Screenshot of the first website Google turned up for the keyword “Branson, MO.” No comment on the town slogan or it’s interest in attracting “groups.”

So effete conservative snob Charles Murray (he of the Reagan-era anti-welfare tome Losing Ground) talked the equally snobby conservatives at the Washington Post into letting him snub a few liberal elites on the op-ed page last week. It begins…

The tea party appears to be of one mind on at least one thing: America has been taken over by a New Elite.

“On one side, we have the elites,” Fox News host Glenn Beck explained last month, “and the other side, we have the regular people.” The elites are “no longer in touch with what the country is really thinking,” Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle complained this summer. And when Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell recently began a campaign ad by saying, “I didn’t go to Yale,” she could be confident that her supporters would approve.

All this has made the New Elite distinctly touchy (see Maureen Dowd’s “Making Ignorance Chic”), dismissive (see Jacob Weisberg’s “Elitist Nonsense”) and defensive (see Anne Applebaum’s “The Rise of the ‘Ordinary’ Elite”).

“Elite?” they seem to be saying. “Who? Us?”

Source: Charles Murray in The Washington Post

He continues with cliché “you say potato, I say potato“ comparisons until reaching this exciting conclusion.

They take interesting vacations and can tell you all about a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada or an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor, but they wouldn’t be caught dead in an RV or on a cruise ship (unless it was a small one going to the Galapagos). They have never heard of Branson, Mo.

I probably wouldn’t have picked Branson as emblematic of lowbrow Americana but Murray does. Therefore I’m going to use Branson as the example in the rest of this post.

Jeana Jorgensen of My Sex Professor went to a lecture by relationship sociologist Curtis R. Bergstrand at the Kinsey Institute. She brought back the following demographic data on swingers in America.

Bergstrand administered an online survey in 1999, with just over 1,000 participants, including questions from the General Social Survey such that many of the swingers’ answers could be compared to those of the general population.

During the course of the lecture, Bergstrand only had time to give us a partial glimpse of his data, but we learned that the swingers in his study are:

• Around 40 years old on average (respondents ranged from 22-82 years old)
• A wide range of occupations (some doctors and lawyers, but the bulk are miscellaneous blue collar workers)
• Semi-educated
• 90% white
• Primarily Democrat (but on a liberal-conservative spectrum, tended toward the center)
• Psychologically normal (lacking pathological traits, as has sometimes been assumed of people who veer outside monogamous normalcy)
• Happier and more excited in their marriages than non-swingers

• At least as devoted to their families are non-swingers

Bergstrand concluded that swinging seems to enhance strong marriages, but has negative effects on weak ones (this trend is anecdotally corroborated by people in the swinging and polyamory communities).

Source: Jeana Jorgensen of My Sex Professor

That sounds about right. It also happens to sound about like the non-elites Murray valorizes in his op-ed.

There’s a pervasive belief (among both left and right) that sexual “liberation” is and always has been limited to the elite, the effete, the overeducated, or either coast. Instead it’s as likely to occur in Charles Murray’s heart-of-America fantasy Branson, MO (which I’d imagine he’s never visited) as Berkeley, Boston, or Greenwich Village.

Aside: The following data points are totally non-scientific and they use non-orthogonal criteria* but

• Data point #1: a small amount of tweaking still turned up at least 60 male and female OKCupid users within 25 miles of Branson who match the looking for “casual sex” or it’s loose affiliate “activity partners” who’ve been online at least once in the last year.
• Data Point #2: according to numerous sources the population of Branson is… 6,000 people. Which isn’t the same as all the people within 25 miles. But I’m just sayin’

Anyway, I think the real takeaway from both Bergstrand’s presentation and Jorgensen’s post is the part where swinging per-se isn’t an indicator of either strong or weak relationships.

* But then I don’t recall sloppy methodology ever particularly bothered Murray in his own work.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon on sexist attacks against men in politics.

The Name It, Change It campaign has been a big deal this election season, helped in no small part because feminist-minded folks are fed up with sexist attacks on female candidates.  But Amanda Hess has an interesting take on the whole issue today that’s worth discussing.  Not to get all “what about the menz?!” on you, but it’s an important question.  What about sexist attacks on men?

The WaPo has put together a compendium of sexist attacks on male candidates this election, some from female candidates happy to play the “mean girl” role, and some from male candidates channeling their own junior high school homosocial shaming tactics.  Male candidates and female candidates who get this kind of sexist shaming tend to be getting the same flavor—-apparently, a favorite way to attack both men and women is to feminize them.  Women are shamed for doing female-identified things like wearing high heels or having breasts, or they’re told to get back in the kitchen or they have their sexuality used against them.  Male candidates get feminized, too—-told to “man up”, that they don’t have “cojones”, or to “get your man pants on”. 

Source: Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon.

MRAs will tell you feminists never stand up for men and never all out sexism against men. Except of course they do it all the time. The two choices would be that
a) the two Amandas aren’t feminist (snort) or
b) MRAs are mistaken about who, exactly, the real man-haters are.

Via Lindsay Beyerstein’s of Big Think and other sources, it’s being reported that Republican activist James O’Keefe conspired to film himself having sex with CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau in order to somehow embarrass her and her employers.

It says a great deal about O’Keefe that he and his colleagues would cook up a stunt like this.

It says considerably more that they agree he’s such unutterable scum that having sex with him ought to be a career-ending humiliation.

Sheesh! And these are the kind of people who go around saying feminists hate men!

Here’s that story by the way.

Dirty trickster James O’Keefe’s foray into gonzo porn has ended disastrously for him. O’Keefe schemed to seduce CNN investigative reporter Abbie Boudreau in front of hidden cameras. The right wing media activist, who recently pleaded guilty to charges of attempted phone tampering, tried to lure CNN’s ace investigative reporter to a small boat, excuse me, a “floating pleasure palace,” stocked with sex toys, strawberries, champagne, hidden cameras, and Mr. James O’Keefe.

...

The memo argues that Boudreau deserves what the conspirators hope she’s about to get: “The joke is that the tables have been turned on CNN. Using hot blonds to seduce interviewees to get screwed on television, you are faux seducing her in order to screw her on television.”

O’Keefe feared that Boudreau might get the better of him as a journalist, so he plotted to destroy her with sex. Once again, male privilege and misogyny eclipse common sense.

She said it here.

I think Beyerstein’s right that the episode exposes the roots of misogyny and privilege in the daft but deep conviction that men are fundamentally unlovable and unloved. That combined with the equally deep, and equally flawed conviction that only broken or damaged women desire sex (or conversely that desiring sex damages or breaks women) breeds the desperate and self-fulfilling resentment that fueled O’Keefe’s stunt.

And just to be really, really clear here, while the conspiracy says volumes about O’Keefe and his fellow Republican’s entirely juvenile inability to shed the both of bogus Two Rules of Desire it reveals no more about their intended victim that if O’Keefe had instead planed to meet her wearing a belt filled with explosives.

From comments from a reader, NR, relayed by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo

I know it’s obscure and hidden in the voluminous federal law and Supreme Court Decisions so possibly Newt [Gingrich] would have missed it, but there is already fairly well established federal law making it illegal to impose Sharia law on the United States. After an exhaustive search, I found this:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

NR said it here.

It’s a little off the sex-blog beat but since it’s ultimately about tolerance and/or the battle against intolerance I’m going to pass it along.

(For those unfamiliar with our local legal system the law NR quotes is the text of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Which Amendment at one point, as a member of Congress, Mr. Gingrich had sworn an oath to faithfully uphold.)