Another Slippery Post

Warning: Somewhat mature content is contained in this post.

"The fact that it was a lesbian encounter didn't really bother me. What creeped me out was the difference in their ages. Laura's seventeen and Janet's, what, thirty-eight?"

This sentence (or something much like it) was spoken during a casual discussion of The Female Man by Joanna Russ. I and the others in the group had all just read the section where Janet, with the help of a mechanical device, has "sex" with Laura. The others in the group were offended and put off by the twenty-year difference in the two women's ages. My reaction to that (in my head) was, and I quote, "Why the hell not?"

Speaking from a morally relativistic approach, there is absolutely no reason why these two women shouldn't do anything they pleased. Laura was at the age of consent. This is the age of free love, right? Of sexual perversions taken as lightly as a doodle? If there's nothing morally wrong with homosexual acts (I say acts, not people with same-sex attraction), then there's certainly nothing wrong with a thirty-eight year old having sex with a seventeen year old.

But the inconsistency of my fellow group members' logic isn't what disturbed me. I'm very glad that people who look with an approving eye on things considered unthinkable just a hundred years ago would still have some sexual boundaries. No, what disturbed me is the thing that they didn't mention: Laura lost her virginity to a mechanical device. Let's think about this for a minute. Sex is an extremely intimate act wherein a man and a woman become one flesh. This has been so perverted that a woman can now share this sort of intimacy with a metal device, pretending she is having sex with another woman - and no one objects. Maybe I'm naïve, but that strikes me as bone-chilling. Maybe I'm naïve, but that strikes me as dangerous. Maybe I'm naïve, but people who express opinions like mine will find themselves subject to heavy fines and/or imprisonment just a few decades from now. Abnormal behaviors accepted by society become protected by law, and those who oppose things protected by law are persecuted.