The Reactionary Utopian

The Demise of Privacy

November 1, 2007

[Originally published by the Universal Press Syndicate, February 24, 1998]

Monica Lewinsky’s father says he doesn’t believe his daughter had a sexual fling with the president of the United States. It’s enough to make Monica’s lawyer, who has to pretend there’s room for doubt, roll his eyes.

Nobody can blame the poor man for wanting to believe the best about his little girl. But he seems to be, as we now say, in denial. Where does he suppose the phrase presidential kneepads came from? Such a detail carries more verisimilitude than ten affidavits.

Mr. Lewinsky no doubt didn’t raise his daughter to behave as Monica behaved — or rather, as she allegedly alleged (one alleged won’t suffice) she behaved. But the society in which we live raised her to behave that way.

Sex is private, morality is a private thing, private conduct is nobody’s business — these are the bromides of the sexual revolution. So why is sex more public than ever before?

The real doctrine of the sexual revolution is that sex is public, not private. The zone of privacy has actually shrunk. Maybe you’ve noticed.

A prude used to be someone who squirmed about sex even in private; now it’s anyone who merely wishes sex were still private. Private means, among other things, special. Only a prostitute or a lecher considers sexual partners interchangeable; normal people think sexual intimacy should exist only between people whose lives are properly intertwined.

But Monica has grown up as part of a generation educated in the philosophy of the prostitute, which is more or less official now. There’s nothing wrong with any form of sex, so long as it’s “consensual.” There are no moral absolutes — and no gradations or nuances, either.

This philosophy is not only wrong, it’s confused and confusing. For one thing, it’s unrealistic. In practice it leads to all sorts of difficulties, absurdities, and injuries. Monica Lewinsky’s father is a victim of this philosophy, but society no longer extends sympathy to such mortification as he has to endure.

[Breaker quote for The Demise of Privacy: The philosophy of the prostitute]

[Breaker quote for The Demise of Privacy: The philosophy of the prostitute]

Many people think that what the president is allegedly alleged to have done — and flatly denies having done — is private, even if he did it in a government office during his working hours, and even though a marriage vow is a legal, public commitment of sexual fidelity. But as Richard Nixon learned, what is secretly done may be a properly public concern.

Most societies make room for sexual deviancy, provided it’s kept discreet. This means that it’s up to the deviant to make sure that the public doesn’t find out, that his family isn’t hurt, that he doesn’t set a bad example for children, and above all that the norms of sexual morality are given outward respect.

Nowadays this old code is called hypocritical, but it isn’t: It merely insists that if you violate morality, you at least observe decency. Why? Because decency, like good manners in general, is also an aspect of morality. It’s like the moat around a castle.

Under the old code, there was no need for the phrase sexual harassment, because every decent man knew better than to make “improper advances,” as they were called. Nobody would have defended a middle-aged married man who had a sexual affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter. To call such an affair “private” would have been no excuse at all.

The concept of “sexual harassment” is actually too narrow. Men suffer sexual harassment constantly; advertisements featuring nubile, half-dressed women appeal relentlessly to their libidos. Few protest — that would be prudish! — and some suffer it gladly. But nobody asks whether they welcome the endless commercial come-ons directed at their loins. The new code denies that public appeals to lust violate our privacy.

The current White House scandal would have been inconceivable during the prudish Eisenhower era — or for that matter, during the swinging Bush era. A Clinton staffer has actually had to issue a directive requiring female White House employees in short skirts to wear panties. Egad.

Just as bogus rights crowd out real rights, a warped concept of “privacy” is crowding out the real thing. It’s fitting that Bill Clinton has even less privacy than the rest of us, but it’s not much consolation.

Joseph Sobran

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