THE WAR ON SEX

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Miss Nevada USA fired over racy pictures on the Internet

Miss Nevada USA was stripped of her title Thursday after racy photos of her appeared on the Internet, pageant officials said.

Some of the photos show Katie Rees, 22, kissing other young women, exposing one of her breasts and pulling down her pants to show her thong underwear at a party in Tampa, Fla.

"Katie Rees has been relieved of her duties as Miss Nevada USA 2007," said Paula M. Shugart, president of the Miss Universe Organization, which owns the Miss USA pageant and others.

Rees' dismissal comes two days after Miss USA Tara Conner was allowed to keep her tiara when she admitted underage drinking at New York bars and agreed to go into rehab and undergo drug testing.

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So, just to make sure I understand the sense of morality in play here, underage drinking and illegal drug use are forgivable; partial nudity and lesbian kissing photos uploaded to the internet, however, are unforgivable. Well, okay. I mean, the Miss Universe people have a perfect right to do whatever they want with their representatives; it is, after all, a business. But this event so utterly fits in with what I'm seeing as a major heating-up of right wing anti-sex forces that it's hard to ignore. Don't get me wrong; Donald Trump is no sexual Puritan himself, and neither is NBC, but it seems to me that they're running scared in terms of trying to manage an anticipated reaction from the sex police. On some levels, I can't say that I blame them--they're trying to make money, and scandals hurt the bottom line.

On the other hand, this is totally fucked up. The former Miss Nevada has a perfect right as a human being to sex up her life, and even to show her freak side to the entire world via the internet, if she so desires. It doesn't matter what sort of contracts she's signed: it's bullshit, both individually and culturally, to demand that anybody must put aside sexual self-expression while on their own time. It's bullshit, too, that the Miss Universe pageant lives so in fear of anti-sex forces that they include such a clause in their standard contract. All this does is bestow legitimacy on their Victorian crusade.

You know, I could conceivably get behind some kind of reprimand for the drunken Miss USA, especially if she kept on showing up for gigs while soused. That's not unreasonable. But this thing takes me back to the whole Vanessa Williams debacle back in the mid 80s. She got screwed, too, and it's really pissing me off that our culture seems to have not moved forward a single inch in over two decades. Goddamned right-wing Christians.

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