Your Humble Blogger has been itching to write about the Culture War for a while, now, and Matthew Yglesias’ note over on TAPPED has given me the impetus to at least ramble a bit. Oh, and the minifuror over the massively transparent dress Senator Kerry’s daughter wore to the film festival. For the moment, I’ll just write about the culture war on sex, which is only a part of the culture war thang (language! work! music! whatnot!) but is pretty interesting. To me, anyway.
Here’s the thing: Men are marrying men in Massachusetts this week, and the ‘mainstream’ of thought wants those loving couples to openly express their love in legal unions created expressly for them. In, say, 1940, that idea was far from the mainstream. In a couple of generations, our culture has gone from not letting homosexual love Speak Its Name to making it come up with its own name. If there’s a culture war, that battle seems at the moment to be pretty nearly over.
Another battle that ‘my side’ seems to have won is the pornography battle. In 1940, they were just getting rid of the strip shows and burlesques in downtowns. Except they weren’t. I can’t imagine the reaction of, say, FDR to the quantity and variety of freely available hard-core pornography available today. A few weeks ago, I happened to be watching cable tv around ten o’clock in the evening, and saw an ad for a dirty books and toys shop. Not only was it pretty clearly saying ‘we have great porn’, but it was specifically saying ‘we have great porn for women’. Well, I could analyze it in greater detail, but as far as it fits into my current musing, let’s just say, Franklin and Eleanor wouldn’t have imagined that ad passing the social disapproval test.
Yes, there was a big fuss when Janet Jackson showed most of one breast on broadcast television. Wasn’t it interesting that she thought it would be good for her career? And that she wasn’t, you know, wrong? Lots and lots of people were offended by the flash, but even more people weren’t. And compare that to the sort of sitcom jokes that reference porn. We’ve gone from a stag film society, in which certain people were understood to watch (mostly fairly tame) porn but not to talk about it, to an, I don’t know, Paris Hilton Home Video society, where most people are expected to have seen hard-core porn, and to talk about it, but where actually making it is common in both senses.
Another factor in looking at this, though, is the multiple endpoints problem. That is, I’ve picked 1940 pretty randomly, where Mr. Yglesias picked 1964 as, more or less, the beginning of Modern American Conservatism. Somebody who looked at the period between 1880 and 1920 would have seen a culture war that ‘my side’ was rapidly winning, with rapidly increasing understanding of and acceptance for homosexuality, nudity, pornography, free sex, and contraception. Somebody looking at 1920 to 1964 would probably not see the same thing. Somebody looking at 1880 to 1964 might see different trends, and somebody looking from 1974 to 2004 would see something else (it seems to me sometimes that serious movies in the mid-seventies were about sex, and had naked women, where serious movies in the nineties were about disease, and, you know, not so much). So I don’t want to make any kind of certain prediction about the trends I see.
But heck, just for fun, look at a random national ‘socially conservative’ mainstream politician, and see what they think about these issues. Yes, they will give off an air of indignant disapproval, but their ‘correct’ social attitude is likely to be about a zillion times more permissive than the views of a socially liberal politician in 1940. We should teach abstinence in schools’ sexual education classes? We should allow a few localities to have laws against sodomy? We should let the market determine whether companies give benefits to their employees’ lovers? We should restrict toplessness to cable? We should make radio broadcasters use delicate language when discussing blowjobs and rubber fetishes in the morning?
Yes, there are a lot of people well to the intolerant side of my hypothetical conservative, but mainstream is in a whole different place than it used to be.
,
-Vardibidian.