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As a liberal, I feel that the left's left me. Today's left frightens me. Rather than using reason to persuade us and letting the rest of us form our own opinions, the new left is waging a war of abuse and social violence against everyone who's not in lockstep with the the Left party line. It's not what they're saying, it's how they're saying it. This runs counter to liberal values. Liberalism is a political philosophy that has to do with rights. It holds that people are free and that we cannot coerce others to hold certain opinions or to only express certain things. We all have the right to a sincere opinion.
There's more than one way to be on the left.
In this post, I continue my series on liberal vs authoritarian approaches to progress. Today's topic is sex. I'll discuss how I view sex as a liberal and how I see the current left's view on sex as having divereged radically from liberalism.
Sex
The old left has traditionally been sex-positive. We affirm that sex is essentially good. All forms of consensual sex among adults are basically good, including casual sex that's merely for the mutual physical pleasure of all parties involved and polyamorous sex, in which everybody involved agrees to it. What's bad is to violate another individual's sexual boundaries or to involve minors in sex with adults, since minors are considered unable to consent.
However, American culture has traditionally been sex-negative, becaues of its Puritanical roots. Traditional conservatism, thus sees sex as bad on the face of it and only acknowledges it to be good if other qualities are added, like sex within a loving marriage, for example, or sex for the sake of making babies. If someone violates someone else's boundaries via erotic touch, this perspective understands the act as doubly bad: bad because someone's values were violated, but also bad because the perpetrator wanted to do something erotic in the first place. Casual sex and polyamory are understood as fundamentally bad. So are gay, Lesbian, and bi.
Recently, I see the new left as having adopted this puratanical sex-negative thought pattern. It used to be that I'd hear women complain about men violating their boundaries, but, lately, they seem to think that they don't have to set them in the first place. The former follows logically from sex-positive culture, while the latter follows logically from sex-negative culture.
The liberal perspective, on the other hand, is that it's true that there are boundaries we shouldn't have to set (like erotic touch outside of a romantic / dating context), it's everybody's responsibility to set boundaries and to respect boundaries that are set. This is something I see the new left as rejecting.
One problem I'm seeing, in the new left, is cases in which third parties in our community would make a complaint against someone (usually a man) for some sort of perceived, vague sexual malfeasance, when the second party (the person receiving erotic touching, often a woman) clearly consented. These nosy neigbhors couch their accusations in a tearful sales pitch. It's custom tailored to pull at your heart strings. They'll give lip service to ideals like "consent culture" and often make vague accusations, like "I didn't feel like that guy was using language that…". They'll pretend to be "helping" the second party (the one consenting to advances of the iniator), when really they're objecting to any sort of romantic, erotic, or sexual behavior.
They gaslight the initiator of whatever it was (asking someone out on a date, kissing someone, putting their arm around someone's shoulders, etc) because reasons. However, if you stop and be rational for a moment, you'll soon realize the problem. If the second party consented, what's the problem? If we're sex-positive, there is none! The nosy neighbor's real complaint is that erotic touching is occurring at all.
Liberalism holds that the second party has the right to consent. A third party should only get involved if the second party asks them to.
Consent Culture
I absolutely believe in consent. Of course, before we touch someone erotically we should make sure they're okay with that. That's just basic common sense.
I never heard the term "consent culture" until a few years ago and the term still baffles me. As sex-negative as American culture has traditionaly been, consent has always been built into our culture. It's necessary for capitalism, which is also part of American culture. You can't take something from another without their consent. Our nation was founded on classic liberalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism), which implies consent. It follows logically from that that you can't engage another person in erotic touching unless they've agreed to it. The proof is in our laws. Rape and sexual assault are illegal. A culture that did not have consent built into its notions of sex would not have such laws.
So, consent is built into our culture. We don't need "consent culture" any more than we need a no-murdering culture or a no-theft culture. The fact that murders or thefts happen does not imply anything to the contrary. Human beings do all sorts of evil things, by nature, that we need to rein in. Culture and law are there to help us do that. Just as it's obvious that murder and theft are wrong, it's also obvious that consent is necessary.
Respecting Women in Sex-Positive Culture
Of course, men should respect women. That follows logically to any liberal, because we liberals believe that we're all equal. Often, though, when women talk about how they find it sexist if men don't "respect them", I have the awful nagging feeling that they've fallen back into that puritanical, sex-negative thought pattern. In a sex-positive culture, for a man to express desire to a woman is normal. It's not in and of itself disrespectful. If sex is fundamentally good, showing sexual desire is also fundamentally good. Of course, there are appropriate and inapproriate ways to do so. Nobody likes their sex organs being stared at, for instance. It's also certainly disrespectful to take someone else for granted.
Sex-positive culture looks very different from respect in a sex-negative one. Since sex is fundamentally good, there are good sex-positive manners that show that we respect everyone's right to approach sex in their own way. When criticizing sexual interest and advances, we must be careful to properly criticize breaches of sex-positive etiquette, rather than criticizing the sexual fact itself.
Objectification vs Physical Attraction
There's a difference between objectification and physical attraction. If you know someone's a human being and treat them as such (by sex-positive standards), you're not objectifying them. In sex-positive culture, there's nothing at all wrong with feeling primarily physically attracted to someone and thinking sex with them would be fun.
Objectification is a very harsh thing to accuse somebody of. It's batted around like it's nothing, but it actually means treating someone like an object. Psychologists use the term to describe sociopaths and psychopaths, who literally objectify everybody (they treat everyone but themselves as objects to be used, rather than fellow human beings to be related to). So, I wish people would be much more careful about using this term. Objectification could include physical attraction (just wanting pussy or dick, which is quite different from wanting a mutually pleasureable hookup). It could also include pocketbook objectification, such just wanting to get into a relationship with someone for their money (treating the other person as a mere pocketbook to dispense money).
Hints
I've heard a lot of proponents of "consent
culture" insist that people, particularly men, read the hints of the
people they desire. This is unworkable. Was that woman I was talking to at the
convention backing away from me or toward the buffet table? Did she want me to back off, or was she
hinting that she wanted to eat while we're flirting? If we really believe in consent, we have to
throw this idea away. Human beings are
simply hit and miss on reading other people's hints. If someone's coming onto you and they're not
taking your hints, you need to use explicit verbal communication. You don't have to be rude about it. "No thank you" is perfectly
fine. It's perfectly possible to be
polite and explicit at the same time.
The key is not to beat others over the head with your emotions and
recognize that the other person may just not get that you're not
interested. The burden of communication
and setting boundaries is on you.
One fallout from this insistence on everybody reading other people's hints is
that someone who desires another, romantically, may actually read positive
hints that aren't there. Did that woman 6
inches from me with her lips parted because she wanted a kiss, or just because
she felt overwhelmed with a sense of Platonic friendship toward me? By pressuring people into "reading
hints", we actually pressure people into receiving false positives about
what the other person wants. If I brush
a woman's hair back after she gets close to me and looks into my eyes, and she
smiles and looks deeper into my eyes, and then I move into a kiss and she
doesn't feel that way about me, she needs to speak up.
And… I think we need to have a discussion about what constitutes erotic touching. To many of us, including me, kissing is a gray zone. If I give a woman a peck on the lips, and she didn't want it, it's not an emergency. I didn't violate her, because it's not the same as grabbing her ass or her breasts. It's what people do in that gray area in between being friendly and full-on romantic. In many cultures, kissing is totally non-romantic. In ours, a kiss on the cheak is a reasonable thing to do with, say, a woman who feels like a sister to a man, or who's just a close friend. If someone kisses you, and you don't want it, you need to tell them. Every system of boundaries has its gray areas. We can't ask for consent for absolutely everything, or we'd never get anything done (certainly not in an organic way). Too much checking boundaries can make an intimate situation ackward (and note that intimacy is not necessarily romance). Do I need to ask you before shaking hands? Before kissing a dear female friend on the cheak? Without explicit boundary setting, it all falls apart.
Hard Sales Culture
While I disagree that there's any such thing as non-consent culture or "rape culture", I do think there's such a thing as hard sales culture, when it comes to sex. Because of the capitalist nature of American culture, I've met some men who seem to regard women as customers on a used car lot and themselves as the salesmen. They make a hard sales pitch. Sales advice, in America, often includes "don't take no for an answer". While this is not something that any salesperson would take literally (you can't force somebody to buy something), it can certainly make them pushy and unpleasant. As I've said, there's nothing in American culture that promotes rape (though there are morally weak individuals who give into their base desires enough to violate our built-in culture of consent).
I'd like to suggest that we reframe "rape culture" and "objectification" as "hard sales culture" with regard to sex. Being a push creepy is bad etiquette in sex-positive culture. Although these men may not actually violate women, they are disrespectful to them. If they guy is gay, it's disrespectful to men. And, women sometimes engage in this sort of smarmy behaviour as well, although it's rarer.
Sex positive respect is
Conclusions
As a liberal, I see sex as basically good. If you want to convince me that something involved with it is immoral, you need to make your case by explaining how it's immoral from a sex-positive perspective. I'd like to see the left jettison puritanism once and for all. Let's get back to the sexual revolution. We can do so in a civilized way, with an eye to etiquette. We can also do so in a way that respects all views on sex (monogamy, polyamory, LGBT, etc.). While there are dif
