sex and the left

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Wed Oct 23 09:19:27 PDT 2002


``...And you cannot deny the basic fundamental fact that most right-wing opposition to abortion and contraceptives are rooted in the same foundation as their opposition to "deviant" sexual material/behavior: a grotesque fear of their own repressed sexuality. I'm for diversity of sexuality and sexual expression, NOT diversity of ideology...'' Anthony Kennerson

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Well, I can deny it. You need to take this idea a lot further along and see that sexuality and deviance are not really the foundation either. You had it closer when you talked about the body. Or at least that's my view.

It is the body, its entire organic existence filtered through some religious and moral lens that generates their rejection, loathing and fear. The concordance the political right feels toward the austere, grim, phobias of various fundamentalist Christian and Jewish religious traditions isn't accidental.

They find in those wretched systems of thought and practice all sorts of confirmations of their own loathing for the life of the body. Their obsessed with it. For each of the quasi-erotic or merely enjoyable functions, practices, or thoughts that depend on some aspect of the body and its grounding in living processes (including its relational dependence on society and the natural world), they see some form of corruption, filth, or disease, some threat, violation or untruth. They are attempting to completely re-animated some ancient or medieval conceptual frame of society and the world, and these phobias toward the body and life are merely one aspect of their strangely deformed and demented world view. They are an anathema.

So, in my view chasing around various liberalizing ideas about sexuality is something like putting the cart before the horse. For example my disgust for Islamic fundamentalism isn't restricted to its apparent abuse of women.

These fundamentalisms are mirrors of one another and the destructions and social chaos they are perpetrating on their respective societies are reciprocal deformations. That's why I referred to the rightwing Talibanization of the US---an idea suggested by Tariq Ali's book cover that shows Bush done up as Muslim cleric and bin Laden in a suit behind the presidential podium.

Chuck Grimes



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