Sex as Disaster: An Expose
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A “sex disaster industry” has emerged linking federal and local governments with fundamentalist morality groups whose goal it is to propagate fear about sex, to desexualize the social environment, and to divide the population into the sexually “normal” (us) and everyone else (them). All anti-sex crusaders routinely portray opinions as facts and employ linguistic legerdemain by pairing buzzwords to produce phrases like “sex and violence,” “unborn child,” “gay agenda,” “traditional values,” and “partial-birth abortion.” These self-appointed guardians of morality want nothing more than to limit sexual expression to their own sober standards; what’s more, they’re obsessed with the subject of sex, which they see everywhere in a world being polluted by the sex-crazed antics of the non-devout.

The author exposes the more than 4,000 crisis pregnancy centers for what they really are: anti-choice clinics that lure young, mostly poor women away from legitimate healthcare facilities and provide inaccurate and misleading information with scare tactics about supposed links between abortion and breast cancer, future infertility, and mental health. The federal government has already provided more than sixty million of our tax dollars for these and other deceitfully disguised anti-abortion operations. In like manner, the government under Bush will fund nothing but fear-and-shame-based abstinence-only sex education. In his dissection of this tragic travesty, Klein points out that this marriage imperative for sexual activity automatically excludes GLBT people, who can never legally marry in 49 U.S. states. Also, numerous peer-reviewed studies have demolished the argument that reality-based sex ed, as opposed to abstinence only, leads to more sexual activity among teens.

What our government labels as censorship in other countries it considers mere regulation and restriction here at home, with the stated purpose of keeping people safe from sex’s scary temptations. Not content with its stranglehold on the content of radio and TV, the FCC now focuses on the most pervasive communication tool in the history of the world—the Internet, the most challenging nemesis yet for our anti-sex soldiers. At least fifty million Americans spend upwards of twelve billion dollars annually on Internet pornography alone (which accounts for half of all online searches). Yet a vocal and determined minority of fear mongers wants to demonize, criminalize, and pathologize users of pornography because of its very subversive nature in revealing that we can empower ourselves sexually and challenge their view of sex. Porn normalizes sexual behavior and tells us that sex is not dangerous. The very idea of recreational sex is anathema to the religious righteous, who have targeted virtually all adult entertainment venues on the Web (and in the real world, too, for that matter).

If this book infuriates you as much as it did me, it will have achieved its goal. As Klein so forcefully reminds us, eternal vigilance is the price of all kinds of liberty, and especially that of sexual expression in a country still wrestling with its anti-sex traditions.
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Ben Akerley is the author of The X-Rated Bible: An Irreverent Survey of Sex in the Scriptures.