Profit-hungry media spews unlimited anti-Condit 
pornography: Pseudo-feminists rush to help

The Amerikan obsession with Chandra Levy and U.S. 
House of Representatives Rep. Gary Condit proves 
the correctness of MIM's line on the 
oppressiveness of the existing romance culture. 
The latest is that two major newspapers in Gary 
Condit's district have asked that Condit resign 
his seat in the Congress over the Chandra Levy 
case. 

Chandra Levy is a 24-year-old womyn who has been 
missing since April 30th, 2001. Although police 
have interviewed over 100 different people in 
connection to her case, almost all media attention 
has focused on the most powerful of those 
interviewed, Gary Condit. 

At the time of the calls for Condit's resignation 
and as of now August 13, there is no legal charge 
against Condit, merely media gossip. The police 
still call this a "missing persyns" case, because 
they have no suspects or leads as to what happened 
to Levy. As far as the public knows, Levy could be 
on extended vacation in Brazil with the full 
knowledge of her parents. 

Because there are so many millions of missing and 
murdered people in this world, it is possible to 
cast suspicion on just about anyone the way it has 
been cast on Condit--a sure sign of the lack of 
scientific approach to the question. While major 
newspapers like the Modesto Bee and Fresno Bee 
operate this way, the proletariat has to look out, 
especially for its allies in the lumpen-
proletariat: the capitalist media is definitely no 
rational "check" on the injustice system. Quite, 
the contrary, the bourgeois media contributes to 
injustice. The intersection of crime and 
pornography is an Achilles Heel of Amerikan 
culture, holding back progress on numerous fronts.

It's not about Condit or Levy

What really interests the media and sells its 
papers is the fact that a 24-year-old womyn was 
having a romantic affair with the 53-year-old 
House representative. Patriarchal culture has 
always emphasized the acclimation of wimmin to 
power as a substitute for sexual desire while men 
have their sexual desires fired up by profit-
hungry media which focus on wimmin's bodies.

In a system of sexual inequality, the trick is to 
have wimmin get used to wanting their lovers to be 
powerful--members of the ruling class especially--
instead of overwhelmingly physically attractive. 
If wimmin desire to be dominated then the system 
of inequality can be stable, as it has been over 
centuries in many cultures including the Amerikan 
one. Following Catharine MacKinnon, MIM calls this 
process "eroticization of power." While it might 
be more natural to eroticize bodies, especially if 
there is anything to the theory that romance is 
rooted in hormones--biology and chemistry of 
physical attraction--the patriarchal culture 
teaches eroticization of power. 

We see so much eroticization of power that MIM in 
fact is not sure whether there will be romance in 
the not-too- distant communist future. Once all 
power of people over people is abolished as well 
as the culture protecting those power relations, 
there may be no more sexual or romantic drive left 
in humyns. 

Possibly we may find that some people or even just 
one gender has sexual drive and the other gender 
does not. With advances in medicine, people may 
also be able to determine their own relevant 
hormone levels and certainly reproduction will no 
longer have to occur through sex as it has in the 
past. Of the two gender-related obsessions of the 
media--wimmin's bodies and male power-- it is the 
obsession with male power that tells us more about 
our culture. While Playboy and Penthouse can at 
least say they focus on something intrinsic to 
sex, with whatever subjective tastes of the 
moment, and do not pretend otherwise, newspapers 
such as the Modesto Bee cook up reasons to do 
front-page editorials on the Chandra Levy case. 

The Modesto Bee and Fresno Bee say they want 
Condit to resign because he "obstructed justice" 
by failing to be forthcoming with police 
investigators the past 15 weeks. That is the media 
image that needed to be created to sell papers--
secrecy and privacy concerning an affair that 
newspapers can then say they are uncovering. 

Nonetheless the facts show that Condit met with 
various police agencies several times. He also 
submitted to a polygraph test, which even if he 
had been charged criminally, would have been 
considered exceptional and dubious in legal terms. 
In other words, he went above and beyond what is 
required by law and there is absolutely nothing 
concrete to pin on him. MIM would say that 
contrary to "obstructing justice," Condit is a 
typical imperialist obstructing justice as part of 
daily life; unfortunately, that is not the issue 
the media is talking about. If Condit is at fault, 
it is that he did not resist the indecency of the 
media and put up more of a fight. He should learn 
from his own case the nature of the patriarchy.

It's not the issues

Like anyone in the Congress, Condit does important 
issue-laden work. He was one of those who voted 
for amending the U.S. Constitution to stop flag-
burning and describes himself on his web page as a 
"Blue Dog" "conservative Democrat" or "moderate to 
conservative" Democrat.(2) People wanting real 
gender issues did not have far to look with 
Condit: 1) He voted to make illegal so-called 
"partial-birth" abortion. 2) He voted for a 
juvenile crime bill that among other things tries 
13-year-olds in adult courts (which MIM is fine 
with as soon as they also vote, drink, drive and 
have the legal right to have sex.) 3) On the plus 
side, Condit supported an amendment that suggested 
parental notification for family planners working 
with teenagers instead of requiring such parental 
involvement.(3) Overall, in the 105th Congress, 
Condit voted 11 times out of 20 on the same side 
as the National Organization of Women (NOW), the 
largest mass organization for gender issues in the 
United $tates.(4) None of those actual votes of 
his, including how to spend hundreds of billions 
to repress the Third World proletariat through 
military force, attracted so much media attention. 

Condit is an imperialist who fell out of favor 
with the imperialist establishment, a necessary 
victim of the pornography-culture. It would be 
child's play for any imperialist of any faction to 
set up Condit with an affair like this one for one 
wrong vote he made in Congress. MIM is not saying 
that is what happened in this case, but because of 
how the pornography system works that is very 
possible, if not in this case, then in others. 
Such a tactic would work, because the pornography 
culture, the permissiveness given to the media to 
work for profit instead of news, issues and 
politics guarantee the result for someone in 
Condit's place. Both the Modesto Bee and Fresno 
Bee said that they supported Condit in the past, 
but now the Levy "issue" has changed their minds. 

In contrast, MIM disagrees with Condit on the 
issues of substance and more importantly MIM does 
not believe such a corporate-backed Democrat could 
be anything but scum to get to his position, that 
being the nature of the two-party capitalist 
system; nonetheless, we do not focus on Condit in 
this matter.

Pseudo-feminism's blame

Just as the labor aristocracy and labor 
bureaucracy's views are part of the prevailing 
ideology in the imperialist countries, the pseudo-
feminist views of the gender aristocracy and 
gender bureaucracy are part of the ruling views in 
the imperialist countries. Hence, the monopoly 
capitalist news outlet CNN reports the Levy case, 
always focusing the potential blame on Condit, 
because he is a man in pseudo-feminist lingo and 
because he is powerful by mainstream media 
standards. 

No one is investigating why this 24- year-old 
womyn found it necessary to have an affair with a 
53-year-old and married House representative. No 
teachers or parents are being investigated for how 
they taught Levy. There are no Congressional 
efforts afoot to understand why supposed "news" 
coverage (as distinguished from open pornography 
like Playboy and Penthouse) of Levy and Condit far 
exceeds the coverage of other issues resulting in 
far more missing or dead people. Pseudo-feminism 
focuses on people like Condit in such a way as to 
substitute for a real politics. As such, pseudo-
feminism is a necessary prop of the pornography 
culture and patriarchal power relations supported 
by it. 

Only a revolutionary proletarian feminism could 
intervene in such a case, to dampen the 
pornography distribution under capitalism and to 
ban "news"- for-profit under socialism. Papers 
like the Modesto Bee and Fresno Bee should be 
boycotted not rewarded with sales. 

Condit has been in the House since 1989. MIM 
conducted a Google search and we found 6010 web 
pages mentioning him and not mentioning Chandra 
Levy. Next we conducted a search that required 
Levy's name be mentioned with Condit's name. The 
search shows 8760 web pages. That means that in 12 
years in Congress, by this measure, Condit 
received less attention than he received in the 15 
weeks since Chandra Levy went missing. 

The individualist pornography-friendly approach of 
pseudo-feminists has landed us in the position 
where an unproven and informal suspicion with 
regard to one womyn's disappearance weighs more on 
the Internet than all the other oppression that a 
House representative is involved with in 12 years. 
Condit's votes on military aid, Third World debt 
forgiveness, support for wars such as with Iraq 
etc.--all involve real life-and-death questions 
and deserve real-world attention. 

Notes: 1. 
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/08/13/condit.e 
ditorials/index.html 2. 
http://www.house.gov/john/bluedog/what_bluedog.htm 
3. http://www.aclu.org/vote-guide/272.html 4. 
http://www.now.org/issues/election/analysis1998/ho 
use-a-g.html