The crime fighting internet and further thoughts. (An adult post.)

This story in Slate is fascinating.

Turns out that one serious study on crime statistics indicates that internet access reduces the number of rapes (although mainly for teenage perpetrators).

So, all that lack of "mastery of domain" that the internet encourages in teenagers has at least one upside.

One downside, I am sure I have read somewhere in the past, is that widespread familiarity with the explicit porn around today had led many people - mainly men I guess - into having unrealistic expectations of what a sexual partner should be happy to try. This can have serious effects on what otherwise might have been a good relationship.

In fact, the whole issue of community attitudes to what is "acceptable" in terms of everyday sexual practices is pretty interesting, in that it seems to me underappreciated (especially by younger people, who have grown up in the current decadent period) how quickly it changes over time. This is not a subject I have spent much time researching, but as an example, I remember an SBS documentary in which an old gay American guy said that, prior to about the 1970's, gay culture was not at all fixated on anal sex as its predominant sexual practice. As I recall, he claimed that in the 1940's and 50's, gay men who wanted that were seen by most other gay men as being somewhat extreme. This, however, has now changed completely in the gay community. On the heterosexual side, I suspect that the equivalent change in the 20th century is in the attitude to oral sex. (Slate has previously run a story on the apparent very recent increase in oral sex amongst American teens in particular. Experience of heterosexual anal sex has had a big increase too, although I would be curious to know how often this is a matter of regular practice, rather than one off experiment.)

Of course, much of what I am relying on for my impressions is anecdotal evidence, but establishing in retrospect what were previous community attitudes has obvious problems. The type of studies that Kinsey did on this - which do indicate a wide variety of sexual practices earlier in the 20th century - are now considered very methodologically suspect.

Everyone knows, of course, that all sorts of sexual practices were illustrated by older cultures, as shown on Greek, Chinese and Hindu art. The fact that they were illustrated, however, tells us little about the average person's attitude towards those practices. It seems still very arguable as to what exactly was the average Greek man's attitude to homosexuality, for example.

Nor is it clear that relying on famous writer's views is necessarily a good guide to past communities' attitudes. Everyone knows at least a little about the great moral panic about masturbation in the West that ran for a couple of centuries or so, yet how likely were the mountains of pamphlets and books warning of its great dangers to influence the common man's view of it? Surely most father's experience of it as a youngster would have lent some sympathetic understanding of their own offspring's practice? Even Kant, who I generally admire, went completely overboard on this topic, writing:

The obstinate throwing away of one’s life as a burden is at least not a weak surrender to animal pleasure, but requires courage; and where there is courage, there is always respect for the humanity in one’s own person. On the other hand, when one abandons himself entirely to an animal inclination, he makes himself an object of unnatural gratification, i.e., a loathsome thing, and thus deprives himself of all self-respect.

So, there is at least something to admire in suicide, but masturbation is completely depraved?

This post is going no where, I guess, except to make the point that I feel it is important to recognize that attitudes to sexual practices are subject to cultural fashion and highly debatable intellectual analysis. I am not arguing that current Western laissez-faire attitudes are inherently an improvement over past attitudes, even though I have made my view of the moral panic over masturbation clear. Rather, I am suggesting that the current predominant Western attitudes deserve analysis and justification if they are to be any more than just another cultural fashion. My tendency, of course, is to support more conservative analysis, and in that respect I would hope Roger Scruton's approach is worthwhile, but I haven't read much by him about this yet.

I haven't even directly touched the whole current attitude to sexual identity either, which I think should be subjected to the same critical approach, but that is a post for another day.