Gender, Sex, Whatever...

Somehow, there is a feeling this post will eventually devolve into a politicians-are-bad rant. But let us see where we go from here. If you have been paying attention, two events this weeks mark somewhats of a watershed in the Gender Wars. We are, more or less, inured to anti-FGM (female genital mutilation or, in the words of my crass drinking buddies, female circumcision or the Female Cut) campaigns and child protection laws that keep children away from pederasts of all hues. Part of the reason we react apathetically when these stories are broadcast by the Free Press is that the press is a little too free with the sensational details of the stories without putting them in the context of the Gender Wars or the place of sex and sexuality in a prudish, Victorian moral zeitgeist.

Take FGM, for example. The unrelenting message is that it is bad and that it should be discouraged and ended. There is an anti-FGM law on the books and it is being enforced with zeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions. It has had limited impacts, but it most certainly hasn't changed mindsets or rolled back the practice. When three hundred Maa women march to your office and demand that you cease enforcing this law, you know you have a much bigger battle to wage before you can declare victory.

Child defilement or the sexual exploitation of children is the other burning issue that has burned for too long. In an overwhelming number of cases, children between the ages of 13 and 15 are the preferred victims of pederasts. We know this. The police know this. The DPP knows this. So do religious and business leaders. But the sensational stories published by the Free Press are about the parents, uncles, brothers, sons, police, religious and business leaders caught in bed with prepubescent girls. Poverty is often cited as one of the grounds that parents will rely one when they "allow" their pre-teen daughters to engage in commercial sex work. Peer pressure, we will persuade ourselves, is the reason why underage children are having so much sex.

When it comes to gender, sex and sexuality, isn't it time we admitted to ourselves that there is no single reason for things to be one way or another? Shouldn't we accept the fact that we have become too obsesses with the cost of living to the almost total exclusion of everything else? In our desire to "provide for our families", we have taken unprecedented actions that have fundamentally revised social norms and mores, the family structure and socially acceptable acts that have promoted the primacv of the individual over the group, the supremacy of the individual's need over the group's survival, and the over-legislation of day to day social intercourse. We have become a caricature of civilised society. And it is members of our families, our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, who pay and keep paying for our folly every day.