Christopher Caldwell has written an endearingly daft article that demonstrates why the libertarian vibe cannot fail in the long run to carry all before it.
Today, the Swimsuit Issue is as fat as Vogue and as dirty as Playboy: 300 pages of wall-to-wall near-nudity. Only the most determined adolescent could work his way through it single-handedly. And now that it’s outright pornography, of course, it’s become a respectable American institution.
Of course the issue here, from a libertarian perspective is… well… that there is no issue. The fact it is indeed a ‘respectable American institution’ only goes to show how far the libertarian meme has infiltrated into civil society. Conservatives and socialists alike can sneer that libertarians are an irrelevant fringe because we do not have self-described libertarian governments, yet the signs of our influence are on newsstands everywhere and at the same time less people by the year can be bothered to legitimise the democratic bean counts statists think are so important.
‘Dirty’ does not register on the libertarian aesthetic radar except when looking at pictures of wallowing hippos. Playboy is not ‘dirty’, it is just a somewhat tedious magazine which features pictures of enhanced young women, a curious artifact that once featured astonishing beauties like India Allen, Saskia Linssen and Teri Peterson, but is now just another wildebeeste amidst the herd on the news rack. Porn is one of those non-issues, along with feminism, gay rights and racism, that makes libertarians yawn. As issues these things just make no sense within a meta-context that sees the world in terms of choices and natural rights. There are no gay rights or women’s rights, just rights and the choices that spring from them.
People like sex. People pay for what they like. Add sex to your product and people will like it. Stand in the way of that particular economic/ideological steamroller at your peril. So when people like Chris Caldwell ruminate about the ‘dirty’ swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated, he is writing his article on the front of the aforementioned steamroller whilst moving backwards with unseemly haste. It is rather like expecting a description of a woman as ‘immodest’ to have any cultural relevancy. That might work in Iran but in the Western World? Nah. Not even in Peoria and Milton Keynes any more. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, but don’t expect all too many other people to give a damn. If you want to stick to reading Inside The Vatican then be my guest. To each their own.
Of course I have indeed purchased the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and so should you if you like looking at beautiful women. If you have a problem with that then that is exactly what it is… your problem.
