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.
