I fully confess to having an endless fascination with the sexual hang-ups and weirdnesses that seem to fuel the conservative movement, particularly the religious right. Erick Erickson's latest emission is particularly delightful in this regard, and feels, I have to say, like a weird form of projection. Erickson claims the mainstream media would be up in arms about the latest non-scandal that the right has cooked up---basically, that the HHS is tweaking the rollout of Obamacare, as if no bureaucracy has ever engaged in troubleshooting a policy in the history of bureaucracies before---but really, it's an opportunity for him to accuse journalists and liberals of being perverts who have sex fantasies, something he has heard about but no doubt swears he does not have.
He starts off slow:
But you journalists have such erections for everything Barack Obama does, you can’t even summon outrage to report fairly on the latest b.s. from the administration over Obamacare. Is it any wonder so many people have stopped trusting you?
But then really gets warmed up:
But now, you’d rather have cocktails (pun absolutely intended for a good portion of you “journalists”) with the President, jealously size up the competition in the First Lady, and wish you too could be a mistress when you see France’s President and whoever the gal of the week is for him.
Then he seems to have a moment of confusion about how sexual reproduction works:
But with President Obama, half of MSNBC still wants to have his baby and the women over there just want to be his mistress. Hell, France’s President has one.
Note how he treats, grammatically speaking, women who "want to be his mistress" as a separate category from those who want "to have his baby", presumably the same group that, up top, he claims "have such erections". Perhaps this is not his fault. Perhaps he got such poor abstinence-only education that he doesn't understand that the erection-having crowd and the baby-having crowd are, to be blunt, biologically separate categories. Though I suppose there are some forms of fantastical erotica that put both capacities in the body of the same person. But in the real world, regardless of your gender identification, if you have the junk that produces erections, you don't have the junk that makes babies. Though honestly, considering Erickson's relentless anger and fury at women for daring to think they are the ones who get to control what happens to uteruses, perhaps he is deeply bitter about this biological fact and wishes to "fix" it by forcing the government to give him the control over the uteruses that biology did not grant him.
C'est la vie, as members of the mistress-having nation would say, dear Erick. I, too, wish there was a way medical science could allow those who wish to have both a uterus with which to have babies by the President and a penis with which to get erect thinking about the President. But at this time, this is not physically possible. Maybe in our lifetimes. We can keep hoping!
All that said, I hate to bring it back down to earth, but I suspect that the reason that the press is largely uninterested in covering the relentless stream of non-scandals that the right wing media keeps churning out is not because of our sexual infatuation with our President in his mom jeans.
The likelier explanation is that, in order for the press to consider something a scandal, it should be scandalous. A breach of ethics, perhaps, or a travesty of justice? It also helps if there is actual evidence, something that tends to be thin on the ground when it comes to much of what the right considers a scandal.
But no matter! This non-scandal thing is not really the issue here. The real issue here is that Erickson is a living example of the dangers of sexual repression. Sexual repression is intended to keep people from thinking about sex all the time, but as we can see here, it actually ends up backfiring. Far from being free of most sexual thoughts, Erickson is clearly plagued by them all the time. The possibility that people could have non-sexual motivations for their choices baffles and eludes him. That people can think about the President without imagining him naked every single time is beyond his comprehension. He cannot help but inject sexual desire and motivations into everything he does, and so he assumes, incorrectly, that everyone else is similarly afflicted.
I cannot think of a better argument for the sexual liberation that Erickson routinely shits upon (in a non-sexual way) (or maybe not, he may jerk off to that, too). Far from people becoming the sexually obsessed hump machines of right wing imagination if they're allowed to feel good about their sexual desires and even, gasp, express them with other consenting adults, in the real world, being able to have what you want actually tends to, you know, satisfy you. People who actually get to have good sex don't sit around all damn day thinking of little else than all the other sex people are having and how angry it makes you that they are doing it. It's just common sense. People who haven't eaten in awhile also tend to get mean and obsessed with food. If they just ate something, they'd feel better and be able to devote more brain power to other things.
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