NO SEX PLEASE, WE'RE REPUBLICANS
Right now, to be sexually attuned and kinky is to be part of the anti-Bush revolution. Vive la résistance!
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, August 13, 2004
Oh my shining well-lubricated God but it's a darn fine time to be a sensually aware and libidinously curious and sexually active person in America.
It's true. Just look. Look at all the right-wing sexual rigidity and born-again religious screeching and hateful conservative homophobia spewing around the country right now. Can't you just smell it?
Yes, it's the rank scent of raw misogyny and nipple-riffic horror and antichoice wailings, of all those illegal **** in Texas and illegally married gays in San Francisco and the odor of a rabid fundamentalist antiporn crusader attorney general who doesn't smoke or drink or dance, one who covers up the terrifying breasts of awful statues and who apparently believes sexual relations should consist of two minutes with a barbed lash and a fistful of Vicodin. In the dark. While praying.
Why, it's enough to make any normal, sexually active, open-minded, even slightly perverted liberal in America right now feel like the Marquis de Sade. Which is, with the right perspective, a very good thing indeed.
Nowadays, the slightest hint of sexual kink in your life and you get to feel all dirty and naughty and outlandish. Slightest salacious twinge in your groinal region and you get to feel like some sort of delicious deviant, a heathen, a whore, a pagan, a loveslut, a wet-hot dreamboat of yes, something to be feared and loathed and dreaded by much of the antisex born-again leadership while simultaneously deeply, secretly desired by most of them. I mean, what's not to like?
Because right now, to be wantonly open about sexual matters is to be smacked down as some sort of radical, is to be scowled at by the FCC and the CIA and the petrified BushCo evangelicals, is to be considered the dreaded Other, all slippery and self-defined and dangerous. Go ahead, wave your vibrator. Feel like a revolutionary.
Because to do so is to become part of that insurgent energy, that hot dirty mandatory vibration about which sexually terrified neocons and "Passion of the Christ" fanatics are not supposed to speak, lest they explode into a million tiny moans and a thousand long hot fantasies, and then confess all their pent-up sins to a confused, heavy-breathing priest. Titter.
And lo, to be such a heathen is a great thing indeed. Just look at the benefits. You get to induce rashes in sad fundamentalists. You get to align yourself with Janet Jackson's nipple and Howard Stern's porn stars and Texas **** crusaders, all that divine goddess energy and all those orgasm instructional videos and the raw messy bloody screaming dreamy meaning of life.
You get to feel, as you buy yet another new Hitachi Magic Wand from Blowfish or Good Vibrations or maybe Toys In Babeland, as you ply your lover with some Astroglide and a nice acrylic toy, as you dare to feel unashamed of your flesh and proud of your libido and enthusiastic about your desires, that you are part of something larger than yourself, something powerful and necessary and even a bit anarchistic. Something, dare we say, Important.
It's true. No longer are you just a happily salacious progressive human going about your private business, easing your tensions via the pleasures of the flesh and of the latex and relaxing your id sans major pharmaceuticals, all while adding massive doses of desperately needed positive vibration to the planet and the universe.
Rather, you are now, by default, a part of the resistance. You are a dissenter, an insurgent, a thief in the House of Shrub. And you -- yes, you -- sexually active free-thinking love bomb, are contributing to the glorious soiling of the moral fabric that is wrapped like a noose around the "Left Behind" crowd.
You are, in short, a moral terrorist. See? Isn't sex fun?
Look at it this way: How utterly boring would it be if we had a calm, intelligent, sexually attuned, articulate president who wasn't the slightest bit ashamed of the human body and wasn't the slightest bit embarrassed to admit he appreciates the divine female (or male) form?
How completely normal and healthy would you feel if a president came right out and said that he actually (gasp) enjoys sex and encourages his fellow citizens to have it as much as responsibly possible to help ease the nation's woes and relax its rages and knock it off with all the goddamn wars and gunfire and the spitting in the streets?
Sweet Jesus with a leather riding crop! Can you imagine the result? I mean, besides the hellfire and leeches and the apocalypse?
Why, the country might actually relax its clenched ideological muscles. It might actually begin to release all those congealed puritanical toxins from its frozen heart.
It might even begin to soften its isolationist glare and open its moral thighs once again and reclaim that universal verity we all understand to be true: that sex is not, as BushCo's hard Right would have you believe, this sinful unnatural heathenistic act, full of worms and disease and legislation and perversions and wayward fantasies of Lynne Cheney in a ball gag. Shudder.
That it is, in fact, a divinely inspired act, healthy and resplendent and innate and so obviously a fiery, inseparable part of just about everyone's cellular structure that it's sort of silly to deny it.
And when done right (and even, sometimes, when done a little wrong), with respect and appreciation and real education and good porn and intense touching and that hot gleam in the eye, it actually results in a healthier populace, a country a little less tense, a little less anxious, a little less prone to self-righteous indignation and screechy faux patriotism and bursts of sanctimonious puling. Gosh, how horrible.
Just imagine. What a country we could be then. What an attitude we could have. All relaxed and satisfied, aglow, de-clenched, less aggro macho sadism, less insane amounts of repressed lust and painful sexual denial manifesting as molestation and pedophilia and huge collections of kiddie porn stashed on some senator's home computer.
Imagine if much of BushCo's current disease of bogus evangelical machismo was drained away like pus from a wound and the nation was not led by a bunch of snickering myopic war hawks and corporate CEOs, each so obviously sexually repressed and so clearly in need of a long string of anal beads and a nice tub of margarine that they absolutely must lead us into war to compensate for not having sex since the Nixon administration.
Can you imagine it? What a country we could be. How much more pliable, amenable, full of satisfied sighs and open-mouthed laughter and free condoms in the streets. What, too utopian? Naive? Too bad. Raise your Hitachis, humble deviants of the world, and see who salutes.
