Under the Obama Administration, The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has provided nearly $1 million in taxpayer funding since 2010 to “The Popular Romance Project,” an academic program to study the genre of popular romance fiction. This year, one of the Project’s contributors wrote the following:
“…self-confident women, comfortable with their sexuality, can legitimately enjoy naughty depictions of sex ranging from sweet to raunchy, and—these stories may even feature power differentials, domination-submission dynamics, and elements of violence, as long as these elements and stories are framed within a fully consensual relationship.
Such a sex-positive feminist perspective suggests there’s nothing wrong with the term porn, nor with considering aspects of the romance genre as porn. We can playfully, honorably, reclaim and redefine that term—as fat studies does with ‘fat,’ as queer studies does with ‘queer…’ Precisely because such writing and reading is still not considered entirely ‘ladylike,’ these acts can become feminist by opening up new space. ‘You go, sister!’ I cheer all the women reading their Shades [Fifty Shades of Grey]—or writing their own. In this sense, to say romance fiction is porn is to say it’s OK for women to be unashamed in their sexuality.”
This is an old and tired argument that was first made in relation to gay pornography way back in the early-1970s. “Boys in the Sand” (1971,) the first gay porn film to receive cross-over recognition, was even reviewed by the entertainment-bible “Variety” which gleefully heralded: “There are no more closets!” This film, and the others that followed, helped to reimagine the gay lifestyle to the general public as: free, healthy, and happy. Later, the dreaded toll would be taken: according to renowned gay journalist Gabriel Rotello, in his landmark work “Sexual Ecology - AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men,” “…gay men first developed their sexual expectations from porn films, where the most common plot is that partners meet, they have oral sex, and then they have anal sex.” By the end of the 1970s, “gay men accounted for 80 percent of the 70,000 cases of syphilis treated in San Francisco…so when the first announcement of the new immune deficiency syndrome [AIDS] were published in 1981, HIV had already infected 24 percent” of gay men in San Francisco.
Today, the biggest fiction seller of the year was the loathsome “Fifty Shades of Gray” which detailed the most intense and nauseating forms of sexual bondage and disciple; a genre of porn that was once exclusively relegated to the gay sub-culture and heterosexual men with a penchant for the gruesome. The formerly rather tame “Harlequin” romance dime-store novels and Barbara Cartland books have been transformed into a neo-feminist pornographic tableau. According to the Obama think-tank, its all just harmless fun; a tool for empowering women. But, like what took place in gay culture, it has essentially unleashed a form of sexual slavery: young girls, mimicking the onstage antics of current pop-stars, who feel in order to get noticed must pull down their underwear in front of every boy who pays them attention; the societal pressure to immunize children against sexually transmitted diseases; teen contraceptives and abortions; female infertility; and the curious rise in adolescent onset homosexuality. This all speaks of a culture saturated in selfish-sex, a confused populous, and an academic intelligentsia pushing an agenda that’s the worst sort of social engineering.