America Unzipped by Brian Alexander

Church spells it out…Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source.”
    Contraception, erotica, sex outside marriage—Harvey’s reasons for being in business—challenge this authority, and the authority of the state, too, because the family unit is the keystone of the state. “Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men’s baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities.”
    Richard Nixon put it another way. “If an attitude of permissiveness were to be adopted regarding pornography, this would contribute to an atmosphere condoning anarchy in every other field—and would increase the threat to our social order as well as to our moral principles.”
    Interpreting “natural law” to make it a bedrock of human behavior is a core effort of neoconservatism just as it is for the Catholic church and other religions. Adherence to natural law (nobody really seems able to prove it exists) ensures social stability. Defiance of it invites chaos.
    This is how Harvey explains the seeming contradiction that has sent me on the road, the question of how we can be an increasingly hypersexual culture even in the face of the supposed power of “moral values” crusades.
    â€œSo you have on one hand an increasing interest in sexual stimulation, whether it is pornography or vibrators and dildos, and on the other hand an increasing fear on the part of people who are really frightened by sex and their own sexuality who want to stop all that.”
    â€œDo you suppose,” I ask him, “that the increased fear makes for louder protests?” Since people who watch porn or buy sexual devices for use in their own sex lives don’t typically march with signs or petition the government, the field is left to those who oppose, no?
    â€œI think it is possible. It is true, certainly possible, that what you call hypersexual, the increasing sexual stuff in our culture, is related to this issue of the far right, that Paris Hilton washing a car makes people who are afraid of sex more determined and more afraid and therefore more vocal. That seems to be a reasonable hypothesis: More sexual content in American lives makes some people more afraid and determined and energetic.”
    Perhaps, I think, they see a great unzipping. We are unzipping ourselves from restrictions imposed by society or religion or family, and we let loose: with practically an infinite number of ways to express desire, we are dashing toward some indeterminate future looking for an equally indeterminate happiness. But is sex doing the unzipping, or is something else unzipping sex?
    I still can’t help wondering about the influence of salesmanship. Could it be that all this “permission giving” is really driving the sexual culture, that we want more sex in our lives because Harvey’s industry has sold us like Professor Harold Hill sold River City?
    He gets his back up at “the idea that corporate America is somehow creating consumer slaves. That’s nonsense.” I haven’t really suggested that corporate America is creating slaves to sex, necessarily, but I wonder if our sexual desires are anything like my own jones for a huge flat-screen TV with a Bose home-theater system even though I