The road to sexual serfdom? Not happening.

I’ve been enjoying the new Atlantic Ideas Report which I picked up because I like Conor Friedersdorf’s posts over at the American Scene.  It may soon show up in my opposition category on the blog roll.  In any event, Friedersdorf is present interviewing James Poulos and there’s a fun bit about a Pink Police state that’s about as silly as it sounds.

So citizens of a Pink Police State (I should say subjects) are apt to surrender more and more political liberty in exchange for more and more cultural or 'personal' license. And the government of a Pink Police State tends to monopolize and totalize administrative control while carving out a permissive playpen for the people. This tradeoff has a creepy economic component. Already, in places like Russia, China, the Gulf states, and Singapore, we see the machinations of a new 'laboratory of autocracy', as oppressive regimes grant wealthy residents de facto privileges to all the sin money can buy. As I've asked in our own context, however, how many hipsters are too poor to party?… There's more to worry about when we see China's youth consent en masse to equality in servitude in the shadow of Macau, Earth's biggest gambling mecca. Of course the freaky environs of Dubai are a stone's throw from the real Mecca.

Polous develops a nominally similar idea in his article on “The Sex Vote” that sexual liberation can lead to the death of political liberty (note: risqué line art), which I think refers to the concept of classical little-r highly participatory republican citizenship.

Unlike the liberal, democratizing attitude toward the open-ended pursuit of erotic liberty, the traditional libertarian attitude at least recognizes that the arena of the erotic is as competitive as any other status-conferring activity and will foster the inevitable rise of a sexual elite...

The traditional libertarian can accept this inequality of outcomes; not so the liberal. Where the unfettered “market”—in this case, the space of sexual liberty—does not correct for inequalities and externalities, they will conclude the state should step in.

Poulos states that “[t]he Pink Police State is a more extreme version of a regime I use to taunt my libertarian friends in my essay on 'The Sex Vote'” but instead it seems as if he’s arguing that focusing on sexual freedom is the road to sexual serfdom and government enforced sex equality (not to be confused with equality between the sexes).  That doesn’t really make sense to me, the Pink Police state models, Russia, parts of China, Singapore, aren’t providing traditional liberalism or equality so why would they try to pursue some sort of sex equality that undermined bargain with the rich?  If liberalism really had these impulses on a wide spread scale, why isn’t he citing examples in Europe or Scandinavia?  The cute line about how no one is too poor to be a hipster elides the fact that hipster-ism by definition cannot be available to the population as a whole.  If everyone does something, it isn’t hip.

I’ll gladly concede that liberals are concerned with inequality in ways that Libertarians are not.  That will always be a source of tensions.  In the odd fictional example Poulos cites in the sex votes we liberals certainly would be willing to take away a child criminally neglected because the parent was too busy having sex.  We’d also be willing to provide birth control or adoption services to avoid that problem in the first place.  But on the whole the argument never really grapples with the fact that on the variety of sexual issues in the U.S. at least, liberals are the ones pushing for more freedom.  On the whole it can be a fun thing to discuss, hence this post, but I don’t really see how this argument is applicable outside of sci-fi discussions.

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