The 'sequel rule' & 'Lolita rights':
Jr, David R Carlin
SEXUAL ACTIVITY: IS IT REALLY A PRIVATE ACT? The 'squeal rule' & 'Lolita rights' DAVID R. CARLIN, JR. MY FRIEND HASTINGS, who is getting old enough now to qualify as a dirty old man whenever he...
...The privatization of sex has been a sensational victory for individualism, opening the way to further triumphs...
...The big issue is not sex versus chastity, but individualism versus social control...
...It's not that adultery violates one's duty to society at large, as a kind of betrayal of the public trust contained in the office of husband or wife...
...This, you recall, is the proposed U.S...
...As for extra-marital sex, contemporary morality (by a majority though far from unanimous opinion) still considers that to be improper...
...When Hastings asked for my views on this burning controversy, I endeavored to explain...
...But the ground for this impropriety is different from that offered by traditional morality...
...Like almost all sexual controversies, this one reflects-or rather refracts, as through a prism-certain broader and more fundamental conflicts in American society and culture...
...Sex is only the opening wedge, the tip of the iceberg, the nose of the camel under the tent...
...Though sexual activity might be performed in private, it was not really a private act...
...Sexual activity outside marriage was an act of private will, within marriage an act of social will...
...Department of Health and Human Services regulation which requires federally subsidized birth control clinics to notify the parents of girls seventeen and under who receive certain kinds of contraceptives-pill, IUD, or diaphragm...
...and if such promises are not given or if they are canceled by mutual consent at a later date, then of course it would not be considered wrong...
...Adultery is no longer an offense against the very nature of marriage, as traditional morality would have it...
...Opponents of the rule argue that it will lead to more contraception-less sex, hence more teen pregnancies, hence more abortions and out-of-wedlock births...
...There's those luscious young chicks bestowing their favors on scrawny, pimply boys-boys who contribute hardly a dollar to the U.S...
...and although contemporary morality recognizes that marriage has certain contractual aspects (regarding property, for instance), sexual agreements are not among them...
...Traditional sexual morality (in theory at least if not always in practice) was based on the latter assumption...
...I don't know about Italy, but in America, where the Communists are virtually non-existent and the Catholics relatively sane, the division that causes reasonable men to feel short of breath is that between "conservatives" who hold the impossible (and not very lovely) dream of creating social solidarity on the basis of old-fashioned petty bourgeois respectability, trimmed with a gingerbread of born-again Christianity, and "liberals" (usually themselves petty bourgeois, but of the new-fangled variety, hence with very different standards of respectability) who, like so many blithe spirits, cheerfully encourage the maximization of privacy and individualism, never pausing to notice that their program promotes psychic and societal disorder, along with the disintegration of both personal and social conscience...
...What gets him is this...
...Some place Luigi Barzini complains that all Italy is divided between the Catholics and the Communists, leaving hardly any breathing space for a reasonable man...
...As for pre-marital sex, it regards as absurd the notion that one should be held answerable to others-even, or perhaps especially, to one's ultimate spouse, who, according to old-fashioned ideas, was thought to have the right to resent one's earlier sexual activities with other persons...
...and the fact that we've tracked its course with so much solemnity indicates that we're at least dimly aware of these implications...
...hence social regulation of that activity was warranted...
...But that, I suggest, was just the point...
...He calls this his "Lolita rights" and predicts it will eventually prove as great a boon to the class of dirty old men as Miranda rights have been to the criminal class...
...on those occasions when it is an offense, it is an offense against the duty to keep promises...
...Treating sex as a matter of public interest was so paradoxical, so great a tour de force, that it was an ideal way of teaching us that we are not simply individuals but part of a larger whole, the social whole...
...Though this lesson was aimed at everyone, its special target was adolescents...
...Contemporary sexual morality, by contrast, considers sex to be a strictly private concern...
...But behind this deeper division there is a still deeper division...
...but the alchemy of socialization (which includes romantic propaganda as one of its instruments) has traditionally transmuted it into a social thing...
...By giving sex license now to lapse into its original egoistic state, the sexual revolution has given the signal to a multitude of other activities, largely self-centered though often less strikingly so than sex-money-making, money-spending, recreation, self-development, falling in love, preparing one's children to get ahead of the other fellow's children, etc...
...Paul, the married person could say: "No longer do I act, but society in me...
...Where is there a less plausible candidate for public inspection...
...For all the protestations on both sides that their big concern is with out-of-wedlock teen pregnancies and how best to prevent them, one suspects that the real division between the parties is based on a difference of attitude toward sexual activity by kids...
...Hastings says he may sue, citing the equal protection clause, for what he regards as his constitutional right to make an indecent proposition to the next precocious teeny-bopper he runs into...
...And by the time they come of age all the virginal starch will have been taken out of them...
...IF THE "SEXUAL revolution" of the last twenty years or so were no more than its name says it is, it would be no very big deal...
...if they could be taught to regard so fascinating a business as sex as subject to societal discipline, there was hope they might appreciate the need for social control and social solidarity generally...
...The traditional rule that sex should be confined within marriage meant that one was not free to act sexually in one's capacity as a mere private or natural individual...
...While parents of minor children may have a legitimate right to worry about the health and possible pregnancies of their sexually active kids, any interference beyond that point could be justified only on the traditional theory that sex is a matter of public interest...
...Other parental interference with the freedom of their children-with regard, e.g., to schoolwork, smoking, drinking, late hours-is justifiable because society considers these matters to fall within its sphere of legitimate interest and, so to speak, deputizes parents to protect its interests in the home...
...It follows too-to return to our starting point-that adolescent sex, at least when practiced with contraception and backstop-ped by abortion, is essentially unobjectionable...
...If his federal dollars are to be used to subsidize sex by teenage girls, he wants at least to get in on it...
...If something so private as sex fell into the public sphere, how much more so nearly everything else...
...Others-family, friends, neighbors, spouses, potential spouses, and society generally-felt they had interest which might be jeopardized by one's sexual activity...
...Where, as in the case of sex, society has renounced its supervisory claims, parents have no such claims either...
...If sex is a strictly private affair, it follows, as most Americans have come to understand in the last decade or so, that homosexuality is perfectly unobjectionable...
...Proponents contend the rule will promote parent-child communication about sexual matters...
...Once I win my Lolita rights, do you think we can get the court to order the government to set up a computer dating service to put dirty old men in touch with willing nymphets...
...It's just not fair...
...But I think there is more to it than the name suggests...
...Ma, I'm makin' it with Johnny and I wanna go on the pill...
...Hastings, who has always had an uncanny knack for seeing some third issue that both parties to an argument had missed, says he doesn't give a damn whether parents are notified or not...
...If the traditional socialization of sex was a way of driving home the point that we are essentially social, not individual, beings, the reverse process-the privatization of sex-has been an effective way of driving home the opposite lesson: that we are essentially individual beings, not answerable to others for actions that don't tangibly and rather directly affect them...
...If I can have an easy conscience about privatized sex, then surely I can have an easy conscience about privatizing these other things as well...
...for a contract, strictly speaking, is an agreement between parties that society has an interest in, and thus is willing to enforce...
...Nor is it that it violates the contract between husband and wife...
...In a period of economic disarray at home and rising Soviet-American tension abroad, it may seem a bit odd that a dispute about something as trivial as teen-age sex rules should be front-page news...
...A little sex more or less, no matter how great a thrill it may happen to be for certain individuals involved, hardly shakes the foundations of the republic...
...After all, what has a better prima facie claim to be private than sex...
...Since even our genitalia were not available for free private use, society must have powerful claims indeed on the use to which we put our hands and brains...
...that they also needn't take pains to try to become something more altruistic than their natures dictate...
...No, the reason adultery is still viewed as wrong is that it violates certain strictly private understandings or promises made between husband and wife...
...WHEN I FINISHED, Hastings, who had been nodding somewhat during the latter stages of my exposition, roused himself and said he was sure everything I had said was correct...
...The lesson we learned, to borrow once again from St...
...In and of itself the sexual passion is (a great deal of romantic propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding) a profoundly egoistic phenomenon...
...But there's really nothing odd about it...
...treasury-while mature men like me, who spend our lives in service to the Treasury, can only stand and wait for these young things to come of age...
...One side (the parental notification side) tends to look with stern disapproval on adolescent sex, regardless of whether or not it results in pregnancy...
...instead one acted in virtue of a kind of public office-husband or wife- that society had artificially created and inducted one into...
...it's not even that it violates one's ex officio duty to one's spouse...
...Statutory rape laws," he points out with great justice, "discriminate against the very people who foot the bill...
...To borrow and alter some words of St...
...Paul, was that we are members of one another...
...MY FRIEND HASTINGS, who is getting old enough now to qualify as a dirty old man whenever he has lascivious thoughts about a woman under thirty-five, was talking about the "squeal rule" the other day...
...This concerns the question of whether sex is a strictly self-regarding activity or an activity in which society at large has a legitimate interest...
...In retrospect it may seem odd that the traditional conception of sex should have held the field for as long as it did...
...But what really concerns me," he added, "is this...
...the other (the confidentiality party), while not exactly jumping with joy at the spectacle of widespread and increasing sex among school-kids, regards it as a tolerable and fairly normal thing - at worst, a kind of venial sin...
...After all, what business of mine is it what you do in the strictly private portions of your life, no matter how little it may be to my taste...
...I don't refer simply to the issue of the appropriateness of adolescent sex, though that's part of it...
...I'll break your arm, you little snit...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 15
