Eight Carrie Prejean Self-Satisfaction Tapes?

Not really "sex" tapes, per se, but you know.

I don't really find this "hypocritical." I have a problem here, but it's not hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy does not mean "Establishing a standard for yourself and then failing to live up to it." There is a different word for that: It's called being a human being. Or at least a human being who does, in fact, attempt to better herself and set goals and maintain a standard of conduct.

Anyone who sets goals for himself will fail. And what is the alternative?

Hypocrisy is, instead, proclaiming a series of values and vindictively using those values to chastise others for failing to live up to them, all the while gleefully violating them yourself.

Has Prejean done this? I don't remember a single statement she made about sexual modesty. The only thing I remember her saying about sex at all wasn't even about sex, per se, but about marriage, and that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

A position shared, the left is never willing to concede, by our president, Captain Wonderful. (At least publicly he proclaims this -- in private, he's probably in favor of gay marriage, which the left takes to be "better," somehow, than actually believing in traditional marriage and saying so like Prejean.)

So I don't mind this stuff, really. I do not believe Christians are somehow magically neutered and lack a sex drive. I do not believe that Christians do not have kinks and enjoy sex and even enjoy somewhat forbidden sex. I also do not believe that most Christians attempt to claim otherwise, or scream when others demonstrate similar desires.

Mostly what I see Christians saying is that the culture and our major institutions ought not to overly-glamorize sex out of the covenant of marriage, and especially should not sexualize children, both of which seem to be pretty innocuous statements and do not in fact include any possibility of "hypocrisy" at all.

For example, I'm not Christian, and I'm a damnable pervert, but I don't want sex to be too public or too encouraged by our culture. Not because I don't want to have perverted sex -- believe me, I do -- but because I kinda don't want 13 year olds thinking they're "weird" if they're not having sex at such a young age. They should, I think, wait until they are at least mature enough to handle such a thing, as I did, when I chose to remain chaste until my 29th birthday.

No but seriously? This shit with sexualizing children is pretty evil and needs to stop.

But I don't see how any charge of "hypocrisy" can possibly be contrived out of that set of positions. 1, yes, I want pervy stuff, 2, yes, I support other adults' right to pervy stuff, and 3, we should all keep our pervy stuff off of Times Square billboards to avoid putting ideas into kids' heads and exacerbating the already-intense peer pressure to lose one's virginity as quickly as possible.

Where's the hypocrisy? I support both my freedom to be a perv and the understandable desire of parents to have a public space free of overtly-sexual messaging. We can both have what we want, really: We just need people to not look at what I'm doing behind closed doors, and we need people like me to not put what we're doing behind closed doors on a jumbotron ad for Calvin Klein.

At any rate, that's not my problem with Prejean. My problem, instead, is that she has enlisted supporters, such as myself, to support her in her legal/PR campaign, on the theory that the California pageant had nothing legitimate to boot her out on, and that only anti-Christian animus could explain their behavior, when in fact... well, first the photos, which were racy, but I excused and defended. And then, well, the masturbation tape, which I kept quiet about.

And now... the other seven masturbation tapes.

From her point of view, I can see how she's conned herself into believing she's a victim. There is some truth in the idea that this stuff would not have come out, and she could have retained her sexual privacy as most beauty queens do (come on-- you don't think these girls are all virgins, do you?), had Perez Hilton not ambushed her with a question and turned her into a pageant-loser and a cause celebre. And that if vindictive members of the gay gossip mafia weren't looking to "get" her after that.

Yeah, I get that.

On the other hand: She knew all this stuff was out there, she knew it was coming out, etc., and yet I and many of her supporters have been impressed into duty as her defenders through deception.

Because it wasn't ever true that there was no reason, save anti-Christian animus, to kick her out of the pageant organization. A masturbation tape is, well. I'm not really offended by it but other pageant-hopefuls have gotten the boot for the same thing, and even a lot less.

So what do I feel about her? I feel she chumped me in order to advance her own legal interests. And there's nothing hypocritical about that, and nothing about Christianity about that, and nothing about sex about that.

It's just dishonest, and mercenary, and I don't appreciate it.

So, that's that. Yes, she got a raw deal. Yes, a lot of other pageant hopefuls have sexual skeletons in the closet that never come out because the gay left in the media isn't determined to bring them down, by hook or by kink.

But still, for me, I'm very much done defending her. It's not like it cost me a great deal to defend her -- quite the opposite; taking a popular position among your political confreres is never really a costly position -- but still, I feel a bit taken for a ride, and don't really want to defend her any further.

Whether she has anything more interesting to say is up to her. But the Perez Hilton/pageant stuff? I really don't care to hear how unfair it all was anymore. It was unfair, and a book deal was gotten out of that; that's enough. A book deal can bandage up a lot of wounds.

posted by Ace at 07:31 PM

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