It still fucking kills me that I missed him when he spoke at UW last year.
Thanks to sonatine for the link. I have to agree with her fervent desire for George to be our gay boyfriend.
Also: this seriously AIRED on ABC? For serious? When?
So Mark Foley–that’s Mark Foley (R-FL), despite the O’Reilly Factor’s bold, thinking-outside-the-box damage control strategy of captioning him as (D-FL) in its coverage–is being hung out to dry, and not just on the internets.
And don’t get me wrong, he deserves it, although I’m pessimistic about party leadership really being held accountable for its equally damning failure to do anything about him during the long period before the story went public in which they totally knew all about it.
When the news first broke, a friend expressed skepticism about how inappropriate Foley’s behavior had actually been, suggesting that it was really just another gay witchhunt. I didn’t think so, but I could see how someone might: the first chat excerpts were pretty tame. It was only subsequent excerpts that made it abundantly clear that no, Foley really had been making professionally and ethically indefensible sexual advances on 16-year-old pages. However, I’m really annoyed by the constant tossing about of the term “pedophilia” here.
Hanne Blank puts it very well; most of what I have to say would be repetition:
The tangle of age, agency, majority, and what defines a “predatory†or “exploitive†relationship has always been a very difficult and sticky one as far back as the age-of-consent reform campaigns of the 1880s. Determining who is and is not a child, who is and is not capable of consent, and where the legal lines should thus be drawn in relation to sexual communication and interaction between persons of disparate ages has never been cut-and-dried.
My considered opinion, after having spent most of the last four years of my life working on issues pertaining to the sexuality of minors, is that when it comes to sex, Americans define “child” for the convenience and comfort of adults who are terrified of adolescent sexuality.
It’s hard to imagine a situation where I would think a 16-year-old high school student having a sexual relationship with a 53-year-old politician was not, to a greater or lesser degree (mostly greater), exploitative. Similarly, high school teachers who have sex with students are behaving extremely unethically, although, depending on the state, not always criminally. These are cases where even the absence of a direct supervisory relationship does not erase an extreme power imbalance–and certainly, when you’re talking about teenagers, age alone is a big part of that imbalance (although not all of it). As Hanne points out elsewhere in the post, teenagers, while physically mature sexual agents, are just learning how to handle themselves AS sexual agents. The gap between a 16-year-old and a 26-year-old (let alone a 52-year-old) is much bigger, qualitatively, than the gap between a 26-year-old and a 36-year-old.
Being sexually attracted to a 16-year-old, however, even if you are a 52-year-old Representative who should really, REALLY be able to control yourself sufficiently not to send that 16-year-old dirty text messages, does not make you a pedophile. In general, we hope that 52-year-olds, while they may find some 16-year-old bodies attractive, would prefer to have actual sex with people to whom they are a LITTLE more intellectually and emotionally similar. This is, of course, open to the snarky observation that some 52-year-olds are still pretty emotionally similar to high school students, but obviously we hope that most of them have not made it into Congress.
So yeah, a lot of people should lose their jobs over this, and it’s possible that some criminal charges might also be appropriate, depending on how much coercion Foley may have employed. And obviously I don’t put a lot of credence into Rush Limbaugh’s theory that evil lascivious teenagers conspired to ruin Mark Foley’s good name by drawing him into temptation. But I also think that this culture’s refusal to recognize adolescent sexuality, to the point of insisting that being attracted to a 16-year-old is pedophilia, is pretty fucked up.
Porn industry to offer downloads to DVDs
Yes, while the movie studios worry about upsetting Wal-Mart, the porn industry blazes a technological trail. I personally watch most of my DVDs on my laptop in bed anyway, but I’m sure many other people will be interested in this service.
No, really. Why? Is New Year’s the new Sex Toy Day? It starts spiking on December 21–are people really more likely to give the gift of sex toys for Christmas than they are for, say, Valentine’s Day? (There’s a spike in “lingerie” for Valentine’s Day, but it is nothing LIKE the spike for “sex toys.”) The sex toy spike reaches its nadir on New Year’s Eve but doesn’t return to normal levels until January 18–are hoards of bored college kids unable to think of any other way to break the monotony of being home for break?
At first I thought this single year effect must be related to the recent attempts to outlaw sex toys on the state level, but all the news articles on that subject date from March 2006. And it’s only this past year that you have this spike. What the hell happened?
Thanks to Jeremy for the link to GoogleTrends and the initial note of an overlap between the popularity of flowers and lingerie, although you shouldn’t blame him for my instinct to immediately input “sex toys” as a third search term. What he doesn’t note about flowers and lingerie is that while both were pretty popular around Valentine’s Day 2004 in the US, lingerie was barely a blip for V-Day 2005, and still had not returned to 2004 levels this year: popularity of lingerie and flowers, 2004-2006
I would say I fear that we are becoming a nation of Puritans, except apparently we were a nation of Girls and Boys Gone Wild from December 21, 2005 through January 18, 2006. I feel like three years of graduate work in sociology should allow me to better interpret these findings.