Ian Boyne

Sex and sexual matters are big news these days. From reports of political candidates thrashing their wives, molesting underage girls and pulling guns on the husbands of women they are committing adultery with, to murderous throngs blood-thirstily going after homosexuals.

Add to that the raging debate on abortion, the definition of rape, the raising of the age of sexual consent, passing out of condoms to underage children and the continuing concern over escalating carnal abuse. Issues of sexual morality and conduct are major topics, but none of the two major political parties can cash in on the issue, as much as they would want to, because they have very fragile houses.

Each would probably like to exploit the alleged sexual scandals in the other's camp, but they are acutely aware of their own vulnerability so they have to let it pass. Our politicians are not exemplary when it comes to sexual ethics, and we know too much about their philandering and immorality for them to have credibility going after one another. In Jamaica - as in other places - sexual corruption is the great leveller.

In Jamaica, people don't get too worked up over sexual corruption. Only if it concerns homosexuality. Fooling around with another man's wife hardly counts. It certainly would not be regarded as a scandal. The society is very ambivalent, if not nonchalant, about sexual matters. And Kevin O'Brien Chang has rightly pointed out that we are paying the costs for that, though we refuse to acknowledge it. A lot of the crime taking place in Jamaica and perpetrated by young people relates to fatherlessness and our culture which glorifies promiscuity.

Peter Espeut had a first-rate column last Thursday titled 'The Age of Self-Control' - or lack of it, really. It said some profound things expressed simply.

heart of this discussion

Espeut sagaciously goes to the heart of all this discussion about sexual matters: It comes down to an issue of self-control. Or, more precisely, is life simply about sensual gratification and hedonistic pleasure? Should we scratch every itch? Should we pursue every impulse? Should we give full rein to our range of feelings and emotions? If you adopt a philosophy of hedonism, then where do you draw the line?

If life is about the maximisation of sensual gratification, then it is not hard to see societal restrictions, even laws, as necessarily burdensome and oppressive. If the individual is all that matters; if the individual is the absolute reference point and the final arbiter of right and wrong - not any community or society - then restrictions, whether on what I should smoke, push through my veins or whom I should sleep with - another man's wife, a member of my own sex or my own 12-year-old daughter - then that's up to me and my desires and impulses.

If there are no objective values, no transcendence, no supra-cultural, trans-historical set of criteria for determining morality - no natural or supernatural law - then what's all this fuss about the politician being caught with another man's wife, or the other politician driving off with his sweetheart in his SUV, or the other one carnally abusing the little girl over a period of months?

As I watched Cliff Hughes' Impact last week and heard those homosexuals talk proudly of their gay lifestyle and boast of their captivity to homosexual impulses, I could not help but think how hedonistic philosophy has pervasively influenced the society.

The justification of those gay men for their homosexuality was simple: "I feel, therefore, I am. Because I have these feelings and did not manufacture them, I am not responsible for them and must express them." They proudly proclaim their bondage to their desires while, no doubt, seeing themselves as free, liberated men - unshackled by religious dogmas and superstitions. Free, indeed!

Espeut, with the rigorous Catholic philosophical training that he has, sees the issues clearly: "The essence of immaturity is to live life satisfying every craving that arises to obtain pleasure and our modern culture promotes this. Popular songs advise us, 'If it feels good do it'; 'Do it till you're satisfied'; 'Don't stop till you get enough'. The message is clear: Give in to your appetites, whatever you feel to do, whatever feels good, do it. Immediate personal gratification."

I see not just the working-class fellows featured on Impact but middle-class sexual libertines and intellectuals using the same arguments essentially to justify their sexual practices. Our culture does not put any premium on restraint, self-control, the virtuous life, and so our politicians, business people and intelligentsia are generally as impulsive and hedonistic as the uneducated and uncultured.

If consciousness and the will is what distinguishes humans from lower primates, then very few of us justify our humanity. Most live just like animals, giving in to instincts and impulses.

The best arguments put forward by gay intellectuals in defence of their homosexuality hinge not on serious philosophical and rational argumentation but largely on passion. They have a natural, supposed innate desire for same-sex intercourse, and it would be "irrational" and "cruel" to deny them their pleasure, therefore, its expression must be justified. The notion that the desire can be strong and even seemingly overwhelming yet subject to control of the will is absurd and anathema to them.

It is hard to discuss homosexuality rationally, for you are either faced with the barbaric and uncivilised attitudes of the mob who descended on those alleged homosexuals on Valentine's Day, and their more educated but equally misguided compatriots who conveniently use the Bible (which they generally ignore in personal life) to bash gays, and the gays themselves who are visceral, over-defensive and arrogant about their lifestyle.

Homosexuals are sometimes as irrational and philosophically and scientifically unsophisticated as the homophobic population. Let's take this issue of what causes sexual orientation. Homosexuals take it for granted and preach as Gospel that people are born homosexuals when there is no conclusive scientific evidence for this. In fact, the scientific evidence which exists contradicts this view and shows a more nuanced picture.

The most comprehensive representative study of same-sex attraction in twins done by researchers from Columbia and Yale universities found that "less gendered socialisation" in childhood, not genetic or hormonal influences, plays the dominant role in the development of same-sex-attraction. "If same-sex romantic attraction has a genetic component, it is massively overwhelmed by other factors," say Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner in an article in the American Journal of Sociology in 2002.

Even the pro-homosexual scholar, Edward Stein, has challenged deterministic models of homosexual development and has opted for a significant role for indirect choice. See his book The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation.

Even the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review says of Stein's book that it is "a landmark book. It so pulls the rug from under the biological arguments for lesbian and gay rights that anyone from now on who appeals to such arguments will have to answer Edward Stein's objections."

But what is even more significant is that the psychiatrist who was instrumental in having the American Psychiatric Association make the landmark decision in 1973 to drop homosexuality from the category of mental illness and disorder now says that neither he nor his revision committee ever meant to suggest that homosexuality was normal or healthy. "Just because something is not a mental disorder doesn't mean it's normal," Spitzer says in an eye-opening article ('Do Gays Have a Choice?') in the February/March 2006 issue of the scholarly Scientific American Mind magazine.

In a significant study, published in the October 2003 issue of the Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Spitzer reports on his study of 200 former homosexuals who changed their lifestyles over the long term. Spitzer specifically wanted to know how dramatically people could change their homosexual lifestyle. His study showed that most of his subjects reported long-term heterosexual relations of over ten years and experienced "changes in sexual attraction, fantasy and desire".

Scientific studies done by psychologist J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, and Michael King of the University College, London, suggest that the heritability of homosexuality is in the range of 0.25 to 0.50 for males and somewhat lower for females. Commenting on this, Scientific American Mind asks, "This raises an intriguing question. If people were raised in a truly orientation-neutral culture, what sexual orientation would they express? Without societal pressure it is clear that a much larger proportion of the population would express homosexuality than we see now." Which tells of the impact of the environmental and social - and why the anti-homosexual lobby sees the need to keep up the pressure.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com.