F@#k Dynasty by Josh Goller
“social conservative mindset on matters of sexuality: namely, that sex is ugly”
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F#@! Dynasty: How Social Conservatives’ Fear of Sexuality Influences Their Logic
Just as the dust began to settle on the blowback from FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly’s proclamation that the fictional character of Santa Claus “just is white,” social conservatives have another reason to bemoan their perceived persecution at the hands of the “lamestream media.” Cable network A&E has suspended the patriarch of the clan of Bayou fowlers that populate its flagship reality program, Duck Dynasty, for firing off his unfiltered beliefs about gays and African Americans in an unflattering interview with GQ. This suspension, of course, is largely a symbolic gesture by A&E, who would like to distance themselves from the seamier side of the backwoods ignorance that they otherwise ride to huge ratings. By opining on the preferability of a woman’s vagina to a man’s anus, and comparing gay sex to bestiality (in addition to his curiously less outrage-inducing observation that blacks seemed happier in Louisiana prior to the Civil Rights movement), Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson largely forced A&E’s hand. After all, the network had to protect its brand, like any good capitalist is wont to do.
No sooner had news of this suspension hit the headlines (which, by the way, has only drawn greater attention to a Duck Dynasty empire that has already spread its capitalist seed far enough as to warrant a market for their own line of greeting cards), then social media blew up with a conservative outcry of religious persecution—and the #StandByPhil hashtag was born. By this logic, so egregious was a corporation’s suspension of their employee for making statements that reflected badly on the company, that the governor of Louisiana released an official statement on the matter, and a former candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States started rallying the troops under the guise that the First Amendment was under attack. Bobby Jindal even used his platform as governor to not only speak out against A&E suspending an employee for saying something stupid about gay people, but to allude to how gross he thought it was when Miley Cyrus stuck out her tongue a bunch and twerked on the jock of the real son of the guy who used to play Kirk Cameron’s dad.
That Jindal would invoke Miley Cyrus’ controversial performance at the MTV Video Music Awards is actually emblematic of the social conservative mindset on matters of sexuality: namely, that sex is ugly in general, and downright wrong if engaged in outside of a heterosexual marriage. Try it outside the realm of heterosexuality and it’s an abomination unto God. The social conservative platform largely advocates for abstinence programs in place of sex education in schools or easy access to birth control. Family planning and reproductive rights are impeded, while programs that fund welfare benefits for single mothers and their children are routinely slashed in federal and state budgets. Aesthetics and good taste aside, Miley Cyrus’ twerking was so reprehensible to the fundamentalist mind because sexuality is viewed as something that’s shameful. That’s why when women like Sandra Fluke publicly advocate for things like health insurance coverage for birth control, social conservative blowhards like Rush Limbaugh have an aneurysm about how much nasty sex those slutty sluts must be having, before then conversely saying lecherous things about deserving a right to watch.
But even more abhorrent to the fundamentalist disposition is the idea of same sex couples engaging in the act of love. By default, homosexuality is synonymous with promiscuity, hence the pushback at marriage equality efforts that would legally recognize the committed monogamous relationships of millions of homosexual couples. When the Duck Dynasty dad talked about the desirability of a vagina and the perceived ickiness of a “man’s anus,” he claimed to be utilizing logic, but in actuality his statement belied the conservative tendency to speak out against products of their own imaginations. Elderly couples have sex every single day, but the majority of us don’t sit around fixating on the mechanics of old sex. We don’t lose our lunch when grandma hands us a cookie. But when prominent social conservatives get caught soliciting gay sex in airport bathrooms or fundamentalist religious leaders are nailed for buying meth from their gay escorts, it’s evident that the culture of sexual repression (and repression of pleasure in general) often leads to acting out in extreme ways. If enough tension builds up, anyone’s likely to blow. Repressing biological necessities and treating them as ugly and evil benefits no one, especially those children who grow up in situations where—due to abstinence-only education or sheltered religious upbringing—they aren’t ever effectively educated about the basics of being a sexually mature human.
So a token suspension of a reality TV star, who will likely end up making even more money from his GQ snafu, draws the scorn of social conservatives en masse. These outraged hordes who won’t stop tweeting about it claimed that Christianity (in which Jesus had exactly zero things to say about homosexuality) is being persecuted, or that their imagined constitutional right to say mean-spirited shit about large groups of people without social or professional consequences is being trampled upon. The fact that bestiality is so often thrown into their justification of their position, as though raping livestock is analogous with consensual sex between adults, points to a thought process whereby religion is seen as the only barrier separating humans from pulling a Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and fucking anything that moves. Perhaps when repression of one’s impulses is the hardline requirement of you and everyone you know, that’s a legitimate concern. At the very least, maybe it’s hard for social conservatives, like Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, to think about anything but dankness of other men’s anuses when they encounter homosexuals. Maybe, without their own brand of logic (and a strict adherence to selectively chosen quotes from the Bible) these folks really would go fuck a duck.
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Josh Goller sprouted in Wisconsin soil but transplanted to the gloom and damp of the Pacific Northwest where fewer people wear fake cheese on their heads. He's a pacifist with a black belt and a sushi-gobbling flexitarian. He reviews music and books for Spectrum Culture, where he also serves as a senior editor, and he founded and edits the offbeat flash fiction zine The Molotov Cocktail. He hangs his hat in Portland where he enjoys driving through fog and hipster watching.