The Empire Morality

A few thoughts on sexuality, inspired by Bill Maher and Oprah Winfrey. (No, that’s not the image I am trying to convey.) Last night, in a hotel, Kay and I sat watching cable. We don’t have cable, so we watch it when it’s available. Perhaps because I had been overly aggressive in a political discussion with her, had apparently gloated when I made a point she could not at the moment refute (I had not been consciously trying to gloat), had made her upset, Kay settled, with the clicker (what more civilized people call the remote) in her hand, on Bill Maher’s show, whatever it’s currently called. Maher had a panel that one could hardly call fair and balanced. He had an Independent senator from Vermont, which is to say, a Democrat, or a “Progressive”; he had a black woman whose name I cannot recall (Kerry Washington sounds about right), who calls herself an actress and an activist, which is to say, a Democrat, or a “Progressive”; and he had a New York Times columnist, which is to say … well, you get the idea. I will, however, give the columnist, whose name escapes me, but who was young, sharply dressed, dark-haired, the benefit of noting he was at pains here and there to be fair, though he smirked a fair amount at Maher’s immature gags, and was often overridden by the the Senator.

Maher was crude, which, though I’ve not watched much of him, is I think to be expected. He made many jokes about Sarah Palin’s daughter and granddaughter. He did this on the way to making a point about George Bush’s failed eight years of abstinence teaching in America. Or was it the other way around? – he seemed to take too much pleasure in making fun of Tripp, Bristol, and their matriarch for it to seem incidental. Nonetheless, he made the point that in the past year, I think it was, America has acquired the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world. This is presumably a bad thing. Indeed, all other things being equal, I think it is. But he did not make it clear what the circumstances of all these teen pregnancies are. There must be at least two factors to be considered: actual age, as 13 does not equal 18, and marital status. If most of those teen pregnancies belong to married 18-year-olds, I am less worried.

Probably they do not. Probably there are very few 18-year-old brides in America, and probably many of those brides will end up divorced, things being as they are. Maher noted that among the other hundred-and-fifty or so countries who have a lower teen pregnancy rate than we do is India. Now, since all countries apparently have a lower teen pregnancy rate than we do, I’m not sure what makes India so remarkable for having a lower rate than ours. Are they particularly known for their teen pregnancy rate? More so than say, Russia? or Nairobi? or Peru? (Not that I have any idea – all of these countries were chosen without any other thought than multicultural representation.)

That seemingly random mention of India, however, made me think. I thought of saris, and single-sex Bollywood theatres, and arranged marriages, and I thought, well of course we have a higher teen-pregnancy rate than does India! Indians keep an eye on their young. They watch their girls especially, and there is little likelihood that there is time for the pretty young things to get it on. I would guess that very few women work outside the home, and that there are few latch-key kids coming home to houses denuded of parents and grandparents. Call it the Locked Door Theory. The criminal can rightly say to the householder: “Go ahead, lock your door. I’ll get in anyway. I’ll use brute strength, crowbars, sledgehammers. I’ll get in, and I’ll take your stuff, and you can’t stop me.” Really, what does your chain lock add to your deadbolt? And in the end, your deadbolt is only as strong as its weaker doorframe. But in the end, the locked door does keep you reasonably safe, because the criminal who has to deal with the locked door has to deal with the noise and the hassle and the neighbors. He’d rather get into the unlocked car than the locked one. Just so the oversexed teen. He may desperately want to do what all undersexed teens desperately want to do (especially the boys), but he’s not going to give all he has to get that. Very few of them will lay with a man’s daughter while that daughter’s father or mother is at home. Could they? In some circumstances, probably, yes, but only some boys will have the cojones to take advantage of those situations. Even fewer girls would let them do so (or cajole them into doing so).

India has a lower rate because they have a different system. You bet they teach abstinence. They also live it, far more regularly than we do. They have systems in place, and non-governmental coercions, such as shame and who knows what else – transgressors of both sexes most likely are beaten or killed or exiled. This is not to say that all such actions are consistent with a civilized society – they are not – but it is to say that a society that laughs at the two Gossip Girls slurping down a phallic double-scoop ice cream cone together (as Maher, to his credit, briefly introduced as evidence that perhaps we’re oversexed), is hardly equipped to help the 12,000 boys and girls who reneged on their promise of pre-marital abstinence. On one level, I suppose I agree with Maher: teaching abstinence is a fool’s game. But who would expect the children of smokers to follow, in high percentages, their parents’ non-smoking precepts? Teaching abstinence isn’t working right terribly well right now, but teaching the opposite isn’t going to have much better of an effect (more on that in the next post). Teaching abstinence will not become effective until we see it becoming effective in the wider culture, until the casual couplings of shows like Gossip Girl and Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives face a greater censure than they have up to this point (which is to say, any). Teaching abstinence will not become effective until sexual hypocrisy becomes, once again, the tributary coinage paid to the empire morality (or at least, respectability), at which point, the monetary supply will be greatly lessened, I believe.