Sex Crimes and the Soixante-retards

A few years back, I started to think there might be something to be said for the HRA. It did get me thinking though, Why do we have to punish sex crimes quite so harshly?

The real reason of course, very simply, is to make people feel better. Specifically though, I suspect that what people really want to feel better about are their own sexual sins - fornication, pornography, and so on - that aren't actually crimes but are (or traditionally were) seen as being a bit naughty and/or "unhealthy", but which aren't really so different from those that are crimes. In purely material terms, in other words, the "sex crimes" that people get life sentences for and their livelihoods destroyed are hardly any worse than what most people now regard as private, harmless pleasures. They have to punished, and punished severely, to make us feel that they are different, and to make us feel that however bad we may be we aren't nearly so bad as all that! And so it is that the sex criminals we do still punish have to be condemned ever more vociferously and incarcerated for ever longer periods as scapegoats for the rest of us.

Because fundamentally we are all paranoid about sex. I don't know why this is, but it has to have something to do with sex's being a private matter between husbands and wives. (Or at least that's what it's supposed to be!) No one really knows what other couples get up to in the bedroom, and at the same time (presumably for evolutionary/"Darwinian" reasons) no one likes the idea that other people may be having more or better or just more enjoyable sex than we are. And that, I'm quite sure, is why we criminalise sex for children (although of course the official reason is that children don't like sex* and need to be protected from it). After all, if a 9-year-old is getting more action that you are, what sort of a loser must you be!?

Well then, where are the sometime outliers of the 1960s Sexual Revolution - England's version of what in France are know as "les soixante-huitards", though in practice "soixante-retards" is normally nearer the mark - when one comes to modern sex crimes? The answer, of course, is that they're all over the place. After all, as I've tried to point out previously on this blog, there's no reason why a gay man shouldn't be a fascist or a Christian or a Marxist, and by the same token there's little reason to suppose he won't be a sexual hypocrite as well. And thus it was that once "gay sex" was "legalised" in the 1960s (and the laws were "equalised" in the '90s) most gay men gave up on pushing the boundaries back any further.

Here and there, however, little squeaks and whimpers can from time to time be heard that perhaps hint at a half-forgotten bygone era of sexual radicalism that some of the former revolutionaries still have some degree of attachment to. After all, one of the most important tenets of Marxism (and cultural Marxism is just as much Marxism as any other sort) is that the Revolution can never end. However "free" and "equal" sexual minorities (e.g. gays) may now be, they (i.e. others) can still be more "equal" (e.g. children) and more "free" (e.g. paedophiles).

Officially, of course, this is the era of Gillick competence, and given that the mainstream gay movement is now obsessed with "safe" sex that clearly seen as a "safe" way of encouraging sexual activity amongst underage children. And then of course there is the anti-bullying (or anti-anti-gay "bullying") industry, the point of which (Duh!) is to promote a pro-sex message by painting any real or imaginary anti-sex lobby as, er, "bullies".

Unofficially though, and away from the legally questionable world of "sexual rights for young people", the more thoughtful (and more, er, Cambridge-educated) sort of former Sexual Revolutionary has occasionally raised a weak-piping voice in the name of such formerly liberal virtues as tolerance, forbearance and common sense. Former Brideshead-star Jeremy Irons himself has of course been constantly getting himself into trouble down the years for saying sensible things about the kiddie-fiddling panic. But also, out on the Far Left, Peter Tatchell is one of those stopped clocks that every now and again actually tells the correct time. Stephen Fry, who lists Sandel as one of his favourite books when he was growing up and claims to have been sexually active at an early age himself, has also made a perfunctory stab at the same. Richard Dawkins has defended "mild paedophilia". Indeed, for the briefest of moments six years ago it seemed that an unrepentant sodomite who tears pages out of Bibles in hotel rooms might, just might have been about to redeem himself. Sadly, thanks in part no doubt to the trusty Torygraph, we never heard much more from "Sir" Ian McKellen about the dangers of anti-paedo hysteria.†

So, what do these various characters have in common? Well for one thing, with the honest exception of Jeremy Irons††, they have all tended to be quite bigotedly anti-Catholic. For another, it's quite probable that they have all, with the possible exception of Ian McKellen, done some time (whether literally or figuratively) on the psychiatrist's couch - and not, by any means, that there's anything wrong with that! What I mean by that it that they have all at least thought about "things", and are perhaps somewhat aware that the world isn't necessarily a fair and properly ordered place.

My own attitude is one of deep scepticism that misdemeanours of a purely moral nature should (or, for that matter, even can) be punished by violence (including incarceration). And given that it is the state that does and should hold the monopoly on violence it is thus hard to see why such "sensitive crimes" are any of the state's business. But that's not because I want to downplay the gravity of sexual immorality or push "back" any barriers. Rather it's because I believe in the spiritual values of forgiveness (and unlike murder it is possible for a victim to forgive sexual abuse) and reconciliation - values that I cannot imagine a "rationalist" like Richard Dawkins would have much time for. And thus whereas I agree with the sentiments they express, the essential contradiction of their being expressed by such positivistic and essentially amoral characters as Dawkins and Fry, makes it difficult to foresee any time that they'll achieve any sort of fruition.

* In reality of course all children think sex is hilarious. Everyone who has ever been a child knows this, and quite frankly the degree of cognitive dissonance required for "society" as a whole to pretend otherwise is all but apocalyptic. 
† Not that Sir Ian himself has ever been involved in anything remotely to do with gay Nazi paedophilia! Oh no! Absolutely not! Although Brad Renfro did eventually top himself, and Bryan Singer's predilections are now virtually an open secret.
†† For all his faults, Irons has always struck me as being a fundamentally decent human being. There's a good case to be made that he's a "small-c conservative", in that he's pro-foxhunting and at least sceptical about abortion and gay marriage. More to the point though, he comes across has having quite self-consciously tried to be a "good dad" to his various beautiful boys. In any case, it would surely be hard for the star of Brideshead and The Mission to be that anti-Catholic.