I’m starting this post with a warning about the links it contains. Normally that would mean I was about to discuss edge play and feature potentially disturbing images. However, in this case the links are to conservative journalists talking about kink. I realize that may still constitute edge play for some people. On the face of it they’re discussing extreme porn from kink.com, but it quickly gets into general issues of consent and sexual ethics.
What started this unlikely flurry of posts was an essay by Emily Witt entitled What Do You Desire. The heart of the piece is a description of a shoot for the Public Disgrace site, but it also encompasses the tech culture, San Francisco culture and Emily’s own personal life. It’s an essay that got a lot of attention across the web, not just from the writers below. Personally I was unimpressed. As a kinky and techy person, who lives on the West Coast and visits the Bay Area often, I expected to read something I could relate to. Something that reflected, at least in some way, my experiences. Instead it comes across as a high concept piece. Rather than immersing herself into the culture and drawing conclusions from it, I got the impression Emily went in with a concept and cherry picked her observations to match.
While I might not have been impressed, a lot of other people were. What particularly entertained me were a series of posts from conservative writers. Roughly in order (as they responded to each other) there was: Rod Dreher, Noah Millman, Alan Jacobs, Noah Millman 2, Rod Dreher 2, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Conor Friedersdorf and Rod Dreher 3.
There’s enough material in those articles for a dozen posts, but I’ll try and limit myself to just this one. As you might expect they have a few interesting insights scattered randomly through a whole steaming mound of ignorance. I don’t fault them too much for that. No doubt if I was writing about Conservative Evangelical Christians in the South on the basis of a single provocative article I’d also reveal a lot of my ignorance about that group. What I will fault them for is the horrible underlying logic in some of their arguments. Particularly Rod Dreher writing here on the subject of consent.
His argument is, at the heart of it, a variant on the slippery slope fallacy. He starts out by defining consent as the way people judge right from wrong. He then points out consent alone can never be enough, because people can consent to terrible things. For example, the cannibal who ate a willing victim. And therefore, if consent is not your guiding light, then what can be? How can anyone define what is morally right? The only answer must be God.
For all its many flaws, Christianity (like Islam, like Judaism) at least offers a standard by which to judge right and wrong….
…Christianity at least holds on to the idea that Truth exists, and is knowable, however imperfectly.
The huge glaring flaw in this appeal to absolutism is of course the problem of defining religious Truth. Saying Jesus would have frowned on cannibalism is uncontroversial. But what was his position on silk scarves tied to the headboard? Or a little nipple biting during coitus? And if that’s OK, does he draw the line at nipple clamps? How about anal sex between a loving couple? What if it’s a loving gay couple? I haven’t noticed too many burning bushes appearing recently to give us guidance on these areas.
Of course what people like Rod Dreher really want to impose with a religious standard is their standard. They really know what God meant to say. Of course in reality they have no divine hotline. They’re just people making judgement calls about right and wrong like everyone else. They just don’t trust the rest of us to do it properly.
I’ll leave you with an image of two sinners doing terribly wicked things. I know it might look like a beautiful image of two people enjoying an intense and intimate moment, but that can’t be right. Nipple clamps are clearly the work of Beelzebub.
The image is from the always excellent bondage is not a crime tumblr.
OK. I fell for it. I skimmed the Witt piece, and some of the conservative commentaries on it until I got to this:
“Christianity at least holds on to the idea that Truth exists, and is knowable, however imperfectly.”
Now my knowledge of epistemology and metaphysics is rudimentary, but even I have a built-in crap detector that started flashing red lights when I read this.
“Truth exists”.
I assume by this the writer means that there is a class of propositions to which we may assign the value True or False. So far so good.
“…is knowable”
Yep, if a proposition is True that’s because you know that it’s true either on an evidential or logical basis.
“…however imperfectly.”
No. Won’t do. ‘Known imperfectly’ does not compute. It violates the law of the undistributed middle.
Where our knowledge of X is fragmentary or uncertain, we use other techniques – probabilistic reasoning, fuzzy logic, or the humility that says “In my opinion” – but we don’t say we know X.
In short, the writer is bullshitting.
Now we can have a debate about the merits and demerits of porn (and I personally have got no time for most of it) but an argument that says, “We must get rid of porn because some imperfectly known supernatural entity says so” is not fit for purpose.
I actually think they were writing more broadly than just porn. I think it was the whole idea of kinky sex that disturbed them. They don’t just want to control what people see, but how they live and think.
It seemed to be that one opinion was that it was always depraved, disgusting and loveless (all of which is clearly not true), but at least it was consenting, which is a good thing. And the other opinion was that consent is irrelevant, since bad things can be consented to. Therefore (big jump coming up here) only God’s truth is a good guide. Which as you point out, as it’s formulated here, has a few problems.
-paltego
Hmm.
If you hold to transubstantiation, isn’t communion consensual cannibalism?
Ha. That’s funny. Hadn’t even thought of that angle. Kind of ironic that the one example of bad consent he picked involved willing self-sacrifice and consumption of flesh.
-paltego