The politics of sex

pp. 88-101

in: Robert Grant, The politics of sex and other essays, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

The liberal in all of us would like to keep sex and politics apart. But it is not possible, in the end, to do so. Human sexuality concerns encounters not between organs, but between persons; relations between persons are the stuff of morals; and morals, through the shared concept of "justice", seek dramatic confirmation and support in law (not to enforce them is to make the good look fools).¹ Moreover, law and culture reinforce each other: culture is underpinned by law, and law, at bottom, is simply culture in the guise (or as the radical would have it, the disguise) of necessity. Sexuality, then — no matter how much the liberal may deplore the fact — is intimately bound up with matters that are ultimately political. For the conservative this is no cause for regret. Facts and passions alike are his allies in the maintenance of a world of meaning already present in them and in their product, himself. His advantage over his ideological rivals lies in the fact that nothing human is totally alien to him. Accordingly, his view of sexuality will be neither puritanical nor unduly repressive. At least, what he does offer to repress should elicit no sympathy. For it is nothing more or less than the pretensions to legitimacy of a sexual idiom at odds both with society and, as we shall see, with itself.