10.03.06
Mark Foley: Just Another Argument For Keeping Your Jackass Detector Turned Up High
I’ve been struggling with this post for a day or so now. It is always difficult to carve out a middle ground in any hotly contested and powerfully polarized territory. But as I continue to observe the firestorm of news and commentary about the current events involving the inappropriate sexual behavior of former congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) in relation to certain former Capitol Hill pages, I feel that I’d be doing the wrong thing if I stayed silent.
You see, I think that people are paying way too much attention to the wrong things and going way, way too long for this particular ball.
The rest of this post gets rather lengthy, so I’m putting the rest of it behind a cut. Read at your own discretion.
No, I’m not siding with Hastert or Gingrich or any of the other Republicans who’ve been trying to make Foley’s actions out to be nothing more than a little “overfriendliness.” I know what that’s about and it’s not just cronyism. The “overfriendliness” defense is nothing more and nothing less than homophobia filtered through a horror of the fragility of hetero-male superiority.
There is a strong motivation on the part of conservatives (e.g. Dennis Hastert) to want to believe that the average teenaged boy, particularly one of sufficient quality to be part of the Capitol Hill establishment as a page, is both heterosexual and culturally masculine, meaning strong, autonomous, and impervious. To call Foley’s interactions with his pages merely “overfriendly” is to unequivocally call on this presumed imperviousness: if a young man is a “real man,” his masculinity and heterosexuality will protect him from advances made by other men so long as they are not physical ones. Why, if you are truly a Red-Blooded Straight American Man, you can bet that The Gay will bounce right off of you like bullets bouncing off of Superman. Unless of course another man touches your schvantz, in which case you must have your id autoclaved immediately before you are overcome by the urge to buy a French bulldog, moisturize, and wear pants that actually fit you properly. (Same-sex play may make you gay, but words can never hurt you?)
Even inappropriate and unwanted attempts at homosexual courtship or invitation are, and, Hastert’s responses have implied, should be, discounted and ignored as essentially meaningless, merely “over-friendly.” Why? Because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge that such overtures were in fact meaningful. To acknowledge that would be to acknowledge that they might have affected the young man/men in question. It would acknowledge that men are not impervious, seamlessly masculine, the force of their heterosexuality invincible… that men are sexually vulnerable. It would be to admit a truth that our culture finds utterly unspeakable.
This, I contend, is a large part of what makes it impossible for Foley’s cronies to admit that Foley did something very wrong. And don’t get me wrong: he did.
I want to make it clear at the outset that I do not in any way condone what Mark Foley has been demonstrated to have done with regard to engaging in ongoing conversations with teenaged men, where the conversations were of a sexualized and/or overly intimate nature.
At best, Mr. Foley is guilty of being incredibly inappropriate. He is certainly also guilty of taking advantage of his office and his personal power and social position to exploit those beneath him in the food chain for the purposes of his own sexual intrigue. He is, in no uncertain terms, additionally guilty of hubris, and of letting let his dick do his thinking, some of which behavior may have been aided and abetted by his use of a popular inhibition-decreasing recreational drug (alcohol). It’s not quite criminal stupidity, but it’s definitely on that spectrum.
At worst he has additionally committed crimes. Sexual harassment, sexual manipulation, telecommunications harassment, and what state laws often refer to as “corruption of a minor,” a sort of legal catch-all that is used to prosecute a variety of sexually-related activities in which adults involve (or are involved in with) minors that do not typically include the minor’s or the adult’s actual genitals, are all on the menu of possible choices.
Certainly by doing what he did, Mr. Foley betrayed his office, his committee leadership, and the public trust. He displayed a repulsive lack of honor and an equally repulsive lack of restraint.
(Which, incidentally, is where various commentators’ suggestions that Foley was the victim, and was being led on or instigated to make the comments he did by the teenagers involved, fall apart: if you are an adult, and thus in the position of legal and social authority, and you find yourself the object of unwanted sexual attention from a teenager, you have the easy option to simply not engage with it, full stop, period. It’s called responsible self-restraint. I further note that responsible adults additionally know how to turn off their own IM software or delete e-mails if someone is attempting to communicate with you in an objectionable fashion. Not responding is sometimes the best possible response. Where I grew up we called it not rising to the bait. If people like Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh want to argue that Mark Foley was completely, baldly incompetent to exercise a modicum of self-control, well, hey, far be it from me to disagree with that. Seems like a pretty accurate assessment of the situation, regardless of whether you also want to try to play demeaning unsubstantiated blame-the-victim games with respect to the teenagers involved.)
But as much as I cannot agree with people like Newt Gingrich or Dennis Hastert (or for that matter Drudge or Limbaugh), whose self-protective homophobic minimizing is repellent and irresponsible and whose cronyism is worse, I also cannot side with the many people on both sides of the aisle who are clamoring to see Foley roasted alive on the Rotiss-O-Mat reserved for pedophiles and child molesters.
(This is where I potentially make myself unpopular.)
I empathize, profoundly and deeply, with the impulse to protect children from harm, even when that harm takes place entirely within the realm of the imaginary. (You should see me fuming at some of the movies I see parents taking their children to see!) I admire and firmly support the mother-jaguar rage of parents who would gladly—and entirely reasonably—go after anyone who approached their children with cravenly inappropriate expressions of sexual interest such as the ones with which Mr. Foley approached his pages. I unconditionally respect those deeply emotional protective urges.
But based upon what we know of Foley’s actions to date—and please note that disclaimer, because it’s important, and my opinion on this matter would change instantly should the requisite information emerge to change it—I cannot side with the allegations that Mark Foley is either a pedophile or a sexual abuser of children.
The tangle of age, agency, majority, and what defines a “predatory” or “exploitive” relationship has always been a very difficult and sticky one as far back as the age-of-consent reform campaigns of the 1880s. Determining who is and is not a child, who is and is not capable of consent, and where the legal lines should thus be drawn in relation to sexual communication and interaction between persons of disparate ages has never been cut-and-dried.
My considered opinion, after having spent most of the last four years of my life working on issues pertaining to the sexuality of minors, is that when it comes to sex, Americans define “child” for the convenience and comfort of adults who are terrified of adolescent sexuality.
This is not to say that adolescent sexuality is something we should not be afraid of. We should. It should scare and worry us for the same reasons that it has always—and I mean that in a historical sense—scared and worry us. It is a powerful and new presence that is ultimately controlled by people who have no experience, no credentials, and little sense of what it means in any sort of larger picture. Teenagers are often, notoriously, far more fascinated by how much power sex can have and how good it can feel than they are wary of what risks that power and pleasure can sugarcoat or blind one to.
That’s scary. That’s legitimate. But that’s what we’ve got to work with: a very powerful, difficult-to-regulate, inherently anarchic part of human existence that has its own steep learning curve.
Part of that learning curve is learning how to cope not only with your own sexuality and your own desires but learning how to cope with how other people around you express theirs. This includes learning what to do when someone expresses his or her sexual interests to you inappropriately, or without your consent.
Yes, it’s a big deal. Yes, it’s a big challenge. Yes, a teenager’s own safety and health is at stake.
But the same is true when we let teenagers drive cars, or take summer jobs, or make the trek to school or the library or the mall without parental accompaniment. And just as with those situations we have to give them credit both for being able to learn to handle suboptimal situations, and for making intelligent decisions about how to handle them. These are things we want our children to be able to do. These are things we expect our children to show competence with as they become adolescents, and as they move through adolescence to adulthood. Problem-solving in the real world is one of the ways we gauge adulthood.
By this measure, to say nothing of that of biology, we cannot be so disingenuous as to think of these fifteen and sixteen-year-olds as “children.” They’re not. And the ways they reacted to Foley show it.
We know, for instance, that pages warned one another about Foley’s tendency toward Dirty-Uncle-Ernie-ism. This is a perfectly intelligent response and one which, if my experiences in the workplace are anything to go by, is quite common among card-carrying, old-enough-to-watch-dirty-movies-and-drink-margaritas grownups.
We also know that some of the pages who were the objects of Foley’s inappropriate overtures shied away from taking on the role of whistleblower, preferring to obtain distance and insulation from Foley’s various jackasseries in their own individual and private ways: venting to friends, avoidance, etc. This is also a perfectly intelligent response, and is in point of fact precisely what most adults faced with sexual harassment do as their first line of response to harrassment.
These teenagers were not stupid, nor were they poor victimized helpless little lambs who had no idea what to do to protect themselves. Quite the contrary. They did exactly what most of us do: they were pragmatic, they were outwardly calm, and they didn’t cause a ruckus. They employed simple social engineering and disengagement to neutralize, as much as possible, a sexual pest. When that didn’t work, one of them finally took it to a higher authority. You know. Like you do.
These are not helpless little kids who are truly not capable to protect themselves from sexual annoyances. These are competent intelligent adolescents who are well on their way to being competent intelligent adults, and they are demonstrably capable of fending for themselves–including taking their problems to higher authorities when the problem proves to be more than they can solve with the means they have at their own individual disposal.
I’m proud of these kids, frankly. Sure, it can’t have been fun to have some ooky guy who’s more than old enough to be your dad be insistently more intimate with you than you want him to be. But then again it can also be pretty ooky to have people your own age who you’re not interested in do the same thing. Sometimes sexual things happen that just are ooky, and creepy, and off-putting. They happen to nearly everybody at least once or twice. When they do, one is well-advised to be able to find some way of first evaluating the threat and second taking action to neutralize it (in whatever ways seem to be most useful), because standing there like a deer in the headlights is the one response that is guaranteed to make things worse.
And they did.
Does the fact that the teenagers who were the objects of Mark Foley’s inappropriate and nonconsensual verbal intimacies dealt admirably well with his ooky imposition—and with wholly adult strategies— make what Foley did less bad? No. What Foley did was, as I have said repeatedly, ill-considered, inappropriate, dishonorable, and wrong.
It just wasn’t molestation. Just like someone catcalling “hey baby, nice ass” at you when you’re walking down the street isn’t the same thing as if that person walked up and actually grabbed your ass while saying so. The first is harassment. The second is sexual assault.
It’s also not pedophilia. These teenagers aren’t children. They’re adolescents. There’s a difference. They have passed the point in their sexual development where they can be considered non-combatants in the ongoing struggles of sexuality. This is not to say that having entered the fray they are somehow deserving of being forced into skirmishes they have no interest in. No one of any age should be forced into any sexual or even romantic situation in which they are not personally a willing participant.
It is to say that to call these teenagers children, in the same way as you would call a five-year-old or a ten-year-old, is disingenuous. Furthermore it is to say that to call sexual interest in a sexually, biologically adult body “pedophilia” is worse than disingenuous, it undermines the integrity of the concept of pedophilia and makes it both less meaningful and more dangerous. If you must attach a Latinate label to desires like those Mr. Foley has exhibited, use the right word: ephebephilia, the desire for adolescents. Go ahead and improve your vocabulary, you wild thing, you. I’ve got your back.
Mark Foley is an evident ephebephile and a sexual harasser. Based on what we know of his actions, we know that he has acted without honor, responsibility, or meaningful self-restraint and that he has done so in a manner that exploited his office and the power differential between himself and those he targeted for nonconsensual (or at best marginally consensual) sexual conversations.
Don’t belittle the teenagers who were the targets of Mark Foley’s bad behavior by making them into children. Don’t belittle Mark Foley’s actions by minimizing them or attempting to shift the blame, either.
But at the same time, don’t give Mark Foley the power of turning him into an all-devouring monster. He’s not. There are plenty of other people out there who deserve that reputation; Foley’s not, as far as I can make out from the information that has come to light, one of them.
Mark Foley is a pathetic penny-ante closet case with shitty personal boundaries and no sense of personal dignity. He’s a scared little man who was so terrified of his own desires for other males that he could only express them in timid, furtive conversations with people who were sufficiently below him on the food chain that he knew they couldn’t really hurt him by rejecting him. Indeed he put himself in a situation where he realized there was little prospect of his overtures being warmly received. He’s a pest who deserves a good sound slapping.
If you want to use this incident as a vehicle for teaching your kids something, teach them this: some people, even people in positions of great power, are jackasses. In the event that someone who is at a vastly different place from you in the food chain starts behaving like s/he wants something from you, it behooves you to keep your jackass detector set at high gain.
In the old days, when people in positions of great power were revealed as being as devoid of honor as Mark Foley has been of late, they often went and quietly shot themselves. I’m no big fan of suicide. But it certainly does demonstrate a certain sincerity and sense of personal responsibility of which I suspect Mr. Foley is constitutionally incapable.
And all I really have to say, beyond that, is: way to be a Bush-era Republican, Mr. Foley. Jolly well done.