The cover story of January’s issue Reason Magazine is Guilty
Until Proven Innocent – How the government encourages kangaroo courts for sex
crimes on campus is authored by Cathy Young. The article explores the confused and
conflicted sexual agendas that can get a guy expelled from college for a
seemingly consensual roll in the hay.
Our governing authorities rightly look to protect women from
sexual predators. Conversely, the
culture encourages sexual an attitude of sexual freedom. Popular wisdom holds that the easy access to birth
control and abortion liberates females to explore sexuality as partners with
men.
Ms. Young’s article suggests that liberation has muddied the
already murky waters of sexual relations; making it ever trickier to navigate
the hazardous channels of love, sex and romance.
Let’s look back at how are arrived here and what roles state
and culture played.
Beginning in the 19th Century, Sigmund Freud taught
that society’s ills are squarely rooted in the repressive Victorian sexual
attitudes.
That may be so said Margaret
Sanger, but what about us women? We
can’t let loose without getting pregnant?
We need birth control if we are to have sexual equality and enjoy the
therapeutic benefits of a fulfilling sex life.
Soon the churches fell in line. At the 1930 Lambeth conference the Anglican Church
became the first major confession to get on board with birth control and in
front of the sexual revolution. Come the
Sixties and the Pill and the rest virginity was no longer an option.
Now all of this is fine with us libertarians so far. We really don’t care who hooks up with whom
so long as it is between consenting adults and they assume responsibility for
any adverse outcomes. Yet, once again
democracy rears its ugly head.
Over two centuries ago in his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observed that there exist separate
moral stands for the well-to-do versus the hoi polloi because, let’s face it,
they could afford to be bad:
“In every civilized
society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been
completely established, there have been always two different schemes or systems
of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the strict
or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The
former is generally admired and revered by the common people; the latter is
commonly more esteemed and adopted by what are called the people of fashion.”
In the modern age, we workaday folks live vicariously
through Hollywood celebrities, pop stars and jet setters who leap from bed to
bed and from marriage to marriage because they can write big checks when the
fit hits the Shan.
“How can this be fair?” cry the pleaders for the poor and
oppressed? Why are the wealthy more entitled to a good time in the sack than
us? Isn’t that a basic right? Margaret Sanger dragged class conflict into
the already hazardous battle of the sexes, when she wrote about the “knowledge of birth control, so carefully
guarded and so secretly practiced by the women of the wealthy class -- and so
tenaciously withheld from the working women”. A central argument in the pro-legal abortion
position is that rich women can always “go away” to have their problem “taken
care of” safely while the poor girls fall prey to back alley butchers.
In no time, sexual fulfillment became a right with birth
control and abortion becoming entitlements.
With this, men and women arrived at equality in the bedroom, able to
indulge risk-free pleasure that was often taxpayer subsidized.
We should now be a socialist dreamland of equality with men
and women essentially neutered and turned into indiscriminant pleasure seeking
bio-droids. With the playing field
leveled by legislation and litigation, it should be open season for guys and
gals to find regret free trysts.
However, something has gone wrong. Despite the best efforts of gender levelers
there are still differences in how the sexes survey the sexual battlefield. Vive la difference!
Margaret Sanger herself saw this when she wrote, “There is
no doubt that the natural aim of the sexual impulse is the sexual act, yet when
the impulse is strongest and followed by the sexual act without love or any of
the relative instincts which go to make up love, the relations are invariably
followed by a feeling of disgust.”
She concludes, “Respect for each other and for one's self is
a primary essential to this intimate relation.”
What is happening and what is documented by Cathy Young’s Reason article, is that the breaking
down of cultural and biological barriers to sexual gratification often results
in impersonal hook-ups that engender that “feeling of disgust” and loss of self
respect and resentment of the casual partner.
In other words, buyer’s remorse.
One is tempted to say caveat
emptor, live and learn. However the
backlash now often carries considerable penalties for men who mistakenly
believed that they equal participants in a mutually agreeable shag fest.
The lessons for libertarians here are that, yes, we endorse
equality before the law and strong protections against sexual predators. But let us also remember that the strength of
a free society lies in diversity, including some hardwired differences between
the sexes no matter how much we would like to deny them.
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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
