Fetish, Fantasy, And Permanent Adolescence - The Curse Of American Sexual Puritanism

In most countries, anything goes.  The Ancient Greeks and Romans had concubines, boys, girls, strumpets, and consorts and thought nothing of 'sexuality'.  Sex was a given but one without definition, categorization, approval, or censure. It just was. 

 

Progressive Americans think that they have finally opened up the world to a truly diverse sexuality.  The fluid gender spectrum contains innumerable optional points for all to choose.  Heterosexuality is a thing of the past, a Luddite imposition on the human spirit, a deviation in the name of normality, a heavy weight for individuals struggling to find their true sexual identity. 

Yet there is no more prudish, censorious, and sexually repressed society than America's, a harshly Puritan reincarnation of Salem, the witch trials, and the condemnation of all intercourse save that between saved Christians. 

Really? How can that be when the country is awash in provocative, teasing, prurient images taken from every angle. The pouting, seductively posed model tempting men to buy, the saturation of social media with provocative, inviting videos of beautiful, available women, Hollywood actresses leaving nothing tot he imagination, a virtual sexual cavalcade. 

But a look beneath the surface exposes a strict, doctrinaire, punitive censorship.  The mainstream social media - Facebook, Instagram, etc. - have strict codes of sexual interest and behavior.  Anything smacking of the unacceptable - any sexual relationships other than those codified as correct - is quickly removed and the author banned.  Women want to be ogled, desired, wanted and dress according to age old traditions of sexual allure; but at the same time demand protection from male predation.  Sex is a negotiated commodity with the price set by women. 

Sexual innuendo, flattery, thinly veiled sexual intent are all off limits - micro-aggressions threatening women who want to be taken for themselves and not their sexual appeal.  Sexual foreplay has been reduced to a checklist.  May I...should I...could I...until the whole routine has become a matter of mail clerks filing letters.  A sexless, politically inspired, wet blanket. 

Men have been duped by this new protocol.  They look up at the ceiling of the elevator when a beautiful woman steps in, fearful of offending her with their sexual interest. Compliments on a woman's dress, coiffure, jewelry, or perfume are equally off limits.  Such attention can only be interpreted as male sexual aggression. 

Infidelity is the crime of the century in middle-class white America.  A man's sexual dalliances are but one more example of misogyny, disrespect, and the dishonoring of women.  They are to be legally protected, sexually adored, and yet free to roam. 

The progressive cult of identity has siloed men and women - gay, straight, trans, or something in between - and once a person has declared his sexuality, he becomes part of a protected species.  His sexuality is less important than his political identity.  Being gay is a political statement of diversity, equity, and inclusivity rather than a sexual preference. 

Children are educated to trust no man, for according to the progressive canon, all men are sexual predators, pedophiles, and sex abusers.  A censorious, watchful, meanness is the ethos, the meme, the zeitgeist.  Children observe fathers who walk on eggshells, anxious to please but worried about offense.  They hear teachers warn against strangers, thinly-veiled references to men at large.  They hear priests and preachers harp on about fidelity, trust, and sexual honor, thinly veiled familiar references to the evils of sex. 

Pornography - a common as the sunrise in all cultures (both Mogul miniatures and Japanese Edo woodcuts and paintings were highly erotic as were the Hindu sculptures at Khajuraho) - is considered an insult to women and therefore banned.  Social media are at the forefront of such censorship, and even respected, well-known art works get cut, removed and those who posted them get banned. 

At the same time, thanks to the harsh, Puritanical putsches of the feminist Left and the resultant public sexual propriety, pornography has gone underground - the bailiwick of the most depraved, frustrated, ugly sexual interest ever.

America is a prudish, Puritanical, permanently adolescent society bound and determined to stay the straight and narrow, honor women, dismiss men as single-minded rapists, and make sex into a political cause, a newsworthy event. 

Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, author of the Constitution, statesman, political leader, and genius has been cancelled by the Left because of his affair with a slave.  Of course plantation owners had sex with their slaves, a kind of well-understood droit du seigneur par for the course for men of power, authority, and influence; and to censure them is the worst kind of historical revisionism. 

 

The one social group that is exempted from Puritanical justice is black men.  The inner city, a zone of dysfunction, social disorder, and serial sexuality where single mothers and sexually libertine men are the rule, where anything goes, everything is sold, traded, and bartered, and nothing is off limits, is given a pass.  The 'street', the heart of black culture, is off limits, a no-entry zone.  Black people are a protected minority and even the harshest feminine censure does not apply there.  How men treat women - badly, consequentially, abusively - is ignored in the desire to keep the culture of the street intact. 

Martin Luther King, champion of black Americans and leader of the civil rights movement of the Sixties was a notorious Lothario, a man of insatiable sexual appetites, a serial adulterer and womanizer - all forgiven because of his iconic status and protected racial nature. 

Sex scandals do not exist in France - at least the old France before Islamization.  Former President Francois Mitterrand's wife, mistress, and illegitimate daughter wept at his grave.  Former President Nicholas Sarkozy installed his mistress in the Elysees Palace.  The cinq-a-sept, the familiar time for sexual rendezvous (after work and before wife, children, and dinner) is common.  Men and women have assignations regardless of the insignificant but seemingly persistent rules of proper social behavior. 

The only European President was John F Kennedy, a man who loved women, courted them, bedded them in the Presidential Suite and made no apologies for it. Every other president in recent memory either remained faithful to their wives or in the case of Bill Clinton resorted to smarmy trailer trash  or not-really sex in the Oval Office with an intern.  All the rest were - at least publicly - faithful, uxorious, and infinitely dutiful. 

 

The Abel Ferrara movie, Welcome to New York is a thinly-veiled story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, French politician in line for the Presidency.  He was a man of enormous sexual appetites, such that he was completely eclectic in his tastes.  High society women, chambermaids, prostitutes - all interested him.  He was open and unapologetic about his sexual nature, and when censorious politicians tried to accuse him of prostitution, citing a Parisian orgy with a hundred women, he said, 'How was I to know that they were prostitutes.  All women look the same with their clothes off'. 

He was never accused of serious wrongdoing - the Jeffrey Epstein kind - and the worst that could be said of him was his infidelity; but his wife - at least in the fictionalized version - was complicit.  She put up with anything to become the First Lady of France. 

So the open sexuality of yesteryear, the concubines, harems, cinq-a-septs, and days of executive privilege are gone, replaced by a snarky, basement sexuality and a neo-puritanical, censorious watchdog culture. 

Where is John Kennedy when we need him?