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Notes -
Major NYT opinion piece dropped this week. At the time of my clicking on it, it was under the headline "Born This Way? Born Which Way?" It is a tour de force of Current Thinking on all things sex and gender, covering trans issues as well as sexuality. Given that the title is so evocative concering the topic of my recent AAQC, I feel like I can't help but comment on the current state of affairs. Let's start with the history of thinking on sexuality, since that's the closest link.
And later:
Finally:
She words it differently, but the conclusion is basically the same as what I had said - it was
importantcritical to force people to believe in Dogmatic Position so that political victories could be won, but in the Year of Our Lord 2023, basically no one even bothers defending it anymore; they don't have to! The political victories have already been enshrined.Unfortunately, that's about all that the article really says about the "born this way" narrative and the political history around it. Fortunately, it hits on quite a few other notes that are highly related to things I've thought about and said for a while. The article opens:
And soon after hits the high note:
Man, I can't even blockquote it without thinking about how many domains this thinking touches on. I'm sure it's been remarked on here, and I feel like there was an SSC/ACT post or some other significant post here where people ruminated on life choices, regret, and the human condition of our walk through a garden of forking paths, where every choice we make closes off an infinity of alternate possible realities. Like, this is so core to the the human condition that it's hard to imagine subjects that it doesn't touch on. Nevertheless, I can't help but think about the hot button ones - abortion, consent, child sex, and economics.
Abortion
Commonly, in discussions of abortion, a divide appears concerning what sex is about, how important it is, whether it's sacred or whatever, etc. I feel like a common perspective that is expressed by pro-choice folks is that it is wayyy less important/sacred than they think their opponents think it is. This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis; they just have some amount of fun; then nothing particularly interesting happens. In the era of ubiquitous birth control, they think that sex is totally just like this.
This is used to argue that abortion should be totally fine, and the only people who disagree are some crazy folks who still think sex has some meaning or implies some responsibilities/consequences and apparently want to punish women for basically playing a game of tennis.
Consent to sexual relations
We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.
Regardless of how annoying/stupid/unprofessional you think it is, basically no one would argue that it should be criminal. But we absolutely would if it was sex! It seems to be significantly different.
Child sex
When it comes to the question of whether children can consent to sexual relations, the dominant position is that it is just trivial that they cannot. I mean, sure, they can consent to playing tennis just fine, but sex is completely and totally different. Why? I've steeped myself in the academic philosophy literature on this topic, and while it's a thousand times better than the responses you'll get from regular Joe, it still comes in seriously lacking in my mind.
Westen doesn't take a super strong position on the topic, but likely grounds it in what he calls the 'knowledge prong' of what counts as valid consent. A person needs to have sufficient knowledge of... something... related to what sex is, what it means, what the consequences could be, the cultural context... I'm not exactly sure what. I don't think he did the best job of really digging in to details here. This is perhaps the most fruitful line of inquiry for future academic work for those who want to salvage a consent-only sexual ethic, but right now it's seriously lacking. Any work will definitely need to distinguish from tennis, because I see kids out learning tennis at our local courts somewhat regularly, and they can hardly be said to understand the risks/cultural context/etc. of tennis any more than could be said for sex.
Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex. The opinion piece writes:
A disciple of Wertheimer might say that a large part of how children perceive sex, and whether they perceive it as harmful or not, may depend on the perceptions others have of it.
Of course, either of these approaches opens up all sorts of cultural engineering possibilities. If we team up the "sex is like tennis" folks with the "comprehensive sex education as early as possible" folks, it's easy to imagine how society could change to one where children learn the requisite knowledge and are not, on net, harmed by the sex that they do consent to. Some folks might cheer on this result, saying that society would be immeasurably improved to the point that it unlocks this new world of possible good things... but the "it is trivially true that children cannot possibly consent to sex" crowd would certainly disagree.
Economics
I don't have a better subtitle for this section, but my thoughts here are background shaded by the free market, Marginal Revolution style economics, which emphasizes that it's important to let people make choices, even ones that they end up deeply regretting. "Capitalism is not a profit system; it's a profit and loss system," they say. You have to let people choose to try things that may succeed and make them a boatload of money... but which may also fail and lose them a boadload of money. This is often justified by placing a possible governing agent in a position of ignorance - you just don't know ahead of time which choices are going to be spectacular failures and which are going to be spectacular successes. Pushing in an even more libertarian direction, many folks want to say that we should just let people do the most harmful of drugs, even though we can be 99.99% sure that it is destined to end in pain and hardship. The article wants to have a sense of this for individual gender choices. 'You know what? Even if they regret it, we need to let them choose, because we're in a position of ignorance.' The article begins concluding with:
Hits a bit different after a section on child sex, though.
Closing Thoughts
I don't have a nice tidy bow to put on this package. I have my personal beliefs1, but I don't have a nice clean way to just directly put together a story connecting these things in a way that will please any particular reader with their own inclinations on the various questions involved. Mostly, it just really stands out to me that lots of people have completely contradictory opinions, at their conceptual core, when we try to apply them to all of the above problem domains. I don't think it's "just the outgroup", either. I think we need careful work and reflection across problem sets to help people understand where their positions are sounding hypocritical and why there are serious, huge problems here that are fundamental to the human condition. Reductive slogans aren't going to work. "Shut up and mouth these politically-acceptable words or you're an X-ophobe," isn't going to work.
1 - If you must know, I think the transgender ideology is near incoherent philosophically and anti-science biologically; I think abortion is wrong regardless of whether sex is like tennis; I don't subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and therefore don't think the question is of all that much import for whether children should be able to have sex; I generally lean pro-profit-and-loss capitalism and less drugs.
I don't know how many people agree with me on this but I do believe that Sexual Revolution didn't go far enough, sex is just a physical activity similar to tennis and the only reason it is not treated the same way is because prudes still have their way. More over puritan factions won in both the right and the left in spite of proclaimed commitment to the principle of sexual freedom in the latter one. Technology did solve issues that come with unrestricted love-making, we just need to wait for the culture to catch up(just in time for some other tech to disrupt it again). Some niche cultures are already there and make polyamory work quite well.
I don't believe this at all, and I don't believe you believe this, either. To illustrate, I'll simply take my favorite argument against sex-work-is-work: suppose you have a close family member of the opposite sex who starts a business. I would want to support my family, and so I would make a point to patronize the business, at least once if not regularly. However, if the business was prostitution or sexual photography, I wouldn't think that my patronage would be welcome, and I wouldn't dream of trying.
So I ask you, if you had a family member who started a business, would you support them? If it was a bakery would you buy a cake or loaf of bread? If it was a vineyard would you buy a case of wine? If it was a landscape business, would you get your weeds pulled? And if that business was prostitution, would you become a client?
It very quickly becomes clear to me that sex work is not work, and that sex is not like tennis.
This seems like picking the criterion to suit the conclusion. Was there some prior general rule that "work" was something you'd support if your family did it? So if a family member sold medical equipment or industrial mining equipment, you'd buy it?
My favorite argument is similar, but it focuses on the government instead of the family and therefore avoids your criticism: If sex work is Real Work™, then the government can use all of its regular powers to compel you to do it.
Prisoners can be compelled to do work; some clean up ditches, some fight wildfires, some stamp licence plates, and some perform Real Work™. Maintaining your unemployment benefits requires a reasonably active job search and accepting good offers of employment, which obviously includes Real Work™ for a significant subset of the population. Appearance/ethnicity is a bona fide occupational qualification for Real Work™, so obviously foreign workers will be qualified to fill the niches that locals can't.
If you want to go wild, they could even restrict who gets to do Real Work™ (even as an unpaid hobby) much like they restrict the practice of medicine, engineering, or law.
There are countless other ways that something would be changed by becoming "work", but those are the most obvious and objectionable IMO.
What if I reject the premise that government can compel people to work? I think both military conscription and prison slavery are morally unjustifiable.
Maybe that should be your first priority, then. The fact of the matter is that the government can compel you to work, morals be damned.
I think you are reaching here. In general governments can't compel you to do any work, save for a few exceptions. The european declaration of human rights for example carves out 4 exceptions: prison labour, military service, emergency service and normal civic obligations.
For prison labour you would have to make the argument that prostitution is a necessary part of the rehabilitation process, which seems far fetched. Also most countries already ban prison labour for non-violent offenders (the US is basically the only western exception) and prostitution with a murderer seems a dicey proposition (I would want a prison guard supervising it, at least).
For military service I think the prostitution would have to be limited to other members of the military to count. You couldn't make the argument that prostitution to the general public is military activity, for example. However you could make prostitution one of the civil service options for conscentious objectors. I'm not sure if you could make it the only option. Also most countries have already abolished the draft so most governments could only do this during war.
An interesting case is emergency services, actually. In Iverson v. Norway it was determined that Norway could compel dentists to perform dentistry (for appropriate remuneration). You could use this to redistribute prostitutes (which tend to cluster in big cities) across your nation's entire territory. You could also make the argument that incels represent a national emergency that needs to be solved. But what principle would you use to compel incels to have sex with prostitutes? Probably something about involuntary treatments.
Normal civic obligations is probably your best bet. The case law on this is pretty nebulous, it's unclear what counts and you could make it like jury duty. I suspect it would get shot down, though.
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