The War on Sex in this country has never been at more of a fever pitch. Church signs damn lesbians as hellbound. An accidental visit to a website that contains child pornography lands you in trouble with the law. A teacher is jailed, not without cause, for sleeping with a student of legal age. And on and on.
This week, we interview author/sex therapist Dr. Marty Klein, PhD about the State of the War on Sex, what we can expect under a McCain-Palin administration, and how we can win the war...
First, you're a sex therapist. You wrote a book called The War On Sex. In these troubling sexual times, how are you able to have a regular sex life? The people that must come in, with their problems...
Well, I can say this... Every good sex therapist communicates with his or her partner and every good sex therapist knows what they like erotically and is not afraid to communicate it and hopefully enjoys the satisfying consequences.
You say the War on Sex is different than your typical culture war. Can you elaborate on that?
The term culture war implies that there are two sides, like the North and South back in 1861. The truth is is that the War on Sex is really not two sides, equally equipped with opposite agendas. On one side, you have a group of people who just want to be left alone and not force other people to go to nude beaches or have abortions or anything like that. On the other side, you have decency groups... and local, state, and federal government... they not only have their own private agenda, they make it a public one when they tell people how they want them to live. The latest example of this is Sarah Palin: it's not enough that she doesn't want her children to read certain books, she wants to prevent other people in the community from reading those books by removing them from a public library...
Another example is the government in Phoenix, Arizona... even though none of the members of the government had ever gone to any strip clubs and no one had ever complained, they felt that they had to shut them down. The problem isn't too much government, it's the government pursuing a moralistic agenda.
Do the conservatives want to bring us back to the sort-of Puritan era?
You know, it's really unsettling to hear people say we need the government to roll back the rights we've been accumulating over the last century. It's unsettling to hear people say, "All social problems can be traced back to sexuality." Or that sexuality needs to be somehow repressed. There's no data that says our social problems can be traced back to "sex."
You say in your introduction that some people "hate sex." What do you mean by that?
If you listen to some of these groups, like the person Bush asked to run the FDA, you would think that people need to be protected from their own sexuality, that adults need to be prevented from making choices... because those choices might be harmful to those adults. These people tell kids that sex can make them sterile, that sex can make them suicidal, sex is a toxic substance they need to keep away from. And that's just an awful training for young people.
What made you decide to write this book? Was there a final straw?
[Laughs] Well, I've been feeling that way for a while. Anyone who does this kind of counseling is inundated with the shame from people about their own sexuality and the sexuality of their partner. And then watching the Bush Administration dismantle, particularly our rights around reproductive health services and watching the Bush Administration fund religious institutions that were discriminating against sexual minorities and training young people to fear their sexuality, that was a real motivator...
It's just become clear to me that the level of misinformation in the culture about sexuality is no coincidence. It's the result of years of careful programming and massive funding... the kinds of things that make Europeans shake their heads and say, "What's up with those Americans?" Because they do-- they think that about us, and they're right. It's no coincidence all this is going on.
Until this book, no one made the case that it's all connected. The fight against gay rights, the fight against strip clubs, it's all connected: the money and the power is all connected.
You say in the book that the American people can win the War On Sex. How will we win it and how will we know we've won?
Well, I don't think there's going to be a day on which we decide we've won. Basically, it ends when the government decides that it's going to treat privacy issues regarding sexuality that same way it treats other private behavior. Which is that, "We don't care what you do, as long as you don't burn down somebody's house while you're doing it..."
Dr. Klein's book and website here.
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