All posts tagged sexual morality

“The internet age, one where men too cowardly to post under their real names claim to be entitled to your private sex photos.”

Earlier today, Amanda Marcotte posted an interesting tweet:

https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/507874570783981568

This reminded me of a couple of things.  One was this old xkcd:

Another was this even older post of mine about “Why I Post Under a Pseudonym,” in which I say, among other things: 

First, I teach at a college.  Many of my students look me up on Google.  If I blogged under my real name, they would immediately find this site.  I already catch them spouting opinions which they take to be mine in an attempt to make points.  If I were to make hundreds of posts in which I give my opinions about virtually every possible subject so easy for them to find, I could expect to encounter that sort of thing every day. 

Second, I often tell little stories about people I know.  Since I use a pseudonym and do not identify these people, the reader cannot be expected to know who they are.  Even readers who know me and recognize the characters may find something of the detachment of fiction in a story published under a pseudonym.  If I were to use my real name, however, I would have an obligation to give the others a right to rebut what I have written about them. 

Third, I am not the sole author of this site.  Others post here, still others comment here.  Some of these are people who are connected to me in some identifiable way (for example, my wife) and who may occasionally make remarks here that they would not want to share with everyone in the world.  If I obscure my identity by using a pseudonym, those others may be able to preserve some measure of privacy.

When I first read the xkcd comic above, I thought of that phrase “some measure of privacy,” and saw it as potentially misleading.  “Privacy” is a problematic word for anything that one puts online.  “Detachment” might be better. That I’ve published hundreds of items over a period of more than seven years, some of them quite lengthy, some expressed with fervor, under the name “Acilius” shows that Acilius and his creator are to some extent the same person.  But only to some extent; important as the opinions expressed in those items may be to Acilius’ creator, he is at the end of the day a human being, who would still exist even if he changed or abandoned every opinion he had ever held, while Acilius, as an online persona, is nothing more than the sum of those opinions and the sensibility that informs them.  That’s why I don’t take any steps to make it particularly difficult for tech-savvy readers to identify Acilius with his creator.

“Private sex photos” would for this reason be in a different category from online commenting personae.  Bodies and their sexual responses are usually closer to the core of what makes a human being into a coherent self than are any set of opinions.  I’m not saying that it’s always easy to draw bright lines between opinions and sexual responses; one opinion might translate into disgust where another might promote arousal, and vice versa.  But I would say that if someone confronted me, in real life, with an opinion that had appeared under the name of Acilius, I would have an entirely different set of options as to how to respond to that confrontation than I would have if someone were to confront me with a graphic image of me engaged in sexual activity.  

That also suggests the difference between data-hacking that results in the public exposure of “private sex photos” and data-hacking that results in the hijacking of financial information.  Banks, credit card companies, and other financial services companies usually offer at least partial refunds of moneys stolen by that sort of hijacking, and those refunds represent at least partial remedies for the injury caused.  But there is no refunding any part of that which is lost when “private sex photos” become public.  

While “privacy” is not the same thing today that it was before the digital revolution, it still isn’t some of the things it wasn’t then.  It isn’t now, and never has been, at all the same thing as secrecy.  A secret is something that cannot be made general knowledge unless those who know it choose to reveal it.  So the precise shape and coloration of your body under your clothes are not secret; anyone looking at you can probably form an estimate of these things to a rather high degree of accuracy.  

Privacy, though, is a concept from the economy of the gift.  We as a society have decided that definite knowledge of the precise shape and coloration of your body under your clothes is a gift which you have the right to share with or withhold from certain people under certain circumstances.  Granted, there are other people to whom we must give this knowledge because of some relation in which they stand to us; for example, medical professionals attending our cases, fellow members of military organizations in which we may find ourselves obligated to serve, etc.  But most of us are in these situations for a finite portion of our lives, and when all is well these situations are themselves governed by well-defined and rigorously enforced rules.  

If, as Ms Marcotte puts it, “men too cowardly to post under their real names claim to be entitled to your private sex photos,” and these claims carry the day, then privacy disappears altogether.  If people who do not stand in any specific relation to us can take as a matter of right what previously we had made available only as a gift, then such things cease to be possible as gifts.  Not only do photos and other graphic representations of nudity or sexual behavior under those circumstances, but also nudity and sexual behavior themselves lose some of the fragile qualities that make each revelation of nudity and each sexual act such an uncommonly precious gift.  The body responds to every stimulus in its environment, consciously or unconsciously; a sex act involves every aspect of the context in which its participants find themselves.  To make a gift of nudity, to make a gift of a sex act, is to make a gift of oneself as one is at that moment, to give everything and withhold nothing.  Even disguises and role-playing and the like only reveal oneself to one’s partner.  Surrender that, not as a gift to a partner, but as payment of a debt collected by a third party, and the economy of gift yields everything to the economy of the marketplace.       

by acilius on September 5, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Current Events
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Posted by acilius on September 5, 2014

https://losthunderlads.com/2014/09/05/the-internet-age-one-where-men-too-cowardly-to-post-under-their-real-names-claim-to-be-entitled-to-your-private-sex-photos/

Chronicles, February 2014

The latest issue of paleoconservative Chronicles magazine features several pieces (by Thomas L. Fleming, Claude Polin, and Chilton Williamson) reflecting on James Burnham’s 1964 book, The Suicide of the West.

Burnham’s work always struck me as highly derivative of Lawrence Dennis, especially Dennis’ 194o The Dynamics of War and Revolution.  Dennis made the mistake of accepting the label “fascist” as a self-description in the 1930s.  Dennis was not an enthusiast for fascism; he thought a fascist regime was inevitable, and that elites ought to face up to that inevitability and try to make the best of what he freely acknowledged was in many ways a bad situation.  He criticized US elites harshly, so that when the United States entered the Second World War, he found himself a friendless man, exposed to attack on all sides.   Prosecuted for sedition in 1944, it was only because the judge died during his trial that Dennis was lucky enough to stay out of prison.  I had hoped that the issue would include at least one reference to Dennis, but it does not.  Justin Raimondo is a regular columnist for Chronicles, and a defender of Dennis; Mr Raimondo’s column this month is about a lady who fixes up old houses.

A couple of pieces in the issue, Dr Fleming’s column linked above and a note by Aaron D. Wolf, bring up homosexuality.  Dr Fleming takes issue with the term “homophobia,” writing: “express the Christian point of view on homosexuality, as Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson did, and you are a homophobic bigot—though the idea of Mr. Robertson being afraid of gay men is truly amusing.”  I am not familiar with Mr Robertson, so I cannot share Dr Fleming’s amusement.  I can only congratulate him on it.

However, I think Mr Wolf’s piece does vindicate the term “homophobia.”  Mr Wolf, also thinking of Mr Robertson, writes:

Robertson believes homosexuality is sinful because God says so in His infallible Word.  He, like Saint Paul, doesn’t make a sophisticated distinction between inclination and activity.  And Robertson follows Paul’s thought process as spelled out in Romans 1—that a society given over to sexual perversion is a society that has followed a long path of degradation.  In addition Robertson, convinced as he is by a higher authority which demands submission and not explaining away, also recognizes that such perversion is not even rational behavior.  Thus, the Duck Commander, in the field, armed, and with his girly-man interviewer in tow, said with vulgar rhetorical flourish what most men, Christian and non-Christian alike, have said in locker rooms or at bars or by the water cooler or wherever: that the very idea of what gay men do, or want to do, is repulsive.

As I understand it, when psychologists talk about phobias, they are talking about anxiety disorders.  So someone who suffers from acrophobia, for example, is not simply “afraid of heights,” but is likely to be seized by anxiety when exposed to heights.   Further, it is my understanding that the two main causes of anxiety attacks are, initially, the fear that one is being forced to meet  impossible demands, and, subsequently, the  fear that one is about to have an anxiety attack.

With those points in mind, I would say that anyone who “doesn’t make a… distinction between inclination and activity” before declaring that God has judged particular people to exemplify “perversion” and “degradation” and to be “repulsive” probably has an anxiety disorder.  Mr Wolf can, by acts of will, prevent himself from engaging in any particular activity at any particular moment.  If he regards same-sex sex as perverse, degrading, and repulsive, he can therefore choose to abstain from it throughout his whole life.  However, inclinations do not respond to acts of the will in that way.  This is not a “sophisticated distinction.”  It is the very crudest sort of magical thinking to imagine that a desire or an inclination will go away simply because we tell it to.  Indeed, it is in the strictest sense unchristian to believe that this can be done, since it denies the reality of temptation.

So, if anxiety is the result of the fear of being forced to meet impossible demands, the belief that one’s inclinations must respond to acts of will in the same way that one’s activities do is a recipe for anxiety.  If that belief is reinforced by the threat that “most men, Christian and non-Christian alike” will regard one as perverse, degraded, and repulsive if one does not succeed in this impossible task, then of course the result will be an anxiety disorder.

And not only in those who have experienced a desire for same-sex sex.  All of us know perfectly well that we cannot shape our inclinations by acts of will, since all of us have at least some inclinations of which we would like to be rid.  Mr Robertson, as a recovering drug addict, knows that better than most.  So, if one believes that merely experiencing a homosexual inclination is enough to mark one as unacceptable for the company of men, one would surely be haunted by the fear that such an inclination might someday, somehow, pop into one’s feelings.

Perhaps this belief, miserable as it makes so many people, is also behind much of the rapid growth of support for the rights of sexual minorities in the West in recent decades.  If we do not distinguish between the inclination and the activity, then denouncing the activity means reviling the people who are inclined to it.  The more same-sexers one gets to know, the harder it is to believe oneself to be a nice person while using phrases like (to quote Mr Wolf’s note) “designed for the toilet” with application to matters that are essential to their social identity and most intimate relationships.  So, perhaps the Mr Wolfs of the world are the true vanguard of the gay rights struggle.

by acilius on February 16, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Chronicles
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Posted by acilius on February 16, 2014

https://losthunderlads.com/2014/02/16/chronicles-february-2014/

Worshiping coitus

Sacred art

One of our recurring themes here on Los Thunderlads is the remarkable weakness of arguments against gender-neutral marriage.  The law-courts of the world are full of lawyers advancing ingenious arguments in support of the most ludicrous propositions; wealthy business interests can suborn economists and other social scientists to make very impressive cases for any policy that will increase their profits; sectarians and enthusiasts of all sorts can build formidable intellectual defenses for even their most far-fetched crochets.  Yet the idea that the title of “marriage” should be granted exclusively to heterosexual pairings, a familiar idea throughout human history and one that enjoys the support of many extremely powerful institutions and of solid majorities of public opinion in much of the world today, seems to find no rational backing whatever in contemporary public discourse.  Opponents of gender neutral marriage have noticed this circumstance; I can recommend theologian Alastair J. Roberts’ recent note, “Why Arguments Against Gay Marriage Are Usually Bad.”  Mr Roberts doesn’t convince me that gender-neutral marriage is a bad idea, but he does come up with a number of interesting remarks to make as he goes along his way.

In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed advocates of gender neutral marriage making themselves look almost as silly as their opponents routinely do.  First up was an article in Slate magazine by Mark Joseph Stern, one subtitle of which is “Why do defenders of DOMA and Prop 8 worship coitus?”  Mr Stern reports on legal briefs recently submitted to the US Supreme Court in defense of measures that seek to reserve marriage for heterosexual couples only, briefs in which penis-in-vagina sex is presented as an essential defining characteristic of marriage.  Mr Stern seems incredulous that this is in fact the premise of arguments presented to the US Supreme Court.  “This argument puts gay marriage opponents in an awkward position. For years, they said gays were too libidinous and licentious to create stable marriages. Now, as proponents of gay marriage emphasize love, fidelity, and commitment, the right is fetishizing coitus,” he writes.  He goes on: “In [Professor Robert] George’s primitive understanding, marriage isn’t about love or raising children. It’s about copulation.”

Mr Stern’s piece went up a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday, Tom Tomorrow reminded me of it.  Click on the image to go to the strip:

I’m not an expert in comparative religion, but it does strike me as rather odd that there might be cultures which do not “fetishize coitus” and grow elaborate institutions around penis-in-vagina sex.  After all, penis-in-vagina isn’t just another arcane sexual practice, but is the act of procreation.  Among animal processes, only eating and death compare to it in the range and gravity of their consequences.   If you’re going to worship any events in nature, it would seem that penis-in-vagina sex would be first on the list.

Now, the institution of marriage in the West has evolved in such a way that “love, fidelity, commitment,” romance, and other abstract  considerations are more important than anything so concrete as penis-in-vagina sex.  The religious life of the Protestant West has evolved to emphasize the purely abstract over the concrete to a remarkable degree.  Throughout the Western world, same-sex couples are usually treated by their relatives and neighbors as the equals of opposite-sex couples in every way; the exceptions come in legal formalities and in random acts of hostility.  I believe that laws should reflect and sustain the actual practice of society, not assert transcendent standards that would revolutionize that practice, so it seems reasonable to me that marriage as an institution should drift free of its last formal links to penis-in-vagina sex.  However, it is no more “primitive” for Robert George to hold to an understanding of the nature of institutions that precludes such a development than it is for Hindus and Buddhists to revere lingam-yoni symbols.

The whole debate, left and right, strikes me as an example of the modern West’s inability to take sex seriously as a moral concept.  Moderns can be quite calm and serious when discussing the legal standards of consent to sexual behavior, but characteristically respond to moral questions about other aspects of sexual behavior with one of two avoidance strategies.  Either they try to laugh the topic off, or they refer it to medicine, psychology, or some other therapeutic discipline.  This is a real problem with modernity.  Since sexual behavior is such an important part of life, people who try to follow a moral code which has nothing serious to say about sex are likely to become unserious people.   Yet it seems to be an insoluble problem.  Modernity appeals to the formal, abstract rationality of the marketplace, of the courts, of science, of bureaucratic organization.  An institution built to support, celebrate, and commemorate penis-in-vagina sex jars with this formal, abstract rationality; but so, eventually, does everything else that makes life possible and enjoyable.

Again, I hold that the function of the law is to affirm society as it is, not to remake it according to some abstract plan; it is because many same-sex couples in fact operate as married couples in the USA that I hope the law will change and recognize the actually existing reality of our society.  As I pointed out here four years ago, to change that fact and the social conditions underpinning it would require a very far-reaching restructuring of US society.  Modernity, with its attachment to abstract theoretical schemes,  might endorse some such restructurings, and people with a romantic hankering for the premodern might wish they could recreate a world in which the concrete and particular take precedence over the abstract and general.  But as a student of the works of Irving Babbitt, I see in such impulses nothing but the drive to assert one’s own power over the world and the people in it, a drive that can never be satisfied, but that grows with each success it encounters.   If we are ever to recover the sense of the sacramental as something inherent in particular actions, particular things, and particular places, it won’t be the law that leads us to that recovery, but a much broader social development that the law will notice only after it is already so far advanced that few people can formulate a coherent argument for or against it.

by acilius on April 2, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Current Events, religion
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Posted by acilius on April 2, 2013

https://losthunderlads.com/2013/04/02/worshiping-coitus/

“Among the loneliest creatures in the universe”

The other day, Eve Tushnet posted a link to this post by Mark P. Shea.  Shea is responding to remarks by Watergate figure Charles Colson, who was in turn discussing the question of whether puppets Bert and Ernie, of Sesame Street fame, should marry each other.  Colson approvingly quotes the official statement from the producers of Sesame Street to the effect that as puppets, Bert and Ernie “do not have a sexual orientation.”  He sees a deeper significance in the idea that Bert and Ernie’s close friendship suggests a homosexual relationship, and quotes blogger Alyssa Rosenberg’s remarks about it.  Colson’s quote from Rosenberg included the beginning and middle of this paragraph:

And more to the point, I think it’s actively unhelpful to gay and straight men alike to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple. Having close, affectionate friendships with another man doesn’t mean that you two are sleeping together, just as liking fashion doesn’t automatically flip a switch on your sexual orientation and make you only interested in dudes. Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way. As much as I write about how narrow depictions of women can be in pop culture, depictions of men may end up being more positive, but that doesn’t mean they’re less limiting.

To this, Shea adds that the idea that friendship between people of the same sex must somehow represent “sublimated homosexuality” is:

just a lie and the incredible poverty that is foisted on our culture (and on men in particular, who are starving to death for lack of male friendships) is one of the great famines of our time. Some of the most nourishing relationships I have ever known have been friendships–with both men and women. American men are among the loneliest creatures in the universe, not for lack of women, but for lack of friends.

Shea’s blog is called “Catholic and Enjoying It!”   Like Shea, Tushnet is a tradition-minded Roman Catholic; the tagline of her blog is “Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood.”  Unlike Shea, she is an uncloseted (though celibate) lesbian.  Colson is neither a Roman Catholic nor a lesbian, but his ardent Baptist faith comes with quite an old-fashioned view of sexual morality.  So Shea’s comment puts them in an awkward spot.  If the label “gay” holds such terror for American men that they would rather take a place “among the loneliest creatures in the universe” than risk being identified with it, surely it is an urgent matter to drain that label of its terror.  To be sure, this is no easy matter.  For decades now, legions of people have been laboring mightily to destigmatize homosexuality, and the work isn’t half done yet.  But it is the obvious answer.  Indeed, the only conclusion I can draw from Shea’s remark is that heterosexual men have a vital stake in the movement to gain full social equality for sexual minorities.  This conclusion, however, is not one that Christian conservatives such as Shea, Colson, and Tushnet can accept, and so they are left facing a vastly complex, perhaps hopelessly complex, problem.  I believe their hearts are in the right place, and so I feel sorry for them.

 

 

 

by acilius on September 16, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Current Events
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Posted by acilius on September 16, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/09/16/among-the-loneliest-creatures-in-the-universe/

Quotable remarks from right-wing commentators

From Heather Mac Donald:

I haven’t subjected myself to much right-wing talk radio and TV recently, so I don’t know whether the Obama-haters have made the predictable flip-flop.  Having opposed Obama’s ultimate verbal support for the Egyptian protesters (an opposition not based on any a priori principle regarding the proper deference due to Middle Eastern dictators, but simply on the rule: whatever Obama does is wrong), the right-wing media, if they were suddenly to become guided by reason, should now be supporting Obama’s caution towards Libya.  Because such backing for Obama’s Libyan diplomacy would represent principle and consistency, I can only suppose that the right is now blasting him for not siccing the American military on Libya. (Secular Right)

From James Matthew Wilson:

According to [T. S.] Eliot, Stoicism is a trans-historical phenomenon that emerges when persons become so alienated from all community that they become incapable of fulfilling their political natures and feel thrown back upon themselves.  Lacking the communal resources to pursue a good life in this world or the next, they conceive of the private reason as the only place where happiness might be “made.”  Pierre Hadot describes this ancient Stoic condition with elegant simplicity.  For the Stoic, the Cosmos consists of an already realized and determined rational order.  Morality consists simply in the assent of reason to that order; one is good if one’s reason accepts that order’s course.  The logical exercises of Stoic life consist in a constant disciplining of the reason, a training to see the rational order of things as they are and to accept them.  This involves stripping away all possible projections from one’s own mind to see the bare order of things.  Hadot cites Marcus Aurelius, for instance, who trained himself to conceive of the act of making love as the simple brushing and bumping of bodily parts.  Stripped of all “anthropomorphic” or “subjective” “sentiment,” one sees things for what they are and accepts them.  This, for the Stoic, is “happiness.” (Front Porch Republic)

From Jim Goad:

I feel sorry for you if you aren’t entertained by people who say things such as Jews “hate God and worship the rectum,” the Catholic Church is “the largest, most well-funded and organized pedophile group in the history of man,” and that “Mohammed was a demon-possessed whoremonger and pedophile who contrived a 300-page work of Satanic fiction.” I find it so funny, I paused to laugh while typing it. If you can make it from 2:35-3:20 of this video without so much as a titter, I’ll pray to the Lord to give you a funny bone. (Taki’s Magazine)

 

by acilius on March 15, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Politics, Quick Links
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Posted by acilius on March 15, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/03/15/quotable-remarks-from-right-wing-commentators/

Why do people have opinions about homosexuality?

When did you most recently look at someone and hope that s/he would express an opinion about homosexuality?  I’m guessing the answer is “never.”  If you have hoped to hear that, then my guess is that you felt isolated and embattled by people who disagreed with your opinion, and you were hoping for someone to  support your views.  Have you ever actually been curious to know what a person thought about homosexuality, or wanted to hear an argument about it that might lead you to change your mind?

When did you most recently hear someone express an opinion about homosexuality?  I’m guessing the answer involves a story about being trapped with some terrible bore.  If it doesn’t involve that, then my guess is that it was some intensely personal encounter.  Have you ever actually found homosexuality a suitable topic for abstract discussion?

When did you most recently express an opinion about homosexuality?  I’m guessing the answer is “when I was being an asshole.”  If not, then my guess is that you were trying to stop the people around you from denouncing those they disagreed with by showing them that you were one of those they are denouncing, and relying on their regard for you as a person to prompt them to behave themselves.  Has anyone ever actually been impressed by the logic of an argument you have presented in support of your opinion about homosexuality?

I mean these questions seriously.  Some friends of mine are currently at odds with each other because they disagree about whether homosexuality is moral.  Mrs Acilius and I were talking about this group the other day, and said that the reason their trouble had come to a desperate pass was that they refused to sit down together and talk about their differences.  If only they could discuss the matter, we agreed, surely they would find a way to go on together, even if they didn’t have the same views.  With a taboo over such a prominent matter, their friendship seemed to be doomed.

Shortly after, we turned on the television and looked for something to watch.  As we flipped, we heard an announcer saying “And now, we take your calls on the question of the day: What should Christians believe about homosexuality?”  We nearly fell off the couch as we raced to change the channel.

If you don’t want to hear anyone else’s opinion about homosexuality and no one wants to hear yours, why bother forming, holding, and expressing such opinions at all?  Granted, there are public policy questions that come before the voters in most democracies nowadays that call for opinions about homosexuality.  But if people didn’t harbor such opinions, would those questions continue to exist?

by acilius on March 14, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Current Events
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Posted by acilius on March 14, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/03/14/why-do-people-have-opinions-about-homosexuality/

Liberalism versus Sex

In the USA, it’s customary to divide the political spectrum into liberal and conservative, where “liberal”= “left” and “conservative”=”right.”  This tends to leave Americans perplexed when they hear people in other countries denouncing hypercapitalist economic policies as neoliberal or ultraliberal.  The easiest way I’ve found of explaining this usage to my countrymen is to mention H. G. Wells.   When Wells visited America in 1906, he remarked that the United States lacked two of the three major political parties that existed almost everywhere in Europe.  One of these was a socialist party.  While there was a socialist movement in the USA in 1906, no socialist party was a leading contender for power in national politics.  The other missing party was a conservative party.  Not only was there no major contender for power in the USA that stood for monarchy, an established church, and the traditional relationship between peasant and aristocracy; there was no constituency in American society that could possibly demand such a platform.  The parties that Wells did find in America would in the UK have been represented by the left and right wings of the Liberal Party:

It is not difficult to show for example, that the two great political parties in America represent only one English political party, the middle-class Liberal Party, the party of industrialism and freedom.  There is no Tory Party to represent the feudal system, and no Labor Party… All Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one sort or another.  (The Future in America: A Search after Realities, pages 73-74)

Liberalism, in all its forms, holds out the promise of a social order based on reason.  Left liberals, including some who call themselves Greens or Social Democrats, want to reform the public sphere so that rational dialogue among individuals will dominate politics, and through politics rational dialogue will provide a meeting ground where a diverse population can live together peacefully.  Right liberals, including some who call themselves Conservatives or Libertarians, want to reform the economic system so that the rational self-interest of individuals will dominate the marketplace, and through the marketplace rational self-interest will generate an free and orderly society.  In either form, liberalism places its faith in the power of reason.

Such a faith can be very comfortable indeed.  Liberals left and right sometimes annoy their opponents by seeming so “terribly at ease in Zion.”  Even the most complacent liberal, however, can hardly fail to notice that some extremely important areas of human life do not seem to invite reason’s governance.  Among the most obvious examples is sexual behavior.  Decades ago, science fiction writer Robert Sheckley imagined what a perfectly rational lover would be like; in his 1957 story “The Language of Love,” Sheckley presented a character named Jefferson Toms who learned how to make love without compromising reason in any way.  Toms discovers why the species that invented this art went extinct when he finds that no potential lover can tolerate his scrupulously accurate endearments.

Of course, Jefferson Toms’ namesake Thomas Jefferson was at once one of the supreme exponents of the liberal tradition and a man who likely followed his sexual urges to betray every principle that tradition exalted.  When they consider sexual behavior, liberals typically speak of “consent.”  That “consent” is a technical term which has little meaning outside the legal processes where it arose becomes clear when we speculate on what may have happened between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.  As Jefferson’s slave, Hemings could not legally consent to enter a sexual relationship with him, or with anyone else.  The law of a liberal society would thus label any sex act in which she participated as rape.  Hemings may indeed have experienced her encounters with Jefferson as rape.  We certainly don’t know enough to defend him in any way.  But surely it must give us pause to realize that our idea of “consent” implies that none of the billions of human beings who have lived as slaves has ever engaged in a wholesome sex act.  A non-liberal Right might claim that this implication reduces the whole liberal project to absurdity, and throws us back to traditional definitions of social roles, rather than individual self-determination, as the proper standard for judging the moral status of any action, sexual or otherwise.

A non-liberal Left might respond differently, but with equal certitude that it had found a fatal flaw in liberalism.  In our own times, Catharine MacKinnon and the late Andrea Dworkin exposed the shallowness of the notions of “consent” that underpin liberal definitions of rightful sexual behavior.*  Those notions imagine a man and a woman facing each other as equals and deciding, by a rational process, whether they will engage in a particular sex act.  At a minimum, an act can be consensual if and only if both parties are consenting to the same thing.  This in fact never happens, nor can it happen in a patriarchal society.  Wherever men as a group are recognized as dominant and women as a group are labeled as submissive, a man will gain power over women and status among other men if he extorts sex from women, while a woman will pay a price for resisting this extortion.  Because of these facts, men and women make such radically different cost/benefit analyses before agreeing to sex that the parties can never be said to have consented to the same thing.  For this reason, Dworkin wanted to excise the word “consent” from rape laws.

(more…)

by acilius on October 9, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in The Nation
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Posted by acilius on October 9, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/10/09/liberalism-versus-sex/