I didn't know that Australia had legalized prostitution. I looked at a few sites and got a sense of the situation. Here is an argument
against the legalization of prostitution which also makes some good points.
I'm envisioning the round-the-dinner-table conversations with a visiting relative, where the boys are asked what they want to be when they grow up, and they tell, and then it comes around to the girls and one wants to be a dentist, the other a teacher, and the third---always the iconoclast---declares that her future dream is to be a sex-worker.
If one looks at the pornographic world---and I personally have, pretty thoroughly---I don't think there is anything at all desirable or admirable in it. I know that there are feminists who support the lifting of all social controls respecting women's sexuality, advocate selling of sex if one wants to. My mother was a feminist in the SF Bay Area back in the late 70s and 80s so I grew up aware of these positions. I know it is not a thing that I have power to stop, and so I don't have any reason to make a big deal out of it, but I am opposed to the encouragement of prostitution, the encouragement of pornographic imagery, the encouragement and the trafficking in adolescent and teen sexual imagery. I see it as a perhaps-inevitable but as a destructive trend. Yet, it has also occurred to me that, like so many things in history, what is a negative thing at one time has an unlikely beneficial effect that no one could even have predicted.
"Perhaps societies and religions have always desperately tried to control sex, and one of the best ways to do that was to create boogiemen to scare people away from it. "We can't support the huge number of kids that would come from you freely expressing your natural tendencies" just wasn't sufficient to suppress such behaviour."
I see the liberalization of sex as an inevitable thing for modernity to deal with, and we are now in the throes of it, but I do think, personally, that there must exist a sane and balanced way to introduce kids to sex, and a sane and balanced way to conduct oneself sexually. So, yes, I do believe in a kind of 'norm', but I also see that I have no necessary right to enforce my norm over someone else's. I think that we only get to see the ramifications of the choices we make when those choices have played themselves out.
The most interesting thing to do, however, instead of looking to the past or even describing the present, is to look to the future and imagine where things are going. If the developing sex-industry is an indicator, it will be toward a global sex-industry with millions and billions of dollars at stake. It will likely involve trafficking in human beings, sexual exploitation of minors, an open catering to any sort of sexual appetite, and a shift in the way that people even think about these things. It is in the exaggeration that one sees the strange levels it could all go to.
"Sex just physically feels so damn good, everything else is piled on top of this basic reality."
While I certainly agree that sex feels good, I have always been keenly aware that 'pleasure' and hedonism is a very complex area. I am not sure it does always feel good, and I think that obsessive pleasures can often feel quite bad. Even Stoic and Epicurean philosophy seems to take as granted that too much indulgence in sex is weakening to a man. Why do they say that? What is their concern? Drugs also feel 'damn good' but one quickly learns that one can sacrifice far too much to that pleasure, and that they can destroy you. I don't in fact think it is that much different with sex, but it is also a bad thing to repress it, or to turn it into the cause of guilt. There is a peculiar and difficult line demarcation line that has to be managed, and so much of this depends on one's world-view, the nature of one's religious views, so many things.
"Psychology is rarely clear. And whose psychology? Yours? Different people might have different drives and needs."
Clearly they do. And we live in an era where all the old control systems are being taken down, and the appetite of the 'demos' will drive them to all sorts of new pleasures. When you get business interests involved, and construct new 'value-systems' (or
anti-value systems), you can get people to partake of almost unimagined pleasures. Sex seems like a pretty basic one and a very powerful one.
'Porn-sex' is all the imagery that we are exposed to that comes from the porn industry. It is not images of 'loving' sexuality, and it is not erotica, it is outrightly pornographic. I don't think this needs to be explained too much. If you were to ask my
personal opinion, where I can stand in judgment of anything I want, I don't think this is good imagery, not to inculcate the masses with. Not to become ubiquitous. One is constantly exposed, in all media, to overtly sexual imagery and there is a 'creep' into mainstream imagery the look and feel of pornography. I personally detest it, but I am not in any sense a Puritan, and I never was. But I always had certain idealism about sex and sexuality, I always tried to conduct it within 'reasonable limits'.
"And during that time were you always completely sexually satisfied? Did your eyes never lustfully wander to some random attractive woman you saw walking by? I would find it difficult to believe that they didn't."
I am not the one to talk here. No relationship I have ever had has lasted more than three years. You are asking me personally about myself, so I can say that I have a sort of 'conscience', if you will, that acts as a control against openly lusting for another when I am with with someone. It seemed dirty and cheap to me, so to feel good I didn't do it. I think that we get some of these controls, as ethics, from our parents.
"But how about the argument that if sexual desires were fully satisfied one's interests and tasks could get even more focus and energy? It's harder to concentrate when you're hungry."
I guess it really depends on what you do, and how society is ordered. In a culture that is heading toward a very middle-ground denominator, something very average, mediocre, run-of-the-mill, I suppose that all pleasures that are part of 'well-being' will become available, and all for pennies a month. You'll have your satellite teevee service that you cannot live without, your connected gizmos, and all the entertainments and services that you need for sexual stimulation and satisfaction, special ones for the boys and special ones for the girls.
Obviously, one could mention the Brave New World vision of things, and there is a great deal of truth in it, and it most certainly CAN be applied to our present. There will come a time---it has in fact come---when this average being will represent a kind of ideal being, and this being will no longer care to recognize nor be capable of recognizing the higher accomplishments, the higher values. They will therefor simply become irrelevant, as they are.
"Tradition seems to play an important role in your ideas. No doubt there's always the danger of unintended consequences when tinkering with something as complex as human relationships and psychology."
It is a part of my ideas because I have sometimes gone to the limits of non-traditionalism. I am a man of my generation after all (born in 1962). A huge part of the cultural process was to break loose from social controls, and to explore new areas. In my case, I am very aware that I am exploring traditional but not because I want merely to take up residence in them, as a safe refuge, but because I respect the sobriety of the individuals who created those values.
