RIESZ: The Sexual Devolution

I didn't believe in any form of reincarnation until last week when Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell blew up my newsfeed. Sarah Palin is pretty damn powerful.

According to the Wikipedia page on Buddhism, you can only come back as a caterpillar or dungbeetle or whatever after you've left your first body. But apparently, Sarah can inhabit two bodies at once. J.K. Rowling was onto something with this horcrux thing.

I didn't even care to learn anything about O'Donnell. It was just blind un-luck that I came across a video on YouTube of her '90s MTV anti-masturbation campaign. What made it doubly worse was the fact that the apple juice I was drinking promptly shot out my nose upon hearing her say: "Lust in your heart is committing adultery, so... you &- you can't masturbate without lust!"

It's like eating dinner with George Washington, realizing he said something completely racist and not being able to physically respond because you can't just update him on the last 250 years. Poor, poor '90s Christine: trapped in a world where grunge and angst dominated the MTV scene, just trying to make a difference in the lives of the poor, unfortunate souls she deigned to call her fellow Generation Xers.

I have a theory about people who try to tell other people not to have sex or self-medicate themselves, especially those people who actually go on national television to do so. They've been psychologically suppressed to the point where it's irreversible. There's a part of their brains that's just shut off, like the Westboro Baptist Church members who walk around with their picket signs wearing blank stares.

Christine O'Donnell's victory will give momentum to those who'd rather see a decline in college enrollment and a sharp population increase, i.e. Tea Partiers with a hatred for extramarital sex and abortion. I'd be pretty pissed if this idiocy swept the east coast and we lost the Planned Parenthood on Comm. Ave. Have we come this far to just let it all go to shambles? If it gets that bad in the next 10 years, we might as well just buy a ton of dinosaur blow-ups and start talking to each other in grunts.

My point isn't to convince you to vote Democrat (although that'd be cool), but to highlight the possibility that everything we've worked for in the last 50 years to make sex education accessible to high school and college students could blow up with the work of one or two extreme conservatives. This isn't a state run by the Puritans. Since the '60s, America has largely prided itself on being a nation where sex is discussed and possible negative side effects are beat into our heads. I thought realists were growing in power. I thought new-age parenting, in opposition to that of the '50s, was a growing trend. Scary to not know what's coming next: another sexual revolution? Or a sexual devolution?