The F*ckery of the Founding Fathers
A Presidents' Day Special
Hey horny readers! It’s Presidents’ Day/Week in the United States, so this week’s newsletter is a special one. This country’s founding fathers were horny as hell (and completely fucked up), so why do we make them out to be saints?
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Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. In case you’re new, I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a comedy writer, film producer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter last year. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Want to know more? Read the whole description on substack here.
Ready to get a little smarter? Okay, let’s go!
Monday was Presidents’ Day. This week is Presidents’ Week. We have a whole week now when we honor our founding fathers with discounts and parking lot road rage incidents outside Walmart.
There are many people who hold our founding fathers to a god-like level. The idol worship has been challenged in recent years by conversations about slave ownership and other details from their lives that have brought them down to a more human, and deeply flawed level. There are many accounts of their sex lives throughout history, so perhaps people have always been looking for a way to humanize them. But what happens when reading those accounts prevents us from romanticizing who they were?
Alexander Hamilton performed the first major public apology for an affair, two centuries prior to Bill Clinton. Jefferson had affairs and fathered a child with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman whom he inherited. Female slaves had no legal right to refuse unwanted sexual advances at that time, yet history made her out to be his “concubine” for centuries. George Washington wrote a letter professing his love for a married woman, and wasn’t the perfect image of a stately grandpa with wooden teeth that we were brought up learning about.
As I wrote about last year, the elections of the time were also just as dirty as they are today. During the election of 1800, Jefferson’s friend James Callendar, an influential journalist at the time, accused John Adams of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” In turn, Adams’ friends warned that electing Jefferson would create a nation where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”
Benjamin Franklin was likely the biggest horndog. In a column from 1745 titled Advice on the Choice of a Mistress, Franklin advised bachelors to seek out older women: They “hazard no children,” he wrote, and “are so grateful.” He added, “So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old from a young one.” All pussies are alike, our brilliant founding father believed. Just put a basket over her head!
Speaking of brilliant, he “Christopher Columbus’d” a lightening rod (invented it after he accidentally shocked himself in 1746), but legitimately invented bifocals and the urinary catheter. If you visit the Franklin Institute website, you’ll find out that he was many things in his lifetime: a printer, a postmaster, an ambassador, an author, a scientist, and a Founding Father. They don’t mention that he frequented brothels in several countries and wrote dirty notes to young women. He didn’t visit his wife on her death bed because he didn’t want to leave the salons.
Many people quote his wisdoms from Poor Richard’s Almanac, like “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Rarely seen on a motivational poster in the principal’s office: “After three days men grow weary of a wench, a guest & weather rainy.” Also from Poor Richard’s Almanac, also true, but almost never quoted. Any why not? It’s definitely not more fun to imagine him as a dick-less inventor is it?
The behavior bothers me less than the desire to make these shitty men (but not shittier that anyone else) into our saintly American daddies. Why are we unable to accept these men as deeply flawed? Is it possible to have some great ideas and lots of bad ones? Eliminating the horny narrative and presenting the founders as sexless has set a permanent standard that every president (except Trump) should be the same. Maybe it’s scarier to think that the founding fathers are just like many of us: driven as much by great intentions, sometimes as much as their own vices, chasing a dream and a good time.
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You can access all past newsletters here!
Definitely a good reminder that people were sexual back in the day...but whew, some of the things they said and did were horrifying. But that sadly hasn't changed much either...I could imagine some of the politicians of today saying the same things.