[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: The Plot Against Sex in America

Wed Dec 15 23:51:01 PST 2004

>
>The Plot Against Sex in America
>
>By Frank Rich
>New York Times December 12, 2004
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/12rich.html?oref=login&pagewanted=2&8hpib&oref=login
>
>
>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
>
>
>_______________________________________________________
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand