For the record, I don’t care what John Edwards did with his dick. It’s none of my goddamned business. It’s none of anyone’s goddamned business except John Edwards, his family, and yet another not-so-cute mistress of a Democratic superstar. I don’t care if he lied to the public about it because it wasn’t our right to ask. If he’d been a moralizing conservative who had devoted most—or any—of his attention to restricting the sexual freedoms of other Americans (while secretly engaging in extramarital, homosexual, and/or prostitution-al sex), I would feel differently, but John Edwards has devoted his time and energy to the socioeconomic betterment of Americans’ lives. His private "failures" are none of our fucking business and we should be ashamed of ourselves for being so enthralled by this story. And if money changed hands to cover this up, the extortionists should be sent to jail and the media indicted as their co-conspirators.
I can barely fathom the spectacle of news organizations covering this as if it were the equivalent of forging documents, fabricating evidence, and lying to the American people into a cataclysmically mismanaged war. All the talk of disappointment and betrayal just sounds surreal to me. The guy did what a majority of married men have done since the dawn of time. He fucked another woman. When will this incredibly common storyline cease to shock people? When will Americans (as opposed to Europeans, for example) stop feigning moral indignation about something that everyone is doing? When will we develop a healthier, more honest attitude about sex—an attitude that is able to reconcile the pragmatic and emotional value of domestic commitment with the simple fact that men will never stop wanting and trying to fuck other women?
I know it’s going to be harder for the women reading this to understand this perspective, even though many of you are fucking around on us too. Sluts. What you don’t understand (because you were raised on bullshit fairy tales that paint a portrait of love that could only lead to disappointment) is that men view and experience sex in a fundamentally different way than you. For whatever reasons—biological, sociological, whatever—sex is nearly always an emotional experience for you. It can be an emotional experience for us, but it can also be, in the words of a great man, “the equivalent of eating an egg salad sandwich.” So while it may look to the outside world as though John Edwards has done something monumentally stupid, on the inside he simply couldn’t comprehend that anyone would really care, or that newspapers would put this in the same column as CHENEY’S OFFICE OUTS CIA OPERATIVE, or TENET ORDERED FORGED DOCUMENT, or BUSH AUTHORIZES ILLEGAL WIRETAPPING OF AMERICANS. After all, he wasn’t going to leave his wife and children—he was just going to fuck this broad seven ways from Sunday, wash up, and go home for dinner. Who cares?
I don’t really mean to get into a full-throated argument for sexual anarchy. I just wish we would turn our backs on this nonsense. Again, it’s one thing to expose moralists for their hypocritical indulgences (see: Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, Bill Bennett, David Vitter, et al). It’s another thing to dig into the life of a man who has already dealt privately with the people to whom he is responsible. We shouldn’t be asking these questions and we shouldn’t be listening to anyone else ask them for us. And we don’t need to respond, on cue, with the scripted shock, disappointment and outrage. It’s pathetic…really. Let the Republicans flaunt their alleged moral superiority from their respective brothels and airport restroom stalls while the rest of us focus on more important issues. Don’t validate their faux piety by pretending that this incident somehow invalidates the man’s life and work. Fuck them. If this is “the end of John Edwards’ public life,” it will be because we didn’t have the courage to say “Why the fuck would this be the end of John Edwards’ public life? What does this have to do with the issues John Edwards has devoted his life to? What do we care if he was getting a little ass on the side while he tried to alleviate suffering for millions of people around the world? Hell…what good is trying to alleviate suffering for millions of people around the world if you’re not going to get a little ass on the side?”
Comments