The Victorian era
has been romanticized as a time of strict moral and social values and restraint; the Law apparently took a dim view of what it considered perversion at the time. The laws repressed every form of behavior that wasn’t officially approved. This might lead you to think that Victorians were prim and proper gentlefolk who went about their business with dignity and grace, pausing only now and then to admire some new steampunk device (Only I suppose it wasn’t steampunk then)
The real truth of the matter is that nothing could have been further from the truth. That amount of sexual repression, and the perversion is like a high pressure steam line, the excess has to go somewhere. The Victorian era (Which coincided with the growth of Photography) saw the first widely distributed porn. Oh, there was hand drawn porn prior to that, but not the quality and certainly not the volume.
It wasn’t just porn, either, what people got up to during those times was well documented- for instance, in the private diaries of henry Spencer Ashbee (“Walter” in ‘My Secret Life”) and the observations of Richard von Kraft Ebbing (“Psychopathia sexualis”) in the mid to late 1800’s.
These two books are the Perverts Bible, both old and new testament. What can’t be found in the one is detailed in the other. All seven “Normal” sexes, all the kinks, all the fetishes, from autoerotic asphyxiation straight through to xenophilia.
There’s a feeling that today’s pervert is much more than ever, but it’s not true, read those books and you’ll find that- like children who have more fun with the boxes than with the toys- the Victorians had only their imaginations to go on. And did they ever go on. There isn’t anything you can imagine that they didn’t do, other than the things we now need technology for. And they more than made up for it. And it isn’t just sex, the topics of birth control and abortion are (Obviously) foremost in their minds as well. So a LOT of that went on. At a time when even the sex-obsessed Japanese were still coyly giggling behind their upheld fans at pictures of samurai with impossibly large peckers giving it to ritually complaining girls with equally impossibly huge genitalia, the Brits and Europeans were inventing new ways to have sex that we haven’t even begun to understand today any more than everyone completely understands what Hendrix was doing half the time.
Where is all this leading? Hold on to your butts, this is where it gets weird.
The liberal left has latched on to ‘Libertarianism” and has it completely and fully in it’s grasp. “Good Libertarians” aren’t just interested in being fiscally left alone, they feel they have the right to tell their candidates how to behave on their personal level.
What? Og you’re insane! That’s the OPPOSITE of libertarianism.
Well, no,, actually, it isn’t. The Left has carefully instructed Libertarians in how Libertarian candidates should act, and any mention of their own morals or ideas immediately disqualifies them from anything. “I’ll never vote for one of those asshole Christians because they’re too busy telling people what they can or can’t do in their private lives”
There have been few more ignorant ideas in the world, and these are particularly ignorant having been generated- in the main- by liberals.
See, there’s a couple dirty little secrets you may not understand, if you’re an idiot.
First of all, even Conservatives get up to some real kink in their private lives. And they do some weird stuff, and always have- as the writings of Ashbee and Von Kraft Ebbing illustrate. Everyone is a little kinky in their own way. And a damned large number of those fine people will, when their daughter gets knocked up, take her to an abortion clinic. Not all, but enough that there will never be anyone clamoring for it to become illegal in large enough numbers to “Take away your rights as a woman!!” (Jesus, that makes me want to slap people when I hear that. What if the infant growing inside you is also a woman, aren’t her rights being infringed?)
Sure, there are a few small groups who are vociferous and sometimes even nasty, but to accuse them of trying to impose their morality is a shibboleth of the left and the left alone.
Bottom line: Conservatives will not be in a big hurry to impose their morality on anyone. The left is not afraid of having morality imposed, it is the morality itself that they fear. And they have done an excellent job of instilling that fear in this generations libertarian party liberal apparatchiks. If the uptight Victorians who had to put pants on table legs to keep men from becoming aroused were unable to stamp out perversion prior to 1900, they sure aren’t going to be able to in 2012, and only a fool would try, and everyone capable of reasoned thought knows it. The leaders on the right aren’t makingthe discussion about abortion, or gay marriage, or whatever, the left is, because they know that the American public is easily distracted by it. And everyone takes the bait every time. And then accuses the right of making the debate about that instead of more important things.
We’ve done a bit better this time with that, the leftist shibboleths haven’t resonated as much as they have in the past, at least partially because Romney is a leftist in his own right, in many ways. So they can’t gain as much traction.
So: Where am I going with this? Let me turn to DeToqueville:
a despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other
Each time we go to elect someone for anything, the socialist indoctrination arm (Schoolteachers) and the propaganda arm (Media) and the enforcment arm (Unions) of the left damage the character of anyone valuable or worthwhile in any way they can, knowing full well that the well trained apparatchiks on the right and in the middle will do as they’ve been taught and disdain them for what they’ve ben taught to disdain them for. Used to be it was all about big business, or war, but these days people are beginning to get wise to the reality of those situations, so morals and religion are the target of the day.
Remember that dirty little secret? that nobody is going to stop you from being intimate with your cousin Al, or jamming lit candles into various orifices(Orifii?) whilst crooning? Hunt you down and make you give up your collection of oiled midget porn? Well, they aren’t. And the Moral people the press are attempting to assassinate in your eyes are not the ones making an issue of gay marriage or abortion, the media is.
At the end of the day, no matter how much you may hate Romney, no matter how much the media has trained you to be distrustful of him or anyone like him, no matter how you may assume he’s going to do that one silly religious thing that’s just going to make you insane with the rage the left has trained you to have:
It’s a hell of a lot easier to prevent Romney from interfering with abortion, or gay marriage, or whatever, than is has been to keep the Won from fucking this country up the tailpipe.
So if you’re concerned that you long for someone to vote “For” instead of “Against”, remember that in this- as in any presidential election, it is not a President for whom you vote; you vote for Freedom. The ways in which Romney might threaten your freedom are far more manageable than the ways Obama already has. Everything else is a distraction to keep us from noticing that our freedoms are being gradually removed.
Me, I’m not voting for Romney or against Obama. I’m voting for the person who I know can get elected who I expect to do the most to preserve freedom.
Want to vote ‘For” instead of “Against”? Vote for freedom.
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Pretty much covers it. As said to someone, “I don’t care for Romney much either; you’d rather have that socialist clown Obama back in the Oval Office for another four years? Really?”
Well said. I think the choice is obvious, and should have been obvious in 2008. Well, it was to anybody with a clue, at any rate.
The part I find amusing is that the liberals always say that conservatives want to get into everyone’s personal life. Then liberals want to limit: the guns we can own, the types of fat we can consume, the size of soda we can drink, the amount of alcohol we can consume, the cars we can drive, the safety features those cars must have, the type of gasoline we can buy, the type of light bulbs we can buy, the amount of water our toilet can use for flushing, the amount of electricity we can use, what we can hunt, where we can hunt, when we can hunt, IF we can hunt, the type of dog we can own, etc etc ad nauseum.
Methinks the liberals doth project too much.
Whooah, Og. Thanks. Good points that shall be used over the next couple of months.
“Good Libertarians†aren’t just interested in being fiscally left alone, they feel they have the right to tell their candidates how to behave on their personal level.
What? Og you’re insane! That’s the OPPOSITE of libertarianism.
Meh.
The opposite of libertarianism is thinking the State should tell candidates how to behave at the personal level.
If someone’s going to be representing me, there’s nothing in libertarian political theory that says I can’t be picky about their character and its expression.
Whoooosh.
Vote against lawyers. I’ve known a few and none of them should lead.
Well, I’ve heard it said that when the law is plentiful about something, it’s because there’s a lot of that thing being done, more than usual. I’d guess that there was plenty of giving of the evil eye and laying on of hexes back in the 1600’s, so they had witch hunts. There was plenty of drug use in the 1980’s, so there was the War on Drugs. When Prohibition was in effect, people must’ve been drinking like fish the was the law was so emphasized. There was a huge crackdown on graffiti in the early 2000’s since by the 1990’s, tagging was an epidemic in the cities and rail yards.
And yeah, the Victorian Age, which was so suppressive of sex, had to be a right randy time instead of an example of virtuous living. I’m sure there’s plenty of people nowadays who think they’re from a long line of Moral Majority members who’d be surprised at the monkey business a few generations back in their family line. People were shocked when Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old cousin, but how many people would do the math on great great grandma and find out she was married by 14 and had 4 kids by 18, and the guy she married when he came home from the Crimean War, their families lived in the same village in their fold of the Alps for centuries, so they were cousins 7 times over by the time they got married. And all those people who treat Oscar Wilde as a secular saint who was martyred for his homosexuality by doing hard time at Reading Gaol, they ought to look at his trial a little more closely and see that considering the boys he was with, he’s more of a Jerry Sandusky than a picked-on monogamous gay lover who only wanted one adult man.
One of my oldest books is the Book of Lists, and it tells of all sorts of Victorian era hijinks. One funny story is where an English poet was so shocked at the sight of his wife’s pubic hair on their wedding night that he abstained from sex for the rest of his life. Then there’s Sarah Berndhardt and her hundreds of lovers, Lola Montez who began being a courtesan to royalty at 13, and ended up controlling the King of Bavaria with her love moves so much his subjects revolted and deposed him. Then there’s a painter named Tolouse-Letrec who was a midget living in a brothel who the women named Teapot due to his both being little and having a huge, er, “spout.”
Amazing people think of Queen Victoria being a cold fish when she was a healthy German girl with a huge libido who her cousin/husband Prince Albert had a heck of a time keeping up with. Then once he died, she’s alleged to have had a few friends with benefits from then on. And let’s throw in the “celibate” clergymen who lived openly in the rectory with concubines and the children they had with them, helping to inspire the Reformation that today would get them excommunicated and shamed. Victorian age? They make us look like dull pikers.