Weirdly, people don’t hook up here.
Do laws against rape and sexual harassment exist to reinforce heterosexual, monogamous relationships? Sociologist Mark Regnerus (famous for his controversial study claiming that same-sex relationships damage children, which looked almost exclusively at children born into heterosexual marriages,) argues as much in a truly baffling article. He manages to sound surprised that most people aren’t just having random hook-ups in public all the time. The reason for this lack of public sex, he argues, is that heterosexual monogamy is still going strong.
Let’s walk through this very peculiar argument, shall we?
In many ways our social system still curbs its participants toward a very basic public chastity. Consider your time at the grocery store, your day at work or school, coffee at the café, the car or train ride back home. Sexually uneventful; you probably didn’t even notice. Daily activity in the social world still manages to largely reinforce the basic sexual integrity of the person.
Regnerus rightly observes that people don’t often have sex at the grocery store or on the train. So far so good. So what’s the problem? Regnerus argues that people SAY they’re sexually libertine – meaning, I suppose, things like greater acceptance for sexually explicit material in media? – but they tend to not act like it when they’re in the office.
He also argues that many men might WANT to act more sexually explicitly in public – he cites Tinder and Grindr as examples of this. But they’re held back:
From sexual violence laws, campus consent codes, all the way to workplace dating policies or norms—it’s as if public life is an ode to the complementary, peaceable, and pivotal relationship between man and woman.
So there’s two kind of strange things going on here.
One is a very old and boring understanding of men as inherently sexually aggressive and women as the Gatekeepers of Sex and Society. He’s pretty clear about this: “In other words, even when technology presses us toward socio-sexual chaos, women are much less apt to comply.” This is an incredibly unflattering view of men, and puts huge pressure on women to behave chastely or be victim to violence. Which is pretty messed up.
The other is this weird idea that laws against rape or sexual harassment have anything to do with monogamous heterosexuality. Criminalizing doing sexual things without consent doesn’t imply anything about any consensual sexual activity, with someone of any gender. It just identifies non-consensual sexual activity as what it is, which is violence. By identifying these laws as protections for heterosexual monogamy, Regnerus is continuing that narrative that men are sexually aggressive and are reigned in from just randomly harassing or attacking women by the desire to eventually marry one of them. Which, again, is messed up.
Interestingly, we had a discussion similar to this in a class I took once, and we came to a very different conclusion. Why isn’t public sex (or nudity, which I think is what we were talking about specifically) accepted? We decided that it was because not all participants – in this case, random passersby who didn’t want to see a naked person on their way to work – had consented. Regnerus’s question can be answered in a way that relies much less on antiquated gender roles and much more on respect for people regardless of gender.