Ambivlomatic

I’m envisioning an auditorium filled with militant adults and youth with contrasting ideologies, backgrounds, and experiences, and yet one unified mission.  Self-appointed delegates and speakers for the cause range from secular policy makers to religious leaders to something in between.  Children, arguably more than slightly influenced by the crowd’s fervor and the adults’ accessible rhetoric and basic appeals to morality and values, are taking a stand against a society that they believe is corrupt and against their own interests in living in a nation that has not abandoned traditional and fundamental ethical principles promoted by gods and communities alike.  They are all collectively becoming very bonded, very powerful, and very pissed off.  They grit their teeth and grind their axes.  They take no prisoners and dish out plenty of shame and fear-mongering.  Tempers are flaring.  Blood is boiling.  Nerves are rising.  The auditorium feels like it’s going to explode.  Thank goodness this is just a fantasy, I’m beginning to scare myself.

Finally, the dissenters are allocated to speak.  A rain of boos, curses, threats, and slogans fill the air as the auditorium transforms into the Colosseum.  “Throw the fucking Christians to the lions!  Crucify the bastards!” one preacher shouts.  “Silence is contagious; your sex lies are outrageous!” a prominent scholar sneers.  “How dare you tell me what God intended for my body!” a seven year old screeches before rushing to one of the opposition and biting his arm.  He cries and attempts to push her away as her mother screams at the targeted young man, “Don’t you dare touch my baby!  I’ll kill you!  KILL YOU!  You’re nothing!  NOTH-ING!”  She spits in his face as he stumbles closer to the podium to deliver his rebuttal.  Beads of sweat drip from his forehead and mustache.  He doesn’t understand how, after being cordially invited to his son’s high school to take part in a sex ed debate based on his controversial work in the field, the very person who invited him (the school principal) could be making metaphoric violent cutting gestures at his own throat while glaring at him and holding an empty bowling ball bag.  He clears his throat and tries to remember the factual points he was planning to make.

The crowd dies out momentarily as his lips begin to move in front of the microphone.  “Honestly, folks, I don’t understand how you can argue so fervently for premature pleasure and for youths to explore each other’s bodies when there is no statistical correlation with…”

Interruptions abound.  “You don’t care about the children!  You don’t care about me!  You don’t care about our pleasure!  Sex(less) monster!  Child victimizer!”  Depravity narratives fill the air before the unwitting abstinence proponent has a chance to finish his sentence.  “Now, wait, hold on, just hold on!” he insists in the microphone.  “This is ridiculous!  What’s so progressive about any of this?  Why did you even invite me here today if you don’t want to hear the words out of my mouth?  What’s the point?”

“Kill him!  Kill the sexless monster!  He’s trying to challenge our thinking!  He wants to take away our pleasure!”  The crowd rushes the stage to confront the poor sap and literally tears him apart in their collective solidarity and insanity, feasting on his remains.  It kind of looks something like the death of Captain Rhodes in Romero’s Day of the Dead.  The ABC proponent screams to the crowd, “Choke on ‘em!  Choke on ‘em!”  Bub is nowhere to be found.  The end.

Okay, so I got a little carried away with that little fantasy, but it was kind of fun to write.  I’m sorry.  I was thinking a lot about how impressed I am with the sex negative Right’s ability to establish broad coalitions from church and state via sex education debates and criticism, their communal, national, and international constituencies, as well as their effectiveness in promulgating fear and shame toward the masses.  It’s hard not to admire their effectiveness and how something as scientifically unfound and criticized as abstinence-only education could have such a heyday and end up affecting so many people worldwide.  Obviously they had some help with, you know, culture and all being how it is, and as Irvine astutely points out in her book Talk About Sex, the Left is far more vulnerable to smear tactics and scapegoating and remain on the defensive.  “It is what it is,” as some of us are fond of saying.

I just need to set the book down from time to time and wonder, geez, what the fuck were many of the Left doing relying on sound social scientific data and rational arguments when, you know, they could just try to scare the shit out of the general public into accepting pleasure and self-determination?  Why make people sexually literate when you can simply blind them with fear and fill their ears with noise?  What if they were to channel all this talk around family values, morality, and the children to their own ends?  They’re all rhetorical ploys, they can be utilized just the same.  You know, get the media and religious leaders involved and construct an absolutist moral system built for pleasure.  Tap into those emotions and acknowledge their importance, as Irvine has.

No, this doesn’t sound like a good idea, but then again, my blog doesn’t sound like a good idea, but I’m obliged to post one by tonight, damn the consequences.  I guess what I’m getting at is that I’m continually thinking about sex education advocates’ faults.  Our often inaccessible jargon and academic prose.  Our frequent presentations of ourselves as the champions of reason and science versus simplistic moral systems and religions.  How we won’t “go there” with the shameless tactics of the fear-mongering sexual McCarthyists.  How we claim to have an open mind and yet how some of us (myself definitely included) can’t bring ourselves to hear out our opponents or read outside our allied disciplines without the snide commentary, the eye rolling, the side jokes, the personal grudges, and, best of all, the deep down assurance that whatever they have to say is wrong, and that we know better.  Our invocation of oppositional binary constructs (left v. right, liberals v. conservatives, pleasure v. shame, etc.).

Wait…maybe there’s more overlap between us all than we care to admit.  It’s just that they have the powers of culture, slander, and fear on their side and we have social inequalities, scientific data that only our inner circles read, and Foucault.  Damnit!  Why can’t there be ways to dissuade the use of public (dis)approval and euphemized buzzwords as effective political and ideological strategies?

I’m not nearly as pessimistic about the state of sex education today than I was a few years ago, but still, to quote Marilyn Manson, it’s a long hard road out of hell.  Especially when “heaven” is really more of a purgatory than anything, but is made out to be “heaven” when some of us set up ideological end points on the spectrum such as conservative “abstinence-only” and liberal “comprehensive sex education.”  Many of us know that comprehensive sex education is anything but comprehensive, and that there are more similarities than either side of the same coin cares to admit.  If not, then you should check out Jessica Fields’ book Risky Lessons as a god example of how these slippery ideological distinctions sometimes utilize the same rhetoric (e.g. “children having children”) and share the same assumptions regarding young people’s bodies and what they should be doing with or learning about them.  Some folks have forgotten to critically think beyond the binary spectrums we construct, and sometimes the folks that fall into one side or another become uniformly characterized in ways that keep us from acknowledging common ground and shared concerns.

I know this whole blog has been one big muse (not Muse, unfortunately) session, but sometimes I get tired of the us v. them talk.  I get tired of the us v. Republicans talk, or jokes about conservatives.  For all of my life, the joke’s been on us.  I don’t really see any collaborative mobilizations as a result of some of the same methods that “they” utilize, and yet more aggressively and far more effectively.  Are we all that enlightened?  The right has over the years appropriated our sex dialogues and protocols to their own ends, and of course they had a lot of help from cultural anxieties, prejudices, and the paradigms of heteronormativty, disease, and fear.

Irvine defines “depravity narratives” as “tales about sex education that rely on distortion, innuendo, hyperbole, or outright fabrication (pg. 54 of Talk About Sex).  Irvine further states that they get their power from sounding sound, relying on threats and shame, appealing to cultural logic, coming in droves, and finally appealing to social ignorance about the activities discussed in the narrative.  They also certainly invoke an emotional response from listeners, and emotion work is thankfully something Irvine highlights in her writing.  I’m wondering if there’s any room for us, as proponents of sexual literacy, self-determination, diversity, and pleasure, to tap into a sort of counter-depravity narrative.  I’m not one for disseminating lies and promoting ignorance, but I also acknowledge how fear and shame are profoundly effective motivator—hecko, we all should be familiar with this as we all survived some deficient form of sexuality education, be it in or out of the classroom.

I’m rather ambivlomatic (ambivalent and problematic finally become one!  Thanks, Jason!) about thinking about this, but unless we can find a way to bridge allegiances and find common ground with folks that tend to make us grit our teeth, grind our axes, or simply LOL, I wonder how effective appeals to sound science and good guy badges will be as a sexuality education strategy.