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Politics and Sex
by Alec Mouhibian

Politics is easily the worst thing to happen to sex since the institution of marriage. This is a problem for students, who get political before getting married, and hence have some sexual considerations when casting their ballots and choosing where to locating themselves on the spectrum.

The sad fact facing us is that everybody’s anti-sex. The Left is anti-sex, what with feminism and all. The Right is anti-sex, what with abstinence and all. The seafood industry is anti-sex, as research shows that people who get crabs in bed are less likely to order them in restaurants.

There are two basic types of sex: casual and causal. Religionists oppose the first; feminists oppose both.            

Thanks to feminism, we are flooded with laws that classify eye-contact as sexual harussment and charisma as date-rape. This is because the feminist forces that be are dominated by the likes of Andrea Dworkin, who believe that all hetero sex is rape. This wouldn’t be so bad, I guess, if they weren’t also against rape. But they are. So they’ve crusaded to outlaw all remnants of romance from society. It is no coincidence that among these contemporary feminists only one of them is a moderate, I mean in looks.  

Religious conservatives have had their own dismal crusades—some of them joint with the feminists in an alliance from Pagan hell—against pornography and sex on TV. The main difference is that the religionists are more culturally inclined. Whereas they would not mind to see “healthy” restrictions passed, the feminists approach legislation with a shrill passion exemplified by the veins of Howard Dean. In other words, because the Left is more political, the Right is the less dangerous choice in the voting booth, no matter how equally anti-sex the two sides may be.

(And if you think open-space laws are good for sex, forget all talks of how promiscuous everyone was in Soviet countries. They had no room to do anything in! When you’re getting joy on a park bench and you start getting that tingly sensation in your ass—it ain’t cause your girlfriend suddenly turned pro. It’s most likely a potato beetle or something.)      

But the more important question is: why? Why are we hog-tied in bondage to prudery with a Beltway?

Because we’ve forgotten what sex is. Namely, the fact that it’s the same as getting a job or buying a ream of paper, and not in the way that paper can be delightfully warm when fresh out of a Hewlett-Packard. I’m talking in the conceptual sense. All three are voluntary actions of mutual consent, to be uninhibited by outside parties. Problem is that, while most of you would realize this about sex, many don’t recognize it elsewhere.  

Politics is force. The good systems reserve it to protect rights; the bad ones allow it to violate rights. Once that distinct line is crossed, it dissipates in the dust. Principally speaking, there is no difference between minimum wages, price controls and sodomy law—they are each a form of forcing the preferences of one group on the voluntary relations of others. Support it in any realm, and you’ve effectively unzipped the barrier to get penalized in the penile realm.

Ergo such heinous contradictions as the fact that, when your lover fucks you in the ass, it’s called sodomy—yet when the government fucks you in the ass, it’s called “public service.”

This is the basic contradiction that must be corrected. Increasing the liberty of love means trimming the love-handles on our grotesquely out-of-shape body politic, obese from the continuous luau that is each session of Congress. Force needs to be restored to its proper function in the protection business, as defined by the good system of government, the original American system, the lasciviously laissez-faire Constitution.

Lascivious. I love that word.  

[This column first appeared in The Daily Nexus, UC Santa Barbara's daily paper.]
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