Virtual Sex in the Real World

I'm told by people who listen to Howard Stern that he often says that ratings are all about the the lesbians. I've been asked several times if Second Life is "only about the sex." To this I reply, "And the Real World isn't?"

The obsessive focus on the imagined goings on with other people is part of our own projection, the latest example of this comes from the rumors that are running everywhere in the wingnutsphere that Hillar Clinton is having a lesbian affair with a beautiful female aid If this means anything, it probably means that the people writing about it are attracted to the aide in question, which is entirely understandable. It is even understandable that they project that desire on to other people. It's even understandable that they want to turn this into a sex rumor about a Presidential candidate that they abhor.

The obsession with Hillary's sexuality goes well back, by the time I followed politics at all, it was something that the hard core true believer kool-aid on IV drip types would bring up. In their view, any woman who is strong and confident must be a lesbian. It's a double projection. One is their own wish fantasy about what heterosexual women must be like: stupid, submissive with low self-esteem. I think this picture itself tells a great deal about the people who say such things, because that is their estimation of who would want to have sex with them. It's self-loathing turned into a sex narrative. The other form of projection going on here is the projection of how people in power treat sexually attractive women around them. They have sex with them.

Personally, I'm not big on Hillary Clinton. Personally, I don't care what her sexual habits are, so long as it goes on between consenting adults. This looks, to me, like an attempt to distract people's attention from the long train of homosexual men who are well placed in the Republican Party, including Senator Larry Craig, who is currently fighting to worm his way out of a guilty plea for having solicited gay sex. In a bathroom. At an international airport. From a police officer who is much younger. Not just solicit, but repeatedly pressed despite more than a few signs of non-interest. Right now in Washington a Republican State Representative has resigned after admitting to the police:

State Rep. Richard Curtis, R-La Center, admitted to having sex with a man he met at an adult video store in Spokane last week, according to a police report released Tuesday afternoon.

The police report offers a far different version of events from the brief account Curtis gave Monday to The Columbian, one that seems likely to threaten Curtis' political future.

The report is filled with graphic details of an encounter that began at a porn store on a Spokane Valley strip and concluded miles away in Curtis' room at the city's poshest hotel.

The "ewww" factor around people like former Rep. Foley and Senator Craig, combines with the relatively stolid relationships that several serving members of the Republican caucus are engaged in. Relationships that seem to be well known in their own districts, but some how are not reported in the press.

So there it is: the real world, like second life, is not just about sex, but about projections of virtual sex. Lacking the ability to be powerful, lacking the ability to go to bed with someone as attractive, they project both on to a Presidential candidate, and draw from this the conclusion that the media is sitting on a story. I'm told here and there that this rumor has ripped through what is now being called "the Village," meaning the tiny group of people who are inside the bubble of the beltway's echo chamber. The Village People have an obsession with sex scandal, obviously.

If anyone needs an example of how avatars are all over the place, here it is. All over the right wing blogs, people are logging in their minds to someone else's life, and doing what they wish they could do in the flesh.

I just have to ask the question: why does this matter? Well, it matters because many people seem to be politically bisexual: against gay sex when they raise their hand in the legislature, and all for it when they raise a different appendage elsewhere. Am I the only person who thinks that the government doesn't have any need to know about this sort of thing unless there is an actual crime involved? Am I the only person who believes that by making this kind of activity outlawed, it creates more incentive for murder, blackmail, lying to the police and the public and other forms of activity that come from guilt?

Can't we all just get it on?