Did you know that comic book artists have their own legal defense fund? Did it ever occur to you that they would need one? Evidently they do. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund exists to protect the first amendment rights of comic artists. And they’ve been busy lately.
Scenario: Halloween in Georgia. Local businesses get together to give merchandise to kiddies as a special trick-or-treat activity. Small-town community spirit and all that. Comic store owner hands out graphic novels. One ended up in the pile that wasn’t supposed to be there. Gets into the hands of 6- and 9-year-old brothers. Father has bookstore owner Gordon Lee arrested. CBLDF to the rescue.
Was it S&M porn? No. It was a story about the birth of cubism. It depicted Picasso hanging out in Paris with the great artists, writers, and musicians of the day. It featured the works of these artists.
The graphic novel, written by Nick Bertozzi, is called The Salon. Nick is also helping with the costs of the hapless bookstore owner’s defense.
So what was it that shocked Daddy so much? A weewee. On a drawing of Picasso. Nevermind that the artists were on some magical absynthe-induced high that allowed them to go tripping through Gauguin’s paintings. Or that characters were telling each other to go fuck themselves. Or that there was some vampire with a taste for painters’ blood terrorizing Paris and decapitating its victims. That didn’t bother Daddy. What got to him was what he claims was a partial erection on a naked Picasso. (Do they teach physics in the Deep South? An object in motion and all that? Evidently not. I guess that’s why it never occurred to Daddy that the appendage might just be flopping around because the character was running. Like they do.)
Here’s some more obscenity, this time in Virginia: Kilmer Middle School has just instituted a rule that students are prohibited from physical contact of any kind. No hand-holding. No handshakes. Nothin’.
Home of the free? Can somebody please tell me how America is different from those countries where bands of angry men run around abusing and arresting women because stray hair has fallen out from under a scarf? Where police can issue a citation because a college woman is eating an ice cream cone too provocatively? Or harrassing young men because they have hair gel in their hair, which makes them look too “Western”?
You don’t even need Bush’s fascist, theocratic government. Your own fascist, God-crazed population is doing a bang-up job of policing morality. I’m beginning to think you actually prefer it that way.
Evidently, one can’t even buy sex toys in Georgia. A wee bit repressed? Peut-être.
Policing morality has always been a conspicuous feature of American society at large.
I recall visiting Key West, Florida, somewhere in the free and liberal 90’s. Lying on the beach at Fort Zachary Taylor we were checked on a regular interval by a state trooper to make sure no “indecent physical contact” occurred…
America at large has always been obsessed with sex (remember nipple-gate?), or more precise: obsessed with repressing it existence.
Like you pointed out, there is little difference between the ways millions of fundamentalist US Christians look at sex and the repression of sex in may Muslim countries.