Maybe I’ll tag this with politely controversial. A couple in West Virginia was arrested yesterday for violating bigamy laws. A 46-year-old man and his 20-year-old daughter had a child. They had not met for roughly twenty years, but after the daughter reached out one day the man had started an extra-marital affair. Through his arrest he leaves behind two children and a wife. I’ve always had trouble with our moral righteousness over incest. Imagining a scenario of incest between a brother and sister, as consensual adults, engaging in a romantic and sexual relationship often elicits disgust and moral indignation. People who react often say, “clearly unhealthy power dynamics” or “the children will come out messed up.” But even if you control for that, you tie up the respective reproductive tubes and you keep it only between siblings maybe instead of parent-child relationships, many people are still intrinsically disgusted. This leaves us wondering - were we ever actually thinking about the children? Or are we reacting to something fundamentally different, our tacit cultural foundations imprinted when we’re young by family, friends, religion, politic? Or maybe some of this is virtue signaling, that you are a good person because you dislike the bad thing. Note: there is a theory called Genetic Sexual Attraction, where people who largely fail to imprint familial roles to family members can develop sexual attraction towards each other. There haven’t been many conclusive studies, as they are often one-off case studies. But that there exists such a theory in the literature is no doubt interesting.

My worry is that the #MeToo movement and the inclusion of homosexual relationships into the archetypical relationship mold has us moralizing about things by giving rationalizations and pointing at martyrs for cultural change. Milo Yiannopolous is not exactly someone I would agree with on most counts, but it is well known in many homosexual communities that older men often act in part as a sexual and romantic liaison to younger boys and men. The nature of taboo and prohibition is that maturity is required in order to navigate the ultimately confusing and downright dangerous experience that it was and frankly still is to be queer in society. But while Milo has said plenty of profoundly hurtful things, the one he gets ousted on is defending this sort of act, something that has been well known and quite reasonably positive for gay communities across America, if not the globe. We call him a pedophile, and a victim of abuse, and this is the language we know it in a culture that doesn’t directly apply and moralizes heavily over the kinds of sexual and romantic experiences that are considered legitimate.

I believe we’re doing the same thing with the #MeToo movement, if on a more subtle and maybe permissible scale. Like any radical piece, the Babe.com rocked the world on what conversations surrounding sex ought to be like. It was controversial and effective in galvanizing conversation surrounding “hookup culture.” Like any other radical movement, it is aggressive and messy and there are martyrs for the cause. But again I find the denial of culture affecting these situations, as if we are all free agents acting of our own will. People don’t go out of their way to be evil - there is a clear understanding that what they are doing is at least good for themselves, and hopefully good for the people and things they care about. There’s this really fascinating book called Sex and the Soul by Donna Freitas that’s a qualitative study on students from many many many different colleges, evangelical, public, private, catholic, etc. And while it seems that most students don’t actively enjoy participating in hookup culture, they do so anyways because it feels like it is the way we do things. Is it right to be morally indignant at a person when the behaviors around sex are simultaneously tacitly understood and yet parroted? What are we really getting at? How much of this is anger towards a person versus anger towards a culture? And on top of this, how much of it are we trying to publicly preen ourselves so that we resonate with those who’s opinions matter most to us?

To it’s credit though, these cultural structures sex and romance are ones that would be best served by demolishing them, and nobody ever got anything radical done by being moderately uncomfortable and writing about it on their blog. If you want to be revolutionary, perhaps its best to get angry at the shades of gray.