The “Free for All” page of the Saturday Washington Post
has become mainly a forum for the politically correct to complain
that their exquisite sensitivities have been rudely violated by
some Post reporter or editor who has failed, say, to
include the pronouns appropriate to both sexes or who has
made the mistake of mentioning a woman’s appearance. Last Saturday,
one Bill Crews of Washington wrote to remind us that, as he put it, “Not
Everyone Is Straight”:
A certain strain of heterosexism — a belief that
everyone is or ought to be heterosexual — was alive and well in
“Let’s Talk About Sex,” on the March 27 In the Loop page. “Every
last one” of the male interns in Congress “will probably be” at an
appearance by “Grey’s Anatomy” TV star Kate Walsh, reporters Mary
Ann Akers and Paul Kane wrote. They seemed to totally discount that
there are gay male interns who might not be all that interested in
Walsh. Maybe they’d be more interested in her co-stars, Eric Dane
and Justin Chambers. Maybe some lesbian interns would want to see
Walsh. Your literary device demeaned and discounted gay men and
lesbians and contributed to the social stigma placed on them. It
had no place in The Post.
Imagine! It is now to be thought demeaning to a young person if it
is assumed that he (or she!) might leer at one sex rather than the
other. Equal opportunity ogling! What is wrong with this picture?
What happened to the official culture’s stern insistence that it is
wrong and shameful to ogle anyone? Oh, right. I forgot. There is no
more official culture. Or rather, the formerly unofficial culture
that once had to hide away in corners and feel ashamed about
yielding to unbridled appetite has now become the official culture.
Like Mr. Crews, it’s out and it’s proud — which is what produces
such new problems as that of, say, the gay scout. When I was a
scout, it was pretty generally understood that the promise to be
“clean” somehow included the promise not to engage in sex of
any kind, gay or straight. Not that we had much choice in
the matter anyway. But now his sexual feelings, gay or straight,
are thought to be an essential part of even quite a young child’s
identity.
Of course the “repression” of such feelings by the official
culture took place in the context of a sexual ideal — sex confined
to marriage — that, to put it diplomatically, wasn’t always lived
up to. But that’s the point of having an official culture of the
old type. It told you what the social expectations were even if it
allowed for the possibility that those expectations would not be
met. It’s this expectation which we have lost — and, with it, a
mercifully fallow sexual period in which maturity and socialization
can work on the youthful spirit in a way they no longer can.
Coincidentally, in the same day’s Post there appeared a sad story about an eighth-grader from
California who was killed because he was gay. Or at least he
thought he was gay. Encouraged by the official-unofficial culture
to explore his “sexual identity” at an age when, not so long ago,
most kids knew or cared little about such identities, he had
decided not only that he was gay but that being gay meant that
“with his school uniform [he] wore purple eye shadow, nail polish
and pink lipstick. In the weeks before he died, he added purple
boots with three-inch heels.”
What, I wonder, was left of the “uniform”? Pretty obviously the
boy, Lawrence, “Larry,” King had been indulged by his teachers and
parents in this conceit of himself as an outrageously camp figure,
and this indulgence naturally encouraged him to make it known that
he wished to declare as his “valentine” the classmate who
subsequently shot him as a result. “Homophobia,” of course, is
responsible, but homophobia is the product not just of irrational
hatred but also of the kind of immaturity that is hardly surprising
in eighth graders. Now one boy’s life is over and another’s is
ruined because responsible adults in our culture have decided that
experimentation with “sexual identity” is perfectly appropriate
even for eighth-graders.
Thus, the Post blandly assures us that, “reassured by
changing pop culture and easy access to information on the
Internet, the age of sexual identification has dropped over the
last few decades to the early teens and as young as 10, experts
say” — as if this process were a social force as inscrutable and
inevitable as homophobia itself. But are we quite certain that an
official culture that had the confidence to reassert itself and set
its face against the sexualization of childhood could have no
effect, even against pop culture and the Internet? Or, to put it
another way, are not pop culture and the Internet themselves in
part the products of the official culture’s abdication of its
responsibility to give moral leadership to society?
