Many different people in the discourse, coming from many different schools of thought, seem to find it intuitively obvious that having sex in public is morally wrong. (Indecent exposure presumably counts in the same category.)
I am very baffled by this.
I mean – yes, some people who see it are going to find it very unpleasant to witness. Probably a fair number of people will find it unpleasant. This is also true of things you can do in public like “holding hands with your gay spouse” or “being black” or “wearing clothing that features provocative political slogans.”
The only general solution that doesn’t seem to lead to endless social war, or to intensely repugnant conclusions, or to a melt-your-brain-into-slag level of mandated utilitarian calculation regarding the psychic preferences of untold numbers of strangers, is a basic deontological rule: other people do not get input into your visual presentation in public, and their opinions on the matter can be morally discounted to zero. Which includes the visual presentation that is “I am naked” or even “I am having sex with this other person.”
I mean, if you want to make the case that it’s distasteful or even possibly rude, I’m not hugely inclined to argue. I might well even agree. But “distasteful” and “rude” don’t amount to “unethical” under most schemata.**********
…is the objection primarily about children who might see it? Because I don’t think that’s a very good objection either, but admittedly it requires a more sophisticated level of argumentation in order to address it, because children make everything ten times harder in the world of moral philosophy.
Not all public behavior can be reduced to “visual presentation”. Do people have the right to the “visual presentation” of openly carrying a gun? I mean, many people answer that question “yes”, but still, you see the parallel, right? Having your genitals out is incitement and not protected speech.
Before anything else: I am glad that you let this drift from public sex to indecent exposure generally, because I think that’s a much cleaner topic discursively. If anyone thinks there are important differences, we can talk about them.
Not all public behavior can be reduced to “visual presentation”.
Well, no. Some of it has significant components that are auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc. The difference actually matters, because I think it’s close to a human universal that some kinds of sensory input are much harder to shut out / ignore (hearing and [I hear] smell are much worse than sight, no one fucking cares what you taste like in public).
But much of it can.
So the gun parallel doesn’t work so great, unless you think that the problem is specifically with open carry and not with carrying a gun generally. Like, I’m honestly not sure where I fall on the wide spectrum of opinions about gun control, but at the very least I can sympathize with the outlook that says “it’s not a good idea for people to be carrying around weapons that can quickly and efficiently murder a bunch of people.” The problem with the guy openly carrying a gun, insofar as there’s a problem, is that he has a gun. Frankly, all else being equal, I’m glad he’s doing me the courtesy of announcing the fact.
I think we’re all pretty sure that the guy on the subway across from you does in fact have a penis, whether his coat is open or closed.
So the callow internet-pwn response to this argument is “yes, I’m quite sure having your genitals out is properly read as ‘incitement,’ just like when women are horrible enough to incite men by showing their ankles or mouths.” That’s…a close enough parallel that I do feel compelled to mention it, but also nasty enough that I feel compelled to call myself out on the spot for Bad Discursive Hygiene.
Speaking seriously, though, it’s pretty damn obvious that these standards are 100% cultural (which doesn’t mean “fake”), and flexible through the normal process of cultural evolution. There are places where a woman not-wearing-a-burka really is “inciting” the people around her, in the sense that she’s doing something that can be counted on to trigger a powerful aversive psychological reaction. In a liberal multicultural society, the general answer on which we’ve agreed – wisely – is “we don’t fucking care.” She can wear what she wants, and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem. I see no reason that the same standards of liberty and courtesy shouldn’t be applied to the guy who wants to have his dick out.
But even that’s callow. I am, admittedly, kind of dancing around the real issue here.
Look. Imagine, for a moment, a hypothetical society where there were many fewer taboos surrounding public nudity. Do you have even a second’s doubt that there are thousands upon thousands of decent upstanding right-thinking guys, guys who under the current social regime would never once dream of committing indecent exposure, who would leap at the chance to make fashion statements involving an exposed penis? Have you ever been to Pride?
My imagined interlocutor, who may or may not share your thoughts, replies with: “Maybe, dude. But we don’t live in that world. In this world, men who expose themselves in public are creepy and threatening, and women benefit from not having to deal with them.”
Which is entirely true.
But this is not because there’s anything particularly magical, or “correct,” about the exposing-your-genitals taboo. It’s because it’s a widespread taboo. Period.
Taboos are, in some ways, like the culture-wide version of personal boundaries. Decent functional people generally don’t want to violate them; violating taboos makes people very uncomfortable (which decent functional people generally hate doing intuitively), it marks you as an unpleasant outsider (and decent functional people generally have some kind of prized insider status somewhere), it comes with very severe potential personal costs down the line (and decent functional people generally have a lot to lose), etc.
Some people have arbitrary, insane personal boundaries that make no sense. Some people even set those up deliberately! And yet it’s wholly accurate to say that someone violating a personal boundary should be read as a real red flag, no matter how arbitrary or insane the boundary is; that person is much likely to violate other boundaries too. Decent functional people respect boundaries, the vast majority of the time.
Same goes for taboos. Even if they’re arbitrary, insane, hurtful, or unjust.
Like, what kind of person is happy to do something that marks him as a serious norm-violator?
(1) An enlightened sage, a Diogenes-type who is just totally immune to what everyone thinks of him because he is so completely secure in himself.
(2) A hero of justice, who is actively trying to change the world by striking a blow against a bad taboo that’s doing damage.
Great. Those two kinds of people together are going to make up a tiny fraction of a percent of your population, unless you’re in the situation where there’s some kind of social movement going on and the hero-of-justice has a lot of followers.
But you’re more likely to get a lot of…
(3) People who have hit absolute rock bottom socially, who don’t mind being seen as perverted or threatening or disgusting or whatever because they have no hope of anything better, and so just do whatever they want with no filters.
(4) People who really really really want to do the taboo thing and don’t have enough self-control to stop themselves.
(5) Sadists who are actively seeking out the chance to hurt other people psychologically.
People in categories 3-5 are Very Bad News, generally speaking. Trying to filter them out of your life is a very sound strategy for avoiding awfulness. And that means that there’s a lot of good to be done by taking taboos seriously, whatever they are, and keeping well clear of those who violate them. It is good Bayesian practice.
The problem is that this kind of local-optimizing can justify literally any shitty rule, forever.
Like…a guy who’s willing to go out and blaspheme Allah, in the middle of a village in Afghanistan, is probably not a guy you want marrying your daughter. And that’s true even if you don’t believe in Allah yourself and you privately say blasphemous things all the time. What is that guy’s problem? I dunno, but he doesn’t care if he burns all his bridges. Maybe that mean’s he’s a freethinking hero. Much more likely it means that he’s an impulsive troublemaker who likes upsetting people and doesn’t have many prospects to ruin.
To take things in an even darker and uglier direction, what kind of person is publicly gay in mid-20th-century America? Someone who doesn’t mind spending all his time in sleazy, shady places on the wrong side of the law; someone who consorts extensively with criminals, many of whom are not just criminals-because-stupid-laws-about-homosexuality; someone who doesn’t care whether he can be blackmailed, or who is possibly subject to blackmail already; someone who has no ability to engage with a lot of the good, worthwhile institutions of the world. Good Bayesian inference would suggest that you should probably stay away from such a person.
But that’s fucking awful. I do not want to be held hostage, forever, to Afghani attitudes about blasphemy or mid-20th-century American attitudes about homosexuality.
So my ultimate response is: take the hit to your filtering ability, let the perverts have their brief jubilee before exposure becomes normalized, and tear down every arbitrary fucking taboo.