The Plot Against Sex in America

[hornplayer]

this will appear in Sunday's New York TImes (see the dateline):

December 12, 2004
FRANK RICH
The Plot Against Sex in America

WHEN they start pushing the panic button over "moral values" at the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting's WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York, you know this country has entered a new cultural twilight zone.

Just three weeks after the election, Channel 13 killed a spot for the acclaimed movie "Kinsey," in which Liam Neeson stars as the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime, that women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity. At first WNET said it had killed the spot because it was "too commercial and too provocative" - a tough case to make about a routine pseudo-ad interchangeable with all the other pseudo-ads that run on "commercial-free" PBS. That explanation quickly became inoperative anyway. The "Kinsey" distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating that the real problem was "the content of this movie" and "controversial press re: groups speaking out against the movie/subject matter" that might bring "viewer complaints."

Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints about its own cowardice because by last week, in response to my inquiries, it had a new story: that e-mail was all a big mistake - an "unfortunate" miscommunication hatched by some poor unnamed flunky in marketing. This would be funny if it were not so serious - and if it were an anomaly. Yet even as the "Kinsey" spot was barred in New York, a public radio station in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women's rights organization based in Chapel Hill that it could not use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on-air announcement. In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels, fearing indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public service spot created by Los Angeles county's own public health agency to counteract a rising tide of syphilis. Nationwide, the big three TV networks all banned an ad in which the United Church of Christ heralded the openness of its 6,000 congregations to gay couples.

Such rapid-fire postelection events are conspiring to make "Kinsey" a bellwether cultural event of this year. When I first saw the movie last spring prior to its release, it struck me as an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American social history. It was in the distant year of 1948 that Alfred Kinsey, a Harvard-trained zoologist, published "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," a dense, clinical 804-page accounting of the findings of his obsessive mission to record the sexual histories of as many Americans as time and willing volunteers (speaking in confidentiality) would allow. The book stormed the culture with such force that Kinsey was featured in almost every major national magazine; a Time cover story likened his book's success to "Gone With the Wind." Even pop music paid homage, with the rubber-faced comic Martha Raye selling a half-million copies of "Ooh, Dr. Kinsey!" and Cole Porter immortalizing the Kinsey report's sizzling impact in a classic stanza in "Too Darn Hot."

Though a Gallup poll at the time found that three-quarters of the public approved of Kinsey's work, not everyone welcomed the idea that candor might supplant ignorance and shame in the national conversation about sex. Billy Graham, predictably, said the publication of Kinsey's research would do untold damage to "the already deteriorating morals of America." Somewhat less predictably, as David Halberstam writes in "The Fifties," The New York Times at first refused to accept advertising for Kinsey's book.

Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of "moral values" voters, we're back where we came in. Bill Condon, who wrote and directed "Kinsey," started working on this project in 1999 and didn't gear it to any political climate. The film is a straightforward telling of its subject's story, his thorniness and bisexuality included, conforming in broad outline to the facts as laid out by Kinsey's most recent biographers. But not unlike Philip Roth's "Plot Against America," which transports us back to an American era overlapping that of "Kinsey," this movie, however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel entirely contemporary. That Channel 13 would even fleetingly balk at "Kinsey" as The Times long ago did at the actual Kinsey is not a coincidence.

As for the right-wing groups that have targeted the movie (with or without seeing it), they are the usual suspects, many of them determined to recycle false accusations that Kinsey was a pedophile, as if that might somehow make the actual pedophilia scandal in one church go away. But this crowd doesn't just want what's left of Kinsey's scalp. (He died in 1956.) Empowered by that Election Day "moral values" poll result, it is pressing for a whole host of second-term gifts from the Bush administration: further rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights, pulchritude sightings at N.F.L. games and, dare I say it aloud, reproductive rights for women. "If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil." Such is the perceived clout of this Republican base at government agencies like the F.C.C. that it need only burp and 66 frightened ABC affiliates instantly dump their network's broadcast of that indecent movie "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day.

In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the Murdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that, however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: The Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are dealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools.)

"Kinsey" is an almost uncannily helpful guide to how these old cultural fault lines have re-emerged from their tomb, virtually unchanged. Among Kinsey's on-screen antagonists is a university hygiene instructor who states with absolute certitude that abstinence is the only cure needed to stop syphilis. Sound familiar? In tune with the "moral values" crusaders, the Web site for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has obscured and downplayed the important information that condoms are overwhelmingly effective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. (A nonprofit organization supporting comprehensive sex education, Advocates for Youth, publicized this subterfuge and has been rewarded with three government audits of its finances in eight months.) Elsewhere in "Kinsey," we watch desperate students pepper their professor with a series of uninformed questions: "Can too much sex cause cancer? Does suppressing sex lead to stuttering? Does too much masturbation cause premature ejaculation?" Though that sequence takes place in 1939, you can turn on CNN in December 2004 and watch Genevieve Wood of the Family Research Council repeatedly refuse - five times, according to the transcript - to disown the idea that masturbation can cause pregnancy.

Ms. Wood was being asked about that on "Crossfire" because a new Congressional report, spearheaded by the California Democrat Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junk science (AIDS is spread by tears and sweat, for instance) have turned up as dogma in abstinence-only sex education programs into which American taxpayers have sunk some $900 million in five years. Right now this is the only kind of sex education that our government supports, even though science says that abstinence-only programs don't work - or may be counterproductive. A recent Columbia University study found that teens who make "virginity pledges" to delay sex until marriage still have premarital sex at a high rate (88 percent) rivaling those that don't, but are less likely to use contraception once they do. It's California, a huge blue state that refuses to accept federal funding for abstinence-only curriculums, that has a 40 percent falloff in teenage pregnancy over the past decade, second only to Alaska.

No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the pop culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in little jeopardy: in a nation of "Desperate Housewives," "Too Darn Hot" has become the national anthem. A movie like "Kinsey" will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the cultural war over sex that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the same information about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own "moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptive prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval of local officials; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact.

While "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was received with a certain amount of enthusiasm and relief by most Americans in 1948, the atmosphere had changed radically by the time Kinsey published his follow-up volume, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," just five years later. By 1953 Joe McCarthy was in full throttle, and, as James H. Jones writes in his judicious 1997 Kinsey biography, "ultra-conservative critics would accuse Kinsey of aiding communism by undermining sexual morality and the sanctity of the home." Kinsey was an anti-Soviet, anti-New Deal conservative, but that didn't matter in an America racked by fear. He lost the principal sponsor of his research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and soon found himself being hounded, in part for his sympathetic view of homosexuality, by the ambiguously gay homophobes J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson. Based on what we've seen in just the six weeks since Election Day, the parallels between that war over sex and our own may have only just begun.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[graypencil]

ye gods ..

can the stocks, pillories, and burning Janet Jackson at the stake be far behind?

Foaming "christians" like Bob Jones really scare the crap outta me.

make ALL churches pay taxes!!

[cookie]

These people are idiots who believe in an "ideal" that was NEVER true anyway. They simply want the option of persecuting people who dare disagree with their worldview. They also want to feel superior and more worthy than others.

And you can't tell 'em anything. These people care not one whit about science or reality. They accept everything by faith and only by faith. They believe that "The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men." These are people who accept nothing other than what they believe to be true.

Now, I've heard some of these folks talk about how "closed-minded" public schools, the gov't, the society etc. are about fundy Christianity. But I ask you: who are the ones with the closed minds? These people won't even CONSIDER that the Bible may be largely allegorical. They believe it in a childlike way because the book says they should. In other words, don't think; follow and don't entertain any questions.

These people have even begun campaigns against using the greeting "Happy Holidays" because they feel it diminished Christmas. What? Christmas is everywhere. It could use some diminishing. And saying Merry Christmas to say, a Jew or a Muslim or pagan, or non-Christian of any variety is ignorant at best and downright aggesive and insulting at best. They think they should get a pass for their good intentions I guess.

Fundamentalists of all stripes are bad for a free and open society. Christian or Muslim fundamentalism---it's all the same.

[Uli]

Originally Posted by cookie

These people are idiots who believe in an "ideal" that was NEVER true anyway.

Yep, my definition of facists.

[Ron Thorne]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, America remains shrouded by puritanical beliefs and practices. And, hypocrisy! Bob Jones III is probably whipping it right now in some bathroom or closet.

[Monte Smith]

It's true. Good God, it's too true. My big fear is next year bellybuttons will be out and all the girls will be wearing Pilgrim hats and buckle shoes.

Originally Posted by graypencil

ye gods ..

can the stocks, pillories, and burning Janet Jackson at the stake be far behind?

Foaming "christians" like Bob Jones really scare the crap outta me.

Jesus christ, Gray! How old are you?

This kind of shit has been going on since the founding of this country.

This Jones cat is no fearsome radical, he's just yet another in a long line of looney christians.

Relax.

[sonic1]

No christian is gonna stop me from being my disturbed perverted self.


In fact, the more christians around, the more people for me to corrupt.


hoo hooo hoo hwa wha haaaaaaaa...

[Darryl G. Thomas]

I'd like to share Rich's concerns but I think this is a big to-do about nothing.

Yeah, every now and then some movie, piece of art, or work of literature will draw some fire from a group that's trying to keep its name in the papers or the donations coming in and some form of censorship may occur; but the genie's out of the bottle on this one. Porn is a billion dollar industry. Mainstream corporations are making big money off of sex. Commerce rules in this country. The FCC may bark every now and then, but there is too much money to be made. Look at Howard Stern? He's laughing his way to the bank. The FCC did him a favor.

Last night I'm watching ESPN, sitting through erectile dysfunction commercial after erectile disfunction commercial with interruptions for some genital herpes commercial. Switched over to Cinemax in time for an endless array of soft porn movies...

Like I said, the genie's out of the bottle.

[sonic1]

It is interesting though that the more intellectual stuff gets banned before some of the more mindless stuff.

I mean Fox has some of the most sexual stuff on regular TV.

I am interested in what does get banned and why and how the people who do so have that power.

But I am not worried I will be wearing pilgrim outfits. And porn is safe as long as there are repressed christians around!

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by sonic1

But I am not worried I will be wearing pilgrim outfits.

Maybe you could popularize that as a new fetish.

[sonic1]

let me lick your buckle baby...


mmmmm....holes in sheets...

I can see it Pete.

[walto]

I think Rich's piece is great. (And this is from a guy who occasionally cringes or covers his eyes during risque segments of cartoons [and commercials] shown on Comedy Channel after 11 PM).

[patricia]

Knowledge is power and always has been. This business of thinking that if we don't see or discuss a subject magically makes the subject not exist is ridiculous.
The Kinsey studies were ground-breaking in their time in the way they dealt with human sexuality. They opened the eyes of the general public and were instrumental in de-mystifying human sexual behaviour. Ignorance of sexuality was epidemic during the period in which the studies were published.
Knowing about sex doesn't mean that society is on the greased slide to a Hell rampent with promiscuity, any more than knowing about taxidermy turns us all into a society totally obsessed with stuffing animals and displaying them in our homes as art.
Tempest in a teapot.

[Jazzzoline]

What the heck..
The most perverted people I knew or heard of were people who were too much into the Jesus stuff. You know, those who go to church every day, light "lampions" at home and pray for hours...
Those persons for whom sex is the most forbidden are the most perverted.
Then they ask for forgiveness...

[willy]

You people are STILL listening to the extreme left kooks at the NYT?

Hasn't the left lost enough elections, both locally and nationally, in recent years?

They never learn...

[Ron Thorne]

Folks can be as (predictably) glib as they choose on this subject, complete with sophomoric retorts which include references to "Pilgrim hats and buckle shoes". So, with the hope that my original (puritanical) point is further considered, here it is in another form.

Believe it or not, millions of Americans still think that sex is purely for procreation, and/or should only consist of the man-on-top-get-it-over-with-quick routine, otherwise known as the "missionary position". DUH!

I know that I'm risking having my right wing membership card pulled here, but I tend to be liberal on social issues.


Sans the paranoia, I tend to side with the liberlas in this argument.

Originally Posted by willy

You people are STILL listening to the extreme left kooks at the NYT?

Hasn't the left lost enough elections, both locally and nationally, in recent years?

They never learn...

Then again, I also agree with this.

[sonic1]

liberals/democrats aren't losing elections because of social issues.

They are losing elections because they are weak candidates. Just a bad time for liberlas.

But I can recall times when republican candidates were the laughing stock, which is why some of this gloating is going on today.

[Gary Sisco]

Bah, puritans are always the horniest motherfuckers around. And no one loves some good hard porn more than a rightwing Repub or a correctoid pwogwessive. They just can't *say* so. And we all know that the tongue is mightier than the, um, well ...

Hard men are good to find baby

[Phil_Meloy]

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

My big fear is next year bellybuttons will be out and all the girls will be wearing Pilgrim hats and buckle shoes.

I wouldn't be too stressed as long as that's all they were wearing.

[tippy]

censorship will never stop sex. Channel 13 runs programs very regularly that feature homosexuals and homosexuality that I'm sure are more educational and interesting on a human level than anything hollywood has ever put out. PBS during their many drives is annoying for sure and commercial but they've still got some great thought-provoking programming.

[Phil_Meloy]

Originally Posted by tippy

censorship will never stop sex.

You're probably right about this tippy.

[tippy]

I was walking on a ledge there, Phil.

[Phil_Meloy]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Hard men are good to find baby

Gary are you sure your not confusing this with the "Cheesiest Lines in Movie History" thread?

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

Sans the paranoia

Tish, you spoke French!

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by Ron Thorne

Believe it or not, millions of Americans still think that sex is purely for procreation, and/or should only consist of the man-on-top-get-it-over-with-quick routine, otherwise known as the "missionary position". DUH!

So what?

Originally Posted by Pete C

Tish, you spoke French!

[shrugs]

Come to Mardi Gras!!!