When More is Less

Having spent several nights indulging in my ultimate weakness--watching MTV--I've been thinking about sex (unavoidable in just about every video shown on TV), especially in regards to the differences between Holland and the States. It has been shown that in countries like The Netherlands, where many families talk openly with children about sex/sexuality, there is greater cultural openness and improved sexual health among young people.

I would argue that America, despite its obsession with "booty," has fallen into a “sexual recession.” Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, sex was an incredible driving force in America, an emerging axis around which new social and political movements were organized. When AIDS emerged in the early 1980s alongside Reagan’s Christian morality platform, the heady insouciance of previous decades was lost, throwing America into the sexual Dark Ages.

Under Reagan, America experienced an organized backlash against sexual freedom—witness the Meese Commission’s tactics to investigate pornography. The Commission, a virtual who’s who of the Religious Right, blamed porn for everything from child molestation to drug culture, but its findings were largely rejected.

Today, as America drifts steadily into a Republican era of hypocritical sexual conservatism, it’s always good to remind the folks at home exactly who they voted for. There’s former Oregon Sen. Packwood, who set the records for Congressional sexual harassment, John Ashcroft, who touts less government save when it comes to “moral” issues such as abortion and homosexuality and, of course, Bush, who cut off funding to international family-planning organizations his first day in office. Bush renamed Roe vs Wade’s January 22 anniversary “National Sanctity of Human Life Day.” This was a huge insult to feminism.

The issue of sexual freedom is developing along staunchly partisan lines. According to a survey conducted by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, states unsupportive of sexual health/rights are those that largely voted for Bush. While Republicans are focusing most of their energy on the war effort and passing laws to benefit the wealthy, future elections will probably be waged on issues of sexual freedom.

Also to consider: sexual images have supplanted the “getting some” credo of previous decades. By the time the average American teen graduates from high school, s/he will have spent 15,000 hours watching television, (compared with 12,000 hours spent in the classroom,) and viewed nearly 14,000 sexual references per year, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education. Are we getting less even though we’re watching more?