A reaction to Clive Hamilton’s latest article ‘Rethinking Sexual Freedom’.
I’m the obsessive type. The kind of person that latches their grip onto a subject and the people involved. The Internet filter debate is a contemporary battlefield in the war of individual freedom versus universal stability and as such I clung to it.
A part of my foray into the field has been the emergent enmity between myself and Clive Hamilton. This site’s readers will remember that, not long ago, my own cold war with the good professor briefly ignited as a war of words.
Today I sat down and started reading more of his works, looking for something to love. Indeed I agree with some of his assertions, especially on the pressures facing children and teens today, but I still find myself unable to stomach his stance on sexuality.
One of his latest essays, Rethinking Sexual Freedom, represents, for me, the enemy. He claims that -
It’s now evident that the removal of most taboos and social prohibitions on sexual activity has led to a highly sexualised society in which erotic imagery and sex talk are to be found everywhere in private and public life.
- and through a series of arguments about the awry hydroplaning of the movement towards sexual liberation, concludes that -
In affluent, liberal societies, the task is to understand that freedom cannot be found in a moral free-for-all, but only in the careful exercise of restraint.
At one point in the article he attacks one of the more extreme expressions of permissive sexual self determination, the sale of a consenting adults virginity -
In a perfect convergence of the narcissistic interpretation of 1960s liberation and pure market thinking, she declared: “I don’t have a moral dilemma with it. We live in a capitalist society. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to capitalise on my virginity?” Why not indeed? If he requests it, the purchaser of Natalie’s virginity will be able to authenticate the quality of the product by way of a gynaecological examination and then consummate the transaction in brothel. Nice. As if to underscore the perversion of the ideals of feminism, it turns out that Natalie holds a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies.
I suppose Clive can be forgiven for making a value judgment on the situation, it’s his job. It does, however, align his arguments with a conservative outlook on sexuality.
It appears Clive has missed the irony in calling this a perversion of feminism. Feminism being the movement that fought desperately to allow women to determine how they used their bodies without being controlled, restrained or chastised by male ‘intelligencia’ in ivory towers.
He also goes too far straw-manning ‘post-moderns’.
The debate over the sexualisation of girls has outed these post-moderns. They have always argued that children are sexual creatures and should be allowed to explore and express their sexuality without the guilt imposed on them by neurotic adults and conservative clerics. Luckily, they believe, children are much smarter than neurotic adults and slip easily into a savvy, ironic, critical mode whenever there is any danger of falling under the sway of advertisers or media.
He then goes on to describe an unholy alliance between those that think children shouldn’t be punished merely for touching themselves in ‘a naughty place’ and corporate vampires trying to push ‘corporate peadophilia’ as a means of selling their wares.
While I have no problem with attacking commercial interests having anything to do with children’s sexuality, it’s wrong to say that there is a causal relationship between the two without undermining a movement to remove shame and denigration from the lives of children.
I agree with Clive that sexual liberty has been used immaturely over the last few decades. I see these as teething problems, painful, undesirable and yet passing. We do need to rebuild the moral code, but to rebuild it again as a societal construct as opposed to an individual choice is unsustainable in the long term.
Unfortunately it may be the marketers and advertisers that ruin it for everyone by giving social conservatives more clout than ever before. Could we effect desirable change by tightening ethical regulation on corporations only? Why? Is it because they have greater influence over more people? If so then could the argument spread to celebrities having a different level of ethical restriction in law? I certainly hope not.
In the end Clive does make a call that I agree with once taken out of the context of his essay.
Today the historic mission is no longer to attack and tear down, but to rebuild a moral code.
I agree, though a moral code worth building must be robust enough to sustainably allow for and tolerate the whims and impulses of the majority of people, not just stabilise people’s lives in a low entropy state.
I think we’ve come to the point where we can no longer separate morality and ethics from the technology of the day and that, as Clive so vehemently desires, we can use technology to help us shape or buffer people’s actions.
Where Clive and I differ is that he would prefer to use technology in a restrictive manner to achieve that ‘low entropy state’ favoured by conservatives, whereas I would prefer to use technology to sandbox behaviours that would otherwise be too unstable to allow in physical situations.
Encapsulating society within a set of values will not reduce society’s entropy. No matter where we draw the line of ‘this much freedom’, parts of it will swell and explode. Crime, riots, revolution, all expressions of the compressed combustibles of the human condition are historically the only thing to expect from a restraining moral code. We do need to rebuild the moral code, but we need to make something more robust than current conservative notions.
