Manipulating Sex Fears For Fun and Profit
Two pieces of sex news. Seemingly unrelated, except that I happened to come across them in the same week.
But they’re striking me as having an oddly common theme.
In Piece of News #1: Remember that company, CleanFlix, that would take DVDs of feature films and edit them to produce sanitized, sex-free, “family-friendly” versions? (Before they got hit by copyright laws, anyway.) According to the Salt Lake Tribune (via The Hollywood Reporter, Esq.), Daniel Thompson, one of the managers of the company, has been arrested on suspicion of having sex with two 14-year-old girls . . . and of using the movie-sanitizing business as a cover for a porn studio.
My initial reaction to this story: Is there a sex-phobic right winger who isn’t fucking guys, hookers, or teenagers? Any at all? Anywhere?
And my second reaction: You wanna know what really bugs me? These right-wing sex-phobes are getting more action than I am. Here I am, being vilified by the right — well, I would be if they knew about me — as a Godless wanton pervert . . . and I actually lead this very tame life, at home with my wife watching Project Runway. Our non-monogamy is largely theoretical, and I haven’t been to a sex party in years. But do I get credit for my wholesome life? No, I do not. But put on a squeaky-clean, sex-loathing facade, and you can get away with buttfucking goats in your rec room, without anyone calling you anything but a good Christian. Bastards.
But that’s not where I want to go with this piece. I don’t want to gas on about right-wing sex hypocrisy for the forty billionth time. I want to talk about . . . well, let’s get to the second piece of news.
In the second piece of news: From the (Cincinnati) Enquirer, via Eros Blog, comes the story about the makers of Enzyte, the obviously fakoid “natural male enhancement” pills advertised ad nauseum on TV, being prosecuted for fraud.
And not just for the regular “false advertising of an ineffective product” sort of fraud. The fraud goes much deeper and broader than that. According to the testimony of the company’s former vice president of operations, the company flatly made up fictitious doctors, numbers, and customer satisfaction surveys to support their claims. They enrolled customers in a monthly “continuity program” without their knowledge, charging them every month for more product, and deliberately making it difficult to un-subscribe from the program. And in particular — take note of this, it’s important — they required customers to get a notarized statement from a doctor saying that the Enzyte didn’t work before honoring any requests for refunds.
And they did this last part, specifically, because — quote — “it was extremely unlikely someone would get anything notarized saying they had a small penis.”
“Interesting stories,” you say. “But what do they have to do with each other?”
Just this:
They illustrate how easy it is, in a culture that’s riddled with shame, fear, and anxiety about sex, for frauds and liars to use that shame and fear and anxiety as a cover for their misdeeds.
In the first story, Thompson was able to use people’s fears about filthy smut in the movies as a smokescreen for making porn and having sex with underage girls. He apparently figured that nobody would suspect the manager of the “we provide wholesome, sex-free family entertainment” company of being a smut merchant. Given recent events, you’d think this wouldn’t work so well any more . . . but he apparently figured right, at least for a while. If it hadn’t been for the 14-year-old girls — and the mother of one of them who figured it out — he might still be getting away with it.
(FYI, the original founders of CleanFlicks are disavowing Thompson; they point out that he became a manager of two CleanFlicks brick- and- mortar stores only after the original company sold them off, and in fact they’re suing him for trademark violation. The point still stands, however — which is that Thompson was using the clean, wholesome, anti-sex image of the CleanFlicks company as a distraction and a cover for his activities.)
And as for the second story: Well, it’s obvious that the Enzyte company was able to prey on men’s anxiety and shame about their sexual adequacy to make millions selling an obviously fraudulent product. But they did more than that. They were able to prey on men’s anxiety and shame about their sexual adequacy to ward off complaints and demands for refunds. They counted on men’s shame — not just their shame at having been taken in by a shamelessly fraudulent “male enhancement” product, but their shame at “needing” the product in the first place, and their unwillingness to acknowledge it — to keep their fraudulent business alive and humming.
Now, I’m not saying that, in a perfectly sex-positive society, nobody could use sex as a smokescreen. I’m idealistic, but I’m not that idealistic. Sex is important, sexual feelings and desires are powerful, and there will always be people around to take advantage of important, powerful feelings and desires. When we want something badly enough, there’ll always be someone promising that they can give it to us. And when we’re afraid of something — and important, powerful things will always inspire fears — there’ll always be someone promising that they can protect us from it;
What I’m saying is this: In a sex-positive society, in a society without our reflexive, amped-up fear and shame about sex, these people would have a lot less cover. In a society where people weren’t terrified of sex — and sexual failure — the promise to protect us from it wouldn’t be nearly as effective a smokescreen. We wouldn’t be taken in by it nearly as easily, and we’d be a lot more willing to fight it A sex-positive society wouldn’t make us completely invulnerable to sexual frauds and liars . . . but it’d give us much better defenses than we have now.
This entry was posted on Friday, 8 February 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Friday, 8 February 2008 at 12:27 pm c4bl3fl4m3 wrote:
You make fantastic points, but throughout the whole thing (and not just with you… all of the thing via everyone), I just keep thinking that it’s such a shame.
Why?
I genuinely loved those Smilin’ Bob ads. Thought they were hilarious. And Bob kinda reminded me in looks of one of my old therapists, the only one that ever really worked for me, the only one I ever “clicked” with.
Of course, I’m also sad that people got fucked over, and that a company would be so blatantly dishonest. And to find out that they intentionally capitalized off of people’s insecurity over their genitals… ooh, that enrages me. But I’m more sad that Enzyte didn’t work, because if it was, none of this would have happened, and I’d get to see more of the stupidly funny antics of Smilin’ Bob.
on Sunday, 10 February 2008 at 5:07 pm David wrote:
What? You mean the Enzyte commercials weren’t just a parody of all that spam I get?…
Really.. those commercials were hilarious. I’m (not really) surprised that anyone would take them seriously. Desperation = Desperate Measures, I guess.