The Right to Sexual Privacy

While surfing the net the other night for quotes about sex, I came upon these two and decided they deserved closer scrutiny.

We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regime
--Camille Paglia

For something so personal and intimate as one’s sexual relationships, after being taught general ethics, people ought to be left to determine their personal sexual ethics on their own, in a way that works best for them. To regulate, legislate, and pontificate on what consenting adults do in private is to treat them as if they were children, without the capability to take responsibility for their own actions.

To allow consenting adults to fully own their sexuality does not mean there won’t be any possible negative consequences. But as responsible adults, it should be our decision to weigh the pros and cons of our lifestyle choices and be willing to live with whatever consequences that may result from such choices. The only sexual choice that is risk-free is lifelong abstinence/virginity, which would be an unworkable and unacceptable tradeoff for most of us. Nearly everything in the world comes with some risk; it’s just part of life.

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm - as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.
--Camille Paglia

That is one big difference between life in a totalitarian regime and one in a democracy. In a totalitarian regime, it is assumed that citizens are not capable of making responsible choices on how to live their lives, and so, most aspects of life, are regulated, choices made for them, as if they were children. Ideally, in a democracy, it is assumed that citizens are competent adults, capable of running their private lives with minimal government supervision and are responsible for the choices they make. As long as what we do does not infringe upon the rights of others, we should be allowed to decide what is right for ourselves, even if it is different from what the majority might choose. Most importantly, we have the right to be wrong and to live with and learn from our mistakes…or even to keep on making what others might consider to be mistakes, if that’s what makes us happy.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that liberal, libertarian, and libertine, all stem from the root word liberty.