It is tempting to view the Saga of Bristol and Levi as political: the sacrifice of two young lives to the vice- During the campaign, the response to Bristol’s pregnancy was one of the McCain-Palin spin machine’s only successful maneuvers, from the pre-emptive announcement to the image makeover of the “fuckin’ redneck” father to the couple’s coming-out at the Republican Convention as smiling fiancés.

I’ve been peeved all month about the latest panic: “sexting.” More and more states are bringing child-porn charges against teenagers who take racy pictures of themselves and send them electronically to lovers or pals. Child pornography is a far more serious crime — in terms of penalties, anyway — than is having actual sex. Sentences run to years per image, and after prison the person must register as a sex offender, a kind of life sentence in itself.

You might call sexting a dunderheaded act — who knows where your immortalized nipples might end up — but also a victimless “crime.” Yet here is the amazing part: Child-porn law is based on the minor’s inability to consent to being photographed; the model is ipso facto a victim of the photographer. Sexting, in which the model is also the photographer, is a crime in which a person can be both perpetrator and victim at the same time.

U.S. sex law is like a black hole: Once reason falls in, it can never re-emerge.

Can all this get any stupider? Just as I was asking myself this question, a post arrived from sex therapist Marty Klein’s blog, Sexual Intelligence, confirming that it could:

Massachusetts state representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein (D-Revere) has introduced a bill making it a crime for anyone over 60 to pose nude or sexually for a film or photo. The person taking the photo — whether a lover, artist or commercial porn maker — would also face jail time.

Adding insult to injury, the proposal amends a bill designed to punish those who make child pornography. It treats fully functional adults who happen to be over 60 the same as children under 18; it explicitly takes away their right to consent to be photographed in a lascivious way.

What Klein doesn’t mention is that the bill precludes consent not only by “an elder” but also by “a person with a disability.” Massachusetts law defines an elder as someone over 60; a “disability” is “a permanent or long-term physical or mental impairment that prevents or restricts the individual’s ability to provide for his or her own care or protection.” The bill is an obvious violation of the First Amendment, says Florida Constitutional lawyer Marc Randazzo, who notes that among the consent-stripped could be his own mother, whom he describes as a 60-plus sexually active “knockout” with a lung condition. Representative Reinstein, by the way, is 38.

We can hope this idea languishes in committee — and, if not, is ridiculed to death. Yet, once impassioned, Reinstein does not rest. Her 2006 proposal to honor the Fluffernutter as the state sandwich failed; it is back on this session’s calendar. Now that senior advocacy groups have informed her “elder exploitation and pornography is on the rise,” she told the Boston Herald, the necessity of her new bill is a “no-brainer.” This is an indisputable fact.

It is axiomatic that anything you want to outlaw is widespread, on the rise or both. Once reported, the proliferation of said pernicious activity will be re-reported until it becomes “fact,” with or without substantiation. Like elder porn, sexting is alleged to be widespread and increasing. Among many others, CBS News recently told its audience that “roughly 20 percent of teens admit to participating in ‘sexting,’ according to a nationwide survey by the National Campaign to Support Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.” It called sexting “shockingly common.”

Is 20 percent shocking or common? Is the number even accurate? Journalist Debbie Nathan did what every reporter should: She checked the source. Turns out the datum was derived from a grand total of 653 survey respondents ages 13 to 19. These kids were among a randomly selected subgroup of a self-selected pool of 375,000 teens and young adults who have told a polling outfit called TRU that they’re willing to answer online surveys. Of the young people TRU sent questions regarding their electronic sex lives, 90 percent chose not to respond. But 653 teens were moved to disclose, and about one-fifth said they sent sexy self-portraits to lovers and friends.

Bill Albert, the Campaign’s chief program officer, defends the survey’s credibility but stresses that it “represents just one point in time. For all we know, the practice could be decreasing.” Yet sexting prosecutions are proliferating as fast as sexting is rumored to be. And by the time Reinstein’s bill reappears, granny porn will also be recognized as a serious public safety threat, warranting strong laws to combat it. Mark my word.

It is easy to make fun of the Keystone Komstocks who write and enforce vice laws. Yet this recent pair of virtue-rescue missions deserves serious attention because the same misguided principle lurks behind both efforts.

That is, anyone who displays her body in a sexual way cannot possibly be doing so on her own volition. Somebody somewhere must be coercing her to remove her clothes, dance around the pole or aim the camera and press “send.” That the disrober-aimer-sender is usually female only compounds the suspicion that she is not in possession of her own mind and body.

Nearly three decades ago, pro-sex feminists defeated two municipal ordinances enshrining the idea that pornography is violence against women. Adults generally have refused to be protected from self-exhibition for fun or profit. Voyeurism is also a popular entertainment: Commercial pornography, one of the enduring legacies of the sexual-liberation movement, is flourishing. Sexting, you might say, is a 21st-century offspring of both these phenomena. For better or worse, pornographic tropes, including the defining elements of exhibitionism and voyeurism, are part of the lingua franca of teen sexual self-expression. And the digital revolution has turned every girl, boy, woman, man or transperson into a potential pornographer.

These truths are evidently disturbing to America’s upholders of decency. Turning their attentions from adults to children, they’ve vastly expanded the universe of minors in need of supervision. Everywhere, the sexual age of consent has risen from 13 or 14 to 16 or 18. Clipped at the bottom, the age of sexual majority might now be shorn at the top — at 60 — and around the edges, where bodies and minds have differing abilities.

Older and disabled people have long been infantilized, and sexual neutering is part of it. They (or should I say we; I’m 56) are considered cute, weak and dim — also attributes of innocence, which is to say ignorance and incompetence. This condescension shows itself in various forms of discrimination, which has led to the designation of the disabled and people over 40 as “protected classes” — legal categories of people, such as racial or religious minorities, who may suffer discrimination based solely on who they are.

But legal protection often is distorted into legal protectionism. As in anti-sexting and elder-porn laws, that usually means protecting people from themselves.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine a 16-year-old taking a semi-nude picture of herself and sending it to her 17-year-old boyfriend would be prosecuted under child-pornography laws,” Bill Albert told me. Neither, apparently, did Vermont’s legislators. They are now scrambling to carve out an exception to state child-porn laws that decriminalizes the consensual exchange of graphic images between people 13 to 18 years old.

Although skeptics are already worrying that “predators” will get in on the sexting game, I predict the amendment will pass. Vermont has been more lenient to juveniles than have other states. But at the same time, we can expect to see more sexual behaviors criminalized — and more classes of people protected from what might be their own desires. This year, in clauses regarding sex-crimes victims, the phrase “or a person with a mental illness or disability” has been inserted after “a child 13 years of age or under.” That could be a good thing, guarding people who really need it, and Vermont’s legal definition of mental disability is far narrower than Massachusetts’. But who will define the consent of the disabled? And what will we be shielded from next? Baby-boomer porn?

And then, what will the next legal do-over look like, as the state attempts to scrub its politically motivated, unnecessary and harmful sex-crimes laws of their unintended consequences?

This column originally ran in Seven Days.

And lotsa speakers, including me.

You can hear my talk,  given Saturday March 14, here.  It was recorded by Indybay.org, a “radical news site where every reader can also be a reporter.”

Scroll down to Judith Levine (I’m the one in the green leather jacket) and you can either download or listen to the audiotape.

In the spirit of a private-propertyless world, feel free to distribute it as you please.

A couple of weeks ago, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, prosecutors charged six teenagers with creating, distributing, and possessing child pornography. The three girls, ages 14 and 15, took nude or seminude pictures of themselves and e-mailed them to friends, including three boys, ages 16 and 17, who are among the defendants. Police Captain George Seranko described the obscenity of the images: They “weren’t just breasts,” he declared. “They showed female anatomy!”

Greensburg’s crime-stoppers aren’t the only ones looking out for the cybersafety of America’s youth. In Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah (at last count) minors have been arrested for “sexting,” or sending or posting soft-core photo or video self-portraits. Of 1,280 teens and young adults surveyed recently by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, one in five said they engaged in the practice — girls only slightly more than boys.

Seranko and other authorities argue that such pictures may find their way to the Internet and from there to pedophiles and other exploiters. “It’s very dangerous,” he opined.

How dangerous is it? Not very, suggests a major study released this month by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet Studies. “Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies,” the result of a yearlong investigation by a wide range of experts, concludes that “the risks minors face online are in most cases not significantly different from those they face offline, and as they get older, minors themselves contribute to some of the problems.” Almost all youth who end up having sex with adults they meet online seek such assignations themselves, fully aware that the partner is older. Similarly, minors who encounter pornography online go looking for it; they tend to be older teenage boys.

But sex and predatory adults are not the biggest dangers kids face as they travel the Net. Garden-variety kid-on-kid meanness, enhanced by technology, is. “Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline,” the report found.

Just as almost all physical and sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone a child knows intimately — the adult who eats dinner or goes to church with her — victims of cyber-bullying usually know their tormenters: other students who might sit beside them in homeroom or chemistry. Social-networking sites may be the places where kids are likely to hurt each other these days, but those sites, like the bullying, “reinforce pre-existing social relations,” according to the report.

Similarly, young people who get in sexual or social trouble online tend to be those who are already at risk offline — doing poorly in school, neglected or abused at home, and/or economically impoverished. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a child from a family whose annual income is less than $15,000 is 22 times more likely to suffer sexual abuse than a child whose parents earn more than $30,000.

Other new research implies that online sexual communication, no matter how much there is, isn’t translating into corporeal sex, with either adults or peers. Contrary to popular media depiction of girls and boys going wilder and wilder, La Salle University sociologist and criminal-justice professor Kathleen A. Bogle has found that American teens are more conservative than their elders were at their age. Teen virginity is up and the number of sexual partners is down, she discovered. Only the rate of births to teenage girls has risen in the last few years—a result of declining contraceptive use. This may have something to do with abstinence-only education, which leaves kids reluctant or incompetent when it comes to birth control. Still, the rate of teen births compared to pregnancies always tracks the rate among adult women, and it’s doing that now, too.

Like the kids finding adult sex partners in chat rooms, those who fail to protect themselves from pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases and have their babies young tend to be otherwise at risk emotionally or socially. In other words, kids who are having a rough time in life are having a rough time in virtual life as well. Sexual or emotional harm precedes risky or harmful on- and offline behavior, rather than the other way around.

Enter the law — and the injuries of otherwise harmless teenage sexual shenanigans begin. The effects of the ever-stricter sex-crimes laws, which punish ever-younger offenders, are tragic for juveniles. A child pornography conviction — which could come from sending a racy photo of yourself or receiving said photo from a girlfriend or boyfriend — carries far heavier penalties than most hands-on sexual offenses. Even if a juvenile sees no lock-up time, he or she will be forced to register as a sex offender for 10 years or more. The federal Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2007 requires that sex offenders as young as 14 register.

As documented in such reports as Human Rights Watch’s “No Easy Answers: Sex Offender Laws in the U.S.” and “Registering Harm: How Sex Offense Registries Fail Youth and Communities” from the Justice Policy Institute, conviction and punishment for a sex crime (a term that includes nonviolent offenses such as consensual teen sex, flashing, and patronizing a prostitute) effectively squashes a minor’s chances of getting a college scholarship, serving in the military, securing a good job, finding decent housing, and, in many cases, moving forward with hope or happiness.

The sexual dangers to youth, online or off, may be less than we think. Yet adults routinely conflate friendly sex play with hurtful online behavior. “Teaching Teenagers About Harassment,” recent piece in The New York Times, swings between descriptions of consensual photo-swapping and incessant, aggressive texting and Facebook or MySpace rumor-and insult-mongering as if these were similarly motivated — and equally harmful. It quotes the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund, which calls sending nude photos “whether it is done under pressure or not” an element of “digital dating violence.”

Sober scientific data do nothing to calm such anxieties. Reams of comments flowed into The New York Times when it reported Dr. Bogle’s findings. “The way TV and MUSIC is promoting sex and explicit content daily and almost on every network,” read one typical post, from the aptly named MsKnowledge, “I would have to say this article is completely naive. The streets are talking and there [sic] saying teens and young adults are becoming far more involved in more adult and sexual activities than most ADULTS. Scientific data is a JOKE … pay attention to reality and the REAL world will tell you otherwise.”

A better-educated interlocutor, NPR’s “On the Media” host Brooke Gladstone, defaulted to the same assumption in an interview with one of the Harvard Internet task force members, Family Online Safety Institute CEO Stephen Balkam. What lessons could be drawn from the study’s findings? Gladstone asked. “What can be and what should be done to protect kids?”

“There’s no silver bullet that’s going to solve this issue,” Balkam replied. But “far more cooperation has got to happen between law enforcement, industry, the academic community, and we need to understand far better the psychological issues that are at play here.”

It’s unclear from this exchange what Gladstone believes kids need to be protected from or what issue Balkam is solving. But neither of them came to the logical conclusion of the Harvard study: that we should back off, moderate our fears, and stop thinking of youthful sexual expression as a criminal matter. Still, Balkam wants to call in the cops.

Maybe all that bullying is a mirror of the way adults treat young people minding their own sexual business. Maybe the “issue” is not sex but adults’ response to it: the harm we do trying to protect teenagers from themselves.

This piece ran on Feb. 2 in The American Prospect. Tags: child protection, sexuality
]]> http://www.judithlevine.com/2009/02/teens-sexting-and-the-law/feed/ 6 http://www.judithlevine.com/2009/01/whats-up-for-o-nine/ http://www.judithlevine.com/2009/01/whats-up-for-o-nine/#comments Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:08:05 +0000 Judith http://judithlevine.com/?p=286 If I can't keep resolutions, I can make predictions . . .]]>

It ain’t all pretty, but 2009 looks a lot better than anything this millennium has witnessed so far. As in all things psychological and political, the signs point every which way. So here are my predictions — some grim, some gleeful, some substantiated and some woven of the holey cloth of dreams. Here’s to a really new New Year.

Class struggle, welcome back
“JUMP, you fuckers!” This placard, carried at a September rally protesting the financial industry bailout, may be too explicit for some of you random-acts-of-kindness practitioners. But its underlying sentiment is probably a healthy one.

Admit it. Unless you’re a hedge-fund investor laying off your gardeners or listing your yacht on Craigs-list, your heart is not flooded with compassion for the Masters of the Universe whose universe has suddenly deflated. You are not moved to tears by the suicide of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the financier ruined by Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The Villehuchets were so rich they lent money to Louis XIV; for such crimes many of them ended up on the wrong edge of the guillotine blade. Yet Rene-Thierry believed that the rich would forever get richer, and never pay.

Sisters and brothers, you are feeling a scintilla of schadenfreude, that slightly guilty pleasure in the misfortune of those who justly deserve it. Savor the emotion. The baby bankers throwing back $20 martinis in SoHo, the private-plane weekend commuters cluttering up Vermont’s woods with their 40,000-square-foot ski chalets, complaining all the while about their property taxes — these people’s needs and values have afflicted the rest of us long enough. Then crank your spite up to anger, a necessary ingredient of class struggle.

Not to worry, post-partisans. The U.S. isn’t on the verge of condemning Bill and Melinda Gates to the fate of the anciens Villehuchets. But when John McCain failed to convince voters that ending the Bush tax cuts would lead directly to Venezuelan-style communism, we may have witnessed Americans waking up to which side they are on. (Note to Joe the Plumber: I didn’t know Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, but I know you’re no Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet).

You’re a Wall Street investor? Me, too. Don’t let that confuse your loyalties. Your retirement fund is probably hovering in the high four figures. Sign a card, comrade. This year, we eat the rich.

Muddied green
If the rich, having faces, are not on your list of comestibles, you are in 2009’s avant-garde. Our food co-op is selling “artisan tofu.” Watch for the Gourmet Magazine feature on root vegetables.

But if designer rutabaga is the rage, its purveyors may be out of luck. Shoppers tell pollsters they are cutting back on organic veggies because of high prices. Magazine editors are deep-sixing their green issues. Hybrid-car sales are sluggish, while lower gas prices are boosting purchases of SUVs. Red (as in the deficit column) is shaping up to be the new green.

The lesson here is not that we should all build saunas, sit back and enjoy the Earth’s rising temperatures. It’s just that we can’t rely on consumer desire to save the oceans from boiling. Want gas-guzzlers off the road? Implement emissions standards that prohibit their manufacture. With climate-change experts and activists heading Obama’s new White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that just might happen.

The White House heats up . . .
It won’t satisfy aficionados of extramarital fellatio and cigar play, but when Michelle puts on that red dress, Mama, somebody’s going dancin’ tonight. The Obamas bring some much-needed mojo back to a household that has gone frumpy and depressed. And for America’s growing girls and boys, the First Woman is living proof that smart, strong and serious can be sassy and sexy, too. Abstinence only, RIP?

. . . and sells out
So Rick Warren, the “purpose-driven,” anti-gay pastor of California’s Saddleback megachurch, has been chosen to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Is this trip to the dark side our new leader’s idea of crossing the cultural aisle? Or is it truly his first political faux pas? We’ll know after January 20, when he either pulls his own don’t-ask-don’t-tell or puts his money where his mouth isn’t and appoints some pro-equality judges. The question is how long queers will lie still and be sacrificial lambs to excessive ecumenicalism — and what we will all do if Obama doesn’t come to his senses.

Racism redux
This Christmas, Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman sent committee members a little gift: a CD featuring “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin of “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” In it, Shanklin regales listeners with an impression of Al Sharpton and ridicules not only Obama but also Snoop Dogg and Louis Farrakhan. Another highlight of the CD: “The Star Spanglish Banner,” an anti-immigration tune that begins, “Jose can you see . . .” And you thought the GOP had loaded neo-fascism, along with its cheerleader Sarah Palin, on a plane back to the permafrost. Dream on. Politico.com makes a good case that the flap over the CD could help, rather than hurt, Saltsman’s chances.

The new neo-atheism
Pastor Rick is giving that invocation. We still have not one but two prayers at the inauguration, not to mention one at the start of every Congressional day. The Washington National Cathedral, though it receives no government funding, is the congressionally designated “national house of prayer.” Conservative Christianity still exerts a deep influence on the politics of this purportedly secular nation. (Read Jeff Sharlet’s brilliant book The Family and shudder to learn how deep it is.) Still, there are signs that God may be taking a back pew in Washington. Obama has promised to nix the global gag rule, which prohibits reproductive-health providers in U.S.-aid-receiving countries from mentioning abortion to their clients. I’ve lost track of the number of times the word science has been spoken around Capitol Hill lately, uncoupled from its longtime companion, creation.

Prozac nation
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-V, won’t be out until 2012. But this year the controversy will keep heating up over whether the bible of psychological disorders (and guidebook for insurance-claim arbiters) should include Apathy Disorder, Caffeine Withdrawal Disorder, Internet Addiction and a host of other dubious diagnoses. These days, new psychological illnesses are almost invariably “discovered” by pharmaceutical companies that just happen to have devised drugs to treat them. The plot thickens when you learn (as the Center for Science in the Public Interest reported last May) that more than half of the new members of the DSM-V writing group have ties to Big Pharma. As the manual gets fatter, and more former human discomforts are enshrined as disorders, there will be fewer of us who are not certifiable — that is, certifiable consumers of psychotropic drugs.

Revenge of the nerds
First, the improbable happened: Republican pundits defected when McCain chose a dimwit as his running mate. Then the unimaginable: A candidate was elected not despite but because of his gift for uttering elegant sentences describing subtle and informed thoughts. Then that glimmer of possibility became reality in a Cabinet composed almost entirely of class valedictorians. Could the intellectual be making a comeback? Book sales are down, it is true, but publishers may be shedding mostly those customers who buy books (especially books by the likes of Tina Fey and Jamie Lee Curtis) and don’t actually read them. Call it the audacity of hope, but I’m putting my money on a brand-new product line that will pull the publishing industry out of the ditch: books for readers, written by authors.

Mission accomplished
Reports from Iraq tell us the courts are travesties of justice and the prisons are torture chambers; freedom of speech and the press are nonexistent (the journalist who threw his shoe at Bush was allegedly beaten brutally and faces seven years in prison); and women are in purdah. In other words, the U.S. “liberation” of Iraq has produced . . . Dick Cheney’s “democracy.” Next year in Afghanistan!

This piece appeared originally in Seven Days.

For a girl who grew up in a communist family, this month’s events should be cause for fireworks. As Marx predicted, the self-sown seeds of capitalism’s own destruction are spreading tendrils under the foundations of Wall Street, opening fissures in the walls of marble. Lenin told his comrades the profit-insatiable capitalist would eventually sell the people the rope to hang him with. Now he’s sold us the rope — and we’ve hanged ourselves. But the salesman, too, is gazing nervously at the gallows.

It’s an infidel’s Rapture, the End Times as foretold by the Prophets Karl and Vladimir.

So why do I feel so blah?

Maybe it’s because the revolution is not even near. “The end of U.S. capitalism? I really doubt it,” U. Mass economist Gerald Friedman told Al Jazeera last week, echoing colleagues across the political spectrum. “A capitalist system — or any social system — can only be brought down by an opposing system supported by a rising economic class. There is no such contender on the horizon right now to challenge capitalism. So we’ll continue to muddle along.”

Maybe it’s because the muddling is certain to be painful. “I don’t know about you, but I planned to retire someday,” a friend told me. I thought of the IRA statements lying unopened on my desk.

But maybe, just maybe, it’s because this enemy of the plutocratic state is grieving for more than my evaporating savings. And, in spite of the recent burst of populist fury against the tycoons and deregulators, I suspect America is feeling similar.

The story of our latest infatuation with Wall Street began with the economic policies and culture of Reaganism. Businesses started replacing guaranteed pensions with individual market-dependent retirement accounts. The government deregulated everything (the process was accelerated, and pretty much finished, by the Clinton administration). Politicians told us government protections like Medicare and Social Security were hanging off a cliff. The media announced the S&P numbers at the end of every five-minute news brief, while cities were festooned with LED tickertapes, constantly reminding us of our fortunes. The schools started teaching personal finance in the third grade.

Before you knew it, half of American households held stocks. Ordinary people were identifying with the high rollers, thinking of Wall Street as Main Street. The other afternoon, I overheard two grizzled guys — they appeared to be just this side of homeless — discussing investment strategies. “Even money markets aren’t safe anymore,” said one. The other nodded sagely.

But our stake in Wall Street’s well-being is not just economic. It is emotional: a kind of codependent love. The markets are our abusive lover.

We love the markets because, increasingly, we depend on them for comfort and security. We also love them because they promise romance: more and more, happily ever after.

Wall Street needs our confidence; the markets are nothing if not a vast confidence game. But, of course, it also requires risk. So, like that abusive lover, the markets keep us off balance. They parcel out their goodies in unpredictable and inscrutable ways, then take them back with equal caprice. This leaves us hungry — and unsatisfied desire always feels like love.

When Wall Street screws up, like an abuser it feigns contrition, mewling and begging. Even while it asks our indulgence, it blames us for its problems and threatens us with abandonment. Market capitalism is the author of our pain, but we are too scared to disbelieve its threats — or refuse its demands.

Master deregulator John McCain has been on a tear against Wall Street’s greed, as if this were an aberration. But economic systems, like people, have personalities, and capitalism is a narcissist. Selfishness is not a dysfunction; it is the central function of a system designed to alchemize individual self-interest into a common good. But a narcissist cannot love, so a folie à deux — or, in this case, à tous — develops. Because the markets’ parsimonious and conditional love leaves us needy, we grasp and hoard, too. Greed is capitalism’s antidote to anxiety, its answer to feelings of powerlessness.

Who among us is not greedy? Who does not buy two for one, even when we know the pennies off that extra pair of sneakers are subtracted from the paycheck of the factory worker? Who, when renting or selling a home, does not ask for “what the market will bear,” even when that price is helping to gentrify the neighborhood and displace the very people who made it a good place to live?

We feel we can’t help it. Capitalism, the controlling spouse, has indoctrinated us with a version of ourselves, and any divergence from that image creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. We doubt ourselves. If we reject the get-mine ethic — choose the greener, politically cleaner (and thus more expensive) product, list the house at less than top dollar — we may get a spiritual buzz, the sense that we are strengthening the community or saving a Chinese child from the factory. But what is this vague feeling compared with the hard evidence of figures ticking up in the dividend column? Are we really saving a child — or depriving a family of needed wages? Did we actually help the neighborhood — or just one lucky new homeowner? Are we ethical actors in an imperfect world — or bleeding-heart schmucks?

When complicity creates self-loathing and resistance self-doubt, we can always resort to a tried-and-true survival mechanism: self-delusion.

How many of us read the mutual fund prospectus to see what corporations our dollars are supporting? How many buy into a socially responsible mutual fund and then pretend the problem is solved?

Me, for one. One day, I casually opened the pamphlet of my fund’s investments. Immediately, I discovered several pharmaceutical companies on the list. All were deemed benign, even exemplary, under the fund’s labor, community and environmental criteria. But what about their routine tactic of inventing or exaggerating medical disorders to get people to buy the snake oil to treat them — a practice I despise? The fund’s vetters can hardly be expected to exclude every company that manipulates or lies to consumers; there would be virtually none left to invest in. Yet I realized at that moment that the fine tooth of my political sensitivities would find almost no corporation free of moral nits.

So what did I do?

I tossed the prospectus in the recycling bin.

Wild swings of elation and depression, confidence and doubt, realism and denial. And after it’s all over — when the other has walked out with your home and your life savings and your self-confidence — you declare that you never trusted the bastard in the first place.

Sounds like love, doesn’t it?

******

A crisis, of love or money or both, elicits many emotions. One is panic, which leads to rash decisions; another is anger; a third, depression. Congress, with its $700 billion no-guarantee-of-working bailout, has acted on the first. I’m feeling the second, but sinking into the third. Paralysis is an effective defense against pain.

If Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine is right, however, these emotions are part of the plan — and must be resisted. Crisis, Klein argues, provides the perfect environment for anti-democratic and wealthy elites to push through politically repressive and economically unjust policies (the Patriot Act; the seizure of peasants’ land to build hotels after the 2004 tsunami) that citizens would fight in calmer times. Massive instability is so propitious to such radical changes that the “reformers” and their beneficiaries are not beyond creating it to move things along. For instance, Klein quotes neoliberal economist John Williamson asking an audience of top-level policymakers in 1993 to consider “deliberately provoking a crisis so as to remove the political logjam to reform.”

Klein predicts that the finance industry bailout, which was written and shoved through by the bank lobbies, is only the first step. Should McCain be elected, she says, his administration will use the Treasury’s overextension to justify cutting a host of existing social programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, housing subsidies — and putting the kibosh on any new ones, just as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have forced debtor nations to do worldwide.

It’s a sign of the success of this strategy that an American presidential candidate— no, both candidates — are running on the backlash, calling for more regulation.

The romance of capitalism may be over, but we’re still in bed with Wall Street. And for the moment we’ve got no place else to sleep. Still, this is no time to be dozing off the blahs. If the bankers’ crisis-response team has had its blueprint for action at the ready for a decade, progressives should not get huffy about right-wing conspiracies. Instead, we need — indeed, have needed, for about 40 years — our own conspiracy, our own plans, and fast.

Depressives, awake. Drink a Red Bull, or five or six. Be alert but not rash, calm but not docile, skeptical but not cynical, hopeful but not naïve. Fix the marriage; stay together for the sake of the kids.

But start depending on our friends. Practice solidarity. Invest in each other.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

So I hereby absolve two objects of recent public sexual shaming: Gregory Viens, arrested in Moretown for sneaking into his boss’ barn to shtup the cows; and Idaho Senator Larry Craig, nabbed playing footsie with an undercover cop in a Minneapolis airport men’s room. In the first case, according to the Valley News, the local vets certified that “no harm came to the cows.” In the second, harm would have come to no one. Defense-of-Marriage Craig’s taste for the urine-scented assignation warrants no self-loathing, congressional investigation or arrest.

Still, the man isn’t off the hook. Of what should he feel ashamed?

The easiest way to describe Craig’s wrongdoing is hypocrisy, a word increasingly apt for the entire GOP. Indeed, as the deviant predilections and sex-crime convictions of a growing list of elected officials come to light (for a comprehensive catalogue, see armchairsubversive.com), the right wing of the party is beginning to look like the chateau in Pier Pasolini’s film Salò, where the upper echelon of Italy’s fascist officers enacts upon a group of youths the sexual tortures described in de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. It’s almost axiomatic that the most aggressive public moralizers are the perviest practitioners in private.

But the workings of shame make the discrepancy between Craig’s public “family values” stance and his semi-public “wide stance” more complicated than hypocrisy. Psychologist Elliot Aronson, whom I mentioned last month, notes that a person suffering cognitive dissonance labors internally to erase contradictions between his word and his deed, or between the way he sees himself and the ways others see him. As Aronson told Susie Bright in her always on-target blog, “Everyone can spot a hypocrite except the hypocrite himself.”

Self-justification isn’t just internal. The sociologist Laud Humphreys, in a much admired 1970 study of homosexual public sex titled “Tearoom Trade,” found that more than half of his men’s-room cruisers were married and living with their wives; only 14 percent considered themselves gay. To appear — and feel — certifiably straight, these self-described heteros commonly adopted fiercely conservative public personae. Humphreys called the posture a “breastplate of righteousness.”

In other words, when the righteous Larry Craig stands at a podium beside the wife and kids and proclaims, “I’m not gay,” he isn’t exactly lying. For one thing, Mr. and Mrs. Craig may regularly enjoy marital congress out there in Potatoland. But even if they don’t, if Larry doesn’t consider himself gay, who are we — especially those of us clamoring for a cultural and legal space between genders and sexual “orientations” — to call him gay? And if he honestly believes he isn’t gay, can we even call him a hypocrite?

The one label the senator has undeniably earned is bigot — even if his actions stem from self-hatred. For his long and valiant crusade to encode his homophobia as the law of the land, he should be truly ashamed.

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At first, Craig’s humiliation seemed to have inspired humility. In his resignation speech, he confessed — five times — that he was “humbled” by the support of his family, his friends, his constituents and numerous Idaho party apparatchiks (congressional Republicans went notably unmentioned). Did he feel he didn’t deserve it? And why? Hard to say; he was vague. For a moment, I fantasized the senator, brought low by his own misguided legislative philosophy, repenting, being born again in true brotherly love and tolerance, and making amends to all those who have been similarly persecuted.

Then I snapped awake, probably to the voice of Michele Norris on “All Things Considered” reporting that Craig had already decided to fight to reverse his guilty plea, in hopes of retaining, if not his Senate seat, then a shred of his reputation. In the meantime, Senate Republicans will have to employ an ethics investigation as suspects use their jackets in a perp walk, to cover their own sullied heads.

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Many political commentators have suggested that laws such as the Defense of Marriage Act “drive” gays and lesbians to desperate acts in public places because they can’t do it legally — say, after putting the kids to bed and watching a rerun of “Law and Order.” I repeat: Nobody should be arrested for the victimless crime of consensual sex. But some of us wonder sadly what will happen to eros when there is no more shame, which by definition always has its public side: It is a set of socially enforced and personally internalized rules of conduct. Consciously or not, Larry Craig may be wondering the same thing.

Shame can kill libido. It can also be a powerful aphrodisiac. I suspect that many gay men of the generations that came of age before Stonewall forged deep erotic associations between getting off and the possibility of getting caught. Younger gays, growing up in somewhat friendlier times, may not relish rough or risky public sex as much as their older brothers did. But the fact remains: For a hit of forbidden sex, plenty of people will drive themselves to the docks, the dunes or the alley. Or take a plane to the airport rest room. Repressive laws keep the thrill of risk alive by keeping the danger of apprehension real. Politically and erotically, a guy like Craig gets to have his cock and eat it, too.

In the end, Craig’s wrongdoing isn’t a matter of saying one thing in public and doing another in private — and not just because what he did, or was about to do, happened in public. As both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage or gay service in the military know, sex laws are not just about “privacy” rights. Sexuality is a social fact, and expressions of desire and identity — from wearing a dress and a beard to smooching under a streetlight — are public, political acts.

The Religious Right has scoured the public space of sexual speech and images, as well as sexual acts. It counts on the threat of sexual stigma to silence potential objectors. Then, once in a while, a guy bent on scouring, like Larry Craig, gets scoured. It’s a shame he can’t feel ashamed of the former, not the latter.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

If I were voting, I’d vote for H. 275. But I’d do so with a heavy heart.

It’s the same feeling I had in 1993, watching a videotape of 3000 same-sex couples celebrating their symbolic weddings at the gay-rights march in Washington, D.C. To me, those wedding bells were tolling the death of a radical movement.

At the march of 1987, the Reverend Troy Perry, of the Metropolitan Community Churches, had joined several thousand pairs as well — and I wasn’t so thrilled then, either. I much preferred the spirit of ’72, when the National Coalition of Gay Organiza-tions demanded the “extension of legal benefits to all persons who cohabit regardless of sex or numbers.” By ’87, as the nation slid rightward, gay organizers were already hewing their vision to the Christian-American model: Noah’s Ark. Now the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation was demanding that “homosexual couples” (emphasis mine) get “the same privileges and benefits as heterosexuals who commit themselves to similar relationships.”

Beyond that, their demands were far from moderate: health care for all, “without regard to ability to pay” and funded out of the federal military budget; reproductive freedom, including free abortion; “an end to racism in this country and apartheid in South Africa.” In no document I could find was there mention of the “right” to put on a uniform to kill and be killed for your country. The word marriage was equally scarce.

On New Year’s Eve 2000, I toasted Vermont’s new civil union law with some lesbian friends. But our elation was mixed with disappointment. “Is this why I’ve been a feminist for 30 years?” Nancy asked. “So I can join the military and marry my girlfriend?”

Strictly speaking, Nancy couldn’t marry her girlfriend — but that’s not why she was bummed. Rather, I think she was saying she wanted to be recognized, not normalized. And she understood that normalcy is always the subtext — and the prize — of marriage.

At the hearings leading up to the passage of the law, I’d been struck listening to witness after witness as they trotted out the bona fides of their normalcy. “Everyone wants to know what Christopher and I do in the bedroom,” one man told the judiciary committee. “I’ll tell you what we do. We sleep.” Have no fear, straight people! Let us marry and we perverts will stop having sex — just like you!

Today the normalcy of people whose movement once proudly called them queer is a standard argument for same-sex marriage — and for that movement, marriage is the gold standard. “Flanked by her life partner, Susan, and their teenage daughter, Caledonia County resident Ann Parker described the ordinariness of her family’s life,” read the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force’s February 7 press release announcing H. 275, which is not slated to come to the floor this year. “We hurry out to basketball games on work nights to watch her cheer,” says Ann. “We struggle to save to pay our taxes, we take turns with our neighbors pulling each other out of the ditches in the winter.”

She concludes: “All we want is the same opportunity as our heterosexual neighbors to get a marriage license from our town clerk.”

If all gay-marriage advocates wanted were equal rights, they might accept what many legislatures and even several presidential candidates now openly support: all the privileges and obligations of marriage, without the name. But that’s not all they want. “Being married means something powerful to us — something that no other legal status can capture,” Ann says. That desire is at the heart of the marriage movement. The Freedom to Marry Task Force in 2000 pronounced civil unions a “bitter compromise” — and not just because the law would not affect Social Security or federal taxes. Beth Robinson, co-counsel to the plaintiffs in Baker v. Vermont, the lawsuit that wrought the law, put it this way: “Nobody writes songs about registered partnerships.”

Ann and Susan and their supporters want that powerful, ’50s-love-song feeling. They want not just rights, but what the state confers on their straight friends’ relationships: sentimental and moral validation.

For the record, I am 54, never married and, in the 16th year of a committed relationship, not intending to marry. My general feeling, reinforced each time I learn of another nasty gay or lesbian divorce, is summed up in a recent New Yorker cartoon: A man, looking up from his newspaper, comments to his wife: “Gays getting married? Haven’t they suffered enough?”

Still, I have the option to reject marriage or embrace it — because I am heterosexual. And if I have the option, so should Ann and Susan.

But cheerleading? Taxpaying? Neighborly acts in the freezing cold? Is this what it takes to get a few rights around here?

More to the point, is “ordinariness” — a.k.a. normalcy — what gay advocates should be exploiting to convince others they deserve those rights? At a time when Constitutional protections are being denied to an ever-widening class of deviants — illegal “aliens,” sexual “predators” — is it in the interest of gays and lesbians, or any American, to hold up normalcy as the ticket to citizenship?

**** The below section was inadvertently omitted in the printed version of this article. ****

Proponents of gay marriage argue that because gay marriage makes homosexuality more visible, it also makes it more acceptable, not just for judges or ER doctors but for the lesbian bride’s formerly homophobic cousin. Because gay marriage renders queerness “normal,” notes Yale legal scholar William Eskridge, it is both radical and conservative.

But marriage is intrinsically conservative. It does not just normalize, it checks for normality at the door. Assimilating the monogamous, long-term, “virtually normal” homosexual couples like Ann and Susan, marriage pushes the queerer queers — drag queens, club-crawlers, polyamorists — farther to the margins. Gay marriage won’t help these outliers. It could even leave them more vulnerable, as wedded homosexuals cease to identify as sexual outlaws.

“Marriage sanctifies some couples at the expense of others,” wrote cultural critic Michael Warner in his 1999 book The Trouble with Normal. “It is selective legitimacy.” In Vermont in 1999, his words were borne out. A coalition of liberal clergy implied that same-sex married people, like straight ones, are more godly than couples in unofficial unions. Married gays, they wrote, “exemplify a moral good which cannot be represented by so-called registered partnership.”

A secular state in a pluralistic democracy has no business affirming any religious version of relational morality. But if we didn’t have marriage, a legitimate state function would be left undone: Ensuring the individual and collective interests of people sharing homes, expenses and children. “You can call it anything you want,” remarked Brooklyn Law School professor and sex-law expert Nan Hunter when I interviewed her a few years ago. “But you have to have some mechanism by which people can easily, quickly, and cheaply designate another person for a whole list of purposes” — co-parent, co-homeowner, medical proxy, heir. I’d call it “personal partnership,” and a variety of such partnerships can encode legal rights and strictures commensurate to the obligations incurred, notably children. Such a range exists in many other democracies.

Civil unions stand in this secular tradition, not the tradition of marriage. Indeed, what I like best about CUs is the distance they maintain from marriage’s role in bestowing sexual-moral legitimacy. One little-advertised clause of the 2000 law is a less-extensive class of mutual rights given to cohabiting kin, called “reciprocal benefits.” The clause was included in response to opponents’ claims that queers would get “special rights” denied to “maiden aunts” and others barred from marriage by incest prohibitions. I believe the drafters regarded it as a necessary compromise. To me, the clause is extraordinarily radical, because it undermines the sexual-regulatory function of marriage.

H. 275 nods toward church-state separation by allowing clergy to refuse, on religious principle, to “solemnize” a same-sex marriage. But what were they doing signing civil marriage licenses in the first place? Rather than letting them decline, legislators should rescind the clergy’s authority to confer civil marriages at all. And while they’re at it, they should let straight people get civil unions, too, as nonreligious partners do in Europe, Australia and elsewhere.

The government must distribute its material and legal benefits equally. As long as heterosexual marriage endures, homosexual marriage is a necessary liberal reform. But that does not mean replicating every marital right, sacrament and diagnosis of normalcy.

Instead of counting on marriage to deliver economic, medical and social security, Americans should work for these benefits as they are provided in every other industrialized democracy — to each child or adult, whether single or coupled, living within or outside a family of any configuration.

And all of us — G, L, B, T, Q or S — should get behind the most radical demand of all: full social and sexual citizenship for everyone, both the demonstrably normal and truly queer.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.