HOLY HELL, can we please stop talking about General Patraeus’s boring-ass love-octagon? Why are we so obsessed? I’m so bored, to the point of napping, with sex scandals. This one takes the cake as the least scandalous one to date. He didn’t compromise state secrets. He wasn’t blackmailed. He didn’t even seem to have any weird fetishes that would make it interesting. So why do we care? Katie Roiphe at Slate makes the excellent point that we care because we’re prudes and we don’t want to stop rubbernecking, even when we should. “In a series of recent scandals, we seem to be having trouble separating public responsibility from private life, the breaking of marriage vows from the breaking of laws, a vague sense of wrongdoing from a rational assessment of the facts. ”
Maybe if he’d just been HONEST with his wife from the beginning, there never would have been any worry about blackmail or national security, and we wouldn’t have to go through this bullshit. I mean, COME ON. The guy is off in Afghanistan and Iraq for months at a time. He’s a big deal. People are going to be near him. He’s going to get lonely. If he’d just called his wife and been like, “Look, I need to get my freak on” and the two of them had dealt with the situation like grown-ups… Oh wait. This is how grown-ups act. Ick.
People cheat. It happens all the time. We’ve mostly all done it. It’s part of human nature to want sex, so sex happens. And not always within the bonds of matrimony/pair bonds. And what’s stupid about that is that if we’d just grow the hell up about it, we might be able to devote less time, energy, and tax money (how do you think the people investigating the tens of thousands of “racy” e-mails in this case are getting paid?) on this lame stuff.
Look. After spending my weekend at a porn convention, and having lots of sex before and after that convention, I simply can’t fathom why we give a shit about General Patraeus’s affair. Is it sexy? No. Is it scandalous? Not really. Is it hum-drum, everyday, run-of-the-mill political sex scandal material? Yes. It is. Yawn. We all have nearly limitless access to all the sex we could ever want on our computers, in our advertising, and in our lives. Do we really need to get interested in the mostly-boring details of a completely boring affair and its weird hangers-on, none of whom we have ever met? Can we please just get over it and get on with our lives?
But you know what? I’m still reading all the stories about it. Maybe because it keeps me from fuming over the continuing slaughter of Syrian citizens. Maybe because I can use it to ignore the partisan obnoxiousness going on in our government. Maybe it distracts me from doing any real work. Whatever the reason, it IS more fun to follow than the rush up to the “fiscal cliff,” and so I’m going to keep reading it, most likely. But I must say, it’s still not as good for procrastinating, nor is it nearly as much much fun, as this:
Lolcats rule!
Anyway, look. I’ve got a Poetry Brothel coming up this weekend, and before that my interview with Dave Navarro, as well as several fabulous interviews with porn stars from the Exxxotica NJ convention last weekend, will be up on WHACK! You want entertainment? Read or watch those. Leave the General and the other people involved alone… if you can. If your Steve Hirsch of Vivid Entertainment, don’t offer Paula Broadwell less than a million to be in one of your movies.