Yellow Journalism
You gotta hand it to the mainstream press. By wrapping salacious little items (“TEEN PROSTITUTION ON THE RISE”) in the appropriate tone of self-righteous indignation they pander to the conflicting impulses of a simultaneously prudish and leering American public. At least the real smut peddlers can be counted on to call a spade a spade. Slate’s Michael Kinsley spewed forth the following in a recent op-ed piece concerning the revelations over Schwarzenegger’s “swinging” past:
But if it did happen, exactly as Arnold described it in 1977, it’s pretty disgusting. It’s disgusting even if it was consensual all around. It’s disgusting even though Arnold wasn’t married at the time. It’s disgusting even if this amounts to applying the standards of the 21st century to events of the mid-1970s.
Alas, Kinsley fails to articulate precisely what is so “disgusting” or even politically-relevant about group sex. “Disgusting” sure sells those column-inches though. I find it ironic that extramarital affairs are accepted, even expected, in our ADD-addled society, yet other sexual arrangements remain in the realm of the truly disturbed. Kinsley drones on:
Arnold may be just surfing the zeitgeist: a swinger in the swinging ‘70s (Were they swinging? Hard to recall …), a governor in the sober 2000s. Like similar statements from George W. Bush about his drinking and Dan Quayle about evading the draft, Schwarzenegger has said he didn’t know back then that he’d be running for governor today. Which works fine as an explanation, but fails miserably as exoneration.
Only in America and a few Islamic nations would consensual sex be equated with alcoholism and draft-dodging. Kinsley laments that the voters haven’t picked up on this one. I give them more credit than that. Perhaps it’s simply that they’ve become inured to it all after years of watching the media peddle so much sensationalistic smut under the guise of serious reporting. It’s about time the folks over at Slate got back to covering issues of substance.
Another gem of a “news” article resurrects all the tired cliches about girl-on-girl kissing. Girls only lock lips to attract male attention. Guys love it because they might get the opportunity to join in.
On this particular night, the women we ask are uniformly disgusted by the prospect of kissing another girl in public. They think it’s a trashy ploy for attention. They think it’s pathetic.
Nowhere, of course, is it suggested that women might be doing this for their own enjoyment, or that men might let the girls have their fun. That’s too dangerous an idea in the collective rigor mortis of our sexual culture.
A recent NY Post article on the new swingers seems to say, well, at least it’s better than sneaking around behind someone’s back. The author takes great pains to show us these are otherwise “respectable” professionals sporting expensive SUVs and manicured lawns, as if we might have supposed that only crack-addicts were into swinging. I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that it was “respectable” professionals whose complete lack of ethics ran Enron into the ground. As the article grinds on the inevitable portrait emerges of swingers as sexually frustrated solipsists who have grown bored in their unhealthy marriages.
“We have two kids and if we didn’t do this we would have broken up by now. But we love each other and the last thing we want to do is break up.” Many of the couples say they began swinging after 7 to 10 years into the marriage and site “sexual boredom” as the biggest reason for their adulterous behavior.
You couldn’t present a better textbook case of people who shouldn’t be swinging. Fortunately it’s easy to spot these people. At a sex party they’ll be the ones ignoring their partners as they run around frantically trying to get a piece of everything else in sight. I don’t think these new swingers will be at it for very long, and they’ll leave a blizzard of divorce papers in their wake.
Gary Trudeau, ever the insightful commentator, captured the zeitgeist of the national sex debate in a recent comic strip that was banned from the funny pages. Even solo sex is, apparently, too much for the public to handle. Boopsie says, “People shouldn’t sit around talking about sex like it’s the weather! It’s inappropriate.” But that’s essentially the problem. Americans don’t take sexuality seriously, reducing everything to the level of mindless spectacle. The disingenuousness of the public debate contributes to an environment in which people do all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons.
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