Sex In The City - Anchorage Edition

 I've gotten a few calls and emails from Outside friends and family asking about our Mayor's resignation.  Our local situation, has gone national.  Sex does sell newspapers and does gather clicks.  

It seems worth noting here.  We have a good mayor who's worked hard to deal with homeless issues and early on took a strong stand on COVID-19.  And even though we are now finally getting higher new case counts (between 150 and 255 statewide for the last week) our state Test Positivity level has stayed below (with a one day exception)  the CDC benchmark for problems of 5.0.  

Nevertheless, there's a vocal minority who have been showing up at Assembly (our city council) meetings to oppose the closing of bars and indoor eating restrictions at restaurants.  

The homeless initiatives have also generated strong vocal opposition to the mayor too.  While people complain about homeless encampments near their homes, when the mayor developed a large coalition with key funders to buy some properties to house the homeless and to set up an addiction treatment center, neighbors of those properties were enraged.  (I'd note I took an 8 week class last fall on this topic with key local people working on this problem and the municipality has adopted the best approaches from around the country - particularly Housing First - to attack this problem.)

In any case, the mayor's term would have been up next July, after an April election for a new mayor. A relative sent a link to a long Defector article on the Anchorage Mayor story.  While it tends to treat this as "Wow they do weird shit in Alaska" story, it does seem to have all the facts pretty much in order, so if you want more details, you can go there.  (I would note that while they mentioned that one actor in this story had been an escort, I would add that she has stated strongly that she was not a sexual escort, but rather a 'date' someone could hire.)

Society And Sexual Pictures

But one thought has to do with online sex related activities.  It seems there is a generational divide over using dating apps and sharing sexually explicit photos with people.  I say generation gap meaning only that younger folks use these apps  differently and more frequently than older folks.  But clearly older folks who are single, divorced, or widowed use them as well.  And some married folks do as well.  In any case, mores are changing. 

The Defector article makes that point as well:

 "I think ours is now a fairly permissive, post-affair society and today’s married office-holding rogues can get away with consensual, inappropriate messaging relationships if they want to. That said, if I were Berkowitz, I’d be extremely keen to peace out of this job."

The whole phenomena of selfies and sexting combined with the unforgivingness of the internet suggest that mores about public nudity are going through a transition.  And I think this is probably a good thing.  While clothing makes sense as a form of protection from weather and other hazards, we seem to have a fetish about public display of human genitals.  I recall being in Bali in the late 1960s when it wasn't unusual to see women in public with their breasts uncovered.  And I encountered a tribe in Uganda in 1970 where clothing consisted of a string like belt that exposed everything.  

It would be interesting to know what percent of the US adult population have shared pictures of themselves in texts or chats.  I suspect the number is much larger that people would suspect.  And I suspect it's still enough of an issue that many people would lie if asked about it.  

But such photos have spilled into politics.  Rep. Joe Barton of Texas resigned after a photo was published.  Representative Katie Hill of California resigned after pictures were published, though in her case it seems to be more about having a relationship with a staffer,  though she considers it a case of revenge porn by her ex-husband.  Rep. Weiner of New York resigned over a photo in 2011.

 A 19 year old gay Texas city council member who was forced out of office when someone anonymously sent nude pictures of himself he'd shared with someone on the gay dating app Grnder. 

At this point, with lots of people sharing  sexual pictures and videos of themselves to intimate partners, or online, inevitably some of those pictures are going to go public, either by accident or intentionally.  Revenge porn  and dick pic are both in the dictionary.   More and more mainstream movie actors are involved in fairly sexually explicit situations on film.  Mores are changing.  

It's a long time since Senator Gary Hart was knocked out of the 1988 presidential race because of a picture of him on a boat with an attractive woman on his lap.  

Given President Trump's numerous sexual misadventures, it would appear that sexual indiscretions are not an issue with Republican voters.  But they are used to attack political opponents.  

The real issues related to the Mayor of Anchorage, in my mind, are the ones he has to resolve with his family.  They really aren't the business of the people of Anchorage and don't affect his ability to do his job.  Unless there's more that we haven't learned about, I'm sorry he has resigned.