The GOP's Sexual Anxiety?
Republicans are squeamish and repressed when it comes to sex! It’s easy to say, of course, but is it true? Today, Andrew Sullivan says the fact that “the two biggest ticket items that have leaped into public consciousness discrediting parts of the stimulus package have been family planning and STD prevention” is a “glimpse into the far-right psyche.”
I generally tend to think that when it comes to politics, the right, as Andrew writes, is too often and too easily “galvanized by sexual panic,” particularly with regard to gay marriage. But in this case, is it sexual panic, or is it an understandable hesitance to bring sex in the public sphere? It’s not uncommon to pine over an ideal of sexual openness (I’m sure I’ve done it myself), but let’s be honest: Sex is personal. Sex is intimate. Sex — thinking of it, talking about it, participating in its many rituals — can be embarrassing and uncomfortable. Sex, and the complications that surround it, is something not easily shared with others.
So when sex and its many, many complications — STDs, pregnancy, contraception — become matters of public scrutiny and public funding, well, I think it’s reasonable to be concerned, even upset. Sex should be a private matter, and Americans needn’t be forced to open up their wallets in order to pay for the sexual decisions of others — especially under the absurd guise of “stimulating the economy” (and asinine, offensive, and probably flat-out wrong arguments about children don’t help matters either).
Are these issues of primary importance when it comes to the stimulus package? Of course not. Are they issues which deserve public attention, scrutiny, and, yes, even concern? It certainly seems reasonable to me to think so. And, needless to say, you can’t discount the simple fact that, even (perhaps especially) in politics, salacious headlines sell (or at least bring readers). So news vendors and widely read gossips have an incentive to play up stories involving sex.
As for Republican attitudes about sex, well, politically they may come across as prudish, but there’s at least some evidence to suggest that in the bedroom, they’re happier, and perhaps even kinkier. So maybe it’s not actually that Republicans are particularly more uptight when it comes to sex — it’s that they’re enjoying themselves, and don’t feel any need to talk about it.
great links!
— razib · Jan 29, 07:39 AM · #
Republicans feel comfortable keeping the kinky stuff out of the public sphere, and yet they vociferously oppose same-sex marriage and (safe-)sex education. Reading this post, one would almost risk assuming that Republicans thinks sex and relationships and all that “family values” stuff belongs in the privacy of American homes; certainly far, far away from Capitol Hill. Isn’t there a disconnect here?
— Haarball · Jan 29, 12:52 PM · #
So it’s “do as we say, not as we do” for the conservative coalition? I don’t want to accuse you of dishonesty, since perhaps you’ve consistently held this position, but this doesn’t fly as a defense of congressional republicans, or many conservative intellectuals.
I think I also disagree with you on the merits of your preferred position. While I understand the desire not to have discussion of sex be a major part of the public sphere, (confession: I do read that Dan Savage fellow), there’s reason to believe this isn’t no longer a feasible ideal. Given the prevalence of serial monogamy in our culture, and the shifting public norms that accompany it, can we do without discussion of sex? If you think there’s heavy costs to people having children when unmarried and unprepared, or, worse, spreading STDs, isn’t a public discussion important? That’s not to say that the liberal view of the matter is obligatory—maybe the answer is an attempt to regain a traditional understanding and traditional norms—but just to say that public discussion is pretty important.
— Justin · Jan 29, 03:33 PM · #
What a strange post. Typically, it’s Conservatives/Republicans who have been most in favor of legal restrictions on sex such as sodomy laws and strict laws against prostitution, and who (Libertarians aside) are mostly opposed to the idea that what happens in people’s bedrooms is not the State’s business.
Even if one believes that sex is such a private issue that the government should stay away from it, directly, that doesn’t necessarily imply that the government should stay away from the public health consequences of sex, such as STDs.
In practice, the government is already well involved in sexual issues: Look at all the laws we have concerning sexual conduct, funding for AIDS-related things (drugs, prevention, etc), and the government’s role in sex education (including abstinence education), for some examples. This involvement is nothing new.
— Ratufa · Jan 29, 04:15 PM · #
As far as Americans being “forced to open up their wallets in order to pay for the sexual decisions of others” goes, we already do. In spades. Every time somebody on medicaid (or medicare for that matter) needs treatment for an STD. STDs are some of the most preventable diseases in our society and this provision in the bill would save the govt millions and millions of dollars. http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/28/drudge-std/
— LeighH · Jan 29, 04:17 PM · #
Peter is really talking about two things here: Andrew Sullivan’s comment on the reactions to controversial elements of the stimulus package, and conservatives’ attitude toward sex generally. For the latter, I’m not sure I agree that conservatives are that unwilling to talk about sex. They just see the politicization of sex generally as a bad thing. Given the rise of illegitimate births in this country, for example, there is good reason to believe that contraception programs have failed rather impressively. Conservatives are certainly not shy about bringing this up, but it has little to do with priggishness.
For the former, though, I think Peter is right and Andrew is wrong. Particularly, I want to reemphasize what Peter said, that the reaction against contraception and STD programs in the stimulus bill is not the result of prudishness but of those programs’ transparent irrelevancy toward any kind of economic recovery. Think of them like earmarks: by themselves they are an iota of government waste, but they are symbolic because they are so incandescently abusive and so throw into sharper relief other forms of more subtle waste. Just so do the aforementioned programs point to how partisan a project the stimulus bill is.
— Blar · Jan 29, 04:24 PM · #
Blar,
As Peter put it: “But in this case, is it sexual panic, or is it an understandable hesitance to bring sex in the public sphere?” That was followed by a discussion of sexual openness and how Americans shouldn’t be forced to open their wallets for other people’s sexual decisions. That it’s absurd for contraception and STD programs to be part of the stimulus package merited 9 (non-parenthetical) words in his entire post.
If Peter’s main points were that these programs don’t belong in this bill and that Republicans singled them out because 1) It’s understandable to the public that such things don’t belong, 2) Attacking contraception and STD funding plays well to the base and 3) Debates involving sex are sure to get some airtime, then he picked a pretty round-about way to make them.
— Ratufa · Jan 29, 05:55 PM · #
Ratufa, I don’t think Peter was making points two or three at all. I made a sort of paraphrase of your point three in disagreement to Peter’s notion that the GOP doesn’t like talking about sex. Point two was raised by neither party.
Peter’s entire third paragraph addresses point one, which is also the launch point for his broader notion that the GOP thinks sex should be private.
As I said in my original post, I thought Peter was making two points, one of which I agreed with. You seem to be conflating the two still.
— Blar · Jan 29, 07:23 PM · #
I don’t think anyone disputes that conservatives are kinkier—it goes hand-in-hand with the general atmosphere of sexual repression in which they are raised. I’ll never forget the year I lived in England and it didn’t seem like a month would go by without another Tory politician being caught wearing a gimp suit.
— jeff · Jan 29, 08:16 PM · #
I did not intend for points 1-3 in my previous post to appear like I was putting words in Peter’s mouth — those points are the reasons why I think that the Republicans specifically picked on funding for STD programs and contraceptives when attacking the stimulus bill. I should have been more clear.
But, the notion that the GOP picked those items because of some general principle that the government should avoid sexual issues is not well-supported by previous political behavior — see sodomy laws, etc. That we should be “upset” because the government has public-health related STD programs (as opposed to being upset that money for these programs is in the stimulus bill) seems strange for all sorts of reasons — for example, Google for: “county health department” std prevention.
— Ratufa · Jan 29, 08:57 PM · #
“…and Americans needn’t be forced to open up their wallets in order to pay for the sexual decisions of others “
This is not a principled argument of the GOP or the American right, who’ve been quite happy to pull trillions of $ out of Americans’ wallets during the Bush administration, to f*ck up the Middle East, and/or to enrich the cronies of the administration.’
It’s been over a quarter century since the GOP publicly, permanently and definitively gave up any right to the claim of fiscal responsibility; please adjust your memes accordingly.
— Barry · Jan 29, 09:10 PM · #
but let’s be honest: Sex is personal. Sex is intimate. Sex — thinking of it, talking about it, participating in its many rituals — can be embarrassing and uncomfortable. Sex, and the complications that surround it, is something not easily shared with others
Untrue. Reject.
— Senescent · Jan 29, 11:44 PM · #
I think Mr. Suderman unduly extrapolates an aversion to “bring[ing] sex into the public sphere” from conservative objections to federal funding of contraceptive and sex education programs. For those on the religious Traditionalist side of the Conservative alliance, there is long precedence for public discourse and governmental “interference” in sexual behavior. The Comstock Act is the obvious example.
Against the Libertarian argument that sexual matters should be purely private and individualized, the Traditionalist answers that a healthy sexual culture in necessary to the survival of a healthy society. On abstract principle, the Traditionalist position is more similar to what you might call the Liberal position than to the Libertarian position, in that both recognize the legitimacy of legal and governmental action in directing sexual culture. The government has a legitimate interest in sexual issues because sexuality is important to the rightful functioning of society as a whole.
Where Traditionalists and contemporary Liberals differ, indeed where they are diametrically opposed, is in their vision of what constitutes a healthy sexual culture. The Liberal position, stemming from a view of sex as fundamentally directed toward personal fulfillment and individual expression, sees the role of government as ensuring equal protection for all types of sexual activity and of minimizing the “risks” associated with certain forms of sexual behavior (e.g. STDs and unwanted pregnancies).
The Traditionalist position, arising from a view of sex as primarily directed toward sacramentally embodying a divine perfection and generating the fundamental communal ties of the family, sees the role of government as encouraging the type of sexual behavior that best fulfills these functions: that is, monogamous lifetime marriage, especially including the openness to children.
So from the Traditionalist perspective, the objection to the programs in the stimulus bill comes from their particular nature as programs that may promote sexual behavior apart from that norm (whether they actually are or not is certainly debatable), not simply from their status as governmental legislation on the topic of sex. Alternative programs, such as a different approach to “sex-ed” or different techniques to combat STDs, might well garner Traditionalist approval.
However, as with the Comstock Act, the failures of past legislative measures intended to promote the Traditionalist position may raise quite reasonable questions about whether federal or governmental measures are effective tools in promoting traditional sexual norms. That, however, is a pragmatic question separable from the question of the inherent legitimacy of governmental “intrusions” on sexual matters.
— Ethan C. · Jan 29, 11:57 PM · #
As to the separate point about whether such matters belong in an economic stimulus bill: of course they don’t.
But just as the Democrats see this as an opportunity to smuggle their agenda through, if the tables were reversed I’d probably do the same for my policies. Though I’d like to think that I could do a better job of rationalizing it than Pelosi has. :)
— Ethan C. · Jan 30, 12:02 AM · #
@ Ratufa: Fair enough. Certainly anti-sodomy laws were disgraceful, and I can appreciate the need for STD prevention and care. But do you actually think that a massive expansion of contraception and STD prevention, among others, have any place in an emergency economic stimulus bill? Address arguments, not the motives behind them.
@Ethan: Good points all around. I would merely add that the traditional conservative arsenal has lately been updated with a lot of sociological data supporting their claims; e.g. the correlation between contraception programs and illegitimacy. Also, even in post compassionate-conservative America I think Republicans are still less keen on government programs than Democrats, so perhaps they wouldn’t be tempted to quite the level of abuse and excess we see in the current stimulus package. I could still see such abuse happening were the partisan alignment different, in which case I would still decry it for all to hear. This is too big to handwave as typical politics.
@ Barry: Considering how well Iraq is doing now, and considering that a partisan Congress just passed the largest spending bill ever wherein large parts are nothing but payoffs to “cronies,” perhaps conservatives aren’t the ones who need to adjust their memes.
— Blar · Jan 30, 04:13 PM · #
Late to this. All I’ll say is I never talked to my wife about what we would do with our children if one or both of us were jailed for making the films we make while Bubba was pres. Under GWB, however unlikely the actual possibility, it seemed like a prudent question to review a few times a year.
Under Bubba my only thought was to make my films as honestly as I could. Under GWB I decided to forestall controversial topics until the political climate became less hostile.
I’m guessing more than a few of you think that sounds hysterical and/or paranoid. But it didn’t seem that way to me and my wife. It just seemed prudent.
— Tony Comstock · Jan 30, 11:07 PM · #
Blar, thanks for bringing up the sociological data. With all the kerfluffle over whether “abstinence only” sex-ed in public schools works, I wonder if anyone has run the numbers of some real Conservative options, like homeschooling?
— Ethan C. · Jan 30, 11:54 PM · #
C’mon Reihan, you guyz sliced and diced this last spring.
Conservatives are <i>against young girls having sex</i>…..wasn’t that your conclusion?
— matoko_chan · Jan 31, 11:08 PM · #