Salon.com ran an article entitled "The upside of 'puritanical' politics" by Alyssa Battistoni. Battistoni repeats a meme about the Strauss-Kahn case, linking Strauss-Kahn's sexual promiscuity to the allegations of sexual assault against him. The key excerpt is below the jump.
But while it’s tempting to just leave it there -- to decry America’s puritanical "bedroom politics" that require elected officials are performing their jobs well to resign because of affairs. From this perspective, French politics, in which both the press and the public show little interest in politicians' sex lives, represents the ideal. But the Strauss-Kahn case, in which a long history of womanizing that was deemed irrelevant by the French media is now coming to light, is a reminder that private behavior even by liberal politicians who support sexual and reproductive rights can reflect and reinforce cultural issues around gender, sex, and power -- and that there are no easy answers, just glib ones, when it comes to what should be kept private or made public.
The point is well taken -- womanizing seems at odds to women's rights. However, there is nothing about sexual promiscuity, in itself, that is at odds to women's rights, and nothing about it makes Strauss-Kahn any more likely to be a rapist, than if he'd lived a chaste life until this point. His consensual sexual proclivities is no more relevant to his case than the alleged victim's sexual behavior.
I'll make my point from a gay man's perspective.
For every attempt at gaining equality for LGBT people, there has risen the idea that gay men are particularly sexually predatory, whether it is alleged that gay rights will give permission to gay men to sexually abuse children, or that they will sexually assault fellow soldiers in showers. Usually those making these allegations come armed with quasi science. For example, even though gay men only make up about 5 to 8 percent of the male population, about 25-35% of child abuse victims are boys with male perpetrators. Or, they will point to evidence that men are raped by males at a higher rate than the percent of gay men in the population.
But actual science looks beyond this raw data. For example, the men who molest boys, when it comes to their adult relations, tend to be exclusively sexually involved with adult females. Social scientists look at this pattern and decipher an "adult sexual orientation" [Groth and Birnbaum (1978)]. And for pedophiles, whether their victims are male or female, that adult sexual orientation tends to be heterosexual. Research into pedophilia has repeatedly confirmed this view. As recently as this week research shows that pedophiles choose victims primarily on whom they have access to, not based on sex of victim.
What about perpetrators of what conservative anti-gay activists call "homosexual rape"? Experts on male rape dismiss that terminology. When researchers looked for the sexual orientation of men who committed acts of male rape, they found that only a small percentage of them were gay. What researchers did was look at the consensual relations of male rape perpetrators. What they found was that the vast majority of male rape perpetrators' consensual sexual relations were with women. In other words, consensual sexual relations have NOTHING to do with rape.
Rape is about power and domination. It's about force and violence. It isn't about how much sex you have, or how many extra-marital affairs you have. If Strauss-Kahn is guilty of rape, it won't be because the French media ignored his sexual proclivities. Neither will it be because he was sexually promiscuous. It will be because he found a sense of power in the act.
Last week I wrote a diary entitled, "The enemy is a whore," to discuss how the other in society is often sexualized to discredit his or her group. We see this too often in rape cases. Victims are often portrayed as sexually promiscuous as a means of discrediting them. We do this to sexual assault defendants as well. Here I challenge you to this: when forming your opinion about whether Strauss-Kahn is guilty or innocent of the charges against him, explain your reasoning leaving out any of his promiscuous behavior. Because there is no upside to puritanical politics.