The new authoritarians
Mary Kenny
Sex: Facts, Frauds and Follies Thomas Szasz (Blackwell pp. 208, £8.95, £3.50) Here is an interesting piece of information. Orthodox Jewish men have been traditionally brought up never to touch their own penises. This is because the male sexual organ belongs to the Jewish God, and circumcision is the holy symbol of that covenant. Because of circumcision, conveniently, little Jewish boys can learn to urinate without touching themselves: 'Without hands!' is the admonitory cry of the Jewish mother teaching her boy to empty his bladder. 'Better a bad aim than a bad habit!'
Suddenly, all those books like Portnoy's Complaint fall into perspective. Suddenly it becomes clear why so many American psychiatrists and sexologists are Jewish, or why, indeed, all the leading British agony aunties — Marje Proops, Anna Raeburn, Claire Rayner — are Jewish. It's all those centuries of telling, and being told, 'Better a bad aim than a bad habit'; it is the effort to wrestle back sexuality from this jealous Jehovah, who insisted on having the foreskin for Himself.
Thomas Szasz is. not being in any way anti-Semitic in telling us about this; he is just as hard on the Christians, and on Islam, too. According to Szasz, the Christians have been, if anything, worse about sex. The Jews at least endorsed the legitimacy of sexual pleasure within marriage. The Christians traditionally taught that all sex was wicked, and extolled chastity and celibacy over everything else. Which presumably explains why so many nymphomaniacs have been convent girls. As for the Muslims, for them, sexual enjoyment has only been admissible for the male. The Koran, indeed, promises a sensual male heaven for the faithful, where the good Muslim 'shall recline on couches lined with thick brocade, and shall dwell with bashful virgins, as fair as coral and rubies.' What dreadful male chauvinists they are. It is Szasz's contention that there never has been a society in which 'sex-education has been value-free. All sex education, in the past, has been loaded with cultural propaganda whereby the person is socially conditioned to the traditional values of the society in which they are placed. And so it is today. Sexuality, in our societies of the West, has been wrested out of the hands of the theologians and the holy men, and seized by the sexologists, the psychiatrists, the 'health-educators'. And in his view, the propaganda of the modern sexologists is just as loaded, just as imprisoning, just as baneful in its effect as it ever was under the priests and the rabbis. Where once the traditionalists taught that masturbation brought disease and madness, the modernists teach that inability to masturbate is a kind of illness which mtist be 'treated'. If people are not masturbating properly, theY have to be taught how to do so, with financial support of Government funds. to the sexologists. What was once forbidden is now compulsory. If men are impotent, they must have penile implants to make them virile. If women are inorgasmic, they must have therapy, or surgery, to help them. Millions of women are simply made wrongly, it appears. And millions of other people are dwelling in the wrong body altogether, suffering from trans-sexualism; they require sex-change operations which should, in all humanity, also be provided by the Public purse. `By resorting to such reasoning' writes Szasz, 'virtually anything displeasing to a person could be defined as a disease and its medical alteration accepted as treatment. Perhaps Oedipus Rex was not really a tragic hero, but a sick patient: he was suffering from "transvisualism" and sought to cure himself by putting out his OW n eyes. Let us suppose that an elderly person threatened to kill himself unless a Plastic surgeon made him look more youthful. Would that make his "condition" a disease ("trans-chronologicalism") and cosmetic surgery, making old people look Younger, a life-saving procedure?' Don't worry, Dr Szasz, it's already happening.
As a leading libertarian philosopher, Thomas Szasz makes a good case against the new authoritarianism of the sexologists and health educators, as he does against the old authoritarianism of the churches. And When he writes about the new authoritarians, he certainly has got their number; the vogue for sex education in the schools has nothing to do with the transmission of biological information; it is simply the cloak for the transmission of a new ideology — that sexual liberation and fulfilment is the nght of every individual. Sex education was introduced into American schools in the late Sixties, financed by the federal Government under pressure from the fami1Y Planning lobby which was agitated about teenage pregnancy. Funds jumped from two million dollars in 1969 to 150 million dollars in 1978; but the more that money is Spent on sex education, the more teenage Pregnancy increases. 'The fact that the consequence of sex education is an increased rate of illegitimate pregnancy (just as the consequence of drug education is an increased rate of drug abuse) has not weakened the credibility of these programmes. On the contrary, the sex education lobby uses such statistics as evidence for a need for still more sex education.' Szasz's clear-sighted logic is particularly relevant to Britain at the moment, where a Conservative Government is invoking the aid of the sex education lobbies such as the Brook Advisory Clinics to spread contraceptiveeducation packs for the under-16s within the schools.
What is the answer? Dr Szasz does not ‘'.'rite to provide answers; the only liberation, for him, is the liberation of the individual from as much outside interference as is humanly possible. Human beings are neither animals nor machines; they have to work out their own destiny for themselves— without God or Masters & Johnson. 811t this analysis contains, I think, what he himself would call a self-contradiction: as no society has ever existed where sexuality is 'value-free', how can he believe that there ever will be a society where it could be 'value-free'?
In actual life, it comes down to whether you believe in the old authority or the new one. 'He that is not with me, is against me'. There has never been perfect cultural freedom; human choice has always been limited by social constrictions. Despite the wealth of material that Dr Szasz provides — indeed because of the wealth of his evidence — it is difficult not to conclude that absolute personal freedom is impossible.
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