Doug asks:
Has he (Scalia) visited? Commented? Or is this just an incongruous fantasy?
No, not visited. Just a point of comparison. Referencing an uptight German homophobe on sex is like ordering the lone fish dish on a steakhouse menu -- yeah you will get a meal, but it will not be very satisfying. LOL
Michael asks:
> So you dismiss the charges against MTV?
MTV is sexually daring -- yes. What is wrong with that? So is William S. Burroughs. I recommend neither for 11 year olds. (Though encountering Burroughs and Gordon Merrick helped save this 14 year old's life 3 decades ago.) I know you believe MTV is targeting 11 year olds even though it says it doesn't (just like queers -- we say we don't recruit, but we do, we do), but all television sets have on/off switches last time I checked. And MTV is a channel that a person has to pay for in order to get it.
> Is it OK with you to have 11-year-olds be invited to watch drunken college kids engaging in public foreplay?
I didn't realize that MTV was sending out emails. Kids have it so easy today. When I was young . . . . LOL.
To my mind it is the parents' job to monitor the books/films/tv/recordings that their children encounter. My parents did. What I fear is some kind of Republican morality police censoring art and communication. We don't need the state to act in loco parentis. We have too much of that already -- no talk of homosex; abstinence only sex education; prayer before football games and graduations. You don't want me to start talking about variety being in the best interest of individuality do you? LOL LOL.
> Ralph Nader might fear sex. Who knows? Who cares?
I do. Lack of sexual sophistication to me is a dangerous attribute for a grown person to have. Always makes me wonder what other aspects of a person's personality/attitudes are stuck in reverse gear -- race? gender? politics? economics?
> What has he ever directly said that is worse than the syrupy hypocrisy and rote repression mantras of the mainstream candidates?
What bothers me is the way he reduces everything down an issue of corporate power. He is as much a victim of tunnel vision as Bush is on the right. Hence his "gonadal politics" comment. He cannot accomodate queer issues into his world view so he trivializes them so he can then dismiss them.
John G. wrote:
> That does not detract from the insightfulness of the observation (certainly not Nader's alone) that sexualized representations in contemporary commercial media at best trivialize human erotic relationships in the service of
selling commodities (Frankfurt School's analysis of "repressive desublimation" is on-target here) and at worst contain an authoritarian populist element that shades into fascism (the vulgar misogyny of "libertarian" -- and now ABB'er -- Howard Stern as an epitome of this).
Why do they trivialize erotic relationships? Couldn't it be seen as a celebration of the erotic? Sometimes the erotic is a special communication between you and your partner(s). Sometimes it is just having fun in an SM dungeon or swinger's club. And sometimes it is used as a commercial come on. John Paul and the rest of his ilk to the contrary, human erotic relationships are not this sacred gift to be enacted only between husband (male) and wife (female) after the children have been fed and tucked in, in the privacy of one's home, under the covers, with the lights out, in the hope of fertilizing an egg.
Erotic encounters only have the meaning(s) we apply to them. They have no inherent meaning. It is the commercialization of life/culture that is the problem, not the erotic. But it is so much easier to focus on the erotic. Nice way to distract those who are being exploited by commercialization. Give them a straw man to get upset about while the f**king they should be worried about goes on unimpeded. (To prove I have been reading posts and trying to learn: didn't Lenin and the Bolsheviks advocate free love?)
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister