Wednesday
It’s a fairly reliable rule of thumb that those people most obsessed with sexual perversion are those most associated with it. Recently, members of the GOP, taking their cues from QAnon cultists, have been charging Democrats with being soft on pedophilia, if not being actual pedophiles. Yet many more prominent Republicans have been associated with pedophilia than Democrats, starting with the former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert and Florida Representative Mark Foley. We could also mention Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who closed his eyes to trainer abuse when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, and Donald Trump, who would wander through the backstage dressing rooms of the Miss Teenage beauty pageant and who spoke sympathetically about how his friend Jeffrey Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” And then there is Alabama judge and Senate candidate Roy Moore, with his long history of hitting on teenage girls.
Oh yes, and there’s also GOP firebrand Lauren Boebert, who is married to a man who, at 24, exposed himself to two young women in a bowling alley. (Lauren, who was 17 at the time, was present when this happened but that didn’t prevent her from later marrying him.) And let’s not pass over those Republican legislators in my home state of Tennessee, who came very close to passing a pathway to marriage without minimum age limits, relaxing guardrails that were in place to protect minors from predatory behavior and abuse. Only public outcry has gotten them to back off.
I thought about this as I was teaching Othello recently. Republican hypocrisy—or projection—alerted me to Iago’s own obsession with sex. On Monday I examined why Iago hates Othello to the degree that he does, chalking it up to “ressentiment” or resentment. But his sexual hang-ups may enter into the dynamics as well.
Consider Iago’s obsession with Othello’s sexuality. Early in the play, he rouses Desdemona’s father by saying that “an old black ram is topping your white ewe” and that “your daughter [is] covered with a Barbary horse.” If this isn’t stopped, Iago warns the father, “you’ll have your nephews [grandchildren] neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins and gennets [donkeys] for germans [close relatives].”
Later, in a curious comment, Iago tells us that he hates Othello because he has slept with Iago’s wife Emilia. We have no evidence that this has in fact occurred. It sounds much more like a classic case of projection, with Iago so obsessed with Othello’s sexuality that he imagines it entering his own bedroom:
For that I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leap’d into my seat; the thought whereof
Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards…
There’s also the strange story Iago invents about Cassio’s dreaming. As evidence that Othello’s former lieutenant is cuckolding him, Iago gives the following account:
I lay with Cassio lately;
And, being troubled with a raging tooth,
I could not sleep.
There are a kind of men so loose of soul,
That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs:
One of this kind is Cassio:
In sleep I heard him say ‘Sweet Desdemona,
Let us be wary, let us hide our loves;’
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry ‘O sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard,
As if he pluck’d up kisses by the roots
That grew upon my lips: then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sigh’d, and kiss’d; and then
Cried ‘Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!’
What’s striking about this is not so much that Iago has invented it but that he indulges in such graphic details. It’s as though he’s fantasizing. The point of the story—that Cassio is in love with Desdemona—almost gets sidetracked by Iago’s description of what Cassio is doing to him physically.
If one adds to this Iago’s anti-women diatribes, along with his mistreatment of his wife Emilia, one begins to wonder if his hatred against Othello stems from a frustrated homoerotic attraction: perhaps he is in love with Othello and feels betrayed by the Moor’s marriage to Desdemona and his preference for Cassio. Maybe the “cursed fate” in Iago’s story of Cassio’s dream is not the Moor taking Desdemona from Cassio but of Desdemona taking the Moor from Iago. It’s like the way that Olivia takes Sebastian from Antonio in Twelfth Night.
To explain Iago’s extreme hatred of Othello, consider that hate often burns hottest when it starts off as love. In any event, while Iago complains about others being obsessed with sex, it appears that he is the real obsessive.
Which also appears to be the case with the GOP. Nor should we be surprised. It makes sense that the party that talks most about childhood innocence–that accuses Democrats of killing unborn babies, running global child trafficking rings, and giving overly lenient sentences to those who download child porn–is the party that has the bigger problem with actual pedophiles.
Additional thoughts: I should make it clear that pedophilia isn’t confined to Republicans. There are undoubtedly pedophiles amongst Democrats and Independents as well. But Democrats are better at policing their ranks. There is also a link between fascism, with its insistence on purity and control, and pedophilia.
As regards Iago’s possible homosexual tendencies, it should be clear to regular readers of this blog that I’m not saying that homosexuals are more likely to be evil than heterosexuals. (We don’t make Macbeth stand in for the latter.) Evil can be found across the gender preference spectrum. It is true, however, the sexual repression can breed monsters. On a historic note, men sleeping with men in Shakespeare’s time was not the big deal it became in later times. Some of the world’s greatest love sonnets (Shakespeare’s) were written by one man to another.