It’s a difficult subject to tackle, how we should approach sex. Sex, both as an identity and as as an activity, I mean. Yes, societies have done various things throughout history, but generally they’ve let instinct and necessity dictate the terms. And on the side, once they’ve paid tribute to what need to be done to survive and keep things stable and functional, people did what they wanted.

We’re living in a very different time when advances in technology have freed us, quite recently, from a lot of the limitations of necessity. We have reliable birth control. Child mortality has fallen drastically. Women don’t have to have children as quickly because they can expect to live longer and have their fertility be more prolonged. Men are much less likely to have to have to fight and die to physically protect their family or state, or die from the occupation or by chance. Women don’t have to spend as large a part of their life having multiple children just to keep their people from going extinct, because there’s a much greater chance of survival for each child. Technology makes many basic tasks far easier for anyone to perform, reuqireing less specialization in the basics of daily life and sustenance. And there are far more opportunities, as a result to pursue things that interest us without much restriction from the needs of daily life and our own physical constitution.

Our ability to move around and change our minds and delay choices has greatly increased, simply because we have more time. We have more freedom, in general, to experiment in life in ways that would have been risky or impractical or too time consuming before. Having a flattening of what life requires of us, both individually (there’s less need for you specifically to contribute what you are to the world) and as a member of our sex means we also experience a flattening of identity and significance.

My world around me doesn’t need me the way it used to. That’s great for freedom and opportunity, but harder on identity. There’s much more pressure to invent and demonstrate, on your own behalf, in the course of a just a few decades, your identity and significance against a very large and indifferent backdrop. Take any longer than that to figure it out and you’ve lost a lot of time, you might not get enough time to build something validating that significance before your opportunities start shrinking again.

We’ve seen some of the downsides of relying too much on the need and demands of society (and in many ways, life), too much restriction, too little freedom, too little opportunity, too much identity provided. And, having won a bit of respite from the near-term physical consequences of our choices (we’re so secure in our size and wealth that, frankly, what any particular person does with themselves doesn’t really matter to the wellbeing of the family, state, or species), we celebrate by throwing it all off and denying it ever had any real need to exist in the first place, and was merely a chain of restraint upon our individuality. Any negative consequences can be mitigated by science, technology, and medicine, or by the intervention of the state, where moral authority moves to rest. The requirements of any personal morality or virtue are released and morality becomes more about controlling social outcomes.

Of course the more you rely on the force of law and external authority to police and enforce the outcomes of our internal states, the less people are likely to seek the solution in or between themselves. They will expect the state to resolve conflicts. They will expect it to militantly protect their territory and rights against the intrusions of others. And those rights will increasingly become a tool to be raised against the competing claims of others. The interior, after all, is a stage for freedom of expression and identity, and to affirm that is to affirm the good; it is only at the level of social consequence that evil exists and must be arrested. So outward signs of adherence to that ethos become more and more important, the phylacteries become bigger and bigger, the likelihood of mobs looking to stone offenders greater and greater.

Oddly enough, I think you end up in this place whether you place too much emphasis on rights or responsibilities. Going too far in either direction on the socio-political spectrum ends up in meeting the other coming to greet you from the other aide. And denial of any reality to our differences in sex will ultimately lead to a similar state of loss of identity as the overenforcement of it did.

Both approaches will wield ideological and social pressure to deny you your right to yourself. Both will fail to respect our nature in both its essence and its potential. Tyranny and anarchy both are dismal states, and apply their power differently by locating them in either external compulsion or internal futility, but the upshot of both is that you don’t have any connection to or power over what’s out there above you (either because it is so fixed we cannot dialogue with it or is so unfixed it doesn’t exist), and your position is one of essential futility (nothing in your experience has any relevance above your situation).

So how much should be regulate sex, or the ideas and concepts of sex? More than not at all, would be one answer. And less than completely, would be another. Not tyranically, and not anarchically. Of course everyone is going to have personal opinions about what feels tyrannical or anarchic to them, deoe ding on what they feel like and want to do at the moment. And even plenty of people who agree with a given ethic or understanding will find themselves struggling with it in one of these ways during their lifetime. But that won’t necessarily disprove or prove the rule.

Sex, in my opinion, needs a calm, measured discussion. But not because it’s so vague or technical or simplistic. Because it’s a legitimate source of passion and power. We have to treat it with the respect it’s due, not strip it of its content. And we need to keep an eye on the species, as well as the individual, because sex transcends individuals to affect whole societies, families, cultures, the past, the future, everything. Humanity is built on this thing. The sexes are the two halves of our species, and their coming together is what changes and perpetuates it. There are few things more momentous you could be considering.

So sex deserves taking seriously. And it requires a very broad and a very granular scope. I also think it requires a vision. Sex is about life. Life is more than just a set of rules or propositions, useful as those may be for organizing our thoughts and approach to it. A vision is something more. What is the living thing, in its environment, the creative embodiment of the state that we seek and value and pursue and protect? What is this thing, not only in truth, but in goodness and health, in beauty and desireability? What makes it loveable? And how can we be sure that it is truly loveable, rhat it something that will be in harmony and balance, that will produce life rather than restrict it, that will make sense across the dimensions and times of our lives and the lives of our species?

Visions can give you all of that. We test them with our cognitive tools. We calmly evaluate and theorize and argue. But the arguments and propositions and rules and values we derive are not the thing itself. They pertain to that thing. They may even convey it. But they are not themselves the living heart.

The important thing is to have the discussion, and have it intelligently, and have it with the understanding that it is a vision we are ultimately developing and testing and explicating. That doesn’t mean we don’t need an understanding. It doesn’t mean we don’t need regulation and rules and values. It doesn’t mean there won’t be any poetry or emotions involved. But we need to be able to calmly consider the possibilities and propositions like adults considering something with ramifications for our species and our societies, as well as the happiness and wellbeing of many individuals.

Any kind of stonewalling must be rejected, both the refusal to allow any questioning or exploration, as well as the unwillingness to accept any need for arriving at conclusions (clear values, guidelines, and regulation). Unfortunately, those are the two most common positions. Both are really just refusals to have an intelligent conversation for the sake of protecting their position. We all take sex so seriously that, deep down, whatever our position is (even a very liberal one), we are extremely defensive and draconian about protecting it.

So let’s just drop the illusions and have the discussion. We all take sex seriously. We all have very, very strong opinions and feelings about it. And it’s a matter of consequences. And most people, upon reflection, could agree that sex needs to be addressed and regulated more than not at all and less than tyranically. Some things should be regulated. So since we all on some level share a common value for this subject and a common opinion that it seems some amount of consideration, then the question simply becomes, which things, and how much? That is a very practical starting point that let’s us take things right back to fundamental principles, to the vision, to what sex is and what it is for and what role it should have in human life. And that can allow each side to more clearly make their case for their vision. And that, I think, will be the beginning of some actual sense in the discussion.