There is so much money to be made scaring the hell out of Americans about sexuality that no one on this gravy train can afford to slow it down. Any outsider who questions this juggernaut is immediately labeled insensitive, anti-family, immoral, or a pedophile.
The Sexual Disaster Industry (SDI) involves federal and local government, conservative religion, so-called morality organizations, right-wing think tanks, victim-parade daytime talk shows like Maury and Dr. Phil, and news programs looking for a bump (“Isn’t it awful the way people go to strip clubs? Film at 11!”). Honorable mention goes to the psychotherapy profession (current motto: “You’re sure you were never molested?”) and to the nighttime adrenalin-rush crime shows like CSI.
Acting independently (while reacting to common cultural imperatives and personal anxieties), these institutions dramatically overstate the amount of sexual violence, sexual danger, sexual immorality, and sexual freakiness around us. They’ve created the illusion of an enormous sexual “other” living in our midst—tens of millions of sexual predators, bisexual sadomasochist anarchists, satanic molesting sex educators, wanton husband-stealing strippers, and malevolent shyster pornographers.
The Industry is continually inventing and warning us about new sex-related disasters in the making. And although government, religion, and civic groups are working overtime creating more and more solutions, everyone agrees that our safety and peace of mind is further away than ever. It would seem that our sex-related problems are just too big, that human sexuality is just too degenerate. That’s why programs need more donations, citizens need to be more vigilant, people need to give up more rights, and government has to pass ever-stricter laws.
There’s a better explanation.
The contemporary American narrative of sex-as-danger is a rich one. In this well-known tale, our country is filled with pedophiles and date rapists; pornography drives people to destroy their marriages and to commit violence and perversion; sexual entertainment damages communities; sex education seduces children into having sex; premarital sex leads to STDs, pregnancy, depression, and suicide; contraception leads to promiscuity, ruining lives; and abortion leads to breast cancer, sterility, and crippling guilt.
Almost all sexual choices are morally wrong, physically dangerous (for self or others), and economically and politically disastrous. Managing one’s own sexuality, or the sexuality of one’s neighbors and community, therefore, involves reducing anxiety and minimizing danger, not maximizing intimacy, self-exploration, pleasure, or spirituality. It’s a full-time job.
Government hearings periodically bless the latest problem from which we must defend our families. Some of Washington’s recent crusades involve “promiscuity,” cybersex, and alleged over-reliance on contraception (in the country with the highest rate of unintended pregnancy in the industrialized world). The idea that the U.S. Senate would hold hearings with titles like “The Science Behind Pornography Addiction”1 and “Open Forum on Decency”2 sounds like a Jay Leno or Jimmy Fallon gag. If only.
The government selects the witnesses to these hearings who will provide the exact outcome it wants. Junk science, like Judith Reisman’s anti-porn delusion about “eroto-toxins,” is common.3
The basic qualification of many who get to testify is that they’re really upset. Or a reformed pervert. So ex-porn junkies like Phil Burress create Citizens for Community Values, and demand action about porn addiction. Concerned Women for America lectures senators about contraception causing promiscuity. Donna Rice Hughes washes out as Gary Hart’s eye candy and is reborn as an expert on abstinence and Internet porn. It’s like credentialing someone as a doctor because she’s really worried about illness, or choosing an accountant because he’s flunked several audits.
Oh, for some actual expertise: sexologists, sociologists, psychologists. But expertise would contradict the media–religion–civic group–politician Disaster Axis (religion and the media terrify people, “decency” groups offer solutions, politicians fund them). Science, statistics, historical perspective—they might tell us that our kids, our property values, and our bodies are safer than we think. Americans don’t want this good news. Given our guilt and shame about sex, problems and anxiety make more sense. So problem-oriented faux expertise (“Look at how I wrecked my life, I know how dangerous sex is”) carries the day.
Every industry promotes basic assumptions about the world in which its customers live, and how its products improve lives. Despite a lack of evidence—despite contradictory evidence—the SDI has effectively persuaded Americans that the following (unproven) beliefs are principles of modern life (which, of course, justify the very existence of the Industry):
Together, these six assumptions create a landscape of danger and powerlessness, in which suspicion of one’s own and others’ sexuality is sensible. Surrounded by this much danger and potentially explosive eroticism, fear (and resentment) isn’t just plausible, it seems responsible.
This is the context for the SDI’s marketing of its products: programs, laws, investigations, new psychological diseases. Allegedly designed to make our lives safer, in reality they make people more frightened. And when people are more frightened, they don’t ask questions about whether programs are making them safer—they just want more of them. The constant reminders of the Amber Alert system makes parents feel more afraid, not less—while rescuing virtually no kids.4
And so regardless of the alleged problem being addressed (porn addiction, stranger abduction, date-rape drugs, blight surrounding strip clubs), the Industry’s solutions (its product) always involve the same things: desexualize the environment, reduce the opportunity for sexual expression, increase the costs of sexual activity, increase community anxiety, divide people into the sexually “safe” (us) and “dangerous” (them).
The true product of the SDI isn’t safety, but fear. If it were safety, various political, religious, media, and civic institutions comprising the Industry would encourage:
That’s just for starters.
The SDI’s newest product is fear of same-sex marriage. It’s crazy, but of course they predict disaster: straights won’t marry anymore, people will demand the right to marry animals or their own children, no one will have kids anymore, children will no longer aspire to couple, too many children will be raised (poorly) by gay parents. As Pat Robertson says, “what about bestiality and child molestation and pedophilia? How can we criminalize these things and at the same time have constitutional amendments allowing same-sex marriage? This is just the beginning in a long downward slide in relation to all the things that we consider to be abhorrent.”5
It’s all nonsense.
If they were honest, they’d say, “We’re against same-gender marriage because it’s against our religion. We don’t think anyone should have the right to do that.” But that doesn’t inflame people sufficiently. The SDI doesn’t want people annoyed, it wants them frightened and angry. It can then channel those feelings into political power and financial gain. Annoyed people don’t donate time or money. Angry, frightened people do.
The Religious Right’s hypocrisy is astounding. They claim to care about the children, women, men, and families supposedly at risk from the sex-related disasters they describe in fetishistic detail. They tell us to support this or that law, give up these or those rights. But they disappear when it comes to addressing the actual risks Americans really do face—risks that the Religious Right is creating and exacerbating every day.
These include the child who’s feeling more guilt about sex, the teen who’s more vulnerable to unwanted pregnancy, the prostitute who’s more subject to customer violence, the swinger who loses custody of her son, the newlywed who can’t buy a vibrator, the lesbian unfairly dismissed from her job, and the desperate couple who can’t get emergency contraception. They aren’t abstractions—theirs are real lives, compromised or ruined by the self-righteous, ultimately worthless flailing about of the SDI.
The SDI’s goal isn’t to address the real problems of real people. It’s to (1) inspire us to fear sex and (2) provide society with excuses to restrict sexual expression. No, they won’t fix the problems they say they’re so upset about. The only thing they fear more than sex is going out of business.