

Jeremy Bentham's revolutionary views on sex - dang
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/26/sexual-irregularities-morality-jeremy-bentham-review

======
jmduke
The money quote, for me:

 _Sodomy, he argued, was not just harmless but evidently pleasurable to its
participants. The mere fact that the custom was abhorrent to the majority of
the community no more justified the persecution of sodomites than it did the
killing of Jews, heretics, smokers, or people who ate oysters – "to destroy a
man there should certainly be some better reason than mere dislike to his
Taste, let that dislike be ever so strong"._

It's a shame that Jeremy Bentham's name is nowadays more associated with Lost
than the utilitarianism he pioneered. _An Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation_ is a good intro to his general line of thinking:
[http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/278](http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/278)

~~~
dang
Yes. It's a conventional view now, but Bentham was so far ahead of his time on
this that it makes him seem more interesting. That's what's significant about
this article. It's remarkable in intellectual history for views so contrarian
(and prescient) to be discovered in a major thinker 200 years later.

Unfortunately, the thread quickly went hopelessly off kilter. It's being
heavily flagged and we're certainly not going to override that.

~~~
lexcorvus
_It 's a conventional view now, but Bentham was so far ahead of his time_

Bentham was "ahead of his time" only because his intellectual descendants
triumphed. If, e.g., the Nazis had won WWII, 19th-century anti-Semites would
have appeared "ahead of their time". In other words, it's wrong to equate
"being ahead of your time" with "being righteous".

Bentham was also wrong about sodomy being harmless, at least regarding anal
sex. Among other things, anal intercourse causes loose sphincters in its
recipients and is far more effective at spreading sexually transmitted
diseases than vaginal intercourse. (This is a Humean _is_ , though—a matter of
fact. It doesn't necessarily justify banning the practice. That's a Humean
_ought_ —a matter of opinion.)

------
Mz
Excerpt:

 _Bentham was the first major English philosopher of sexual liberty, and it 's
about time we celebrated that. "If there be one idea more ridiculous than
another," he once wrote about the sexual prohibitions of his day, it was that
"of a legislator who, when a man and a woman are agreed about a business of
this sort, thrusts himself in between them, examining situations, regulating
times, and prescribing modes and postures". Today we are all the heirs of this
once revolutionary way of thinking._

------
parennoob
I would say the current state of the tech world is antithetical to Bentham's
views in just about every sense. We, as a group, are massively sex-negative.

Is that why this article is on the top, or because it was submitted by an
admin?

~~~
delinka
By "sex-negative," do you mean "negative about gender" or "negative about
sexuality" or even "negative about the act of intercourse?"

I can't begin to generalize about my technology peers because they are such a
diverse group and because intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our
professional interactions. From my perspective, it's just that these things
are not relevant to the part of our lives that intersect, not that we're
negative about them.

~~~
parennoob
> By "sex-negative," do you mean "negative about gender" or "negative about
> sexuality" or even "negative about the act of intercourse?"

The latter two.

> "..intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our professional
> interactions...these things are not relevant to the part of our lives that
> intersect, not that we're negative about them."

You seem to be of the opinion that it is completely possible to separate the
personal from the professional. Yet a lot of us absorbed in the tech/startup
world spend the larger part of our awake time (~10 hours or more) interacting
with people at work. In such an environment, I don't think it is realistic to
totally separate the professional from the personal. Otherwise, you turn the
meaning of "personal" on its head for the majority of your working week, if
you have to behave "non-personally" for > 60% of the time.'

And actually I think this is part of what I mean to say. The attitude of, "Sex
is not relevant in the workplace. Let's be _professional_ about this." Why
not, exactly? Why are professionalism and sexuality mutually exclusive? Maybe
if we at least explore the possible reasons why people's sexual motivations
may cause them to interact in specific ways at work, we can make progress
towards making those interactions somewhat positive and frictionless.

~~~
delinka
I'm of the opinion that most people don't need to discuss things irrelevant to
the task at hand. I deal with personal life throughout the day - I IM my wife
and children for various reasons. I have co-worker friends that I lunch with
and with whom I _do_ discuss personal matters sometimes. I do not need to
discuss personal matters, let alone sexual (for all interpretations) matters,
with my manager, with the other team members, with various other male and
female co-workers. It's not relevant to the reason I'm at the office. Ever.

~~~
parennoob
Your things are very specific to your situation, yet you yourself easily
generalize them to "most people". What about people who don't have wives or
children? What if their social circles are mostly concentrated at the office
(as often happens with young people in startups)? What if they have a crush on
their manager, or their attractive co-worker?

These are real things that happen, and just forbidding them from ever being
spoken of is not a very good strategy in my opinion. And I think Bentham's
thoughts are very applicable in this regard.

~~~
delinka
Who said anything about forbidding these topics? I simply express a lack of
understanding about why such things would be relevant to a place that has
nothing to do with such topics. People _want_ to talk about this stuff at
work? Fine let's talk. But at some point, we need to get our jobs done. If sex
and gender are an obstacle to getting work done (you know, the actual reason
we're even getting paid to be in this office), then sex and gender discussions
are a priority.

As it stands, they're not critical to doing my job. If you're standing around
the water cooler for hours a day discussing football, cinema, the symphony,
and/or sex, you're not getting your job done unless you work for a company
whose business revolves around these things. Are these things taboo at the
office? Certainly not. Are they relevant to the jobs of most people in the US?
I doubt it, but certainly I could be swayed by actual data on the subject.

~~~
parennoob
> "People want to talk about this stuff at work?......water cooler for hours a
> day discussing football, cinema, the symphony, and/or sex..."

Either you misunderstand my point, or you're making a straw man argument. I
was talking about discussion on here (HN), not sitting around water coolers in
the office for several hours. See how my previous comment has been downvoted
without explanation? I'm talking about that sort of thing, reflexive "Ewww, he
said _sex_!" behaviour.

> "If sex and gender are an obstacle to getting work done (you know, the
> actual reason we're even getting paid to be in this office...."

Well, it isn't an obstacle to work every day, but it can be. You might have
heard of the github incident recently, or if you haven't, you might want to
read the details.

------
neckro23
> In one surviving letter to a friend, he joked that his rereading of the
> Bible had finally revealed that the sin for which God had punished the
> inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah was not in fact buggery, but the taking of
> snuff. He and his secretary had consequently taken a solemn oath to hide
> their snuff-pouches and nevermore to indulge "that anti-Christian and really
> unnatural practice" in front of one another. Meanwhile, they were now both
> happily free to enjoy "the liberty of taking in the churchyard or in the
> market place, or in any more or less public or retired spot with Man, Woman
> or Beast, the amusement till now supposed to be so unrighteous, but now
> discovered to be a matter of indifference".

This got a snicker from me. I guess sex jokes really do never get old.

~~~
lotharbot
"Sodom's real crime was _____" is considerably less funny when you realize a
_rape gang_ surrounded Lot's house in the Biblical story. That's not the sort
of thing I'm inclined to brush off with a joke.

~~~
dang
This comment and a couple of others in the thread seem destined to provoke a
religious flamewar. That would be off topic.

~~~
lotharbot
The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious (or
possibly political) flamewar. That's probably why it's been flagged way down
to the second page. I was honestly surprised that you were the one who posted
it; I'd have thought you'd have foreseen it being problematic.

I did my best to keep this comment targeted at the "rape isn't funny" angle
rather than the "here's how I do or don't agree with the Bible" angle -- that
is, directed at the offensive concept rather than the religious source. If you
have a suggestion as to how I could have better stated it, please let me know.

~~~
dang
> The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious
> flamewar.

This strikes me as utterly odd. The article is about a major new finding in
intellectual history. If Bentham used Biblical language, it is only because
everyone did.

That said, your theory of the article fits the data of the thread better than
mine does.

That in turn said, a "rape isn't funny" flamewar is every bit as off-topic if
not more so.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" rape isn't funny" is entirely off topic._

... in response to a joke about Sodom and Gomorrah?

Perhaps that's not the topic you originally intended, but as the comments
show, the article left the door wide open for it.

> _" The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history"_

It presents that finding in a very poor way.

~~~
dang
I'll try to respond to the points you've made here and upthread.

I posted the article because it surprised me. Also, of all the classic
components of HN, history is by far the least represented. HN needs more high-
quality historical articles.

Is this article high-quality? I take it you don't think so, but it seems to me
as good a bit of intellectual history as we can hope for from major media
these days. It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full
of information. To pick just one example, the fact that Bentham's writings on
sex were kept out of Bentham scholarship as late as the 1960s is remarkable.
So I'd say the article easily clears the bar for a good HN post. It's also
news, of a sort—a pretty dramatic revelation about a major thinker.

The thread went bonkers, but we should hesitate to overinterpret that. There's
a lot of randomness, and the threads are sensitive to initial conditions. It's
not hard to imagine a sensible discussion of this article on HN, though the
dice came up snake eyes this time.

As for off-topicness, sorry to put this glibly, but yes: responding to
something off-topic with something even more off-topic is certainly off-topic.
Triply so when it's a fast track to a flamewar.

An on-topic discussion is typically about the specific content of the
article—the things that make it stand out from other stories. Going on a
tangent is fine if it's something surprising, i.e. if the tangent adds
information, like this one did:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077).
But when a thread breaks away from the specific content of a story and makes a
beeline for some generality, no information is added. The worst kind of
beeline is the predictable ideological tangent. That's not only off-topic, but
likely to fuel an agitated argument, and those are the lowest-quality
discussions on HN.

So the rule of thumb for on-topicness on HN is something like this: story
specifics good, predictable ideological tangents bad.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of
> information."_

Odd. I found it to be lacking in valuable information. There was no indication
as to whether there had been any new manuscript discoveries (though the
sidebar indicates the writings are being newly published). There was no
indication as to anything particularly surprising about his views other than
the era in which they occurred. "There was a guy a few centuries back who
agreed with modern sexual mores, and it wasn't published because society
wasn't open to it a few centuries back" doesn't strike me as a particularly
valuable contribution. Obviously some people saw it as such or it wouldn't
have gotten so many upvotes -- but obviously others saw it as not belonging.

> _" responding to something off-topic"_

It was a direct quote from the article. In fact, it was _the_ quote from the
article that I thought pushed it over the line into flagging territory.

Even so, I'm not sure why you think my response was a fast track to a
flamewar. I think my response was measured and calm, clearly explaining why
the comment in the original post was problematic, and furthermore adding
information people might not be aware of (that Sodom wasn't following modern
"not your business what consenting adults do" practice; "rape culture" was
alive and well there.) I would expect people reading such a comment to come
away with better understanding, and perhaps not be so quick to treat Sodom as
modern/enlightened.

------
daliwali
"Bodily passion was not just a part of Bentham's life: it was fundamental to
his thought... Of all enjoyments, Bentham reasoned, sex was the most
universal, the most easily accessible, the most intense, and the most copious
– nothing was more conducive to happiness."

Yep, this is someone who tech nerds can honestly relate with. Easily
accessible. Uh huh.

[http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/05/23/amazon-killing-my-
sex...](http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/05/23/amazon-killing-my-sex-life)

~~~
Tycho
_" The biggest thing, the thing that bothered me the most is I felt like my
intelligence was greatly devalued,” she wrote. ”I am a smart woman. I have a
master’s from Berkeley in philosophy. My brain is very abstract, though, the
exact opposite of so many men in tech who have very concrete/literal brains."_

Hmmm...

~~~
delinka
"...the exact opposite of so many men in tech..."

Sounds like a sexist generalism to me. Maybe she should meet more of us. And
while we're flirting with anecdote, perhaps I can take samples from within the
population of my little town out in the sticks and demonstrate the same lack
of abstract thinking in the women here.

~~~
Tycho
I was more struck by the idea that high paid software engineers have the
opposite of 'abstract' thinking. I mean programming is all about abstraction
piled upon abstraction. Maybe they really they meant something else like
'tolerance for ambiguity.'

~~~
delinka
I'd go so far as to allow the quoted to be referring more generally to tech
workers in general, including many that do _not_ function in the abstract.

With regard to "tolerance for ambiguity," perhaps there's a point to be made.
I know _I_ have a low tolerance for ambiguity, but I work with male co-workers
( _cough_ sales weasels _cough_ ) that are just as ambiguous about things as
anyone else could ever be.

However, I think you've illuminated a point that I hadn't considered: that the
speaker meant something other than what was said; that this self-described
intelligent individual may have not been clear; or didn't understand how their
words would be misinterpreted; or is oblivious to their own misuse of
language. And _this_ is usually the cause for so much animosity and/or
ambivalence: that the speaker/writer can't be bothered to clarify their
intent; that they throw up their hands and declare "you wouldn't understand!"
rather than explain themselves; and further that their audience is all-to-
eager to castigate them for being stubborn, abusive, obtuse, etc.

------
michaelsbradley
Men and women are sexual beings, no doubt; and sex can be about but pleasure,
but also so much more.

Readers here may be interested in studying a somewhat different take on human
sexuality, John Paul II's _Theology of the Body_ [1], which "presents an
interpretation of the fundamental significance of the body, and in particular
of sexual differentiation and complementarity, one which aims to challenge
common contemporary philosophical views."[2]

[1]
[http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2TBIND.HTM](http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2TBIND.HTM)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology_of_the_Body](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology_of_the_Body)

~~~
VMG
> The ability of the human body to express truth through the sexual union of
> married couples is acclaimed. The moral wrongness of using artificial means
> to manipulate such a significant aspect of the created body is explained.

Please take a moment to reflect how much damage this type of thinking has done
in the world.

This book isn't just useless and misguided, it's positively evil.

~~~
andrzejsz
Just out of curiosity what damage ?

~~~
VMG
Death.

> It follows that many of those who died from AIDS would still be alive today
> had the Catholic Church abandoned its condom ban in the 1980s, as it became
> clear that condoms were (and still are) the most effective practical measure
> to prevent the spread of the disease.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS)

Also forbidding sane family planning and the prevention of unwanted offspring,
where lack of necessary resources causes even more disease and more death.

~~~
Qzmp
People undeterred by the catholic church's prohibition on sex outside marriage
are unlikely to be reluctant to wear condoms because of doctrinal concerns,
I'd have thought.

~~~
mercer
Theoretically, yes, but sadly the reality isn't quite like that.
Passion/desire often trumps doctrine, and doing something that one thinks one
shouldn't do can have all sorts of nasty consequences, ranging from teen
pregnancy to untreated STD's.

Having been an Evangelical Christian and 'assistant teen pastor' in a previous
life, I've seen this in action in many different areas of life. People
constantly did things they believed were wrong, and the combination of not
being prepared or informed about those things and feeling ashamed about it
afterwards led to a lot of suffering.

