Take Your Shirt Off

Spring fever meets family values.

By Nicholas Santos, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth Free Press

I love late spring at Dartmouth. Everything is in bloom, games of outdoor pong abound and the skin-ful lay out on the Green for hours. Our town of Hanover becomes voluptuously warm just four weeks before most of us have to leave. Enjoy your damn summer, ‘07s.

Watch the kids at your favorite frat basement party, and you’ll notice the changes there too. Public displays of affection increase while the single ones sob into their beers a little harder. The next morning, a few lovely streakers will help distract you from that paper you’re writing for that Philosophy seminar. It’s the hormones, baby; it’s the hormones.

But don’t expect right-wingers to let you enjoy it. Those damn cons are trying to thwart me at every turn. The conservative pharmacists won’t sell us birth control because being able to access sensible, protected baby-free sex will encourage us to have more sex. The conservative medical “experts” are trying to put a stop to the HPV vaccine, a cure for one of the U.S.’s most widespread STDs, because disease-free sex will encourage us to have more sex. And now even the Dartmouth Beacon, a campus-based “compassionate conservative publication,” is telling me that porn is bad and addicting and demeans women and, yes, also because videos of sex will encourage us to have more sex.

Some say I’m paranoid, but they’ll see. Yes, indeed. Mississippi passed a law last July that allows pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that conflict with their ”conscience.” Many other states, including Arkansas and South Dakota, have similar such laws to protect the pharmacists’ right to ignore a girl’s right to healthcare. Screw the Hippocratic Oath. Wait, hold on, don’t ”screw” it, because sex is bad, and nonchalantly tossing around euphemisms about intercourse will encourage us to have more sex. So no more obscenities, I promise.

Joking aside, I can’t take my eyes off the Right. Just look at Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, who insists that it’s far more important to deprive Americans of a healthy sex life than to keep them alive. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex,” Maher told New Scientist magazine in an article about HPV, the STD epidemic that has infected half of all college-aged sexually active women. Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV. Yes, and never leaving your parents’ house for the rest of summer break is the best way to prevent skin cancer. And refraining from any sex at all is the best way to ensure the extinction of the human race. But I wouldn’t want to live in a world where people adhered to any of those suggestions, would you?

The Fires of Darkness, a website meant to help those who use “Satanic” pornography, founded by a minister who overcame his own porn addiction, makes the Christian Right’s approach to pornography pretty clear. Users who do not repent will be subject to a lifetime in the uncomfortably warm environs the title suggests. “Did you know,” it begins, “that pornography consumption can be mood altering and as addictive as narcotics, some studies have shown that pornography can have the same effect on your brain as cocaine.” Porn and narcotics and bears! Oh my!

This proves that we are not funding the sciences well enough in our schools, because conservatives just aren’t getting it. All they’ve learned is how to use big, intellectual-sounding words like “opioids” and “studies.” Last November, Jeffrey Satinover (a religious right Orthodox Jewish doctor who has crusaded for the “conversion” of gays to heterosexuality) stood before the Senate and with a straight face told them “Pornography really does … biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can’t do, in effect.”

Yes, you dolt, and by that reasoning the following also fall under the heading of addictive substances: your wife, my left hand, daydreaming after watching “Mean Girls,” and the shamefully self-gratifying comic strips of The Dartmouth Review. Certainly pornography can be problematic, but don’t let these jokers hide their shoddily-veiled spite for the First Amendment behind pseudo-science.

Let me put it this way, deferring here to Voltaire: “I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I do not agree with what you watch, you weirdos in the freshman dorms, but I will defend your honorable right to it.

In addition to the Right’s favorite scientific explanations for why sex should be approached with such hatred and trepidation, they also just love that term “family values.” I hate the term; it is totally nebulous. What do “family values” mean anyway? (Oedipus killed off his father, and he’s a hero of the classics.) Plus, family need not be framed as antithetical to a healthy sexual life. I’ll bet your family isn’t opposed to sex. I wouldn’t be shocked to find a stack of Hustlers only half-heartedly concealed under your father’s mattress or a few videos in your mother’s sock drawer. You parents may even have had sex all over your now empty house after they dropped you off at school at the beginning of the semester.

If conservatives actually cared about "family values," they’d be stumbling over themselves to get homosexuals into the wedding chapel. There’d be more couples to provide warm, loving, stable households for American children in need of homes. But alas, they’re just using "family values" as a euphemism and a cover-up.

Now, there are good, legitimate reasons to criticize porn. Bruce Gago Dartmouth ‘05 writes in his Dartmouth Beacon article "The Pain of Pornography": "The 10,000 hard-core titles released each year tend to focus on the man’s pleasure at the expense of women." He’s totally right, and this has to stop. We need to focus more on making porn that entertains female sexuality. Porn for social justice! That’s what we need. But letting a bunch of ass-backwards conservatives stigmatize sex, sexuality, and all pornography just pushes the issue into shameful back alleys, preventing honest conversation and jeopardizing our health.

Fortunately, spring on any college campus puts that stigma to shame. God Bless College!

Nicholas Santos, ‘06, is Executive Editor of the Dartmouth Free Press.