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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.
This hits close to this widely downvoted comment I made on the topic.
I want to see people in the camp of 'sex is just like tennis' and even actually 'sex is just like tennis and tennis is a game you can play with a ball or not, and perhaps a racket but maybe not' explain it.
Why is 'groomer' a bad word to them? If open nudity, open fornication, children performing alongside adults in sexualized situations are all to be celebrated... then why not just admit 'yes actually we want to screw your kids' or at the very least 'if somebody else did we're okay with it'?
What is the contemporary justification that this is not okay?
If a father can be shamed for opposing their child dating somebody who is too dark, too male/female, or for deciding that they were the other sex all along... If a child rejecting the father's strict heterosexual, ethnocentric norms is to be celebrated...
Then why should progressives not shame a father for opposing their child dating an older adult who opened their mind about the beauty of inter-generational sexual relationships etc?
It's historically been an effective weapon against advocacy for gay people. Activist PTSD?
Well this made me try and find out why exactly the LGB(T) organizations decided to distance themselves from NAMBLA & co, and from this single source, I don't really see a reason.
If anybody knows why in the 80s-90s, suddenly LGBT activists decided that kiddie-diddlers were not part of the coalition anymore, please let me know.
Here are 2 quotes from it:
Both of these are pretty bewildering to me.
One argument that this article makes is that in some cases LGBT activists ended up on the same side as the diddlers because anti-LGBT laws were based on age of consent, ie age of consent for homosexual acts were higher than heterosexual age of consent, so lowering the age of consent was a way to bring about 'equality'.
Another argument is that making homosexual lifestyle illegal / disapproved of encourages adults to take advantage of teenagers in poor situations, and is less likely in a more tolerant society, so supporting people engaged in that lifestyle is not as important to the community.
In California, specifically, the law did (and still does) have a strict age of consent at 18, with the close-in-age exception only reducing the offense to a misdemeanor, dating back to the 1913. It was even gender-neutral, by text! But in practice, police and prosecutors overlooked the typical teenagers boinking; prosecutors focused on late-20s or 30-year-olds knocking up 14-year-olds, particularly severe embarassments of the upper class, and places where other sexual offenses would be complicated to demonstrate or taboo to discuss. Some of the limited tolerance for diddler-adjacent arguments in the 60s and 70s reflected the ability to deflect onto those less-controversial matters -- two sixteen year-olds giving handies may or may not be moral, but it was nowhere near the same class of bad behavior as the Breendoggle.
And a lot of the early US LGBT movement was from or downstream of California, so it had an outsized impact.
((There's a small remnant of this disagreement when people bring up underaged sexting, same-age relationships, and sometimes the libertarian ephibophilia paradox. But for wildly obvious reasons all but the dumbest of these groups now very clearly demarcate their positions.))
That said, the bigger cause was just that a lot of the modern understanding of child sexual abuse as damaging in itself, not 'just' gross or immoral or something done along with conventional physical harm, is a result of surprisingly recent research. Abuse before the 1970s could sometimes be further demonstrated by physical harm, usually in around a stereotype of a violent stranger kidnapping and dumping a victim, but especially outside of such extreme (and extremely rare) versions most of the focus remained on reputational harm or moral standards, because that was enough. Even in those cases, the victims were expected to not understand or even remember what was done to them. Corruption of a minor was at most understood as making these immoral acts tempting to the victims(!).
(This wasn't helped by the most visible groups for academic being the then-newly contacted non-Western cultures with ‘ritual’ abuse, which charitably investigators weren't always familiar enough with the language and close enough to the victims to hear about dislike, and less charitably associated a lot of less-immediate harm with other cultural practices/race.)
It wasn't until the 1960s that gathering serious information about the prevalence of child abuse really happened at an academic level (yes, arguably, Kinsey did it in the late-1950s, but he wasn't very believed and his methods and reporting were garbage), and the 1970s for a national standard to be set. This made studies of sexual abuse victims possible: rather than searching for extremely rare survivors of stranger rape, psychologists could argue that one-in-four women were subject to such abuse, and they could use standard study recruitment methodology.
When they did, they discovered what Reason euphemistically quotes a once-NAMBLA-supporter as calling "developmental issues" in tremendous quantities. This seems obvious in retrospect -- they were being attacked in some of the worst possible ways by trusted figures, early in their emotional and social development, often for lengthy periods of time! -- but it absolutely flipped the board. This is why you see even opponents of Breen during the Breendoggle focusing on character or mental health of the perpetrator with occasional mentions of physical risks, in a sense that is absolutely alien and repulsive to look at today.
From a more... cynical perspective, the growth of divorce in the 1970s also presented a very large number of extremely uncontroversial targets: perpetrators (almost all men) whose ex-spouses could now report crimes after having legally separated and achieved a level of independence, while those perpetrators could have potentially been awarded some level of custody during divorce hearings.
Thank you for the explanation. I suppose the issue with pedophiles is that they constantly need to get new recruits.
I feel like some of the 'harm' arguments could be leveled against MSM as well, but that's a different problem I suppose.
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