The Sexual Feedback Loop
by Dr James Alexander, The Daily Sceptic:
Further to the essay I wrote on TRANSLOGIC some time ago, I now want to consider not the logic but the causes of the current disarray in our marital law, identity politics and sexual behaviour.
The short argument, here, is that our current disarray is the long consequence of a SEXUAL FEEDBACK LOOP. For at least a century we have sought to achieve sexual freedom. Against the old marital morality, we have tried to do whatever we want with whomever is agreeable as long as this is qualified by consent. This experiment has been premissed on the idea that it is about freedom of activity. But the experiment has not been controlled and limited to activity. By an elaborate feedback loop our tendency to greater sexual experimentation has come back in a great arc to undermine our sense of our own original sexual nature.
In the article on TRANSLOGIC I suggested that there are three logics, which accompany three stages of sexual history.
The first logic is that I am a man, you are a woman, we commit ourselves to each other ‘until death us do part’, and we have children, where we can.
The second is that I am a man (say, or a woman), and I am free to engage in what we call sexual activity (redefined so it is not simply sexual commerce in the old sense but any activity between any of us which involves our sexual organs) with anyone (man or woman, men or women), as long as they are sexually mature, consenting to this activity, and that no harm (also redefined so it is no longer intrinsic harm but consequential harm) comes to any of the consenting adults.
The third is that I am whatever I want to be, be it a man or a woman, or even what is now called ‘two-spirit’ (with both a male and female soul), and am free to ‘identify’ myself in my chosen manner, but also insist that I should be ‘identified’ by others in this way: any sexual activity is secondary to this.
Now, what I want to observe about this is that there is very likely a causal relation between the second and third stages.
We broke the old imperatives: about living in harmony and commitment, about fulfilling our sexual natures in committed sexual relations, about taking responsibility for the consequences of those sexual relations, and about building our institutions around the virtues of the relations as sanctified by care of children.
The second stage, I now think, depended on the assumption that every one of us is whatever we were supposed to be in the first stage: a man or a woman. But then it is assumed that we could do whatever we wanted. The particular claim I want to make here is I think that it is very likely that this freedom to do whatever ‘I’ want dissolved my certainty about who the ‘I’ was who possessed this freedom. Our free sexual activity was not simply free activity: the freedom was a corrosive agent which acted upon our nature – or what we formerly supposed, but now were inclined to doubt, was our nature. In a word, sexual possibility (concerning what we could do) fed back into sexual identity (concerning what we are).
This is the sexual feedback loop.
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