We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I was pointed at this article about consensual incest in the Guardian and yet again the issues are the usual ones… on one hand social loathing of a relationship which translates into the force of law leading to destroyed lives… and on the other people freely doing what they want to do with each other.
Incest is such a taboo that it gets mixed up with all the other extreme taboos, like rape and pederasty, but which a moments thought shows are all quite separate things. If people want to have a relationship that is not coercive, how is that anyone else’s business? Violence within a relationship and rape are reasonably illegal but if those are absent, what is the problem? Does incest make you uncomfortable? Well it certainly does make me uncomfortable. So feel free to not associate with people who act in ways that make you uncomfortable. That is usually what I do.
Yet it is not so hard to understand how these things happen. I have repeatedly felt attracted to a cousin of mine and although it never came to anything, I can certainly understand how in other circumstances things might have happened differently. But is that something that justifies legislation? How can that be? Whose business is it which two adult people have relationships with each other and in what manner? As Dr. Sean Gabb says in the article, if it is because of the fear of birth defects, will we also forbid relationships to other unrelated people who exhibit a clear history of genetic defects with eugenic laws?
I cannot help thinking everyone would be a great deal happier if we all just minded our own damn business and left others to go where their hearts take them, no matter how strange other people might find it.
Kevin Holtsberry writes in Sex and Libertarians that he does not agree with the views that I expressed in Sex makes (some) people stupid back on December 25th, about a 15 year old boy in Australia who was dying of cancer being provided with a prostitute.
I really think this sums up the difference between us. She describes sex between a 15 year old and a prostitute as “casual physical intimacy.” I guess I am a prude because I see sex as an important and consequential physical and emotional act that should not be entered into lightly or flippantly.
No, that is not what sums up the difference between us at all. I have no desire to force my views on anyone else, but Kevin wants his views to have the force of law, that is what sums up the difference between us.
Although it does bother me a bit that Kevin does not feel more empathy for that poor boy wanting to do something so human, it certainly does not bother me at all if Kevin does not conduct his social life the way I do. It does not even bother me that he would almost certainly not approve of the twists and turns of my complex love life. Kevin disapproves of casual sex and presumably feels it should happen only within deep and emotionally engaged relationships. Well I am certainly all in favour of deep and emotionally engaged relationships! But life is just not that simple, at least not for me and I think for most people. If I choose to have a relationship with someone, does that mean I have to marry them? Why? Can we not just be friends? Maybe we are just indulging mutual infatuations for a while and we both want it to be non-consequential because we are adult enough to realise we are not well suited for a deeper relationship. And pretty much the ultimate in non-consequential low risk relationships without a future, would have to be a boy about to die of cancer experiencing sex with a prostitute. Sex does not get much safer than that.
I also believe that it is not something that 15 year olds should be engaged in. A terminal illness does not change the fact that he is a 15-year-old boy and that sex with a prostitute is illegal and wrong and not likely to help him any.
The problem I have with Kevin’s views are that they are based around the idea that it is perfectly okay to force moral ideas on others. This boy was 15 years old, not 5 years old, so he will have had more than enough time to contruct a valid even if incomplete world view of his own, along with moral ideas to go with it. Kevin too has moral ideas, as all people do, but which part of that morality allows him to support using force to impose his views on someone else?
I grew up in a world in which the Communist Party stood as the sole provider of morality and of truth itself. Like most people, I saw it for what it was and lived my life in spite of, rather than according to, the state. I understood intuitively long before I read the books that explained why the state was wrong to try to force me to see things its way. People make mistakes and states are made up of people, which means states make mistakes… and when states make mistakes, they tend to ruin lives and kill people on a far greater scale.
So when Kevin says that something is illegal and wrong in the same breath, I wonder if he thinks that everything that is illegal is also wrong? If he does think that, then I guess he thinks I am very wicked indeed for having not obeyed all sorts of laws that the Yugoslav Communist Party tried to force me to obey, like when I read certain books or forbidden magazines. But if you think I did the correct thing, then I guess you agree with me that morality, not law, is what matters and that law and morality are not the same thing at all.
People have different ideas about how things work, what is moral, what things mean and so on. If someone disagrees with you, you argue and maybe one or both of you changes their mind. Or maybe not. But unless you never make mistakes, what gives you the right to use force to make the other person act the way you want unless they are trying to do the same to you? Yet Kevin do not seem to think this boy can choose what he believes to be correct at all, but rather must do what he is told by people whose views he obviously does not share. He becomes not a boy but just a human shaped animal that has no choices to make at all.
How about some counseling on his mortality and how to deal with it appropriately? Was this out of the question or was he so stuck on sex that he couldn’t think about anything else? Is that the key to dying in peace – have sex? To me this seems shallow.
I have always been chilled when I hear some Americans call for ‘counseling’ when someone else does something they do not approve of. It suggests that only experts can actually understand the truth of a matter and us mere lumpen should listen and learn from them. Kevin should be entitled to die as he pleases, but why does he feel it is important to force his views on how to die appropriately on other people? Morality, as my editor is always saying, is objectively derived, and if not then what passes for morality is just quaint custom to be followed or ignored as one deems prudent [That does rather sound like me, Ed.].
I believe society has the right to define boundaries for the community as a whole – and keep 15 year olds from having sex with prostitutes seems like one we should keep. I for one am glad that prostitution is illegal in this country (USA) and I am also reassured to know that someone still considers it troubling to supply young people with prostitutes. (more on society, boundaries etc. later).
And there we have it: Kevin uses ‘society’ and ‘state’, for only states make laws, interchangeably*1 like all socialists of both left and right. That is why the word ‘socialist’ is such a sick joke: it is the negation of anything ‘social’ and it’s replacement by ‘state’. What Kevin specifically values may be different to that of a bunch of European communists but the underlying philosophy is based on that oh so familiar subjective collectivist matrix, just painted a different colour.
By meeting with political activists the state did not approve of in a private room in somewhere, I might have been arrested and thrown in jail by the now vanished communists. And by meeting a woman in a room in Australia in order to have sex and then paying her, a boy and prostitute might be arrested and thrown in jail by conservatives even though both parties are willing and know what they are doing. Communists and conservatives agree that it is okay to arrest people for free association with other people of whom they do not approve. Same music, just played in a different key.
[*1 Editors note: see Common Sense by Tom Paine]
One of the really nice things about sex is that you can completely loose yourself in it for a while. But what is it about sex that makes people lose their reason even when it is someone else who is doing it?
Our conservative friends may stand with us regarding economic freedom and capitalism, but as soon as I slip into something interesting and make a seriously risqué suggestion, I rarely have a problem separating the libertarians (or Eastern-communists for that matter) from the conservatives and Western-socialists… not that they actually have different urges, just that one is open about it and the other only admits it if no one else is listening.
In some ways, I think many conservatives have accepted the Western socialist-feminist attitude to women, and think we are these poor hunted things that need to be protected from men. This attitude, coming from a strange mixture of Christian prudishness and Western-socialist identity politics, is particularly hilarious to me as I grew up in a communist country in which men were men, women were women and everyone understood the implications just fine thanks.
So when I read something like a sad little article about a 15 year old boy in Australia who was provided with a prostitute before he died of cancer, I cannot help but wonder at how some people have reacted to what was nothing less than an act of kindness and charity.
Conservatives fume about ‘immorality’ and people who fondly imagine themselves to be feminists fume about ‘sexual objectification’, but fortunately in that hospital there were people who realised that what mattered here was not the views of others but rather that a dying boy wanted to experience what all 15 year old boys want to experience before he died.
Some people argued “[it] demeans women and reduces the sexual act to being just a physical one.” Yet what gives those people the right to impose their moral theories on this boy? Clearly he was never going to have the chance to form a lasting or deep relationship, given that he was dying, so how dare these people try to deny him such a basic human experience?
How can a woman be ‘demeaned’ by engaging in her chosen profession with a grateful dying boy? It makes me so angry sometimes when I read of such cruel stupidity and self-righteous dogmatism. I am so very glad that more compassionate souls were there to make the only true moral decision or this story would have reduced me to tears.
The reality is that people have sex for all sorts of reasons, such as love and respect and caring and lust and attraction and curiosity and too much alcohol and it-just-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. That is reality. Sometimes ‘the sexual act’ is ‘just a physical one’ and sometimes, just sometimes, that’s just fine by me too.
In a couple articles in The Spectator, two female writers deplore pornography. One of them, Tania Kindersley, does so in spite of saying she is a believer in free speech, and the other, Rachael Jones writes as a sexually threatened irrationalist who deduces that her obvious personal neurosis indicates the sickness of the society in which she lives.
In fact, I would venture that of the two of them, only Rachael Jones is actually honest, in a pathologically disturbed sort of way. Certainly one thing that galls me about both of them is the implied supposition that all women essentially agree with them. Camille Paglia and I certainly do not.
Tania Kindersley writes in her article The Degradation of the Species, that she believes in freedom of expression and in an unfettered sexuality, but “in this frank and disturbing investigation shows why hardcore pornography is repulsive, demeaning and dangerous”. Well it certainly is a revealing article but not the way she thinks.
Porn isn’t about sex, it’s about money. It doesn’t sate the appetite it feeds it, but increases it: the palate stales quickly, so the industry finds more and more freakish acts and genres and combinations to keep the punters hooked.
Well sorry Tania, but 99% of the sexually oriented things I look at are via the Internet and are completely free. People post things on the Internet for the sheer unremunerated thrill of knowing that somewhere in the world, what they did is turning someone else on. Some of us just happen to like our experiences spiced differently. Also I sometimes like to think about things I would not necessarily do. Is it so terrible that I can find pictures of those things to look at? What is more, does she apply the same logic to cars? Is the fact people tend to buy progressively more elaborate cars with ever more features somehow evidence of sinister manipulation by the Mercedes Car Company Gmbh?
Censorship isn’t the answer. The free market and the Internet would make any attempt at control look like taking on an elephant with a pea-shooter. A war on porn would have the same pompous pointlessness of the war on drugs
So it now becomes clear that far from ‘believing in freedom of expression’, Tania Kindersley does not want to resort to censorship for the purely utilitarian reason that it will not work. With only a few exceptions I find that people who are conservatives and say they support ‘free speech’ will suddenly start equivocating when it comes to pornography if you only dig deep enough and find something they really don’t like.
The only weapon of any potency against the tide of market forces is, paradoxically, fashion: tell the kids that porn is cool and groovy, that the performers really love what they do, and you breed an eager new generation of consumers. But if the rock chicks and movie icons and rent-a-crowd celebrities were bold enough to proclaim that sitting in a darkened room with a can of lager and a copy of Latino Sluts is a pitiful substitute for the real thing, then it might be a start.
Oh Tania, what a sheltered life you bourgeoise English women must lead. I read fashion magazines, skydiving magazines, skiing magazines, hunting magazines, travel magazines, cooking magazines and political magazines. I also buy nice clothes, skydive, ski, hunt, travel, cook and have real life face-to-face political debates. I also read things like Skin Two magazine. Yes, Tania, I do that for real too.
Thanks to Perry de Havilland for editing my article, doing the html black magic and correcting my sometimes confused English. This is my first English language blog post so please be understanding.
Prostitution is a combination of sex and free enterprise. Which one are you against?
– Unknown
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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