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April All of us who follow incidents of right-wing leaders’ lies and hypocrisy, aren’t surprised by the new study reported by the Journal of Economic Perspectives that concludes conservatives use as much, and probably more, online pornography as more liberal people. It fits with the overall psychology of remaking the US in the right-wing’s image. As for lying, whether it’s repetition of the false claim that the Employee Free Choice Act would prevent workers from having a secret ballot about unionization, or claims that LGBT couples can’t parent effectively, both the religious and the political right-wing lie repeatedly. When you’re a true believer, you think lying is just part of the war for Truth. And the method the right-wing pursues, whether that’s on the 700 Club or FOX News is to lie again and again even in the face of others who’ve exposed the lie. Nazi Minster of Propaganda and close associate of Hitler, Joseph Goebbels identified the strategy: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” And Goebbels also hoped for a mainstream media with FOX News and others at the helm that was useful for repeating the big lie: “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” It takes someone like Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart to aggressively confront the deceptions in a way that most corporate media fear doing. Stewart last month successfully campaigned that the so-called premier financial network, CNBC instead of critically reporting the business world’s collapse, had been in bed with its duplicitous CEOs, promoting their windfalls at the expense of every 401k owner. Stewart had to do so by confronting CNBC’s responses to his criticism as lies. Since there’s tape of almost everything, it was painful to watch his smackdown of CNBC’s Jim Cramer of “Fast Money.” Why Cramer would confront Stewart would be beyond me if I didn’t know that with oligarchy goes an arrogance that believes others can’t touch them. And crucial to the response of the financiers who got us into this mess is the message that the little minds of the rest of us just wouldn’t understand “big” finance. So, trust just them to fix the mess they made -- while they lap up their bonuses. Just as lying is denial, so is the hypocrisy that condemns others so as not to face the inner demons that plague much of the right-wing. So says Harvard Business School’s Benjamin Edelman of the study of porn users: “Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by.” The surprise would be if anyone is surprised by that. This study looked at credit card data from 2006-2008 that indicated online purchases of pornography. Thus, it measured not merely those who consume porn online but those who actually subscribe to it, the more dedicated users. Eight of the top ten pornography subscribing states voted for John McCain. Six of the lowest ten voted for President Obama. Residents of Utah were the largest per capita subscribers to porn. Residents of twenty-seven states that have gay marriage bans have 11% more porn subscribers than those that don’t. States where the majority of residents agree with the statement: “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage” are higher subscribers than those where the majority disagrees. Then it tied the results to previous studies of attitudes toward religion. It was almost humorous to hear that church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays whereas their expenditures on other days of the week were in line with everyone else. It’s not hard to find explanations for the hypocrisy displayed in these and other studies, such as those surveying which states have the highest divorce rates. Remember, they found red states the highest and Massachusetts with same-sex marriage the lowest. Edleman speculated: “One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you’re told you can’t have this, then you want it more.” Or, as addiction specialists know: “repression leads to obsession.” In the middle of a culture that’s sick about sexual activity, and a dominant right-wing religious message that sex is dirty, there’s much more involved. Railing against sex is popular. It has proven religiously lucrative as a result. The cultural sexual anxiety fomented by the right-wing also provides the guilt and shame it needs to recruit its victims. Religious addiction leads the right-wing to fantasize against all evidence, including their sexual experiences, that abstinence-only education promotes their sectarian values and discourages sex. Then again, projection of one’s sexual insecurities and shame on others is a time-tested way to suppress those issues. We see this in the simultaneous fundamentalist condemnation of and obsession with same-sex sexual activity. Religious addiction is also a standard way to repress sexual anxiety, guilt, shame, and addiction. Then it labels the sexual activity of those without sexual anxieties sick and sinful. Amanda Marcotte, author of It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, underlines another issue. The main selling-point of straight porn is its basis in gender stereotyping, she writes. It’s geared toward men, not women, and the right-wing’s own worldview tells men to marry a “good girl.” You know she’s “good” because she’s not enthused about sex, especially sexual experimentation. But males, the gender stereotype continues, really want sex and even experimental sexual behaviors. You can’t do that with your “good” wife. So, you’ve got to turn to the “bad” women online. For some it goes further, Marcottte notes, with the growing market appeal of porn that shows men insulting, spitting upon, raping, or coercing women. A sexually liberated, feminist culture, she argues, would have less need for huge amounts of porn. Before that happens, what we’ll continue to see and, I hope, be non-enabling enough to point out, is the scapegoating of everyone else for the sexual sickness of the right-wing. The more miserable they are, the more their denial must, and will, produce lies and hypocrisy. © 2009 Robert N. Minor Other Issues, Books, Resources
Robert N. Minor is the author of Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human and Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He may be reached through www.fairnessproject.org
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