Steve Skojec

I’ve heard for years that when it comes to the international sex-slave trade, America is among the top (if not THE top) consumers. My assumption has always been, without digging deeply into it, that young women who have been made slaves in other countries are brought here and forced into prostitution.

What I never, ever expected to read about was this:

A typical 16-year-old in a middle-class home in suburban Pensacola, Fla., Newell’s nightmare began innocently enough: A new friend she had met in high school asked her to come to her home for a sleepover.

Newell’s mother, Lisa Brant, didn’t like the idea, but after weeks of lobbying by her daughter, Brant met with the girl and the man she said was her father to make sure her daughter would be safe.

But the girl’s “father” was really a convicted felon, and the girl, who had a record of prostitution in Texas, was an accomplice in the abduction. “Her dad took us to this house and said he’d be right back and he left us there,” Newell recounted in a taped interview. “And I asked for some water because I was thirsty. And I drank the water and I blacked out.”

The water had been laced with a drug. When she woke up, Newell was groggy and couldn’t move.

“My legs were being held down, and the guy that was raping me was holding my hands back,” she said in a quiet voice. “I kept screaming, ‘Stop, please don’t do this. Leave me alone.’  But I was so weak, I couldn’t fight them off. Like I was, I was so really out of it.  And I blacked out a few times and I kept coming back to. And I was still being raped every time I woke up.”

Left alone for a moment, Newell managed to call her mother.

“My cell phone rang. And all I heard was, ‘Mommy, help me,’ ” Brant said. “And the phone went dead. And I freaked!”

She called police, but they told her that Newell had probably run away from home, and they wouldn’t be able to treat it as a missing-person case until 72 hours had elapsed.

“He was like, ‘Oh, well, you know, there’s nothing I can do. You know teenagers,’ ” Brant said.

This is insane - both the way it happened and the response of law enforcement. Considering how seriously police take it when you’re going 12 miles an hour over the speed limit, you’d think that in an instance like this a parent could get more than what amounts to an outright admission of disinterest.

This shouldn’t be happening in our country. Abortion, porn, sex slavery - when does it end? It’s barbaric.

And the sad thing is, this is still probably a better, safer, more moral place to live than just about anywhere else.

Newsweek finally discovers what social conservatives have been ranting about for decades.

The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had begged him for a Bratz doll—clad in spike heels, fishnets and miniskirt, enormous puppy-dog eyes protruding from her oversized head. Her sexy look seemed a little too sexy for a preschooler, so he and his wife bought her a different doll, which she was happy with. Except that a few months later, Bratz came out with Bratz Babyz. “If Bratz had looked like Barbie hookers, these looked like baby hookers,” Scott says. Again, he convinced his daughter that My Little Pony was just as cool—and for a moment, the conversation ended. Until, of course, the Bratz came out with Bratz Ponyz. And then, says Scott, an English professor at a small college in Georgia, “I realized porn culture and I were in a death match for my daughter’s soul.”

In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.

Thanks to those of you who have commented on the post I put up this morning.

Now it’s my turn to address this. This post is a bit long, and some of the things I’m linking to are difficult to read, but I think the argument needs to be made. There are simply too many people out there who don’t get it, as exemplified by the commenter last night.

(The commenter’s responses are in bold italics):

Any proof that pornography and prostitution leads ipso facto to the attendant miseries you describe here?

Yeah. There’s proof.

It’s a big topic of discussion among researchers. A 2007 report from the American Psychological Association compiled the findings of myriad studies, showing that the sexualization of young women and girls, in particular, can hurt them in many ways. Problems can include anything from low self-esteem and eating disorders to depression and anxiety.

Simon, the California therapist, has seen those symptoms in several of his young female patients.

While boys tend to seek out porn for their own sexual pleasure, he sees a sexual disconnect with girls who exhibit provocative behavior they’re not ready for - from undressing online to performing oral sex on boys.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with their sexual pleasure,” says Simon. “It has to do with pleasing somebody else - the grasping for attention.

“As a parent, it makes me want to cry.”

Even self-described “progressives” who want to encourage sexual expression find porn damaging:

In my interviews, it was painful to hear how both teenage boys and girls feel pressured to have lots of sex, often emotionally detached, at a younger and younger age; and how so many young women feel obligated to please men sexually because they believed that it was their role as a woman. A 20-year-old female college student thought back to her teen years and said that often she felt that her body was not hers but was for others to look at and gain pleasure from.

It is also alarming that many young men and boys have watched a lot of pornography before they have opportunities for sexual intimacy. Some developed a fear of women when they found that real women’s bodies were not as smooth and shaven and that real sex was nothing like the sex depicted in pornography. It is clear that pornography not only hurts women but also hurts men on many different levels.

The fact is that the entire purpose of pornography is to objectify persons (for financial gain) so that the audience can indulge fantasy through detatched sexual gratification. There is no actual intimacy or love involved in any aspect of the relationship depicted or viewed, and this creates an unhealthy psychological approach to sexuality in general that is damaging to specific, real relationships.

Further, a primary theme in pornography is the idea of power over and humiliation of women. Aside from the fact that these women are allowing themselves to be used and depicted as mere objects of pleasure, there is also an additional level of actual abuse and humiliation that they endure for the purposes of depicting whatever fantasy is being sold. What is happening on-screen is not “acting” - it is real, and as such the fantasies being depicted involve real abuse, humiliation, and degredation of the women on screen.

I was looking for some statistics, and found an article dealing with research one woman conducted into “mainstream” pornography, avoiding the fringe elements involving overt masochism, violence, etc.

To be frank, I couldn’t even read her description of the sort of content she found. I find it revolting. This is not because of prudishness on my part, or repressive sexual morality. I have a beautiful wife and three children. I understand sex within the context of marital love, and it isn’t the caricature of “the necessary evil” spouses must sully themselves with simply to create more children according to the whims of their medieval god-construct.

It is sacred, it is inter-personal, and it is private. There is no sin in enjoying sexual intimacy with one’s spouse. It is a legitimate good designed by a benevolent Creator that in the context of a sacramental marriage is in and of itself a sacramental act. As an act of spousal love, it renews the marriage covenant, brings unity to the spouses, and above all - is so powerful an expression of love that it has the potential to create new life with all of the responsibilities, joys, and sorrows that may bring. To put it bluntly, those who view sex as casual or recreational don’t take sex seriously at all. Contrary to the opinion of many, we Christians are not guilty of despising sex - we merely recognize its profound nature and consequences and revere it accordingly.

For anyone to be able to watch something that is meant to be so private without a sense of shame, there has to be a strong desensitizing force at work. Even among people without religious convictions, couples instinctively keep their sexual intimacy hidden from their children and friends, parents instinctively try to keep their children from being exposed unnecessarily to overt sexual acts in media, and no one wants to see their mother, daughter or sister being used sexually, particularly in a public way.

The desire for sexual intimacy to be private is arguably as instinctive as the desire for sexual intimacy itself, though that instinct can - like any instinct - be suppressed.

I think it’s equally as plausible that overly repressive morality leads to the shame these women feel, which in turn leads to the drugs and self-destruction.

I’d like to return your question: Any proof that overly repressive morality leads ipso facto to the attendant miseries I described here?

You could say the same thing about the drug war - the artificial, man-made costs of drug use are held up as inevitable outcomes of doing drugs, when in fact they are a product not of drugs but of the drug war itself.

Which outcomes are you speaking of? Many of the “costs of drug use” that come from chemical dependency on highly toxic substances are in no way man-made.

There are strong libertarian arguments to be made that the “war on drugs” creates more problems than it solves, but what it does not do is change the dependency caused by or danger of many of the drugs that are outlawed.

I’ve never been able to understand why people view pornography as, in and of itself, immoral.

I’ve never been able to understand why people view pornography as, in and of itself, harmless. Again, people are used as objects of gratification, things that should be kept private are exploited, the intimacy and love that should be the proper context of the sexual act are destroyed, and the act itself is divorced entirely from its procreative powers.

There is - I’ll use the word again - an instinctive revulsion that people should feel when confronted with porn for the first time. I’ll never forget my eighth-grade year, where I was exposed to it on a nearly daily basis. One student, who would raid his father’s stash of magazines, would bring them to school for all of us boys to gawk at. These weren’t just the relatively tame depictions of glamorized nudity in Playboy - they were graphic, explicit depictions of sexual acts.

I had a basic sense that what I was looking at was not in concord with my religious beliefs, but I felt no overarching moral impetus not to look. (At that time, my conscience was not particularly well-formed, and years of public school were working against the religious sensibility I got at home.) What I did feel, however, was a simultaneous attraction and disgust to what I was seeing - attraction because the beauty of the female body and the allure of sex are universal to males; disgust because something inside me knew that what I was seeing was abnormal and obscene. I was not witnessing people making love - I was observing grotesque depictions of exaggerated, stylized sex. It was a perverse abstraction rather than a beautiful reality.

After some time exposed to this, I began to feel that something about it was very wrong. Soon, I found that the images I so eagerly giggled over began haunting me when I least wanted to see them. I swore to myself during one particularly uncomfortable episode where an image I desperately wanted out of my head would not go away that I was done looking at the stuff for good. I’ve never gone back. It wasn’t hard to keep the promise - the sight of it truly disturbs me.

And yet I still have just as much natural attraction to the sight of beautiful women as the next guy. Maybe even more. I believe that the female body is the most breathtaking thing on earth. In my case, It’s not lack of appetite, it’s recognition of what’s healthy to feed that appetite with and what isn’t.

You talk about the commodification of sex…are tall people “commodified” when they get picked first in a pickup basketball game? Or when they’re asked to reach the top shelf to get a can of Spaghettios by that old lady in the Giant? Of course not.

Capitalism demands the commodification of everything. So while LeBron James gets paid big bucks because he’s tall, can run fast, and shoot a basketball, Jenna Jameson gets paid the same big bucks for looking good naked. The very subject of porn might produce a visceral reaction from some but logically the two jobs are the same - both are rewarded for in-demand traits they were either born with or developed (or surgically received, in both cases).

This analogy doesn’t work. A beautiful woman could be legitimately paid to be a model. In that case, she’s paid for being beautiful and allowing herself to be photographed. She could do the same as an actress, but again, she’s being paid to act.

The minute she begins to be paid for sex, however - whether it’s prostitution or porn and regardless of whether she “looks good” doing it - she is doing something else entirely. She is allowing herself to be used, violated in fact, for financial gain. Would she be equally justified in allowing someone to break her bones for money? How about cutting or maiming or organ harvesting? These things would all hurt her, but because sex typically does more emotional than physical damage, people don’t equate it with other forms of voluntary abuse.

When it comes to the question of talent or beauty, of people being paid because they are tall or beautiful, it’s not hard to realize why these things are different than being paid for sex (even if the people being paid for sex are tall or beautiful).  This is the reason why rape is a crime and simply staring at a beautiful woman is not. That someone is visually appealing may be good cause to admire their beauty. It is not, however, a good reason to use them as an object of sexual pleasure, even if they are willing to allow you to do so in exchange for payment. There are a lot of things people will do for money that aren’t good for them. The free market isn’t god. It doesn’t take much imagination to recognize what monstrous consequences would come from allowing unfettered capitalism to dictate what is right and what is wrong.

I guess you’re drawing a red line around sexuality, and I suppose that’s your right. But no mere force of will will ever stop the world’s oldest profession.

I am. I am drawing a red line around commodified sexuality. I also draw it around slavery. Don’t you? It was legal, after all, to have slaves. And it was the mere force of will - of many, not simply a few - that put an end to that, as well.

America still has a big stake in the global slave trade - but most of them are made to be prostitutes or to perform some other sort of sexual slavery. Do you honestly believe that pornography does not contribute to this trade? That the commodification of women as objects of gratification depicted in porn does not contribute to their capture and sale as slaves to perform the role of object of gratification?

Well I’ve got news for you - it does, and the U.S. is again at the heart of the problem:

Certainly poverty plays a critical role in motivating poor girls and women to seek employment in far away places, as well as generating a market for the sale of women to brothels. But what is driving the increase in demand for illicit sex?

In an article in the Journal of Sexual Aggression, Hughes said, “In the last three decades, prostitution and pornography have become increasingly tolerated, normalized and legitimized, resulting in expansion of sex industries all over the world.”

This tolerance, she said, has “increased men’s demand for women and girls to be used as sexual entertainment or acts of violence. The demand is met by increased recruitment of women and girls into the sex industry, usually by violence, deception or exploitation of those made vulnerable by poverty, unemployment and prior victimization.”

The Internet has made pornography ubiquitous, and Hughes said this new forum has “provided pornographers access to a global audience with almost no restrictions or regulations. It provided men, who are usually secretive about their exploitation of women and children, with easy, private access to unlimited amounts of pornography.”

The country that comes in for the lion’s share of the blame is the United States. Hughes said, “The U.S. is the country mainly responsible for the industrialization of pornography and prostitution, either in the U.S. or in prostitution centers created by the demand from U.S. military personnel. The U.S. is also the home of the Internet pornography industry.”

For example, Hughes said that, according to one study, 70% of the customers for live sex shows on the Internet are in the U.S.

People are not animals to be bought and sold, and neither is their sexuality. Our sexuality is an integral part of our dignity as human persons. The inability for some to be able to recognize this is frightening, and as long as our culture continues to “normalize” and indulge these degradations, the problem is only going to get worse.

On yesterday’s post about pornography and the family a commenter writes:

Any proof that pornography and prostitution leads ipso facto to the attendant miseries you describe here? I think it’s equally as plausible that overly repressive morality leads to the shame these women feel, which in turn leads to the drugs and self-destruction. You could say the same thing about the drug war - the artificial, man-made costs of drug use are held up as inevitable outcomes of doing drugs, when in fact they are a product not of drugs but of the drug war itself.

I’ve never been able to understand why people view pornography as, in and of itself, immoral. You talk about the commodification of sex…are tall people “commodified” when they get picked first in a pickup basketball game? Or when they’re asked to reach the top shelf to get a can of Spaghettios by that old lady in the Giant? Of course not.

Capitalism demands the commodification of everything. So while LeBron James gets paid big bucks because he’s tall, can run fast, and shoot a basketball, Jenna Jameson gets paid the same big bucks for looking good naked. The very subject of porn might produce a visceral reaction from some but logically the two jobs are the same - both are rewarded for in-demand traits they were either born with or developed (or surgically received, in both cases).

I guess you’re drawing a red line around sexuality, and I suppose that’s your right. But no mere force of will will ever stop the world’s oldest profession.

I’m on my way out the door so I won’t have time to get to this before work. If any of you would like to take a crack at answering in the comments before then, be my guest.

I read an article during lunch about the experience of a man who discovered that his long-absent sister had become a part of the porn industry. The story is heartbreaking, a chronicle of abuse, alienation and later addiction. But what is most illuminating about it is the sense of shame that permeates the depiction, most strongly in the author’s emotions and those demonstrated by the sister in question.

The article is in Marie Claire (no, I don’t read it regularly, it was linked on a social bookmarking site) and makes no reference at all to religion. But the sense that what was happening was wrong, and how it impacted the brother - who found his sister’s secret when looking through a porn magazine in the first place - is significant. It’s the connection that men who tend to look at women as objects need to make - that they are someone’s sister, mother or daughter. Describing the awkwardness of his sister’s attendance at his wedding, the writer relates:

Toward the end of the night, we danced. She seemed surprised when I came to her table and took her hand and led her onto the floor. The DJ was playing a slow song by Otis Redding. As I held my arm around her waist, I could feel her shaking. Then she started to cry.

“What’s wrong?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Look at me,” I said.

She looked at me, and for a moment it seemed like she thought I might actually have the answer, the words that would make everything right.

When my sister and I were kids, we played a game we called “Make Me Laugh.” We’d go into the bathroom, and she’d sit in the bathtub and be the audience while I stood in front of the vanity and played the comedian. If I made her laugh, then we had to trade places. I’d usually open with some kind of shtick — an impersonation or a corny joke that would fall flat. After a few minutes I would resort to the one thing I knew would get her: I’d flare my nostrils. She’d kill herself laughing every time.

And so that night, dancing with my sister at my wedding, at a loss for words, I did the only thing I could think of to do. I flared my nostrils. And just like old times, she broke down laughing.

I haven’t seen my sister since that night 10 years ago. I still have the porn magazine with the picture of her inside it. I don’t look at it, not just because of her, but because of every other woman in there. I know that each one of them has a story similar to my sister’s.

What is saddest of all about this story is that there is a definitive lack of hope or resolution. There is no redemption, only sorrow, introspection, and the inevitably lingering question of what went wrong?

It’s the kind of story that terrifies a father. I saw another in a UK news outlet today about a young woman who was brilliant enough to be admitted to Oxford at age 13, but ran away from home and became a high-priced prostitute instead. There are many forces at work in stories like these, but what it ultimately boils down to is the family.

What happens in the family makes all the difference. As a sinful man, this responsibility scares the hell out of me. I know my failings as a husband and father - I’m too easily angered, I am overly critical, I lack patience and at times compassion - and I can only pray that I will not lead my children astray or drive them away. I’ve watched it happen in families where the parents do care, where they adhere to the faith and try to teach the right things. Parenting is an awesome responsibility, and fathers of course hold an integral role. I can’t help but feel like our daughters - especially the very pretty ones - are targets of a sex-hungry culture that wants to commodify and destroy them.

God grant us the grace to preserve them from this fate.

And yet, I highly doubt it will surprise you. I’ve got a bone to pick with the culture of narcissism, and I’ll take a swing at it any time I can. As far as commentary goes, there’s not much to say when something speaks so well for itself:

Melanie Engle was trying to just pluck the stray hairs here and there. She was trying to deliver an age-appropriate eyebrow wax to her client. It was hard, though, because there was a foot tapping next to her, and a voice shouting in her ear: “No! Not like that — like a supermodel’s. I want them arched.”

After years in the beauty biz, Engle had seen her share of crazy ladies demanding perfect, Glamour-cover-worthy brows. But this Crazy Lady wasn’t talking about her own brows. The brows in question belonged to Crazy Lady’s daughter. Who was eight.

After sweating through the kid’s eyebrow wax, Engle, today an aesthetician at the Adolf Biecker Salon/Spa outposts in the Rittenhouse Hotel and Strafford — and, it should be noted, one of the most sought-after eyebrow specialists in the region — was directed to give her pint-size client a … bikini wax.

Engle was, predictably, extremely uncomfortable with the idea. But she sent the girl next door to the spa to have it done anyway. “It was clear that this girl was getting a bikini wax no matter what,” she says. “Better for her that we did it, instead of her mother dragging her off somewhere else to get it done.”

Engle is sharing this tale with me one afternoon over my own eyebrow session, after I’ve remarked on another young girl — no more than 10 or 11 years old — ­sitting nearby, thumbing through a magazine and obviously waiting for some sort of spa service. As Engle talks, my head floods with images of breaking this poor young munchkin out of the clutches of her surely nipped-and-tucked mother, to let her grow old and hairy under my prudish wing. “But … there’s nothing there, right?” I ask Engle. “I mean, at eight? Am I forgetting something?”

“Nope,” she says. “There’s not. Doesn’t matter. That’s when the mothers are starting them these days.”

The new Governor of New York, former Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, admitted just after being sworn in that he and his wife had had extra-marital affairs for years.

He didn’t pay for the sex though, so it’s all good.

“This was a marriage that appeared to be going sour at one point,” Paterson conceded in his first interview Saturday. “But I went to counseling and we decided we wanted to make it work. Michelle is well aware of what went on.”

In a second interview with Paterson and his wife Monday, only hours after he was sworn in to replace scandal-scarred Eliot Spitzer, Michelle Paterson confirmed her husband’s account.

“Like most marriages, you go through certain difficult periods,” Michelle Paterson said. “What’s important is for your kids to see you worked them out.”

The First Couple agreed to speak publicly about the difficulties in their marriage in response to a variety of rumors about Paterson’s personal life that have been circulating in Albany and among the press corps in recent days.

They spoke in the governor’s office even as scores of friends, family members and political supporters were celebrating in the corridors of the Capitol his ascension to the state’s highest post.

Given the call-girl scandal that erupted last week and forced Spitzer’s stunning resignation, Paterson conceded that top government officials are bound to come under closer scrutiny for their personal actions.

The governor flatly denied what he called a “sporadic rumor in Albany that I had a love child” by another woman. “That’s just not true,” he said.

“Don’t you think he’d take care of a child if he’d had one?” Michelle Paterson said, in obvious disgust over that persistent rumor.

See? He voluntarily admitted he’s a disgusting creep. It’s so much nicer that way. What an upright guy, and a bold contrast to the disgrace that Eliot Spitzer left behind.

Ashley Alexandra Dupre is everywhere right now. In case you don’t know who she is, congrats on your self-imposed media blackout. For the rest of us, the pretty prostitute with a sob story and musical aspirations who took down the Governor of New York has been a staple in every form of media we’ve laid eyes on all week.

Her song, What We Want, sounds as passible (and forgettable) to me as any of the pop tarts that have burned up the Top 40 charts for far too long. Her song has been reviewed by the National Post in Canada, which reports some pretty staggering statistics:

With almost two million individual plays over two million individual plays (it should break three five million by days end, methinks) on her MySpace page her Amie St. music page (MySpace has come undone) What We Want by Ashley Alexandra Dupré (aka Miss Spitzer) is probably the most listened to song in North America right now.

But that’s not all. MTV reports that New York radio station Z100 has premiered her song over the radio waves of the nation’s largest city. The Washington Post is talking about her prospects of making it big, and references others who were given second chances at a music career after PR nightmares. The song is already for sale (I’ve seen people on blogs saying it’s been purchased in mass quantities already, I’ve got no validation on that yet) and rumors are flying that she’s getting offers to do covers on certain magazines of ill-repute.

The word is, she won’t be facing charges. Which means that the path is relatively clear for her to run right through the open door of celebrity.

Which brings me to my point: we’ve already so blurred the line between female celebrity - be it pop star, actress, or socialite - and prostitute, is there really anything standing in her way? We live in an age when certain porn stars have virtually household names. Perhaps through Ms. Dupre, the fusion of the world of beautiful celebrity and sex-kitten-for -hire will finally be complete.

After all, isn’t that precisely what we want?

I ran across an article in Newsweek about the growing disparity between the burgeoning tell-all sex culture on college campuses and the actual number of sexual encounters college students are having. The good news - although for perhaps the wrong reasons - is that sexual activity seems to be diminishing rather than increasing these days. The bad (and admittedly rather weird) news is that an increasing number of students are publishing their bedroom memoirs with proficiency, leading to the rise of college skin-mags and sex columns. Some students actually consider their appearance in these publications, often with compromising photos to boot, as career builders:

These publications are not purely academic exercises: their creators hope they lead to professional opportunities after graduation. “People think it’s a stigma, but I think we’re in changing times, and it can open doors for me,” says Oleyourryk, who recently moved to New York and is looking for work as a waitress while she continues publishing Boink. “I continually tell my mom this is a great résumé builder,” she says, though she’s vague about what she’ll use her résumé for. Though the young sexpert’s optimism may seem naive, it’s not necessarily misguided, says Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington. “Maybe their generation will take this a lot less seriously than we do,” she says. In the age of MySpace and Facebook, sex may be just one more way to network.

Touching sentiment, isn’t it?

Something else struck me as I was reading through the piece - all of the mentioned publishers of this smut are women. I kept expecting to see a guy’s name somewhere, but it never came up.

Ladies, I don’t know when it’s going to become evident to you that giving away your sexuality to willing bodies or willing eyes is not a power move. It’s a degradation of yourself and a capitulation to one of the stronger and more base male instincts. I can’t tell you why, but men are hardwired to want sex pretty much all the time. (This is not news.) If they can’t have that, they’ll be happy enough just to have a peek at the beauty of your body. This isn’t about you, it’s about them. Even good men struggle to keep these instincts in check. (It’s called concupiscence, but I doubt they teach that word at Harvard or Yale.)

Deep down, it’s evident that even some of the women featured in the story know this:

Certainly, the students behind the publications are earnest and articulate, and may be able to land the jobs of their dreams. If they do experience misgivings about their activities, it may be for personal reasons. “The only times I regret writing the column,” says Bromberg, “is when I have to look my dad in the eye.”

Fathers, perhaps more than anyone, don’t want to see their daughters make themselves into sexual objects. This is because fathers know what it’s like to be men. To battle desire. To want to see, objectify, or use the women God can rightly claim as His most beautiful creations. Any man who has ever been guilty of losing the custody of his eyes and has had the repentance to confess it has probably been told by a priest, “How would it make you feel if that were your daughter? Because she is somebody’s daughter, wife or sister.”

Women have a power over men because of their beauty and sexuality, and history is filled with examples of how it has been both used and abused (Salome, anyone?) for the attainment of power.

In the end, however, the women always lose more than they gain.

Via Creative Minority Report, I found a fascinating look by Washington Post writer Monica Hesse into the bizarre world of Polyamory:

Though Nicole and James had jointly dated other people before, Rebecca, a paramedic with an efficient British accent, is the only one to mesh equally with both. For the triad’s first date, James made Rebecca a plate of homemade Jammie Dodgers (one batch with strawberry jam, one with raspberry; he didn’t know which she’d prefer). Rebecca brought them a plant. There was, says James, “a lot of courting,” and a lot of evenings that ended with him and Nicole pillow-talking about how adorable Rebecca was.

Now they all live together. Most of the time, Nicole and James sleep upstairs in the master suite and Rebecca keeps her own room downstairs. But sometimes James joins Rebecca, or Rebecca joins Nicole, or the three of them lie comatose in front of the television and ponder the baby that will arrive in five months. After that, Rebecca would like a turn at carrying a child, and if the trio meets someone they all connect with, they might add another adult to the household, too.

It’s less about them wanting to fulfill personal desires, they say, and more about needing more people to meet the daily requirements of 21st-century life. As in, if it takes two incomes to keep up with the modern mortgage and school fees, then who is going to provide the kids with a stable environment at home? “Five hundred years ago,” says James, ” ‘family’ meant mom, dad, grandma, aunt, great-grandma — everyone.”

They’re all “out” in real life, accepted by their parents, their respective workplaces and at their son’s progressive school. It’s been, they say, relatively easy. But they’ve heard enough custody horror stories (most famously, April Divilbiss, a Memphis poly, lost her daughter after discussing her lifestyle in an MTV documentary) to make them wary of being too public.

“People in my generation are recognizing that they have more choices when they’re deciding what they want their families to look like,” says Diana Adams, 28, a polyamorous lawyer who specializes in alternative family law in New York. “This is an important historical moment because of the gay marriage conversation. We’re becoming more accepting of gay parents, of single parents.” She hopes to soon start a family with her two male partners.

This is what got Rick Santorum in trouble. In 2003, he said that “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything…” Immediately, all hell broke loose. And the controversy went on indefinitely during Santorum’s tenure. Some liberals, particularly among the homosexual community, went out of their way to excoriate Santorum and besmirch his name. The details are too vile to recount here.

Stanley Kurtz at the National Review saw the connection between Santorum’s prescient assessment of the gay marriage issue and the polyamory movement years ago. Kurtz reported that a polyamorism activist had noted that ”in the wake of Lawrence v. Texas, anti-polygamy laws seem ripe for challenge.”

That was in 2005. It seems that the mainstreaming of polyamory is now already well under way.