Reflections of a stormy petrel

One possible result of “gay marriage” that has not been considered seems to me worth considering, though it may sound paradoxical. It may need not to a less but to a more inhibited and prurient attitude to sex.

My reasoning is as follows. Start from the obvious: the demand for “gay marriage” only makes sense if marriage is conceived as a legal permission to have sex. Marriage, of course, is not and has never been that. But if you take sex within marriage to be legal and permitted, validated and right, in itself (that is, independently of the attitude or potential for procreation), then you correspondingly devalue sex outside “marriage”. I am not saying that we may see a decrease in “hooking up” and casual sex, but if sex outside “marriage” loses the sense of validation, permission and correctness in favour of sex in “marriage”, then that will make the commonplace view of sex outside marriage not just cheap but much nastier than it has been. We may be seeing some advance warning of that even now, for instance in the universal rage of contempt visited on Paula Broadwell (even granting she deserved it). But the worst result would be on the homosexual community itself. Everyone knows that most practising homosexuals do not restrict themselves to one partner. Everyone knows that the whole “gay community” rotates around constant exchange of partners. Everyone knows that when we speak of gay bars or clubs, we don’t speak of chaste establishments; but if homosexual relationships become formally divided between the inevitably small group of permanent, formalized “married” couples and the inevitably much larger pool of players, that will make the “community” of players and swappers even more dirty, even more dodgy, and even more dangerous than it already is.

I think, however, that this effect may not even be restricted to gay sex alone. The loose morals of the present are very unlikely to be changed merely by a change of mood; but we may be heading towards a direction where sex outside marriage becomes joyless and destructive. This is not an unfamiliar trajectory. There was a brief period in the late sixties when free sex and "mind-opening" drugs seemed to be the twin tracks of an ongoing revolution. Then drugs, while continuing to be widely used, fell off into a joyless, despised, lonely twilight world, haunted by freaks and stalked by mental illness and early death. Something like that might well be going to happen to what is left of the once sexual revolution.

My post of five days ago, about Kate Moss, has generated more reaction than I imagined, especially from two members of my f-list. I am, however, unhappy at some of the features of their debate; and I think it is time - as the starter of the thread, the man-in-charge of this blog, and a person, since age has been mentioned, older than either of you - to call for order in this debate. It has got rather more rancorous than I like. And it has gone on sterile, unprofitable ground, far away from its original point.

I will begin by administering both of you a spanking. If you wanna get mad, I will give you reason to get mad at me, instead of at each other.( Read more... )