It's been a bad week for sex in America. First, New York governor Elliot Spitzer, well known moral-highgrounder is found to be consorting with prostitutes, and then today came the news that one in four teenaged girls has a sexually transmitted disease.
Sex scandals are nothing new. Powerful men in politics from Alexander Hamilton to Bill Clinton, to Jim McGreevy have all gotten embroiled in sex scandals while in office. And some of these scandals (Bill Clintons comes to mind)became national -- even international -- obsessions. But if the men involved weren't famous, wouldn't it all just have been sex? Seems to me it's the celebrity that makes it scandalous, not the sex act itself.
Let's face it, our culture glorifies sex as much as it vilifies it. We want our politicians to be tv-ready (witness the fawning over Obama's good looks), but then are shocked, positively shocked I say, when they turn out to be sexual beings. Music videos (mostly watched by teen-agers)feature sex acts only marginally presented as dance moves. Horror movies like Saw and Hostel entwine horror and violent sexual images so completely that they've generated a new film genre: gore-nography. The Victoria's Secret "Fashion Show," has become a soft-core prime time ratings bonanza; shows like The Bachelor pimp women out to generate ad-revenue, and on and on and on.
But still, a politician who has extra-martial sex? With a hooker? How could he? Or a teenaged tv star, getting pregnant? I'm shocked, positively shocked, I say. But sadly, not at all shocked to find out that nearly half of the African American girls in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey had at least one sexual disease. Because a world as sexualized and sexually confusing as ours is bound to have consequences for those too young -- or too arrogant -- to navigate it.
Pundits are very quick to denounce Spitzer's hypocrisy: he was a moralist who prosecuted prostitution rings, after all. And I agree, I think he's a hypocrite and a fool and he should step down. He broke the law, and governors can't do that. But maybe it's not him that's wrong, but the law that's wrong.
So what I'm about to say, I say as a mother of a little girl, and with the full knowledge that many (if not most) of the regular readers of this blog will disagree, but I think public schools should be able to hand out condoms along with strong recommendations for abstinence, and that prostitution should be legalized.
As Senators Obama and Clinton get ready for their showdown in Pennsylvania, Hillary received a crushing blow this past weekend when Pennsylvania's Senator Bob Casey decided to endorse Barack Obama, instead of Clinton even though she and her family has ties to the state going back to the time when she was a young girl. To add insult to injury, a few weeks ago, New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson, the same man who spent Superbowl Sunday with Bill Clinton, who was given numerous positions in the Clinton cabinet, turned his back on his old friend, didn't return his calls, phoned his new pal Obama and jumped aboard the "Yes we can!" train.
RECAP!
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