Many Contingencies

(originally posted on MySpace on Thursday, July 26th, 2007)

I know that the local news is vile. I know this. Nothing should surprise me at this point, when it comes to the ridiculous inadequacies of the local news. Smacking my forehead in consternation is an inevitable consequence of allowing the spackle-coated morons to invade my consciousness.

 Here, background from Salem, OR’s Statesman Journal:‘Sex crimes prompt temporary closure of park west of Salem’ & ‘Holman Wayside park to close Thursday’

Apparently, letting the Oregon public know that this roadside park has been closed due to “sex crimes” is extremely important – it was one of KOIN’s stories tonight on the air (although their website offers nothing supplementary). Because sex crimes are important! They’re newsworthy! Any kind of sex crime, you don’t have to tell me what it is, but you’d best be telling me about it, because it’s a sex crime and that’s news I need to know.

Reporter Kohr Harlan – because he’s a thorough kind of guy, a journalist, don’t-ya-know (and with a first name like “Kohr” what the hell else would he be) – took a camera crew to the roadside park in question. Because, god knows, if ever there was a local news story worthy of a camera crew, the closure of a seedy park off Hwy 22 would have to be it.

Harlan then went so far as to rather breathlessly lead the camera into the men’s restroom, to show us the graffiti. And lo and behold there’s graffiti all over the place. (Which is shocking in and of itself, because graffiti is very shocking, what with all of the…vandalism. Which is what graffiti is, and which is bad. And shocking.) And, as Harlan pointed out to us, this particular graffiti spells out the who, when, where, and ‘how much’ of these, uh, sex crimes.

So, these “sex crimes*?” What are we dealing with here, exactly? Rape, incest, pedophilia, molestation? Sexual slavery? Harassment, solitication, prostitution? Well, I happen to know (because I am just that sort of sophisticated, cosmopolitan type of lady) that what goes on in roadside rest areas is gay sex. And lot’s of it. Now, Harlan mentions “illicit sex,” “rendezvous,” and “sex crimes,” and makes no mention of the women’s restroom – but does he actually go so far as to mention the gay sex? No. Harlan assumes we’re hip to the gay sex.

But then, Harlan assumes a whole hell of a lot. He assumes that the point of this whole prurient enterprise is clear. He assumes that no one will question this bizarre exploitative archaeology of a scene of criminalized sexual culture – “Step right up, step right up! Here is the now-empty parking lot where they used to park their Volkswagens! And those are the trees behind which they engaged in unspeakable things! And these are the bathroom stalls in which they fucked each others’ assholes! You saw it here first, folks!”

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Back in May, our local NBC affiliate KGW screened the faces of four community members from the Salem area, arrested in a sting operation for having consensual sex in the same park that has now been closed, Holman Wayside Park. The KGW website continues to provide access to the supplementary article with four mugshots of the arrested men. The four men in question? Two school teachers, one university professor, and a minister. The site has the story categorized under “Education.”

What kind of fucking insane, irresponsible nutjobs are running this news station? May I ask that question? Will you all forgive me for laying it down quite so inelegantly? The repercussions of this ‘journalistic’ choice on the lives of these men will be ongoing. The fact that two of these men were school teachers was implicitly invoked to suggest the classic stereotypical association of homosexuality with pedophilia. Where was the outcry in Oregon, in response to this bullshit on the part of the media? I didn’t see it, if it happened.

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The cover story of the most recent New York Times Magazine(7/22/2007) investigates (somewhat unsatisfactorily) “The Case of the Juvenile Sex Offender.” The Americanjustice system allows for the placement of eleven-year-olds on sex offender registries, and affiliated websites, because instances of their sex play fell outside what has been legislated as acceptable, “normative” sexual behavior for children.

Need I spell out the fact that the human sciences are far indeed from any sort of definitive picture of what normative sexual behavior for children is, and that the category of “children” is itself historically contingent?

Now I face a world in which I must somehow teach my children not only how to avoid being victimized, but also how to avoid being branded a victimizer. I must teach them, in short, that all touch is potentially dangerous. That their grasping for good-feeling connection with other bodies can be dangerous and wrong before they even have any embodied understanding of what such connection is.

I face the possibility that I will be required by forces beyond my control to teach my future children a bunch of visceral, emotional lessons about sex that aren’t in any way in line with what I feel and believe about sex. Sex and fear just shouldn’t go together, damnit! And now we’re building that connotation into the minds of our young straight out of the gate.

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Apparently, there were (until oh-so-very recently) nearly 30,000 identifiable “sex offenders” with MySpace pages. But MySpace has tracked down and deleted those offenders’ profiles. So now we are all safe. Whew! What a relief!

As we all know, it is possible to set up a MySpace profile with no personal information whatsoever. What were the strategies for tracking down and verifying that these profiles were in fact those of “sex offenders?” And what kind of “sex offenders” have now been eliminated from our community, anyway? Kids who felt up their cousins one time when they were eleven?

A related blogpost and comments at Salon’s Machinist were for the most part (last time I checked) comfortingly common-sensical on the subject of this recent flurry of public morality.

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What am I trying to say, and to whom? That’s a tricky proposition, no pun intended. When it comes to sex and society, the rat’s nest of legal, political, and moral filaments that have become entangled with law enforcement, social services, and most prominently the media (both new and old) make me profoundly nervous. A culture of fear and prurience, moral outrage and self-righteous paranoia has marked past years and promises to steadily encroach on future liberty.

*(Note that ORS 181.594 defines a sex crime as follows: ‘4) “Sex crime” means: (a) Rape in any degree; (b) Sodomy in any degree; (c) Unlawful sexual penetration in any degree; (d) Sexual abuse in any degree; (e) Incest with a child victim; (f) Using a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct; (g) Encouraging child sexual abuse in any degree; (h) Transporting child pornography into the state;(i) Paying for viewing a child’s sexually explicit conduct;(j) Compelling prostitution; (k) Promoting prostitution; (L) Kidnapping in the first degree if the victim was under 18 years of age; (m) Contributing to the sexual delinquency of a minor; (n) Sexual misconduct if the offender is at least 18 years of age; (o) Possession of materials depicting sexually explicit conduct of a child in the first degree; (p) Kidnapping in the second degree if the victim was under 18 years of age, except by a parent or by a person found to be within the jurisdiction of the juvenile court; (q) Any attempt to commit any of the crimes set forth in paragraphs (a) to (p) of this subsection; (r) Burglary, when committed with intent to commit any of the offenses listed in paragraphs (a) to (p) or (s) of this subsection; or (s) Public indecency or private indecency, if the person has a prior conviction for a crime listed in this subsection.’)