Is Keith Olbermann reading Geek Philosophy? Oh man, wouldn’t I love to think so? Last night on Countdown he said flat out that George Orwell’s 1984 was not meant to be an instruction manual, which is exactly what I said recently. But of course that was hardly an original thought, or at least, hardly the kind of thought that you wouldn’t expect any thinking geek to have had recently. But it does prove that Keith and I are birds of a feather and hence destined to be married, right?
*sigh* Love in the time of rising fascism. It’s so romantic.
Anyway, there’s another dystopian novel that I keep being reminded of more and more of these days, like when I read about the Religious Right’s war on contraception in The New York Times Magazine that pretty much proves that these nutjobs are totally anti-sex, or at least anti-sexual pleasure as a divine right of womanhood:
“We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion,” says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. “The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set,” she told me. “So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception.”
I wish I could honestly think it would be crude to suggest that Judie Brown just really needs to get laid by some stud who really, really knows what he’s doing (and don’t we all?), or perhaps just needs some quality time by herself with a glass of wine and some fragrant candles and a vibrator, but it does seem that way, doesn’t it?
But just as bad is the thing that suddenly today made me want to dive for my bookshelf and read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale again. It’s my imaginary love slave Mark Morford’s column today about -- ick -- purity balls:
No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys, but rather fancy creepy dress-up rituals taking place in towns like Colorado Springs and Tucson and Zoloft Jesusville, in which Christian dads rent a bad tux while their daughters, mostly teenagers but many as young as 6 or 7, get all dolled up in gowns from JCPenny and they all drive out to the airport Marriott and prepare to, well, lose their minds.It begins. At some point the daughter stands up, her pale arms wrapped around her daddy, and reads aloud a formal pledge that she will remain forever pure and virginal and sex-free until she is handed over, by her dad (who is actually called the "high priest" of the home), like some sort of sad hymenic gift, to her husband, who will receive her like the sanitized and overprotected and libidinously inept servant she so very much is. Praise!
“I just...,” she sputtered speechlessly... It terrifies me how the kind of geek who thinks deeply and seriously about the shape of our society and the many myriad directions it might take could so often turn out to be correct about all the many, many ways in which it could go wrong and bad and evil and repressed and ugly. Don’t we all just want to be happy? And how could this lead to happiness?:
Virgin girl has zero experience with the joys of her own body, with orgasm, with men, with sex toys or shower heads or good gynecological gizmongery. She then marries a man who will very likely have not the slightest clue (as he has had the same dreadful sexual miseducation as our fair virgin) as to what to do with a woman's body, who will, by most all accounts, be unable to tell an erogenous zone from an elbow, a clitoris from a belly button.
That’s Morford again. Is that what people really want? Why do people bitch about The Handmaid’s Tale -- Wikipedia notes that it has the dubious distinction of being among the most challenged books because of its anti-religious content and focus on sexuality -- and not about these far-right religious nutters who are so obsessed about sex that they’d subject children as young as 4 years old to handwringing over it? Isn’t that just sick?
And it’s not that geeks and hippies and everyone normal and healthy is suggesting wild and anonymous orgies for all, as my pal SF writer and total geek John Scalzi says:
Speaking as a father -- and one of a girl just about the right age to take to a "purity ball" at that -- I'm not going to criticize one of the underlying desires of the purity ball, which is a father's desire to express his commitment to care for and protect his child. I happen to have the same desire. I will note, however, that the expression of that desire can take on rather substantially different forms. These "Purity Ball" fathers think it's best expressed through control; I think it's best expressed through knowledge. I don't want my daughter to pledge her "purity" to me, as if having a sexual experience is some sort of karmic besmirching; I want to inform my daughter so that when she has sex, she knows what she's doing and she has it on her terms, and she comes away from the experience satisfied (as much as anyone comes away from their first experience in such a state) and able to integrate it into her life in a positive way.Which is not to say I want her having sex, oh, anytime before she can vote; indeed, you can believe me when I say to you that among the discussions we'll have will be the ones where I suggest that abstinence really is the best policy through high school, for many very good and practical reasons (hey, it worked for me)....
I try, but I really fail to appreciate how keeping people ignorant about our own bodies and all the amazingly cool things our bodies can do could possible be a recipe for happiness and health. Who’d have thought that geeks -- who are supposed to be the ones all sexually inexperienced and ignorant -- could be the ones with their head on right about this?
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