A Fine Gael TD recently called for “aggressive, tough” legislation to target people who use prostitutes in Ireland. He wanted to target the “acceptability” of buying sex. Sometimes, that party really scares me.

I am not convinced of the efficacy of using the law to change social mores. Certainly, the law has a big impact; I know that the rebel in me, the part of me that still rankles and wrestles and agitates, has its roots in my adolescence, when it dawned on me that having sex was illegal, potentially punishable by life imprisonment. I still simmer on the fuel of that outrage sometimes, the resentment of the outlaw. David Norris used the psychological impact of being criminalised as grounds for his (eventually successful) legal challenge to that law, and I can quite accept that it was as depressing and demoralising as he and his psychological assessors claimed in court. But did it stop him from having sex?
I doubt it.
It certainly didn’t stop me. Even on pain of life imprisonment, desire has a way of asserting itself. One might even make the argument that such legal bondage increases desire rather than dampens it. Because there is a component of sex that is anarchic. Sex can offer the experience of transgression from duty and responsibility and rationality, it takes us out of the mundane, the ordinary, the civilised, the safe, the known. Legislators and moralists may decry this behaviour and wish to deny it, to stamp it out – down with that sort of thing – but, like the Hydra, the more one hacks off those feral heads, the more they keep on a-growing back.
And yet there has to be some way of regulating it, of taming the beast, I acknowledge that. It’s driven us crazy since time immemorial – Sophocles, on being sympathized with about growing old and losing his sex drive, replied that, on the contrary, it was like being unchained from a lunatic. The word lunatic is telling – it comes from luna, the word for the moon, which symbolises feelings, body, intuition, the chthonic, the Dionysian – as opposed to solar qualities of rationality, order, the Apollonian.
How we deal with lunatics tends to be very similar to how we treat sexual anarchists. In the not-so-distant Irish past, the Magdalene laundries were evidence that, in our culture, the two were treated in exactly the same way – sexuality in women was lunacy, and there was only one response: lock them up and throw away the key. As is all too common with religion, the compassion and love shown to the original Mary Magdalen by Jesus got obscenely distorted into a cruel fundamentalist judgmentalism.
The current Irish law that criminalises prostitutes (sadly introduced in the same Act that decriminalised homosexuality) perpetuates this cultural association. Sending whores to prison serves the same scapegoating function in society as putting lunatics in an asylum. It bolsters a sense of moral certainty and safety, but does fuck-all for the benighted inmates.
The modern, sensible approach to mental health is a community-care based model, but sadly that is still under-resourced and primitive in Ireland, perhaps betraying an unconscious fear that if we let them into our community, we have to relate to them, and by coming into relationship with lunacy, sexual or mental or spiritual, we have to face our fear that it’s catching.
We can’t lock our troubles away as a society, it just doesn’t work. To conquer the Hydra, we need to raise it up to the sun, bring it out into the open, discuss the complex issues, make sense of them, negotiate with them. Can anyone honestly say that sending (for example) a father of three to jail after a drunken night on the town, in which he ended up in a working girl’s bed, serves any useful purpose?
I am, sadly, a moral relativist. I can’t see that moral absolutes serve us when it comes to desire; context is all, for I do not believe that there is anything inherently wrong with consensual sex. Friends of mine who wrestle with the beast (and they are mostly men, it has to be said - testosterone is not to be sneezed at as an influence) attempt all sorts of ways to control it, to moderate it.
In gay culture especially, the sexualised man is increasingly the norm, no longer the outlaw, as any visit to gaydar.ie will demonstrate. I know some of my friends hold on to a fierce sense of personal judgmentalism about this aspect of the gay scene, of male hypersexuality, and I sometimes wince at the force of it; it pushes my button marked “sinful outlaw” and I get defensive, no matter how hard I work on it.
I object when personal standards become universal ones, when people use a particularly harsh personal rule to keep themselves on the straight and narrow, and judge others by the same standards. My response is that people are different. Some of us have a vigorously energetic lunatic tugging at our chain all our lives, while others simply do not have any experience of it. I do not judge someone who’s only been monogamous as being “better” in any way than someone who has had lots of sex with lots of different people. It’s only if someone is dishonest or hypocritical, that’s when my hackles rise.
The lunatic energy can be put to use in a different way, however. As my dear old Dad has always told me, the trick is to sublimate, to use that energy to fuel something else instead. He built a business on it, as he only got married at the age of 40. It’s a classically Freudian perspective, and although Freud is outdated in many ways, I find his writing on sex still relevant today.
What’s fascinating, though, is that when in the grip of that lunatic force, but using it differently (as I have been recently when obsessively throwing myself into a redesign of my website that took several long days and nights) I recognise that the essence of my experience is very similar to when I’ve gone a-hunting for sex. The same feeling of being in the grip of something beyond my control. The same dogged pursuit of something intensely selfish and creative, at the expense of everything else. It’s the neglect of the relational, the domestic, the mundane, defying Hera and following Zeus, reaching for the stars. I’ve been like the archetypal nutty professor, forgetting to eat or sleep or do the washing up.
What I abandon in those crazy periods is any interest in the matrix of social networking, of keeping in touch with friends and family, which, whether for reasons of socialisation or genetic make-up, women excel at. The accountability, the keeping in touch, the checking out how everyone is, who was asking after whom, how so-and-so is coping, how that couple are getting on. It’s the naming of people, the placing of people, the socialising of people. In the grip of a creative lunatic frenzy, sexual or otherwise, such normalcy seems toxic.
But it passes. It always does. And then we get on with things.
“Before enlightenment, eat rice, wash bowl. After enlightenment, eat rice, wash bowl.”