Via Jennifer of Activist on a mission to initiate change here’s some news bound to make let’s-keep-sex-a-tool-for-social-control arch-conservatives and English-only jingoists heads explode
Seems as though the police in Montreal were busy arresting and charging an adult store owner for failure to put English wording on a Sleeve Super Stretch. (aka jack off toy) Like tax payers dollars would not be better spent actually pushing criminals through the court system. Sheesh.
On the one hand they weren’t arresting the owner for selling sex toys (particularly sex toys for men, who generally aren’t seen as either needing them to “get off” nor deserving them.) On the other hand they were arresting him for being insufficiently bi(lingual)-positive.
Worse, the language he was arrested for not including was Canada’s other official language, French!
What’s interesting to me, and fairly important, is that the story illustrates how, contrary to certain fairly dominating ideologies about ordered societies, the impulse to debate attempts to regulate morality can coexist peacefully with sexual and relationship license. As opposed to the opinion that sexuality and the forms of relationships are the essence of moral debate.
I don’t know if it’s either necessary or natural or even healthy for morality of any sort to be socially mandated. I do know that if it must it’s probably healthier for such debate to be more evenly distributed across the spectrum of human behavior rather than focused on one or several small areas.
I might also add that it seems more productive to stress over something like bilingualism, which is amenable to social upbringing and social influence and which can be subject to opinion, than for things that appear to have flexible but fundamental baselines in our biologies.
Anyway, I’d far prefer that if a sex-shop operator must run afoul of the law at all it would be not because she or he sold sex toys at all, and not because he or she neglected to label them in all official languages, but only when she or he continued to sell materials after they’d been determined to contain toxic materials or otherwise be demonstrably unsafe.
I found that kind of funny.
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Sun, 2010-05-09 16:15.I found that kind of funny. That’s just so… Canadian.
The language issue in Quebec
Submitted by NightGhost (not verified) on Sun, 2010-05-09 17:46.The language issue in Quebec is huge, and ties in with other major sub-theme of the culture. There is a underlying fear in the French speaking part of the community (which is the majority pretty everywhere-but- Montréal, where sometimes it’s impossible to get service in French in the Downtown sector) that the French (or rather, Quebecese) culture will be assimilated into either an American-like or otherwise English culture.
That fear is based on both social and political events of the past. The English minority used to own the business and would considered the Francophones as cheap-labor, universally uneducated peasants to be abused (see : Speak White… The expression was commonly used against Francophones to tell them to talk in English and was beautifully examined in the poem of the same name. You can find an English translation here http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=738881) . Then of course there was still cringe inducing plan by Lord Durham, openly stating as a goal of the government the assimilation of Francophones, by drowning their cultures in a sea of English and smothering their identity as a group.
Sorry if this is getting long, but the basic background is important. Anyways, what I wanted to point out is the the store’s issue is in no way linked to anything sexual, or even morality. It’s the enforcement of a law meant to make sure instruction manuals come in French, as it is the main language of the province and a majority of the population outside of the Montréal island speaks very little English or none at all. So while it is not a point of morality (and it’s not…especially not in this city) it is a point of safety. And in lesser regard, of respect for the population you are catering to. While I might be bilingual, many in my family are not and I’ve seen them do some dangerous things (or just plain breaking on high-tech items) because they could not parse the instructions correctly.
[Hi Nightghost. Just to be clear I’m not deprecating the bilingual issue. At all! For reasons of fairness, respect, tradition, and, as you say, safety, there really is a moral dimension to the language debate in Canada as well as political and cultural ones. But as I write I’m visiting family just a few miles from the U.S. state of Alabama where the sale of sex toys is absolutely prohibited… and for that matter, English-only policy advocates (coughTeaPartycough) have absolute dominion. And so please believe my sincerity when I say heads around here would figuratively explode at the comparative significance of the elements of the story in Montreal. Thanks! —fl]
Dear Fig, It’s probably not
Submitted by Thaddeus Blanchette (not verified) on Mon, 2010-05-10 04:56.Dear Fig,
It’s probably not natural to socially mandate morality: it’s almost certainly cultural, in it’s broadest, most anthropological sense (i.e. a result of humanity’s apparently unique capacity to communicate using symbols). This means that such debates are inevitable. As Durkheim points out, the existence of society presumes the existence of laws which presumes, in turn, the existence of morality.
This semester I’m teaching a race and biology class to undergrads. We’re discussing the quantum leap culture created in human affairs around about 50,000 years ago. It’s made me somewhat sympathetic, for the first time in my life, to the conservative position on sex. Not convinced, mind you: but for the first time I think I can see where they’re coming from. And I feel for them I really do. Just like I feel for the members of the Flat Earth Society. Willful ignorance based on fear and/or stubborness is a sorry sight. But this is what I think may be going on:...
Human sexuality has been, without a doubt, the mosts socially (and thus, by definition, morally) regulamented behavior in human history. This is understandable: for tens of thousands of years, the heterosexual, sexually diamorphic and phallocentered family has dominated human social and political affairs. It is very much a “long term cultural structure” and probably one of our most historically important. Within the last 50 years, all this has begun to change and for excellent reasons. The problem is almost Marxist in nature: our means of production are pushing a reorganization of the cultural superstructure and doing so precisely on a point which has been relatively stable for at least the past 1000 years. This tends to create enormous resistence.
No wonder conservatives’ nerves are screaming “Hold!! Enough!!!” Marx would have sympathized with them.
The problem is, this kind of change is inevitable: if we want to live in a high-tech, consuming, globalized society (and I haven’t seen many conservatives turning in their SUVs and advocating a “back-to-the-land” lifestyle), we need a sexual/affective structure that makes the best use of everyone’s productive talents INDEPENDENT of their reproductive capacities. In short, you can’t be building space stations, greening the planet and running the internet and STILL mandate that half the planet chain themselves to a stove while another 10% (at least) stay hidden away in the closet. Our technological society demands that every productive, intelligent person contribute to the best of their ability. That, in turn, means that peoples’ sexual and affective lives need to work more-or-less smoothly for them as long as they are not tossing a wrench into the rest of the social structure. Love, as always, needs to compliment society’s functioning (at least in the general aggragate) and not run contrary to it. This has been the nature of sexual morality in its largest and most general sense ever since Jesus was a cave man.
Treating people of color, women and gays like honest-to-god rights-bearing individuals (earlier a category open only to white heterosexual men) not only makes socio-economic sense in this new environment: it’s absolutely imperative for the survival of the planet and the species. Unfortunately, for the billions of people who are still living under the socio-cultural paradigm of pre-modernity, all this looks a lot like heresy (bloody heresy at that) as – just like the recently-won human ability to fly – it goes against the accumulated “wisdom” of centuries.