Demon Rum Strikes Again!
So I'm watching the news this morning, and there's a report on uber-good looking San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom going to rehab because he had an affair with the wife of one of his campaign aides...
And I'm thinking two things: 1) since when does having an affair get "cured" by rehab and 2)shouldn't we just start growing up when it comes to this kind of stuff?
Let's face it, with folks like Dr. Phil dictating the morals of this country, ideas about sexual morals only getting more narrow and more "pathological"--things like having affairs, which men have done for centuries, are now part of some sort of deep pathological problem that men need to be "cured" of....
and we wonder why we don't have more mature attitudes about sex. When every little sexual sneeze that's out of the missionary position gets one sent to rehab for "alcoholism," haven't we just crossed a line into a whole new level of unrealistic moralizing?
To use a phrase "shit happens"--men, and women, have affairs. Newsome's a good looking man, well-groomed, probably has a boatload of testosterone coursing thru that gorgeous body...criminey! I'd think lots of women, married or not, would love to have an affair with him...just looking at him, I can imagine how hard it would be to work along side him, or just to see him regularly, without thinking about wanting to have sex with him.
Oh, I can hear what y'all are saying: but he betrayed his friend by sleeping with his friend's wife!!
Well, maybe the henious act of betrayal of a friend's trust just wasn't on his mind. And maybe the reason it wasn't on his mind had nothing to do with a few martinis...
We are amazing hypocrites in this country. We still love characters like James Bond, who nail anyone with pulse and perky breasts, and porn is a multi-million dollar industry (with big connections to legitimate "family" businesses.) Yet we expect these sorts of things to NOT affect how we feel about sex. We're just supposed to go on with our lives, being laced-up puritans bonded to just one other person who's supposed to be the keeper of our sexual passions. We let pop culture pastors like Phil and Oprah (who, btw, isn't married nor in a relationship with a real man) dictate to us how we are supposed to live our lives.
Yes, I'm real happy that Phil has Robin, and their sex life is stupendous. And I'm happy that Oprah has whatever it is she has (food, maybe)--but why do we rely on other flawed human beings to set the baseline for judging the actions of others??
Perhaps we love living in a passive world, where we sit and watch others acting out what we truly want to do (i.e. porn) while we try to construct and maintain a level of morality that just isn't realistic (nor pathological.) Maybe the majority of people who are just cowards, who can't face the simple human fact that people cheat. And that it has nothing to do with disliking oneself, hating another, nor alcoholism nor drug addiction.
The reasons people have affairs are multi-layered and complicated. For many, they probably start with just too many hormones and inadequate partners. Maybe they start with partners who are neglectful, or that we're no longer attracted to--even it we still love him/her. Sex is sometimes separate from the friendship and bond we share with mates. Sex is, perhaps, far too complicated for us to put into a neat little proscribed box that, if we stray out of, we must be force back into with psychological re-education and psychotropic medications.
So, the Newsom case raises another concern--are we, perhaps, going to get to the point in this country where we start to medicate people so that their sex drives are tamped down enough so that they stay "faithful"? We can seem to shame people enough into changing, so why not medicate them?
Sending a guy to "outpatient" rehab for "alcoholism" because he had an affair seems to me like it could be the first step on a very slippery slope.
And I'm thinking two things: 1) since when does having an affair get "cured" by rehab and 2)shouldn't we just start growing up when it comes to this kind of stuff?
Let's face it, with folks like Dr. Phil dictating the morals of this country, ideas about sexual morals only getting more narrow and more "pathological"--things like having affairs, which men have done for centuries, are now part of some sort of deep pathological problem that men need to be "cured" of....
and we wonder why we don't have more mature attitudes about sex. When every little sexual sneeze that's out of the missionary position gets one sent to rehab for "alcoholism," haven't we just crossed a line into a whole new level of unrealistic moralizing?
To use a phrase "shit happens"--men, and women, have affairs. Newsome's a good looking man, well-groomed, probably has a boatload of testosterone coursing thru that gorgeous body...criminey! I'd think lots of women, married or not, would love to have an affair with him...just looking at him, I can imagine how hard it would be to work along side him, or just to see him regularly, without thinking about wanting to have sex with him.
Oh, I can hear what y'all are saying: but he betrayed his friend by sleeping with his friend's wife!!
Well, maybe the henious act of betrayal of a friend's trust just wasn't on his mind. And maybe the reason it wasn't on his mind had nothing to do with a few martinis...
We are amazing hypocrites in this country. We still love characters like James Bond, who nail anyone with pulse and perky breasts, and porn is a multi-million dollar industry (with big connections to legitimate "family" businesses.) Yet we expect these sorts of things to NOT affect how we feel about sex. We're just supposed to go on with our lives, being laced-up puritans bonded to just one other person who's supposed to be the keeper of our sexual passions. We let pop culture pastors like Phil and Oprah (who, btw, isn't married nor in a relationship with a real man) dictate to us how we are supposed to live our lives.
Yes, I'm real happy that Phil has Robin, and their sex life is stupendous. And I'm happy that Oprah has whatever it is she has (food, maybe)--but why do we rely on other flawed human beings to set the baseline for judging the actions of others??
Perhaps we love living in a passive world, where we sit and watch others acting out what we truly want to do (i.e. porn) while we try to construct and maintain a level of morality that just isn't realistic (nor pathological.) Maybe the majority of people who are just cowards, who can't face the simple human fact that people cheat. And that it has nothing to do with disliking oneself, hating another, nor alcoholism nor drug addiction.
The reasons people have affairs are multi-layered and complicated. For many, they probably start with just too many hormones and inadequate partners. Maybe they start with partners who are neglectful, or that we're no longer attracted to--even it we still love him/her. Sex is sometimes separate from the friendship and bond we share with mates. Sex is, perhaps, far too complicated for us to put into a neat little proscribed box that, if we stray out of, we must be force back into with psychological re-education and psychotropic medications.
So, the Newsom case raises another concern--are we, perhaps, going to get to the point in this country where we start to medicate people so that their sex drives are tamped down enough so that they stay "faithful"? We can seem to shame people enough into changing, so why not medicate them?
Sending a guy to "outpatient" rehab for "alcoholism" because he had an affair seems to me like it could be the first step on a very slippery slope.
posted by Tish Grier at 6:54 AM
2 Comments:
Personally, I think this rehab fad is just how public figures' publicists get them out of the spotlight for a month in the hopes that the scandal sheets will have moved on to something different by then.
oh, yeah...that's I'm sure, what's underneath it all...but in some sense, it sends a chilling message about how *everything* seems curable with rehab. Heck, even lots of alcoholics don't get cured with rehab.
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