All's Fair? Part 2

Setting that topic aside, let me get to the reason I started this post in the first place. Yes, part 1 was just a big, unintentional digression. You might have noticed that the title of this post- "All's Fair?"- has little or nothing to do with the content of part 1, and the reason for that is because it was going to be a musing about love and sexual morality. It's been something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and that article about hymen restoration seemed like a perfect illustration of something that doesn't often seem to occur to the people who long for a distant, idyllic past where good-old-fashioned sitcom values ruled. It seems like a lot of people, left and right, tend to make the innocuous mistake of looking at the significantly lower divorce rates in the past and in formerly colonized countries and thinking, "what the hell is it that they did right that we're doing wrong, with our ridiculous divorce rates?"

So we look to our old friend, inductive argument. We infer to the best explanation, and the obvious answer to the problem seems to be that the pseudo-Victorian sexual morality held by so many of the former colonies (and that we held ourselves until the sixties happened) is the answer, and that the degradation of old fashioned sexual values is why marriage is dying. To be perfectly honest, if I was confronted with a convincing enough sociological study that said that homosexuality, sodomy and premarital sex were actually the reason so many marriages fail and that getting rid of them would bring happiness and stability to the marriages that were left, I'd be tempted. But I submit to you that what Indian culture is doing right is- drumroll please- nothing.

Social sanctions and sexual taboos can force you stay in a marriage or make you cling desperately to your virginity, but they're not going to do anything else. Social pressure doesn't bring love into marriages that lack it (though, to be fair, time and shared experiences occasionally do). They don't make people psychologically or socially healthy who weren't before. If a study says that Indian couples get divorced less often, I think it probably means just that and nothing else. And it always amazes me that, despite that commonsensical explanation being immediately available, people are willing to go as far as they do to make social sanctions against sexuality as strong as they so often are. It stuns me that there are people out there who can understand that gay couples can be in bona fide heavens-to-betsy grade A love with a capital l-o-v-e and still say no to gay marriage. It boggles the mind that someone can understand that there are people out there who have had the experience of seeing new things in old things the way one does when in love, and had that experience because of someone of the same sex, and still say that they shouldn't have the right to a legally and socially sanctioned union because it seems icky. And the dark side of the effort to cling to our old sexual morals goes so much farther than just bans on gay marriage and surgically restored hymens. (See Saudi Arabia and its rampant, violent misogyny).

I wonder how much all the folks out there who want a return to old fashioned values really know what they're wishing for. Literature's a great treasure trove of evidence for this point; women are basically slaves and property in the Iliad (and the Old Testament for that matter), and the Tale of Genji has the title character adopting a 12-year old girl to raise as a fragile, stunted ideal wife.

To be fair, that’s an oversimplification. It's not like people who want "old fashioned values" (whatever that means) want to annul suffrage and bring back the legal model of women as chattel. What the advocates of old sexual morality want is not so much a regression but a revision, to which I say, sounds awesome. Technically speaking, modifying our old sexual ethics until they match an ideal set of mores pretty much amounts to the same thing as building that ideal set from scratch.

And therein, dear readers, lies the rub. Here's the million dollar question. Which of our old sexual mores is the baby and which the bathwater?

Most (though not all) ethical philosophers make a distinction between what they call the right and the good: There are good things that you can do that you have a right not to do (like giving to charity) and other things that you have a right to do but are bad (like being racist). When it comes to sex, a lot of ethical philosophers are concerned with the right instead of the good when it comes to sexual ethics; what exactly constitutes consent, when is sex so unconscionably harmful that we have to criminalize it, etc.

Personally, though, it seems like the more pressing and difficult question lies with the good instead of the right. It's hard to imagine that many people, left or right, are willing to advocate the criminalization of sexual acts performed consensually and conscionably in the privacy of one's own home, but the subtler, trickier and possibly more important issue lies with what exactly constitutes "good" and "bad" sex (that is, ethically). As important as it is to worry about what sex should be legally sanctioned, it seems like there's more immediate importance to the question of what sex should be socially sanctioned. And no matter how much it seems from what I've written so far that I'm your stereotypical northeast-coast hyper-progressive denizen of a brave new world, I honestly find it hard not to suspect that the gradual relaxation of sexual taboos since suffrage has, once it crossed a certain threshold, led to women being objectified more rather than less. And then of course, there are plenty of ways we're still stuck in the fifties and are way worse off for it. (Understatements ftw!)

So what’s the optimal set of sexual morals for society to have?

To be continued.