The Great American Sex Panic of 2017

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/22/the-great-american-sex-panic-of-2017/
Date Written:  2017-11-24
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21770

What interest of sanity or reason is served by this reckless lumping together of flicks of the tongue and forcible rapes into the single broad-brush term “sexual misconduct,” as though there is no important difference between an oafish pat or crude remark at an office party and a gang rape?

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

But voices of sanity such as Beard’s and Crilly’s may be fighting a noble but lost cause against the PC cultural vigilantes, clamoring for the blood of the next prominent stumbler into errant sexual expression, in the lecture hall or office or rehearsal hall or bar. But if we may be allowed to descend from the High Courts of Sexual Inquisition to the land of the living—that is, the merely fallible, sex-tormented mortals who actually make up the human race—who hasn’t lived through anguished or comical moments, either as predator or prey or both at once, in the throes of the temporary madness of desire? And did such impulsive leaps of lust or passion strike anyone as a cause for ritual mass tongue-lashing and tongue-clucking and compulsive daily confessionals and public media crucifixions in the BW era, except perhaps among the most severe of anti-sex feminists like Andrea Dworkin, who considered every heterosexual act of intercourse to be a form of rape? Did anyone but reactionary blue-noses think about suppressing or avoiding the works of Henry Miller? Or D. H Lawrence? Or even Al Goldstein? Yet now even Shakespeare finds himself on the PC Index.