sitting on her ankles, hands positioned on spread thighs and head down until Master allows you to look up. The novel is a tease: you get to see the drawer of sex toys in volume two — clamps and various devices to wear in one’s bottom or front — but the actual descriptions of congress are, apart from explicit names for various bits of the body, pretty tame. Like much soft pornography, this book has the sound and scope of a prudish author and a legalistically prudent publisher.
