Sex Work: In Bed with the Religious Right

[Ian David]

Is American sexual culture schizophrenic? Yes, and this has everything to do with the sexual politics of the religious right. Sexual opportunity is everywhere, but sexual rights have, at the same time, been concretely eroded.

By Dagmar Herzog
June 11, 2009

Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics
By Dagmar Herzog
(Basic Books, 2008)

What inspired you to write Sex in Crisis? What sparked your interest?

Sex in Crisis has a great deal to do with my prior book, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005), which offered a major revision of our assumptions about the Third Reich’s sexual politics and its aftermath, including close attention to the complicity of the Christian churches under Nazism. In his book American Fascists, Chris Hedges had drawn direct parallels between the religious right in the United States and the Nazis, but I thought that was not the point. As a Holocaust scholar, I’m deeply uncomfortable with direct parallels, but what I did learn from studying the Nazis was that they were quite pro-sex for their own followers, while denigrating “Jewish” sex as dirty and immoral. They had it both ways, and that was a significant key to their appeal. Intuitively, I thought there was a comparable dynamic going on with the religious right.

<snip>

1. Far from being uptight, the religious right is lasciviously explicit. And far from being anti-sex, it is very pro-sex; within heterosexual marriage, that is. The religious right promises, to those who will follow its rules, decades of spectacularly blissful marital orgasms. (“It’s like having a million tiny pleasure balloons exploding inside of me all at once,” as one evangelical women’s advice book puts it; another says: “Orgasm is an integral part of God’s design for sex.”) Repression alone, in short, is not sufficiently appealing. Sex sells–also for conservatives. Without the promise of pleasure, the religious right would not have found nearly as many adherents as it has.

2. The religious right succeeded above all by secularizing its message. It sounds paradoxical, but it’s vital. Part of the move had to do with physical health: exaggerating the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and lumping treatable and untreatable, bearable and unbearable, diseases together for maximum scare value (all the while mendaciously denigrating the effectiveness of condoms). But the biggest move was capturing the terrain of therapy-speak about psychological health. It’s not about hellfire anymore. Repression has now been repackaged as promotion of mental well-being. Suddenly everything is about low self-esteem: homosexuality, abortions, pornography, premarital sex. The Bush administration mandated in 2006 that high school curricula dependent on federal funding (and at that point 46 of the 50 states took federal funding for abstinence ed) must inform students that sex before marriage could lead to depression and suicide.

3. The religious right plays on the most elemental fears about the relationships (or lack thereof) between bodies and emotions, performance and intimacy, lust and love. A big reason for the success of conservative arguments in the Bush years had to do with the extraordinary panic that was unleashed in the media around the prospect of the death of postmarital desire. The panic was that not just women but also men were too tired after a long day of work; weren’t attracted to their boring, naggy, imperfectly-bodied spouses; would rather masturbate to porn on the computer, etc. Conservatives rushed in with feminist-seeming arguments about how even when two people were in bed with each other, their heads and hearts were really elsewhere; they spoke to widespread feelings of emotional alienation and anomie, also specifically within marriage, and about how too many wives feel like sperm depots for emotionally insensitive husbands. The manufactured anxiety about the death of postmarital sex explains a great deal about the sudden incapacity of Americans to defend premarital sex.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/images/managed/Story+Image_rhinestonebragstring.jpg
This is a wife's opportunity to 'shine and sparkle' before her marriage covenant lover. - Marriage Vineyard website

More:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/1462/sex_work%3A_in_bed_with_the_religious_right/

Hat-tip to: http://twitter.com/Mark_Timmons/status/2147863320



See also:



http://www.republicansexoffenders.com/


GOP Donors drip with hot, sticky porn money
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1093853

[DCKit]

1. Too damn many buttons on the magic underwear for me. n/t

[Laelth]

2. Very interesting. k&r n/t

:dem:

-Laelth