"Poisonous Fruit of the Randian sexual paradise"

Matthew Loftus, a family doctor in Baltimore, authors this provocative piece, "The Poisonous Fruit Of The Randian Sexual Paradise" (January 13, 2014). Excerpts:

One of the more peculiar 2013 year-in-review articles both celebrated sexual liberation and expressed shock and surprise that capitalism had killed it. I won’t quote the article itself. I will observe that the author rejects the “sexual economics theory” that reduces people to their body parts and then merely a paragraph later decides that because body parts are sometimes all that one wants, such desires should be our guide to sexual decision-making. The people who have been taught for years that sexuality must be atomized to individual choices and pleasures now unsurprisingly love a song celebrating a sexually aggressive man doing just that, while the people who are privileged enough to have enjoyed that atomization are now upset. For so long, though, we have opened the field for businessmen to exploit the bodies of people in order to take the money of others who either pay for the privilege of depersonalizing someone else or pay for the privilege of having their own bodily anxieties exploited. This media spectacle—as well as the reciprocal outrage by traditional moralists on social media and elsewhere that feeds the celebrity machine and the self-righteousness of the ranter—can only be described as onanistic.

This broader capitalist rape culture benefits greatly from both the fantasy that sexual urges are completely uncontrollable except in the cases where someone says “no” and the vestiges of pseudo-Christian morality that assigns as much blame as possible to the victims of sexual aggression. Ross Douthat has observed that a libertarian vision of a perfectly transparent free market is as unrealistic as an libertine vision of perfectly free decision-making. Sex and the representation of hypersexualized bodies becomes a chaotic mess of people using sex for whatever power it gives them over others. Wendell Berry takes this apart quite skillfully in his essay Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community:

If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between two people but as a bond between those two people and their forebears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold.

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In this sexually Darwinistic world, those not desirable or desperate enough to be exploited are, of course, free to couple with one another and quite a number do. Most armchair defenders of sexual libertinism don’t take advantage of the freedom to hook up as conservatives fear that they do (surprise: it’s a privilege of the wealthy!) and instead have the similar sort of longing that Ms. Horvath expresses above. For those who can’t find a monogamous or quasi-monogamous pairing, you can always pay to have your desires sated or lower your standards. Some steal—just like white-collar criminals, it’s the most privileged who are the most brazen with this and the least privileged who are most likely to be stolen from. With your sexual choices atomized, however, you are subject to the vagaries of beauty, class, privilege, and race. Welcome to an emotional and sexual Randian paradise. Read more >>

[Hat tip to JM]