Sex and Politics Turn Everyone Into Liars

Anthony Comstock

Perhaps no American has had a larger effect on public consciousness than Anthony Comstock; yet outside Poli-Sci circles, few remember him. A relative hero of the Civil War and an active community volunteer, he used his insider political connections to lobby for what became known as the Comstock Laws. These laws banned distribution of pornography, sex toys, or contraceptives through the US Mail.

Comstock crossed my mind, following last week’s Atlanta massage parlor murders. The Atlanta shooter, like Comstock, believed his sexual behaviors lay beyond his control: as journalist Eric Schlosser writes, Comstock blamed his lifelong compulsive masturbating on some older boys surprising him with pornography in his childhood. Both men treated their sexual impulses as a monstrous invasion, caused by other people.

Thinking about it, I realized: they’re not entirely wrong.

Sex has a unique capacity for undermining people’s dominant sociopolitical theories. Conservatives, who believe we’re all self-controlled individuals, are unnerved by sexuality’s pre-conscious manifestations, reducing us to animal drives. Progressives, who believe social context explains, or anyway colors, most human behavior, feel ill-at-ease with sexuality’s intensely individual nature. Sex, alone, contravenes many people’s curated sense of their own identity.

Anthony Comstock used his insider status to manipulate legislation to reflect his values. The Comstock Laws, passed between 1873 and 1909, forbade distribution of “obscenity,” but didn’t define obscenity. Therefore Anthony Comstock, deputized by the Postmaster General, used his discretion to functionally outlaw anything which offended him personally. This wound up including feminist pamphlets, anatomy textbooks, and slightly racy love letters.

The Atlanta shooter lacked Comstock’s connections. Therefore he used a firearm to seek and destroy what offended him: non-White women working in physically intimate trades. (Reportedly, the massage parlors he targeted were only massage parlors.) His desire matched Comstock’s, though: stop anything which triggered his pre-conscious libido. He believed he couldn’t control himself, so he used force to control others instead.

Jacques Ellul

Christian Anarchist writer Jacques Ellul wrote, early in his career, that many people try to write their values into law, not to make society good, but to make themselves good. If law and society have values written into them, people don’t have to choose between right and wrong. Bad choices simply don’t exist, because they’re illegal. They don’t want to control everyone else’s morality; they want everyone else to control theirs.

How’s that working, Mr. Ness?

That pretty concisely explains both Anthony Comstock and the Atlanta shooter. They share a conservative ideology that all human behavior is individualistic, and bad behavior arises from bad character. Yet they acknowledge their libidos are pre-conscious, separate from their rational, moral beings. This creates an irreconcilable contradiction within themselves. Rather than address their inner spirituality, they preferred to destroy temptation at its perceived source.

Human sexuality is complex. It’s often conditioned by outside forces, as evidenced by today’s barrage of libidinous images in advertising, entertainment, and porn. But it’s experienced entirely internally. This contradiction makes it difficult to slot into any one-size-fits-all social or political theory. Witness the Leftist internet scolds last week, the kind who believe in institutional racism and injustice, rushing to blame the Atlanta shooter individually.

Essentially, ready-made answers collapse when sexuality enters the discussion. Giving into one’s libido produces the kind of dissolute, self-indulgent human wreck that both the Left and Right hastily reject. Resisting libido requires purging sexuality from either oneself or the world, forms of violence that equally offend secular powers. Spiritual practices which sometimes bring libido under control, are difficult, frumpy, and unremunerative for the capitalist class.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t encourage acquiescing. Today’s society teems with sexual imagery and libidinous stimulation, even in cheeseburger ads, because they encourage a preconscious system that reduces human beings to mere automatons. People who sell sex, at least on an industrial capitalist scale, don’t have your best interests in mind; by encouraging you to think with your gonads, they reduce you to your lowest self, because it pays well.

Both Anthony Comstock and the Atlanta shooter recognized this. But rather than addressing how sexuality influenced them, and coming to grips with the spiritual struggle which our animal appetites create in everyone, they sought to create, by force, a utopian society where they’d never have to face themselves. They wanted to destroy their own libidos, but turned their inherent violence onto others, with disastrous effect.

Institutions, laws, and guns cannot protect our virtue. Only peace, patience, and self-control—what Christians call the Fruits of the Spirit—can do that. Achieving those is long, difficult, and, ahem, unsexy.