The Poisonous Fruit Of The Randian Sexual Paradise

“I don’t even want a boyfriend. I just want someone who wants to hang out all the time and thinks I’m the best person in the world and wants to have sex with only me.”- Hannah Horvath

My mother likes to observe to other less jaded homeschool moms that no matter how well trained a teenage male might be, if he’s alone in his room for hours at a time he’s probably not memorizing his catechism.

My adolescence was spent in the conservative evangelical subculture that had the same approach to sexuality as I did at 14: obsessed with high ideals, beset by inconsistent practices, surrounded by a larger sexually schizophrenic culture, and awkwardly enamored with its own thoughts on the subject. We are still trying to figure out exactly how to talk constructively about sexuality in public, which naturally leads to experimentation. Who’d have thought pastors would describe explicit sexual activities and liberated feminists would put content warnings on their essays? Discussing what our couplings mean and how we ought to publicly speak about them is important, yet fraught with danger of doing harm.

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.

This contrast exposes the ugly fact that sexual libertinism is class warfare. The true victims of the sexual revolution are not the middle-class evangelicals who must now guard their children’s eyes during prime-time television; they are the poor families rent asunder by the chaos of liberated sexual decision making. The example of this that struck me most poignantly of late can be found here. Poor women have less power overall, and so they tend to be more susceptible to the relational chaos, unwanted pregnancy, and disease that goes along with the relentless destructive power of hyperindividualized sexuality. The latter two are things that can be remedied somewhat by the aggressive provision of the appropriate pills and medical interventions, but until the pharmaceutical companies can put relational stability in a pill, all bets are off. Furthermore, anyone who has ever provided such medical interventions can affirm that these prescriptions are no magic bullet.

The concept of consent, which undergirds the whole enterprise, should not be ignored. We have to learn from how feminism has decoded the power plays that attempted to undermine legitimate concerns about female sexuality. However, we must not buy into the deception that consent is all we need; as the inimitable Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry observed recently, a teenage girl can consent to working 16-hour days in an exploitative garment factory. As long as these sorts of power differentials exist, emotional and sexual Randianism will run rampant; “consent” is crucial but an insufficient basis for sexual morality. Thus, when choosing your own sexual adventure benefits the privileged, the harm done to the less privileged becomes the personal injury that complements the cultural insult of depersonalizing sexuality.

However, traditional sexual morality— at least as it has been commonly practiced—is not entirely a panacea.