Afterword on Yesterday's Post (Posted a Day Late)

Note:  This was intended to be posted yesterday but my internet was out.

A few weeks ago, when Monica Lewinsky's reemergence into the public consciousness was much under discussion, a number of feminist blog threads contained accusations that Ms. Lewinsky was a victim of sexual harassment and some went as far as to say she was a victim of child abuse, due to the age difference between her and Bill Clinton at the time of their sex affair.   But Monica Lewinsky hadn't made made a complaint that she was the victim of sexual harassment and she had been an adult for five years when the alleged abuse happened.  She was even longer past the age of consent for more years in every state I'm aware of, seven years past that in the District of Columbia.  

Whether or not she knew or felt herself to have been  the victim of sexual harassment was her right to say, not other women or men, based on their chosen basis for making the claim.   The state, in its responsibility for minor children, is the entity that makes decisions about whether or not sexual activity with and among them constitutes a crime even when there is nominal agreement.  Agreement isn't the same thing as informed consent when the one agreeing isn't mature enough, intelligent enough or rational enough to be making that decision.   None of which were at issue with Monica Lewinsky.   She may have, rightly, considered the latter claim by other people to be an insult to her.

Yet many people, many believing themselves to be feminists, seem to believe they are able to see abuse when Ms. Lewinsky doesn't, even given all of the years and all of the encouragement to define what happened as sexual harassment.   The law which was so obviously willing to haul a sitting president up on charges wouldn't have been reluctant to go after ex-president Bill Clinton.   The charge that he was guilty of child abuse was absurd and insulting to Monica Lewinsky who, if she was anything, was not intellectually impaired.  When I saw her taped deposition played by Clinton's Republican prosecutors, I thought she seemed unusually intelligent, perhaps more intelligent than her questioners whose clear intentions, she successfully frustrated.   What happened was a consenting sexual affair by two adults.  The only other people who had any right to comment on it were those wronged,  Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton

I know that some of those who were so eager to impose their conclusions about her life on Monica Lewinsky or who were so eager to assign the status of a minor child to her would consider themselves to be "third wave feminists" among whom the "sex pos" stand is practically a requirement.   Some of those would consider themselves supporters of workers rights to safe working conditions and, very vociferously, object to any kind of sexual coercion in the work place.  Yet when it comes to commercial sex all of those earnest assertions of protection and dignity go out the window.   There is something definitely out of whack.

In that there is a mix of wishing to appear to be modern and up to date and, especially, to get the thrill of shocking conventional morality.  Though that conventional morality hasn't existed for several decades except in old movies and novels.   Which only proves that what is called a broad mind isn't necessarily a rational or even particularly intelligent mind.

Broad mindedness, as seen in this "sex pos" pose, is adopted to cover superficial or lazy thinking, or, as for so many of the fans of irresponsible sex, callous indifference.   So many of those pushing the latest non-thinking on prostitution-pornography belong to an economic class where they will likely never meet someone who is compelled into sex out of economic necessity or as a form of enslavement.  Heavens knows, it's not something they ever expect their own children with fall into.  It's other people and other peoples' children on whose behalf they are practicing their brand of broad mindedness that just happens to be supportive of an industry that ends up oppressing and destroying so many of them.   If porn-prostitution were the wonderful thing they pretend to believe, they'd encourage it as a career path for their own children and the children of their friends in their own class.  If Monica Lewinsky had been engaging in either, their attitude to her would be as a fallen member of their class, not the victim she has not claimed to be. 

When it is someone whose body is rented for sex, often people without any of the economic, educational, family and social advantages Monica Lewinsky enjoyed, it's as if all of the issues imagined to have made their patronizing expropriation of Monica Lewinsky's life disappear.  And a lot of the people who are coerced or forced into porn-prostitution are younger than Monica Lewinsky.  As I have said, when you look at porn-themed Tumblr blogs,  it is obvious that many of the "models assumed to be 18 or older" are far younger than that, many times it's quite obvious that they look well younger than the age of consent in any American state, their youth and inexperience is advertised as why the men who consume porn should look at that porn site instead of another one.

Any social or political movement that so basically turns on the very bases of it existence won't last in that unstable form.   Its only future is one in which it retains only the label and not the contents of what that movement is.  I think that the fact that gay rights has had its greatest and rather surprising success in demanding a right to marriage, a source of dignity associated with monogamous fidelity is significant.   As Barney Frank once pointed out, the most successful parts of the gay rights movement were asking for the right to be employed, to serve the country in the military and to form families with the stability and responsibilities that come with legal marriage.    While I would question the second one as an entirely positive thing, given the class that gets to fight wars called by the oligarchic elites who decide that,  the point is that what was considered to be quite conventional morality represents the most successful aspect of gay liberation.   The collective experience of gay men of my generation shows that the kind of sexual "liberation" being pushed by "sex pos" leads to anything but liberation.   Reality is real and reality proves that irresponsible and promiscuous sex leads to death, dependence on drug regimens with pretty drastic side-effects and other oppressive consequences.   Responsible adults don't encourage things that lead to that.