Bacchus

Sunni: Why do you regret them? Because of the comments and email you get?

Bacchus: Well, because of the effect the comments have on the tone of my blog, I guess. I've told you that talking about politics is revolting to me, like talking about bowel parasites. So it's dismaying that whenever I make a post that has the most peripheral political overtones, my readers see it as a grand invitation to create a huge comment thread that's pure political rhetoric. They want to take their bowel parasites out, hold them up, admire them, talk about whose is biggest, talk about how they taste when you lick 'em and what it feels like to have 'em wriggling inside you, speculate about whose parasites would live longest in a dead cow, that sort of thing. Everybody loves to talk about their parasites, and it's just fundamentally gross to me. I know I'm stretching my metaphor, but it really is dismaying. I can say, "The government pissed me off today" and somebody else will say, "Yeah, we need to get rid of Bush" and somebody else will say, "Yeah, I can't wait for Hillary to kick his ass", and before you know it there's a hundred posts about the 2008 political campaign and how wonderful it will be when the big Savior Parasite finally gets a chance to kick some bowels. It never has anything to do with the topic of my post, it's always far more contentious and uncivil than I am willing to allow in my comments, and it's just a huge, unwelcome, stinking mess that I have to delete so that new readers will find a sex blog instead of a bad political blog with a dash of sex in it.

Sunni: Wow, I didn't think I'd ever meet someone who thinks of electoral politics in more disgusting terms than I do. You've got me beat, not to mention grossed out, and that's hard to do. So, let's move to something more pleasant: sex. When did sex become something that only liberals enjoy? Or is it that folks of that political persuasion are just more comfortable kissing and telling?

Bacchus: I think it's a given that everybody likes sex, and that includes the folks who are hell-bent to outlaw or socially condemn every sort of sex but fully-dressed, missionary-position, in-the-dark, for-making-babies-only, no-orgasm-for-the-wife-unless-it-happens-accidentally variety. They are trying to suppress it for other reasons -- guilt? fear? self-hatred? lust for power? -- but not because they don't like doing it. Nobody gets that exercised against something they merely fail to enjoy, or where's the American Anti-Broccoli Coalition?

Sunni: [laughs]

Bacchus: No, the correlation between politics and being sex-positive is a lot more complicated, and I can't claim to understand it all. Look, by definition everybody who's not an anarchist thinks governments should have a role in telling you what to do somewhere in your life. Most of my readers want the government out of their bedroom and out of their expressive life, sure. And they may assume I'm a "liberal" because I'm a free speech absolutist, radically sex-positive, and so forth. But your typical "liberal" who is a fellow traveler with me on sex and free speech issues might still turn out to think -- as Democrats often do -- that it's perfectly okay to have government goons with guns running around robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. And they usually think it's perfectly okay to further constrain the already-limited choices of poor women "for their own good" or "to prevent exploitation" by regulating or prohibiting participation in various sex work trades. I despise that sort of arrogant urge to control other people at gunpoint -- and, as you know, every law boils down to a command that's enforced at gunpoint.