Our culture has a serious, childish issue with sex.
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On Sunday night, I was treated to the news via Facebook that a drunken couple at my alma mater, the University of Delaware, had sex behind a dumpster at Grotto’s Pizza (a legendary Delaware pizza establishment), in the same parking lot that I parked in regularly as a commuter student not even four months ago. There are few things funnier to me than the idea of people having sex behind that dumpster, on a holiday where everyone on Main Street on the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day is an obnoxious drunk asshole. But obviously, a few creeps had to snap some pictures and take videos that went viral on Instagram in hopes of getting internet famous.
I wish I could say this surprised me, but this is the life we live in 2014. Unfortunately, having gone to the University of Delaware and living in Delaware, I know for a fact that most of the campus will think this guy is a “legend” and the girl is a “slut”. It’s incredibly disappointing, but that’s another argument altogether, one that indicts a ton of American college kids, not just those in my home state.
The real disappointment, however, was the response to this – a major investigation launched to find the culprits, so they could be charged with “lewd acts”, be outed by the University and probably kicked out of school, etc. Not knowing what kinds of conversations go on between the mayor’s office, the president of the university, or the police department, I’ll hesitate to single one person or group out for this decision – only to say that whoever made the call is wasting taxpayer money, assigning officers to a case that will result in, at most, a fine and a year or two of probation. I’m going to go out on a limb and say there will be no high fives when the Newark PD closes this case. There won’t be a sigh of relief that these kids are finally off the streets. Just another gigantic waste of time while real problems still persist.
Look – I’m not a fan of watching two drunk kids bang behind a trash can (sorry, porn does not imitate life), and to a certain extent, if they had been caught in the act, I wouldn’t be morally opposed to a fine, or at least a reprimand that you shouldn’t get so drunk as to forget that you’re outside on a Saturday. But at a college like the University of Delaware, where students have to sue to find justice for their own sexual assaults, this raises a serious question: why do we make consensual sex such a big deal?
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This problem isn’t just a theoretical one, or one that doesn’t affect other parts of society; ask any politician what having consensual sex with someone they aren’t “supposed” to will do to their career. A quick run-through of recent politicians who have had careers derailed because of a sex scandal – Anthony Weiner, Mark Souder, Gen. David Petraeus, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, even Bill Clinton – shows an alarming number that had consensual sex (or even sexted), just not with the person that they were married to. While we can raise some questions about the personal flaws of these people, the truth is that everyone has flaws. And if your own personal flaws don’t make you a violent person, or someone who attempts to take advantage of kids, or someone who steals millions of dollars from people, then you’re doing a pretty damn good job.
But for all of those male politicians that showed their own personal flaws, we haven’t really ever seen the fallout from a female Congresswoman or Governor caught cheating on a spouse, because that’s only happened once, and the revelations came much later after the end of the affair. The closest recent case we can use is this: two consenting adults, one a former governor caught in a sex scandal years ago, and the other a highly skilled and experienced political operative who was on her way to becoming the new mayor’s press secretary, slammed and given the tabloid treatment by the literary version of a Grotto’s Pizza dumpster, and denied a position she had been all but assured in with the most progressive mayor in New York’s history because…she’s dating Elliot Spitzer.
Think about the ramifications of that: Lis Smith wasn’t cheating on anyone. She didn’t molest anyone’s child. She even refrained from having sex with Elliot Spitzer outside of Artichoke. And yet she still was denied a job based on a sociopathic interest by the New York Post into who she was dating at the time, showing that even the most liberal administration in the country can capitulate to and participate in the constant denial of and systematic shitting-on of women that discourages many from running for political office.
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This is part of a larger problem in American society, one that reaches far beyond politics or a St. Patrick’s Day mistake. America has this inane, kneejerk need for puritanical posturing about sex like we’re all some kind of moral compass, even though Americans spend anywhere from $10 to $14 billion dollars on porn each year, even as nearly every major product of the last 25 years has had some kind of sexually-based ad campaign, and especially because decision makers still see women as part-employee, part-sex objects who can be fired or denied employment on a whim based on their sex life. That, to me, is far worse than seeing some 21 year-old lurch over another one after a few too many shots of Fireball, or some manufactured tears when yet another Congressman apologizes for their indiscretions.
That’s the definition of a real problem.
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