Who needs a unifying theme anyway?

(I reserve the right to use this space to refine my thoughts and see if I can better express my ideas. So I’ve said some of this before.)

Whenever a sexual scandal pops up in politics these days, it’s common to hear people justifying their interest in the scandal by saying that ‘it’s not the sex, it’s the lying’.

Frankly, that’s horseshit.

Western polities –– but especially American polities –– demand candidates who are impossible models of sexless domestic propriety. If a candidate wants to have a chance at public office, we demand that they have the correct number of children, a stable marriage, and that they’ve never fucked anyone embarrassing. Like a virgin falling in love with a prostitute, we stick our fingers in our ears and say ‘la la la I can’t hear you’ and pretend our lover never had a past before they met us.

It’s an impossible standard, and nobody can live up to it without lying. Read the statistics – at some stage in their lives, a staggering number of people cheat on their partners. Most relationships end in failure. Everyone makes idiotic genitals-based mistakes. Yet we demand different from our representatives. We demand they represent something better than us.

So, we effectively force them into a position where they have to lie. And when they get caught with their genitals on display, we tut-tut at them and moralise about what they did. And we lie to ourselves and say it’s not about the sex.

It is totally about the sex. It’s about our prurient interest in, jealousy of (and hatred for) sex and sexuality. And quite honestly, I find the relentless cycles of sex scandals about politicians nothing but a tedious distraction from things that matter.

I hope that more people come around to that opinion too, because this shit is hurting us.