[lbo-talk] Re: Sexuality Under Seige or So What Else is New?

Christian Gregory christian11 at mindspring.com
Sat Jul 31 06:26:06 PDT 2004



>Call me an anti-consumerist puritan, but if your sexuality is completely
>dependent on shopping, I'm just not going to grant it the same level of
>human dignity status. But in any case, I find it hard to believe that even
>SM relationships are disabled by having pre-made sex toys banned, since I
>suspect that such were possible in the days before prefab toys.

First, there is no moment before prefab toys. The Greeks had dildos, though they liked fisting too. And they didn't always use their hands for spanking. And even if there were, S&M as we understand it originated at a moment--let's say 17th and 18th century Europe--when there were plenty of prefab toys.

Second: Don't you think equating sexuality based on toys with sexuality based on shopping is pretty cheap? You write as if we could all just make our own, or we should just use big cucumbers and cattails.

Your argument seems to be that this is a good decision because it upholds the government's right to regulate commerce, and that a ruling in the other direction would have weakened the legislature's right to do. But I can't see how this ruling makes much difference one way or another: the legislature picks and chooses what to regulate anyway. And it's the control of those decisions by those on the right that matters, not whether the courts have the putative right to stop them.

Christian



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