Before one can intelligently discuss sexual policy, one must dispell the great myth of our age. People often ask, "why can't we just say that anything consenting adults do is OK?" Well, it's not OK because it has a long list of negative consequences
There is a difference between arguing that something is OK or not and whether or not it should be legal. Should the government attempt to restrict sex among consenting adults? Also, there are many other practices with potentially harmful side effects that are not illegal, from the obvious such as the consumption of alcohol to the less obvious but dangerous mass ownership and operation of automobiles which harm the environment and cause thousands of deaths every year. If it is the state's role to step in and prevent any and all potentially harmful activities, there are endless opportunities for it to insert itself into out every day lives. Regardless of our views on sex, is this the society we want to live in?
1. Sexually-transmitted diseases are no joke. Thanks to them, the average life-expectancy of a gay man is now 40, compared to 71 for all men. Something like 20% of British women aged 25-30 are sterile because of STDs.
I've always thought it odd that statistics like this are used to illustrate the results of "permissiveness." Gay sex is hardly the most accepted of lifestyle choices. The argument could be made that STDs are more rampant among gays because society has shunned them and does not seek to properly educate or treat them. Perhaps if we were more accepting of homosexuals and gay sex, we would do a better job of preventing the sort of careless behaviors that lead to the spread of disease. Perhaps if we allowed gays to get married, they would be more interested in monogamy and less likely to have unsafe sex with multiple partners. But it is also worth noting that it is always gay men that are used to make this point; lesbians are in fact less likely to contract STDs than straight women. Perhaps women would be better off abandoning traditional values and doing away with men altogether.
2. Making "consenting adults" the standard means polygamy, bestiality, prostitution and God-knows-what-else must be accepted, in the long run. One cannot endorse an idea that leads logically to this conclusion and expect that conclusion not to be reached when lust, money, and liberalism will be straining to reach it. So unless we want brothels to be as common and as public as Tesco, there have to be some limits.
But there are limits and will continue to be limits. This is a rehash of the ages-old slippery slope argument. First we allow people to have sex outside of marriage, next thing you know it'll be OK to marry a horse or rape children. When you paint with that broad of a brush, it's no wonder people are so scared. All these arguments do is stir up irrational fears and reaffirm prejudices.
Also, it's only fair to point out regarding brothels that there is a lot to be said for legalization and regulation. It is a business that cannot and will never be eliminated. When you can help ensure that prostitutes are educated in safe sex practices and screened regularly for STDs, you help prevent many of the problems this article warns about.
Some people suggest that such things are acceptable in private but not in public, but this solution will not work. It is unrealistic to expect that we can accept such things in private but condemn them in public, because allowing people to do these things in private results in the formation of interest groups that will then demand public acceptance. And if people get used to seeing such things in private, the shock of seeing them in public will wear off and they will cease to care.
I've never been a fan of the idea that some things are OK so long as they are hidden but not OK when practiced openly. Either something is acceptable or it is not. In fact, most of your more accepting people tend to feel this way, in my experience. It is more common in fact for the sexually conservative, in an attempt to compromise, to say "OK... Do what you will in your own bedroom but I don't want to see it, hear about it, deal with it in any way. Do what you will but pretend that you're not doing it in your day to day life." So I'm not sure how this fits into any argument against sexual permissiveness.
3. Tolerating "anything between consenting adults" will not lead to a libertarian paradise, but:
a. For the underclass, it will produce a wasteland of broken homes, fatherless children, and mindless couplings.
What is meant by tolerance, exactly? Because to make these things illegal and charge with criminal acts anyone that has children out of wedlock or commits adultery seems to me to compound the problem - certainly it puts the children of these people at further disadvantage. If we're talking about tolerance at a personal level then we already do not have that - People are not generally OK with the idea of a husband cheating on his wife and having a child on the side. Of course, this hasn't prevented it from happening, either. As for the "fatherless children" idea, this goes back once again to the taboo nature of sexual discussion in places like Britain and the US. If we were open about sex, more people would be educated and - hopefully as a result - more responsible. There are no fatherless children coming from safe sex. It is my belief that the practice of unsafe sex is a result of ignorance and/or unhealthy attitudes towards sex. Those are things that spring from sexual repression, not from sexual permissiveness.
b. For everyone else, it will produce an emotionally cruel social order which provides superficial pleasures for the rich and the pretty at the expense of misery for everyone else. It will culturally and socially disenfranchise the old and push the young into premature maturity.
This is all highly subjective, of course. The author is projecting his or her own views on sex on to everyone else. Sexual freedom is not for everyone tantamount to emotional cruelty. It does not make everyone who is not rich or pretty miserable - trust me, I have known more than my share of poor and ugly people that have had plenty of sex and who quite enjoy it. The old are not universally disenfranchised - they have sex too, I promise. And I'm not sure what to make about the comments regarding the "young," because I'm not sure whether we're talking about young adults or children. If the latter, this is just another slippery slope argument, as previously addressed. Non-monogamous sex for adults does not automatically lead to sex with or abuse of children.
c. It will cause young people to waste their 20's chasing short-term flings rather than getting married, and when they finally figure out that this is a recipe for unfulfilled lives and continual heartbreak, they'll be in their early 30's and half of them will not be able to establish stable households before female fertility declines.
Again, this is highly subjective stuff. What is seen to some as wasting the 20's may be seen to others as enjoying the 20's. It is not unfulfilling to everyone; it is not heartbreaking to everyone. Many people will tell you that they are better people for having dated multiple partners before settling down with one person later on. They learned about themselves. They learned about relationships. They feel better prepared to make their partner happy over the long term. Sure, it's not for everyone, but then again, neither is monogamy. Not everyone feels at age 18 that they are ready to commit to one person for the rest of their lives. I do not see how society benefits from forcing this upon someone that does not want it. In fact, pressure to do just this tends to result in infidelity and fatherless children later on - the very problems we are seeking to prevent.
As for the fertility issue, it amazes me to no end how some will act as if the human race is about to go extinct because fewer people are getting married and/or having children in a few western countries. There are 7 BILLION people on a planet with dwindling resources. If anything, we'd be better off having fewer children. You want to worry about the downfall of civilization? Imagine what this planet is going to look like when we pass 10 billion people (sooner than you think, by the way,) and we run out of clean water, food, and fossil fuels. Many of us in the west don't realize there are already a lot of countries where the water supply has evaporated to the point where governments have had to establish strict limits on the amount of water permitted to each household. But we need more babies?
4. A sexual order whose central concept is "consenting adults" will by definition be very selfish towards persons who are not adults, i.e. children. The easy availability of extra-marital sex encourages divorce and makes the children of the partner's previous marriages or cohabitations into nuisances. It will result in a ruthlessly adult-centric social order in which children are degraded, ignored, and not raised properly.
In these modern, more sexually open times, one could argue that we care more about children than we ever have. When in history have children had more rights and more protections? I'm not sure whether there is a correlation between sex and child protection, but that seems to be the argument here and so I will argue that it's flawed in either case. And how does the availability of extra-marital sex encourage divorce? If my wife says to me that I am not allowed to sleep with other women, then extramarital sex is not available and so if I choose to indulge, we get divorced. If she tells me that she is OK with me having sex with other women then she will not divorce me should I choose to indulge. This argument disagrees with itself.
Why, by the way, does having some sex make us selfish? Why does it mean we must put our pleasures ahead of our children? I don't think the argument here is against sex. I think it is against a whole perceived modern, non-traditional, godless outlook on life. It's not the sex itself, but what the sex supposedly represents. Some people cannot perceive that a couple of consenting adults could have sex outside of marriage without being sinful heathens that care about nothing but their own selfish pleasures. This is an argument based on fear that a valued way of life is being eroded. Sex just happens to be the part of a larger whole most likely to grab everyone's attention and stir emotions. But it's not just about the sex.
5. Making "consenting adults" the rule undermines social cohesion by making everyone into a sexual competitor to everyone else. The most ordinary recreational or civic organizations will suffer and the whole tone of life poisoned. Furthermore, because this makes innocent flirting not so innocent, it actually produces a de-eroticized culture with the coldness of Dangerous Liaisons.
The author may see it this way, but most people that practice "free love" do not - in fact, they see it as the opposite. Some people think marriage is about competition. A man seeks out the most beautiful woman he can, a woman seeks out the richest male highest in the social order. What is more cold than that? Want social cohesiveness? Let everyone fuck each other. I'm not arguing either way here, just pointing out that there are conflicting views. The author is stating as fact some highly debatable points.
6. Accepting the sexual revolution means conceding that traditional British culture was as stupid as Tony Blair thinks it is. It means admitting the left was correct. It means giving up one of the best cultural sticks we have to beat the liberal establishment with. And accepting polygamy means giving up one of the best politically-correct cultural sticks we have to beat Islam with.
I told you. Fear. Fear is the key. Eroding tradition, losing to Islam, giving up ages-old power and control, etc. This is about so much more than sex. It is about the people that used to rule and how they were able to maintain control. That control is beginning to slip and so they'll use all manner of flawed and slippery slope arguments to convince you that we've got to go back to the old ways of doing things. "Give us our power back!" is what it amounts to. They are scared, not for your family or for social welfare as they proclaim, but for the sake of their own power and authority.
7. A certain sexual self-restraint has long been part of the culture of Britain and was, in my view, a source of national greatness as male sexual energy was channelled into other pursuits and female sexual energy into the family. Can it really be an accident that our zenith of national greatness coincided with Victorian sexual restraint, and that Rome's decline set in just about the time orgies became fashionable?
Yes, in fact. Yes it can. This is your typical confusion of correlation with causation. Anyone with even a middling knowledge of Roman history knows that it wasn't the orgies that did them in. Oh, and anyone with some semblance of what I consider ethics knows that conquering and exploiting half the world is not a sign of British "national greatness," either. This is your typical nostalgia for the good old days that were in fact not so good for the majority of people involved.
Basically, I think it's important for the reader to understand what this article is really driving at. It's not really even about sex; sex is a tool used to lure people into a larger world view. It is riddled with fallacies and shouldn't convince anyone of anything.
A few of the responses have indicated that there is a "healthy medium" we ought to reach between the old world views of sex and this supposed new culture of permissiveness. I would argue that it isn't so much a middle ground we should find but a rational ground. There are a lot of people out there that have unhealthy and destructive views of sex, and these are not only those that are repressed or threatened by sex but also those that enjoy it. We should be sure that we are safe, responsible, and honest with each other. We should treat others with respect, and take responsibility for our actions. We should educate rather than instill fear, and we should not automatically hate and distrust anyone with differing values. All of these things we can do whether we have sex with one person, one hundred people, or no one at all.
