/ 19 March 1999

Bad vibes down South

Gary Younge : BODY LANGUAGE

Not for the first time the spirit of the United States Declaration of Independence and the rule of the American Constitution are at loggerheads. The founding fathers said everyone had the right to the “pursuit of happiness”. Now the state of Alabama has told women they have no “fundamental, constitutional right to an orgasm”.

A law, passed last year and designed to save the religious and conservative South from the perils of sexual obscenity, has the airwaves and beauty parlours of small- town Dixie humming with talk about vibrators, the plight of Southern womanhood and the right to privacy.

The law forbids the selling or distribution of “any obscene material or any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs” and those who flout it face a year in jail and a $10 000 fine. In short, selling things that turn people on could result in the salesperson being turned in. The law is being challenged and the issue is sitting before a federal judge who has to decide whether to throw the case out or allow it to proceed to a higher court.

For women, arguing the case for using a vibrator in the buckle of the Bible belt is not always easy. If mythology counts for anything, Southern women are not supposed to enjoy sex at all. The idea that they are not only enjoying it but might be supplementing it with some assistance from the local electricity board is more than most of their menfolk can bear.

“It doesn’t surprise me that we would have some problems in the South,” says Sherri Williams, a plaintiff in the case, who owns two stores selling “marital aids”. “Attitudes to women and sex there are pretty backward.”

Popular iconography has reserved two main positions for Southern womanhood. For black women there was the oversized Mamie, best known from the knee down on Tom and Jerry and from the bosom up on Gone with the Wind. For whites there was the Southern belle; dainty and emotionally forceful in a manner that none have personified more faithfully than Scarlett O’Hara at the start of Gone with the Wind.

Since most black women worked in the fields and most Southern whites were poor, these images bore little relation to reality. But the myths had other, far more potent uses.

White Southern women were, if we believe the bellicose, to die for. When Confederate forces went into battle in 1861 it was, their leaders said, for their women as much as it was for slavery. A century later, when the segregationists fought against civil rights, one of the main reasons given was to protect their women from the attentions of black suitors.

>From the vertiginous and virtuous heights of these pedestals, white Southern men clearly hoped their wives and daughters would not then see them having sex with their female slaves. Also from this vantage point they could neither see nor be seen by male slaves, whose virility plantation owners first invented and then feared.

In one of the most authoritative books on Confederate culture, The Mind of the South, WJ Cash wrote: “The shield-bearing Athena gleaming whitely in the clouds, the standard for its rallying, the mystic symbol of its nationality in face of the foe. Merely to mention her was to send strong men into tears – or shouts.”

When the Civil War came it was time for a new construct. White men went off to fight, leaving their women to run the plantations. The Southern belle turned into the Steel Magnolia – a hybrid of the dainty and the doughty.

But with the war and ancient memory and legal segregation abolished the South has become more like the rest of America – a place where gender and racial inequalities persist but in which women have become increasingly assertive and independent. Female employment, divorce rates and family sizes are converging towards the national norm.

But Southern law evidently has taken time to catch up. Alabama’s lawyers say there is no fundamental right “to purchase a product to use in pursuit of having an orgasm”.

“This is really a case about the power of the legislature to prohibit the sale and manufacture of products it deems harmful,” says state Assistant Attorney General Courtney Travers. If women want sex toys, the authorities point out, they can go to neighbouring Tennessee, buy them where it is legal and then bring back the contraband. Tennessee, the plaintiffs point out, is a long way to travel for an orgasm.

It says something about Alabama that the law was introduced before November’s elections, because politicians thought denying people a means of attaining sexual pleasure would be a vote catcher. It went in as part of a much larger Bill aimed at shutting down strip clubs.

“It’s quite common around election time for something like this to go through without anyone really noticing it,” says Martin Mcaffrey of the Alabama American Civil Liberties Union. In this case, however, the women decided to challenge the state before the state got to them.

In a nation founded by puritans the South is still a region administered, for the most part, by some of the most religious zealots. One of the state’s key defence points is that two other Southern states have a similar law and have not been found to be violating the Constitution.

Alabama’s law was signed by the former governor, Fob James, who once threatened to call out the National Guard to keep the Ten Commandments on a courtroom wall. Just outside Montgomery, the state capital, a billboard barks: “Go to Church or the devil will get you.”

Alabama is not the only state in the country to encode such strict sex laws. Oral sex between married, consenting heterosexual adults is illegal in 15 of the 50 US states. Adultery is still a crime in 24 of them.

In Alabama it is presumably okay to have sex with a donkey (there is no law against bestiality there), but not to engage in oral sex with your husband. Mcaffrey says the legislators had to insist that the sex- toy law only applied to the stimulation of human genitalia because if it hadn’t then cattle breeders would also have been flouting the law.

In this extremely patriarchal patch of the US most regard the law not as a moral crusade but a rather ridiculous joke. On one radio talk show a woman asked Montgomery mayor, Emory Folmar, whether he supported her right to buy a vibrator. Folmar said he had no objection so long as they were not publicly displayed.

As soon as the woman was off the air he told listeners: “If she wants a vibrator she ought to just go and sit on a washing machine.”

ends