Roger Scruton on the abuse of sex (lecture transcript)

On the abuse of sex

I want to begin with sketching some modern myths about sex and sexual desire that I think have penetrated the culture and conditioned the way in which all these issues are discussed. And then I want to go on and say how I think these issues ought to be discussed, what kind of conceptualisation of the sexual aspect of humanity is appropriate and true.

Modern myths about sex

The first myth that I think has been particularly absorbed here in in America since the Kinsey report and other factitious attempts at pseudo-science is that sexual desire is a desire for a particular kind of pleasure located in the sexual organs. On this view, all sex is like masturbation, a manipulation of the sexual organs for the sake of pleasure. The other person is seen as a stimulus to desire but not an object of it. And of course that myth has a gratifying consequence for the normal liberal way of looking at these things, namely that it removes the other person entirely from consideration when assessing the morality of any particular act.

The second myth is that sexual satisfaction depends upon the intensity and duration of this sensory pleasure, and that good sex is a matter of getting that right, and that is what lovers should aim at and what ultimately cements the bond between them. And around that has grown a as you know, a kind of mythology of good sex, with an enormous literature both popular and pseudo-scientific, and again that to anybody who’s actually thought about it in a serious way, that myth clearly simplifies if not misrepresents the phenomenon as we know it.

The third myth is that sexual urges need to be expressed and that the attempt to repress them is in some way psychologically harmful. Obviously the origins of this myth lie in the theories of Freud who did not actually endorse the view that repression is harmful. He did impose upon out culture the hydraulic picture of the sexual act and sexual feeling as a kind of boiling, tumultuous flood that we contain which must have an outlet if we’re not to explode. We see the great apostle of this view in Wilhelm Reich, on of the few people–who ended up where he deserved, in prison–of this movement, but the rest of them got off Scot-free.

Now, this myth goes naturally with the other two but it also have the interesting consequence which Freud already drew that there’s not really any such thing as sexual perversion, that the sexual appetite is something by its very nature can attach itself now to this thing, now to that thing. All we have to do is find the channel through which it can find expression in order for our sexual lives to be healthy and fulfilled.

Appropriateness of shame and guilt

Finally, there growing out of these myths, the consequence that many people draw is that attitudes like shame guilt disgust are unhealthy, that their costs cannot be outweighed by the benefits of sexual release when it comes. Hence we should strive to relieve ourselves of all these hangovers and that we should develop procedures of sex education which would be designed as therapies for guilt and shame, ways of getting young people to accept their sexual urges and to find ways to express them without feeling bad about doing so.

Now I agree that we must find ways to express our sexual desires without feeling guilt and shame but I also think that guilt and shame are often justified and that what they demand is not therapy in order to remove them, but right conduct in order that they should have no cause to occur.

What I want to do then is give a conception of sexual desire which will perhaps say something about what right conduct consists in.

Now obviously pornography is one consequence […] or rather the easy acceptance of pornography in our society. You know that since we all have these appetites, they are all polymorphously perverse, we all need to release them: here is a simple cost-free way of releasing them in which there is no victim, because after all it’s only an image that you’re confronting, not another person. This is a kind of sex free from dangers and as Oscar Wilde said of masturbation “it is cleaner, more efficient, and you meet a better class of person” meaning himself.

But I’m one of those who think of pornography as something that we should avoid and do everything to forbid to our children. How can we justify this attitude in the basis of the myths that I’ve just sketched in which you’re all familiar. Clearly, it’s going to be very difficult. Those myths give us an instrumentalised conception of sexual conduct which sees it simply as a means to a particular kind of experience and what is the moral significance of that? There seems to be none that we can straightforwardly describe anyway. So we need another conception of sexual desire if we are to even begin the task of developing a moral assessment of pornography and an assessment of how we might deal with it.

Concept of sexual desire transcending animal mentality

Now, the first point to make is that sexual desire belongs to the aspect of the human being which we summarise in the concept the person. Many of the things that we experience, we experience as animals. The pain of a wound, for instance, is the same experience for us as it is for a dog although of course it’s amplified by our consciousness of the damage that it indicates. But there are other states of mind that only persons can experience and I think this is very important point to begin from. Obviously dogs can experience aggression but not remorse or shame. They can’t wonder about the laws of nature or judge each other morally and so on.

But again, there are some states of mind that are rooted in our animal nature but which are also transformed by our involvement as persons, on example of familiar to everybody is that of soldiers in battle who respond to an attack on their comrades by joining with them in the fight and risking their own lives beside them. Of course, many evolutionary psychologists say well this is just a special case of the general phenomenon of altruism which we can observe also in the soldier ant sacrificing itself in the flames that threaten the ant-heap or in the she-bear defending her cubs from a predator but of course that misrepresents exactly what the soldier is doing. The soldier is consciously risking his life for the sake of others and this is a state of mind which depends on the concept of self and the concept of other and the web or moral obligations that bind them. It’s a state of mind lifted out of the realm of animal mentality and recast as an expression of human freedom.

I think exactly similar things should be said sexual desire. This is obvious rooted in instincts that we share with the other animals and indeed sex has as we know a biological function about which people are getting clearer every day, at the very moment they are getting less clear about its moral significance. And so just as in the case of the soldier the person who responds to this instinct also stands in judgement of it. Is it right or is it wrong to respond. And when he responds it’s from a judgement that this is the right person, that in doing this thing he is in her eyes not demeaning himself but gaining acceptance, just as she is in his. That’s the normal man-woman encounter as represented in that brief moment of truth in American civilisation represented by Hollywood but in this there is a reciprocity of glances involved, a gradual accommodation in which consent is, as it were, woven into the very fabric of the desire so that when they finally give way to it the desire has become an expression of something other than instinct. So, of what?

Persons and the interpersonal

To answer that question we should look a little more closely at the concept of the person. This is a concept that comes to us from originally roman law where it means the legal subject, the entity that can appear before a court of law, serves to affirm its rights and acknowledge its duties.

Most animals are not persons and some persons are not animals. But we are both so that there are features of our mental life that non personal animals just don’t share, like having rights and duties, making judgements, reflecting on the past the the future. We’re self-conscious distinguishing self and other and we relate to each other not as animals but as persons. Through dialogue, judgements, moral expectations and so on. Indeed there are arguments for saying that the concept of the person is essentially tied to interpersonal relations. To explain what a person is, we must explain how persons relate to each other. It’s a relational idea.

And one vital feature of interpersonal relations is their emotional content. My stance toward self and other is reflected in my emotional life. Emotions like shame, guilt anger remorse gratitude forgiveness, rejoicing and so on are essentially directed towards persons whether self or other and learning to feel these things is part of what it means to grow up. In other words to pass from the animal condition in which we are born to the personal condition in which we flourish.

Freedom and responsibility

Fundamental to all those emotions and to the life of persons generally are our beliefs about freedom and responsibility. My response. is revealed in my shame and my freedom is revealed in my forgiveness and so on. We all know that the concepts of freedom and responsibility are controversial but we cannot leave that philosophy to one side because our concern in this conference at least is to examine how we actually envisage ourselves in our lives as persons and it is fairly obvious that in all our reciprocal relations with each other we treat each other as free, The belief in freedom and responsibility is presupposed in anger and resentment, just as it is in gratitude and love. If you take that belief away, little would remain of our emotional life an its rewards.

Now the heart of this idea of freedom is the self, and I’d say the use of the word I to identify yourself as a subject of consciousness, and by my use of this word I create a new centre of being. I, so to speak, set my body aside replace the organism with the self and present to others another target of their interest and response; to know my mind also to change it others should not examine my body and its state, they should look at my words, my opinions, my thoughts. I should enter into dialogue with this thing called I.

Of course the words that I’m using here are figurative, I demand a philosophical exposition but I all I want you to acknowledge is that something like this is assumed in our ordinary human relations. Just think of your response when your friend betrays your secrets. You don’t think of him as you would of a computer in which you have stored some information which somehow leaked out. You don’t ask yourself about what hacked into his brain or how the messages got copied out of it, you go to him and address him in the second person. You promised, you say, and your words are addressed to that very centre of being where his “I” resides. And in accusing him, you’re not trying to provoke some physical reaction, you are expecting a response from that very self, a response from the centre of freedom where he resides. On self-conscious subject among others. In other words, you expect him to take responsibility for what he did, to say “I am sorry,” and so on and so being the process of re-establishing normal relations between you. And that doesn’t mean that there are two things here, a person and and animal, there is one thing, an organism organised as a person, and that’s how we treat each other, in all our free relations.

And the same is true of sexual desire.

Sexual desire as interpersonal

This too is rooted in animal instincts, but in a person desire is recentred, self-attributed to the “I” so as to become part of the interpersonal dialogue. Hence sexual desire as we know it is peculiar to human beings. It is an interpersonal emotion in which subject and object confront each other, I to I. In describing sexual desire we’re describing John’s desire for Mary or Jane’s desire for Bill and the people themselves will not merely describe their desires but also experience them as my desire for you. “I want you” is not a figure of speech but the true expression of what I feel. And here, the pronouns identify that very centre of free and responsible choice which constitutes the interpersonal reality of each of us. I want you as the free being that you are, and your freedom is wrapped up in the thing that I want.

And now you can easily verify this, as I show in my book Sexual Desire, by studying sexual arousal. This is not a state of the body, even though it involves bodily changes, it’s a process in the soul, a steady awakening of one person to another through touches, glances, and caresses.

The exchange of glances is particularly important here. People look at each other as animals do but they also look into each other and do this in particular when mutually aroused. The look of desire is like a summons, a call for the other self to show itself in the eyes, to weave its own freedom and selfhood into the beam that calls to it, and I give a quotation here from John Donne:

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;
So to’intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation

The experience described by Donne is known to every sighted person who has ever been aroused, and likewise the caress and the touch of desire have an epistemic character. They are an exploration, not of a body but of a free being in his or her embodiment, and they too call to the other in his freedom asking him to show himself. I think that all the phenomena of desire can be understood in that way as parts of a mutual negotiation between free and responsible beings who want each other as persons, and I think this has important moral consequences.

Persons are individuals, not merely in the sense of being substances which undergo change but in the strong sense of being identified both by themselves and by others as unique, irreplaceable, not admitting of substitutes. So to treat someone merely instrumentally therefore is always in a measure to abuse him, and while I can employ you for a job and, in doing so, recognise that someone else might have served my purpose just as well, I must at the same time respect your individuality and not treat you merely as a tool or a slave. It follows from this that those relations between persons in which self and other related as subject and object, each is viewed as unique without a substitute. So for instance John frustrated in his desire for Mary cannot be offered Jane as a substitute. Someone who says “take Jane, she would do just as well” has not understood what John wants in wanting Mary.

Conclusions

There are many difficult philosophical issues here which I won’t discuss, I’ve discussed them elsewhere, but just to draw a few conclusions.

One is that arousal and desire are not bodily states or even states of individual persons. They for one pole of an I-to-I encounter and involve a going out to the other in which his or her freedom and responsibility are intimately involved in what is wanted. It’s only in this way that we can explain some of our most immovable intuitions about sex, for example the intuition that rape is an assault next only to murder in its severity, something which Hadley Arkes rather beautifully described to us yesterday, making the point which I was hoping to make today and so I now pass over, so impoverishing my argument to a point of acuity but nevertheless, doesn’t matter.

This account I think explains our disgust at paedophilia, the taboo on incest, why we regard bestiality and necrophilia as perversions, and so on. It explains the role of modesty as an invitation to correct behaviour and shame as a protection against abuse. I don’t think I need to spell these things out since I believe that anyone who recognises the core of truth in what I have said will be able to spell them out for himself.

My purpose is simply to sweep away the myths that I began from, the myths about sexual desire as being a desire for a certain kind of pleasure in a certain part of the body. These states of mind of sexual desire and arousal are not directed towards pleasure or orgasm or any similar thing, they are directed towards one free being by another.

Effects of the myths

One thing that tempts people to endorse the modern myths is the very obvious fact that sexual activity involves bodily changes and bodily sensations and this has made a certain caricature of desire believable in the minds of those who take an accountant’s view of human satisfactions. Of course there’s plenty of literature in America taking this position. But the problem with the myths that lead to that view of sexuality is not that they are false but they are false, because they are false, but to know how false they are you have to do some hard thinking that most people are not qualified to do.

But there is a downside to them anyway, namely that myths can work on reality in such a way that they cease to be myths and become true descriptions instead. Thinking of sex in the instrumentalised way that you get from the Kinsey report and other such nonsense you actually end up transforming your sexual appetites to conform to the myths that you have been absorbing and the more people think of sex as a means to the production of pleasure, or a means for obtaining orgasm, as was famously believed by that madman Wilhelm Reich, the more the other drops out of consideration as irrelevant, and the more sex ceases to be a form of interpersonal relation and retreats into narcissistic solitude.

And I think that is exactly what we are seeing in the case of pornography which exactly conforms to the myths about desire that I’ve rejected. It is a realisation of those modern myths, a form of sexual pleasure from which the interpersonal intentionality has been surgically excised. Pornography takes hold of sexual desire and cuts away the desire. There is no real object but only a fantasy and no real subject since there’s nothing ventured of the self, it’s a risk-free encounter with nothing. To say that this is an abuse of the self is t o express a literal truth, so it seems to me.

Porn addiction and its damage

Like all cost-free forms of pleasure, porn is habit-forming, it short-circuits that roundabout route to sexual satisfaction which passes by the streams and valleys of arousal in which the self is always at risk from the other and always motivated to give itself freely in desire. The short-circuiting mechanism here is in all probability not different from that researched by psychologists in studies of gambling addiction, and TV addiction and the rest.

It exhibits in addition however a depersonalising habit, a habit of viewing sex as something external to the human personality, to a relationship, and to the arena or free encounters. So that if sex is reduced to the sexual organs which are stuck on in the imagination like cut-outs in a child’s picture. To think that this can be done and the habit of doing it established without damage to a person’s capacity to be a person, or to relate to others is to make a large and naive assumption about the ability of the human mind to compartmentalise. Indeed I think psychotherapists are increasingly encountering the damage done by porn, not to marriages and relationships only, but to the very capacity to engage in them.

Sex portrays in the porno image is an affair of attractive people with every technical accomplishment. Most people are not attractive with only second class equipment, and once they’re led by their porn addiction to see sex in the instrumentalised way that porn encourages they begin to lose confidence in their capacity to enjoy sex in any other way than through fantasy. People who lose confidence in their ability to attract, soon become unattractive, and then the fear of desire arises and from that the fear of love. This, it seems to me, is the real risk attached to pornography. Those who become addicted to this risk-free form of sex run a risk of another and greater kind, they risk the loss of love in a world where only love brings happiness.

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