The Dictatorship of the Pervertariat

Has sexuality become a political act, a matter of party affiliation like voting Democrat or Republican, Working Man’s Party or Green, and getting into trouble like Arlen Spector when you switch horses midstream? If you have a particular sexual inclination, are you obligated to vote for it and become an activist advocating it on the part of a whole group of practitioners? It’s a great thing that we live in a more liberated age in which medical advances have proven that masturbation doesn’t lead to insanity. Yet in order to disabuse others of their primitive beliefs, are you obligated to make your sexuality into a collective experience? Must you walk around with a button that reads, “I like to jerk off”? In the socio-political arena, we have seen exactly this type of behavior. Victimhood replaces the awareness of inner conflict that needs to be understood and worked through. Rather than being presented with a complex set of conditions, we are asked to make a choice. You are either for or against. We who have suffered shame at the hands of those who believed that jerking off leads to madness now ask you to show your support for our rights by jerking off too! Better yet, we urge you to choose the jerking off way of life over the repressive, anachronistic, even colonialist idea of having sex with a partner. Naturally, there are important issues that need to be voted on, like gay marriage and the recent decision to extend hospital visitation rights to same-sex partners. But in the course of liberating ourselves from certain strictures, there appears to be a new kind of morality in which practices that were once considered to be perversions are turned into causes. Consensual adults should naturally be allowed to do whatever they like to each other, unless its causes serious harm. (Although the average marriage might not survive such criteria.) But must we all be card-carrying members of the Eulenspiegal Society?