[Vision2020] It's Not About a Gay Man, But a Man's Gaze

[Art Deco]

From:  This Week, 10/20/2006


It's Not About a Gay Man, But a Man's Gaze 

10/13/2006

When I first noticed grown men ogling my daughter, she was barely 14. She hadn't started high school, and she was walking next to her dad, yet men in their 30s and 40s were checking her out with undisguised prurient interest. I often challenged these gawkers with a glare; they'd look back with no evident shame, as if to say, "Yeah, you caught me. So what?" Julia-who's now 15, younger than any congressional page-says that she and her friends run into this kind of leering everywhere. Men two or three times her age approach her on the street and try to engage her in conversation. She's grown afraid to go running in our suburban neighborhood, because so many men shout obscene comments out their car windows. Not one of these men, I would venture to guess, is gay. 

Of all the lessons being drawn from the Mark Foley scandal, the most laughable is that this is what happens when you put gay men in Congress. "Whether we admit it or not," said columnist Pat Buchanan this week, "many male homosexuals have a thing for teenage boys." I'd restate that sentence a bit more broadly. Whether we admit it or not, many men have a thing for teenagers-and they no longer feel very guilty about it. Let us not forget that when she was the same age as Foley's page friends, Britney Spears was our culture's biggest sex symbol. Of the dozens of sex scandals in Washington's recent past, 98 percent have involved straight men and much younger women. So if we really want a Congress free of scandal and drooling predators, it's not gay men we should purge from politics. We should stop electing men. 

William Falk
Editor-in-chief


Should you doubt the truth of the above, discreetly station yourself in Friendship Square on a nice weekday afternoon and observe.


Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
deco at moscow.com



 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20061016/539584da/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 43 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20061016/539584da/attachment.gif