Inquisition and Politics of Sex

20 January 2018

Another bit from the New York Times. In an op-ed last week following revelations that Donald Trump’s lawyer paid an adult film actress $130,000 to keep quiet about their affair, Michelle Goldberg looks at shifting attitudes towards political sex scandals.

She notes that moral scolds of old, like William Bennett, have pivoted greatly in the past two years, embracing “a laissez faire approach to sexuality” at a time that liberals in the #metoo movement are looking to re-ethicize sexual relationships.

In this context, Goldberg gives us our inquisition reference

In the 1990s, many feminists defended untrammeled eros because they feared a conservative sexual inquisition. Elements of that inquisition remain; attacks on reproductive rights have grown only more intense. Still, Trump has reconciled reactionary politics with male sexual license. In doing so, he’s made such license easier for feminists to criticize.

To a certain extent, it’s probably unnecessary to suggest that Trump has reconciled reactionary politics with male sexual license because the two have historically hardly been in conflict. But, it is interesting to see the correlation between shifting evangelical attitudes on morality in politics and the explosive conversation on sex and consent.

What work, then, is “inquisition” doing in this article?