Frank Rich, NYT: The Plot Against Sex in America

[DeepModem Mom]

FRANK RICH
The Plot Against Sex in America
Published: December 12, 2004

WHEN they start pushing the panic button over "moral values" at the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting's WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York, you know this country has entered a new cultural twilight zone.

Just three weeks after the election, Channel 13 killed a spot for the acclaimed movie "Kinsey," in which Liam Neeson stars as the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime, that women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity. At first WNET said it had killed the spot because it was "too commercial and too provocative" - a tough case to make about a routine pseudo-ad interchangeable with all the other pseudo-ads that run on "commercial-free" PBS. That explanation quickly became inoperative anyway. The "Kinsey" distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating that the real problem was "the content of this movie" and "controversial press re: groups speaking out against the movie/subject matter" that might bring "viewer complaints."

Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints about its own cowardice because by last week, in response to my inquiries, it had a new story: that e-mail was all a big mistake - an "unfortunate" miscommunication hatched by some poor unnamed flunky in marketing. This would be funny if it were not so serious - and if it were an anomaly. Yet even as the "Kinsey" spot was barred in New York, a public radio station in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women's rights organization based in Chapel Hill that it could not use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on-air announcement. In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels, fearing indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public service spot created by Los Angeles county's own public health agency to counteract a rising tide of syphilis. Nationwide, the big three TV networks all banned an ad in which the United Church of Christ heralded the openness of its 6,000 congregations to gay couples....

***

In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the Murdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that, however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: The Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are dealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools.)...

***

No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the pop culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in little jeopardy: in a nation of "Desperate Housewives," "Too Darn Hot" has become the national anthem. A movie like "Kinsey" will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the cultural war over sex that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the same information about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own "moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptive prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval of local officials; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/12rich.html?8hpib

[Tsiyu]

1. They believe in some deity from Rome or something

One that says it's okay if we blow up people, rape and torture people, but therapeutic, consensual companionship is BAD.

Of course, Scalia and all the sots making over $500,000 a year still get their orgies guilt-free. ( Do they pass out condoms at these things, Scalia baby? Imagining you naked makes me want to PUKE by the way.)

[Melodybe]

2. I wonder if the Faux News faithful knows that Murdoch owns this movie

Fox Searchlight is owned by Murdoch.

[Tsiyu]

3. Interesting

They feed the frenzy then condemn the food.

[DeepModem Mom]

6. I wonder if Fox News covers any of the controversies involving Fox...

entertainment -- and, like you, I wonder if Fox News viewers are aware, or care, that it's the same Fox company, owned by Murdoch?

[McKenzie]

4. were it not for lust the human race would be extinct

all species get those attributes that help to ensure their survival. We don't have seasonal breeding like animals; we have lust. People don't sit down and coldly discuss the breeding process, it's rather more spontaneous than that, as anyone with enough electricity in their head to generate even a weak synapse knows. The fact that we have compassion as a character trait says something about humanity that we could discuss too but this thread is about something else.

Your country is on a razor's edge between continuing as a democracy and fascism. I don't think it's all due to the fundies either. More likely it's the interface between the interests of corporatism, which is to keep the public diverted from the real issues and the agenda of the fundies which is different entirely. The two factions feed off one another's agendas.

[the other rick]

5. The furor over Kinsey

is about the science, actually. There are a lot of people that questions Kinsey's methods, data, conclusions, and agenda. There is evidence that he not only knowingly worked with 'active' pedophiles, but showed them how to collect data from their 'partners' and report it to him. And his information gathering was far from scienitific if his own notes are to be believed.

Indeed, the Kinsey reports may be the most respected fakes in scientific history.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

7. Links please? (nt)

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Rrrright

The Christian Coalition types are such champions of scientific accuracy. :eyes: