Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Forward to the Past: the New Puritanism." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 35-37). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, April 1997
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
REPENT, ALL YE SINNERS. The age of neo-prudery is upon us and fire and brimstone await. The scarlet letter, that shameful badge of Adultery, has returned to berate us.
The media wallows these days in news of people "cheating" on their state-approved significant others. Dick Morris confesses, Bill Cosby apologizes, Madonna announces a turn to virtue, and talk show hosts and counselors moralize about betrayal and deceit, as if departure from monogamy is high treason.
Just why is adultery the number one Thou Shalt Not?
Here's a clue. Cheating is a financial term, and it can only be applied to sexual relationships if female and male bodies are seen as personal property — which, in this commodity-ruled patriarchy, they are, since paternity still dictates who inherits what. In today's climate of economic anxiety and blind narcissism, the noxious idea that people can own people (as in slavery) erupts like a beanstalk.
But crass reality must be dressed up if medieval mores are to sell. So here comes GOD to ordain fidelity to be Right and fornication (extracurricular) Wrong.
For the nonbelievers, pop culture takes over. Jealousy is not even depicted as mercenary or egomaniacal or super-possessive any more. It's currently noble. The good wife who uses any bloody means necessary to ward off interlopers, à la Fatal Attraction, is a movie cliché.
What's more, celibacy is the prescription du jour even for singles, especially females, teenagers, and the poor. The new welfare destruction bill allots not one penny for jobs, but provides millions to push abstinence!
The flight from the more relaxed practices of many people is part of a larger retrenchment. Renewed sexual conservatism is rooted in and nurtures the general regression. And nowhere is the backsliding more pronounced than in the mass movements of the '60s, which have all shape-shifted into their veritable opposites.
FOR INSTANCE. WHEN FEMINISTS first proclaimed "the personal is political," we hardly expected that the personal would replace the political, with tawdry gossip about officials' bedroom peccadilloes substituting for discussion of their policies and becoming the basis for measuring their "character"! Certainly, we condemn sex harassment, but truly consenting behavior is nobody else's business, and rarely reveals much about someone's integrity or worth.
Our point back then was that the oppression of women is not accidental or isolated, but a symptom of a universal second-class role that the whole dismal for-profit system depends on. This fact, however, has been stood on its head in the recent welfare laws, which blame individual women for broad social ills. And the National Organization for Women's top strata failed to robustly resist this monstrous "reform" because they support Bill Clinton, despite his treachery on the issues.
LIKEWISE, WHEN STREET QUEERS and drag queens revolted at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, the upsurge they set off prioritized sexual liberation as a matter of principle. They correctly identified homophobia as key to deification of the traditional family. But now the movement focuses on sexual self-policing and respectability mongering.
Gay pacesetters demand entrance into the heavenly domain of bourgeois wedded bliss, as gay couples plead they are straighter than straights — less inclined to "stray" or (gasp) divorce. Granted, the right of gays to marry is legitimate, but how foolish to elevate it to First Cause — and how ironic, at a time when old-school marriage is exiting the stage of history.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, for its part, started out fired up to abolish the color line and gain total integration — not assimilation, but access to every civic benefit.
Yet, after decades of backlash, the African American cause has largely subsided into cultural nationalism, which stresses differences with other races and with Jews rather than human similarities. It glamorizes separatism and unrealistically champions Black business as the solution to ghetto poverty. This ideology is disastrous, because when people of color remove themselves from their workingclass sisters and brothers, they remove an essential leadership sector from the common struggle of all the have-nots.
Nationalism, moreover, is infused inevitably with sexist baggage, relegating women to inferior status and outdoing the white establishment in condemning homosexuality.
All right, you've heard it from me before. Reform must grow into revolution or twist into reaction. It's an immutable law of nature — things go forward or backward. At the moment, society is headed cataclysmically in the wrong direction.
To a socialist, personal relations should be symbolized by openness, not a chastity belt. To a socialist, it's not the market that should be free but love.