Eros in all its Forms

An interesting (at least to me) augmentation to Nate's post here. It relates to governmental hypocrisy regarding sex crimes and sexuality. A recent by Human Rights Watch, an international organization U.S. politicians love to discredit, shamed congress into passing a (toothless) policy of "ending" prison rapes back in 2003. They have not ended, of course. You can read HRW's report if you're stomach is strong enough. The present sex crime paranoia, rooted largely in a deep national fear of Eros, is causing all sorts of new laws to be written - and not the liberty-protecting type (as if that ever happens). Rape shield laws, seemingly benign and popular everywhere, deprive defendants of their Sixth Amendment right to a public trial. This right to a public trial needs to be eliminated, according to the chorus of prosecutors and legislators, because of the dire need to stop such awful crimes. This is an outright lie. None of these increasingly severe laws have much to do with keeping citizens safe, and even less to do with any genuine desire on the part of politicians to prevent sex crimes. Most government ineptitude isn't planned or deliberate. It's merely the function of being subject to the inherently immoral laws which guide coercive institutions. As Socrates says in the Apology: "In order to speak out about justice and live one cannot become a politician." But the exploitation of sex crime paranoia is, for the most part, a self-interested power grab. That forced sex is awful is obvious; this is precisely why governments have never ceased preying on our fear of them, and our readiness to demonize the offenders, so as to convince us to cede more power. It's obvious, even to the casual observer, that those in control have little concern with sex crimes. If so, they would at least try to stop them where they occur most often. The proof of this is simple. According to a number of reliable studies , more males are raped in U.S. prisons than women are raped in the general population. Yet the very same sexual assault laws so rigorously enforced on the outside are completely ignored when one ventures behind the razor wire. More than that, it's widely known that prison officials countenance the culture of rape, or even facilitate it by willfull ignorance, because raped inmates tend to be more subdued and docile. The increasingly oppressive laws the rest of us are subject to don't exist on the "inside", where most rapes in America actually occur, and where the state is in total control. Why is that, do you think? It's a national epidemic and an international embarrassment. Yet the same politicians who'd have us believe they abhor sex crimes do worse than nothing about the most brutal, incessant and easily preventable rapes of all - ones that occur on state property, in a controlled and manipulable environment. There's no excuse for it anymore. Politicians know about what's going on. We all do. None of us can watch Comedy Central for much more than an hour without being reminded of it. State officials make themselves complicit in a system of sexual intimidation and torture because, perversely, attempting to stop these crimes would make themselves seem weak on crime. If you're trying to win an election some rapes, it appears, aren't quite so bad as others. (I'll ignore, for the time being, the even more aggressive psycho-sexual policies that General Miller introduced to our foreign inmates at Guantanamo, and how he"Gitmoized" Abu Ghraib. If we're indifferent to the torture of our own sub-humans, our tissues are certainly going to stay dry for "the evil doers.") As it becomes more clear how many innocent and over-punished people are dropped into this type of prison system, it should also become more clear that those who already know what's happening and refuse to help should be held accountable.