Sex Bullies

Austin. Texas—The nice Baptist lady from Waco had come to tell a committee of the Texas legislature why sex education was such a terrible idea—"Just like pouring gasoline on a raging fire." She got to explaining her own family's program for preventing teenage pregnancy. The lady and her husband have a daughter, and on this daughter's 16th birthday, her daddy took her out to dinner at a real nice restaurant. In the course of that dinner, he gave his little girl a little golden ring for her finger. And on this ring was a little golden padlock that symbolized the girl's chastity. The daddy has kept the little golden key to the little golden padlock, and on the girl's wedding day, he will give the key to the padlock, and to her virginity, to her new husband.

Right away, you could tell the audience had a lot of questions. Will it really help to keep her finger locked up? If she gets to be 35 and still isn't married, then can she have the key? Is there some whiff of male control of female sexuality here?

Well, the plan may have a few holes in it, but what we have here, friends, is the latest answer to a series of complex and troubling problems—not an answer just to sex education and to teenage pregnancy but to unwanted pregnancy in general, to abortion, to homosexuality, to AIDS, to pornography, to sex itself.

Sex. There it is, your root cause. The answer is, Just say no. You stop sex and that takes care of all the rest. Heaven only knows why it took so long for people to come to this conclusion.

Look, we all know we're supposed to be living in a sexually liberated country; it has been 25 years since the sexual revolution made the cover of Time magazine, and by now, we're all supposed to have these stainless-steel, free-from-guilt, sex-is-good-for-you attitudes. Bull. The fact is that sex is scary. It makes people feel guilty and ashamed of themselves. It embarrasses the hell out of them. It causes no end of trouble and is probably the root of as much evil as money. Sex has all these squirmy manifestations—makes you do things you don't really want to, lose control, act the fool; it's a hunger, a craving you can't do anything about. It exposes people's weaknesses and vulnerabilities: Very few things hurt more than a betrayal in a sexual relationship, because it's a treason against intimacy, against trust. Sex is powerful stuff.

And there are a lot of people so afraid of it they will do anything—burn down abortion clinics, beat up queers, pressure politicians, mess with the Constitution—to control sex. All these years, groups such as Planned Parenthood have been thinking that education and contraception would help. "I think contraception is disgusting," says Joe Scheidler, the Chicago anti-abortion activist. "People using each other for pleasure."

And you thought these folks were upset about abortion. Randall Terry, the head of Operation Rescue, the militant anti-abortion outfit, is opposed to all forms of birth control and would eliminate all contraceptives. "Ultimately, my goal is to reform this culture," says Terry. "The arts, the media, the entertainment industries, medicine, the sciences, education—to return to right and wrong, a Judaeo-Christian base."

That's a fairly strenuous agenda. Overturning Roe vs. Wade and getting Playboy out of the Jiffy Mart are peripheral goals. Even "the unborn," victims of "the new Holocaust," are only symptoms of the larger problem, according to these folks.

Just what the hell is going on here? Is it new? And is it a substantial phenomenon and a threat to freedom in this country?

There are several centers of frankly antisex thinking currently at work in the society, all of them political-issue organizations focused on something else: They are anti-abortion, antigay, antipornography and anti-sex education. In many cases, they describe themselves as "pro-family." Their constituents and their motives vary, but all of them are deeply afraid of sex. Fundamentalists, of course, have been preaching for hundreds of years that sex is Satan's favorite snare, the surest route to the Devil's lair and a siren source of misery and temptation for the unwary and the infirm of faith. The flesh, they are wont to observe, is weak. They have generally prescribed prayer and cold showers.

In fact, those of you whose notions of fundamentalism come from such quaintly dated efforts as Elmer Gantry are in for a surprise. Fundamentalists discovered quite some time ago that sex is great stuff. To be sure, they recommend it only within the boundaries of Christian marriage and continue to denounce it with varying degrees of vigor in all other contexts, but there is a flourishing fundamentalist sex trade. There are sex manuals for the born-again and all manner of discreet tapes sold through Christian bookstores. Such widely read Christian family counselors as Tim and Beverly LaHaye purvey sound sexual advice. Praise the Lord.

And there is Scheidler, who is such an extremist that Planned Parenthood uses him in its own fund-raising ads. "Anti-choice activist Joe Scheidler used a private detective to track down a 12-year-old girl scheduled for an abortion," reads a current ad, "and then, according to the Chicago Tribune, 'harangued her mother' through his bullhorn, 'demanding to see the child alone.'

" 'The mother was almost hysterical,' Scheidler is quoted as saying. 'We couldn't reason with her.' "

The anti-abortion movement is a particularly complex amalgam of Catholics, fundamentalists and citizens independently convinced that fetuses are human. However, what is observably true is that Scheidler represents both what is new and what is most active in the anti-abortion movement. In 18 months, Operation Rescue—run by Scheidler's disciple Terry—spread from a small group in Binghamton, New York, to 35,000 followers in 200 cities. This group has adapted the tactics of civil disobedience to anti-abortion efforts, claiming moral inspiration from the civil (continued on page 160)Sex Bullies(continued from page 88) rights movement (much to the well-expressed disgust of the leaders of that movement). The anti-abortion movement was, until recently, dominated by Catholic religious leaders and composed largely of women. Most of those women held strong religious convictions against abortion and many were antifeminist as well, because they believed that feminism threatened their identity and prestige in the traditional roles of wife and mother.

But what we are seeing with Operation Rescue is not women who feel threatened by the feminist movement—it is young men. It's young men you see outside abortion clinics these days screaming "Whore!" and "Dyke!" at every woman who enters. Susan Faludi, who is writing a book on the backlash against feminism, reports that Terry's background is fairly typical. Son of a middle-class family in Upstate New York, Terry was a bright and talented kid who was underemployed by the early Eighties. He flipped burgers at McDonald's, pumped gas, sold tires and cars and was laid off twice during the recession. Faludi observes, "The men of Operation Rescue—and police records indicate that 56 percent of the activists are men—do not fit the stereotype of grizzled Christian elders. Almost all its leaders and nearly half its active participants are in their late 20s to mid-30s. They are men who belong to the second half of the baby-boom generation, men who not only missed the political engagement of the Sixties but were cheated out of that era's affluent bounty.

"In the media," Faludi writes, "the abortion debate is most commonly framed as a moral dispute over a biology question: When does life begin? But Operation Rescue's peculiar brand of passion and animosity is fueled by far more personal emotions. These are men who are losing ground and at the same time seeing women gaining it—and suspect a connection."

The resentment of young white men who are losing ground in the system and who blame it on women and on affirmative action takes some odd cultural forms. One of them is the popularity of extraordinarily sexist comedians—"the Rev" Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, Rick Ducommun and others, who are not only hot on the comedy-club circuit but also frequently featured on cable-TV channels. "Bitch," "slut," "cunt," "dyke," "whore"—the insults pour out of them and audiences roar with laughter. Part of their appeal is the lure of the outrageous—to be daring, to be outré, to say what no one else dares say. And part of the appeal is what one form of humor has always been good for—it's a great way to express hostility.

Terry says it without humor: "Our diehard enemies are almost totally feminists. Radical feminism, of course, has vowed to destroy the traditional family unit, hates motherhood, hates children for the most part, promotes lesbian activity. Take Margaret Sanger [founder of Planned Parenthood]. She was a whore, she slept all over the place, all over the world, with all kinds of people."

The prescription is clear: Back to the kitchen; keep 'em barefoot and pregnant.

Perhaps the cruelest manifestation of this attitude is the work of the pro-family forces to stop programs designed to end child abuse and to help battered women. You may wonder how anyone could be against stopping child abuse or wife battering. Easy; ask social workers who deal with child abuse or work at shelters for battered women. They are under constant assault by people convinced that they are destroying the family by trying to stop physical violence within the family. These so-called pro-family groups are often fundamentalist Christians hipped on the notion, pure and simple, that God intended the man to be the head of the family.

With the antipornography movement, the antisex coalition takes on an even more unlikely ally than hip comedians—feminists themselves. In the well-known cases of the Minneapolis and the Indianapolis obscenity statutes, we saw an alliance of fundamentalists and feminists united in efforts to impose legal censorship. In Minneapolis, the statute was vetoed by the mayor; in Indianapolis, it was overturned by the courts. But these will not be the last such efforts. Legal censorship is by no means a majority position among feminists—few approve of pornography, but then, few approve of censorship, either.

Pornography is a cause that attracts a wide range of crusaders. One of the most notable is Charles H. Keating, of Lincoln Savings and Loan: When not presiding over his failed S&L and consorting with U.S. Senators, he spent his time on efforts to keep dirty magazines out of the Pick 'n' Pay. Which is not to say that all who oppose porn are given to financial chicanery—merely that they're a heterogeneous lot.

Antiporn groups also attract a delicious assortment of fruitcakes and bluenoses, who can be counted upon to denounce immortal works of literature, sight sexual innuendoes in Dr. Seuss books and otherwise add to the festive carnival of malarkey that enriches our civic life.

One fundamentalist divine, the Reverend Mark Weaver, heads a group called Citizens Against Pornography and is hell-bent on driving sin out of Austin, Texas. At a recent City Planning Commission hearing, Weaver informed a horrified audience that only the day before, a man had come out of the dirty-movie theater on South Congress Avenue, gone into the alley behind that theater and ... masturbated. And a lady who has two little girls lives right behind that theater and they might have seen that man doing that—except, praise Jesus, she has a large wooden fence around her yard.

Weaver's testimony against the evil wreaked by dirty movies caused John Henry Faulk, 75, to creak up to the microphone and announce that he had been born and raised in South Austin, not a quarter of a mile from where the dirty-movie theater stands today. "I think you should all know," he announced, "that there was a considerable amount of masturbation goin' on in South Austin before there was ever a dirty-movie theater on South Congress Avenue."

The antigay movement, as reflected in its literature, springs from the danker and murkier depths of human motivation. The fact that it is distinctly sick is reflected in the miasma of hatred that surrounds it. A lot of people who are antigay don't just crusade against homosexual book-stores or try to put gay bars out of business with zoning ordinances—they go out and beat up the patrons. It is that sick violence that makes antigay literature and action groups so repellent. The question that always comes up is, Just who is calling whom perverted here?

The more genteel reaches of antigay bigotry continue to enjoy wide social acceptance. The young thug in Dallas who went out gay bashing one night last year and wound up murdering two men he didn't even know is not destined to become a social lion. On the other hand, Judge Jack Hampton, who gave this creep an exceptionally light sentence on the stated grounds that his victims were "just queers," enjoyed more applause than condemnation. He is running unopposed for re-election and has received a huge number of campaign contributions.

AIDS has obviously reinforced a range of fears about homosexuals and has promoted antigay prejudice. As the disease spreads and begins to cost more and more—its impact on the nation's healthcare system has only begun to be felt—it will inevitably help give sex a bad name.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her recent book The Fear of Falling, notes that the current social and political conservatism of the American middle class was caused in large part by a reaction against and fear of the dread Sixties triumvirate—sex, drugs and rock and roll. Middle-class reaction against hedonism, real or perceived, is extremely strong. Middle-class mores call for discipline, self-denial and postponement of gratification.

The President of the United States regularly says that the most serious problem this country faces is drugs, which are, in fact, used by only a very small percentage of Americans. But the fear of drugs and of permissiveness and of all they imply about decline and decay is pervasive in our country. Not even rock and roll is safe from reaction: All over the country, legislatures have passed laws banning the sale to minors of records with "sexual excitement or activities" in the lyrics; some states put warning labels on rock albums and rock videos or require opaque wrappers.

Add to all these trends a sane reaction against the commercialization of sex. Sex, after all, is used to sell everything from cheap, quotidian products such as tooth paste to expensive, exotic foreign sports cars. Thoughtful social critics across the political spectrum deplore the phenomenon, though they disagree about remedies.

All of these fears and prejudices, dislikes and distastes, reactions against wretched excess and sexual abuse result in repeated attempts to outlaw sex in one way or another. James West, a senator in the Washington State legislature, introduced a bill this year that would outlaw not only sexual intercourse among those under 18 but also "heavy petting." According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 54 percent of young women 15 to 19 have had intercourse at least once, so this bill would create a substantial pool of future felons. Right away, you can see the complications that would ensue from legal sanctions against heavy petting. Definitions would be critical. Did you touch it? Did it twitch? If you're the first person in your area to be thrown into the hoosegow for French kissing, how will you explain it to all the mother rapers and father killers doing hard time?

One ambitious Texas legislator introduced a bill that would have made same-sex handholding illegal. But it is unwise to assume that just because this is a hopelessly silly endeavor it will never succeed. American jurisprudence has not always moved to greater freedom—there have been several times when freedom was rolled back, rights were rescinded and the Constitution failed to rescue the many unfortunates. Fear causes more damage to liberty than any other factor.

John Henry Faulk, that wise old man who spoke about masturbation, likes to tell the story of the time his momma sent him and his friend Boots Cooper to clear a chicken snake out of the family's henhouse. Johnny and Boots looked on the lower shelf of nests and couldn't find the snake, so they stood on tiptoe to see if it had got up on top, and that's how they came to be nose to nose with a chicken snake. They left that henhouse so fast they did considerable damage both to themselves and to the henhouse door. Johnny's momma thought it was pretty funny: "Boys, don't you know a chicken snake can't hurt you?"

That's when Boots uttered this immortal line: "Yes, ma'am," he said, "but there's some things that'll scare you so bad that you'll hurt yourself."