August 29, 2004

making sex simply too boring...

Andrea writes about a suggestion by Planned Parenthood that the Harry Potter books should be written so as to teach children about sex:

...What can I say to this except:

EW.

Sometimes I wonder if PP isn’t in fact trying to breed a new generation of celibates by making sex simply too boring. After all, who wants to do something that people write such creepy sentimental twaddle about?

The idea that sex can ever be a wholesome and rational activity (sort of like a nice healthy game of tennis) is lunacy. The whole business immediately becomes not only boring, but tacky. And what do people do in that situation? They immediately go looking for sex that's somehow strange, or dangerous, or forbidden.

Whereupon the sort of liberal blockheads who would join PP in the first place, will instantly start "teaching our children" that strange and dangerous sex such as [fill in the blank] is really wholesome and normal!

(And the PP types will also insist that anyone who suggests otherwise is a right-wing religious nut trying to bring theocracy upon us. If a Democrat were in the White House, I bet those Planned Parenthood dolts would be telling us that the porn-soaked dimwits who harassed prisoners at Abu Ghraib were "exploring other dimensions of human sexuality"—explorations which can be "positive, wholesome and loving," but only if they are not distorted by the Victorian prudery of the "Christian Taliban.")

I think this is similar to the sort of hopeless arms-race that "artists" are in. The poor bohemians are forced to do ever-weirder things to shock the bourgeoisie, who keep accepting whatever they do! Nightmare. The poor lads are now reduced to dunking crosses and flags in urine and calling it "art." Or dropping piles of sticks on the floor in an art museum (as I saw recently). And only a few stick-in-the-muds protest! How frustrating! Pretty soon urine containers with [chose from the list] sacred objects will be seen in the lobbies of the classier hotels and law firms.

You just can't win in the art game. soon "artists" will probably start sacrificing babies by the light of the full moon, just to get a rise out of people...As for the sexual "arms-race," you might recall this, a suggestion in Sweden that pornography should be shown on TV, to encourage sex and procreation. (Which would have, of course, exactly the opposite effect.)

I feel lucky to have grown up in an era when sex and nudity were things most people were still fairly inhibited about. And I suspect the Victorians were even luckier, and found sex much more thrilling than we do now.

Posted by John Weidner at August 29, 2004 11:35 AM
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