The Stupid It Burns*

As usual, Minions brings you yesterday's news tomorrow.

Mitt Romney believes that in France, marriage is a 7-year contract. Would that Mitt had listened when he was told, "You're an idiot." That, it seems, is pretty demonstrable. Limited-term marriage in France? Not so much (apologies for semi-legitimizing pseudofascist pseudojournalist Ms. Ana Marie Assobsession, but she seems to have it more right and more conveniently comprehensive than anyone else I can find, this time).

It seems the left side of the sphere is aflame with discussion about raising the age of consent for porn performance. Uhm, guys? Let's leave teh stupid to the other side.

This started with Garance Franke-Ruta, who usually does not seem to have shit for brains. She wrote an op-ed for the WSJ, forgetting that the WSJ is a fucking fascist media tool, she's a liberal feminist, the WSJ hates her guts and wants her to die as a result of an unsafe abortion, and the WSJ is just using her. The joy of giving herself over to the opposition seems to have led to a cascade failure in Ms. Franke-Ruta's cognitive systems.

The problem, it seems, is that the guy responsible for the Girls Gone Wild series of videos is a racketeering rapist fuckpig. He's on trial somewhere and will, one hopes, get his comeuppance. Just in case you live in a cave, the video series depicts young drunk women lifting their shirts and showing off their breasts, and other nominally lewd things. There have been a number of stories about the racketeering rapist fuckpig leveraging these young drunk women into more hard-core performances, including a story in which he attempts to rape a reporter writing a story. There can be no question that the guy is a piece of shit.

But putting the criminal responsible for much of the problem in jail isn't enough of a solution for some. Franke-Ruta, in her WSJ piece, suggested raising the age of consent for pornographic performances from 18 to 21. This gem of idiocy has touched off a debate between anti-pornography zealots and...uhm, everyone else, I think. Let's substitute "abortion" for "pornography" and I think we can very easily suss out a number of potential problems with that line of thinking, ne c'est pas? I mean, enough problems in like four seconds of rational thought to grok that there's a killer logical inconsistency here. Anti-pornography, pro-choice feminists (and I think we can probably agree that the number of anti-pornography, anti-abortion feminists is slim enough to warrant dismissing their significance) are fatally hypocritical, and given the relative importance of the two issues, maybe it's just best to shut the fuck up about pornography?

Leaving that aside, let's enumerate some problems with Franke-Ruta's proposal.

1. In theory, the problem she's trying to solve isn't 18-year-olds showing their tits. It's drunk 18-year-olds showing their tits.

2. 18-year-olds aren't supposed to be drunk.

The whole thing reeks of the War on Fucking. There's no question that exploiting people is a bad thing. There's an existing legal remedy for that, though; part of the requirement for a contract to be legal is that both parties have the capacity to make a contract. It's pretty clear that a drunk person doesn't have the capacity to contract consent. The implications for consensual sex itself don't matter; they're already extant, and anyone with a brain located anywhere other than the head of their cock understands that. That's an entirely different problem.

The problem here is that, in addition to being born of the same idiotic reasoning that gave birth to a very bad recent Supreme Court decision, Franke-Ruta's suggestion admits of paralyzing confusion about the propriety of sexual behavior. If 18-year-olds can't make a contract to flash their body parts, they're damned sure not qualified to have sex. Is that really what she's saying? I'm honestly not sure, and I'll be she's not, either.

Feminists are the last people I'd expect to have to defend against in the War on Fucking. Shut the fuck up and take a few minutes to separate your ass from a deep well the next time you decide to whore yourself out to the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Right, Garance Franke-Ruta.

The last word must be left for Jon Swift.

Update: It has not escaped my attention that I posted this screed--which someone uncharitably inclined could construe as anti-feminist--a mere two days after a weekend of wallowing in cheesecake blogging. That's an unfortunate juxtaposition, to be sure. It doesn't obviate my point.

I'm also very sorry that this post has more font colors than one of bDr's psychedelic nightmare posts. My bad.

*Title catchphrase unabashedly ripped off from Sadly, No!

Portions in blue added after the original post, because it was suggested to me--righteously, I thought--that I only tied together certain chunks of thought in the confines of my own head. No material was deleted from the original post.