The Dictatorship of the Few
How does prejudice perpetuate itself?
How is it, for example, that when most of the world accepts women as deserving of right equal to men, some countries such as Saudi Arabia or Iran vigorously repress their female population?
Turns out that a small number of people are key to the oppression. The king, the royal family, the elite mullahs.
The dictatorship of the few.
When we look at antisexual prejudice we find the same tyranny of the minority.
It is so common as to be barely noticed.
Consider, for example, the mainstream media’s systematic censorship of advertising of sexual products. Not just tacky, pornographic sex products. All sex products.
Take the case of a women’s sexuality store that ran for a month a 15 second commercial on a network of television stations. The ad shows smiling customers in the store; visible in the background are some of the store’s tastefully designed vibrators.
About a million people saw the ad. Eight people complained that vibrators were visible. The network pulled the ad!
The complainers number about .0008% of the viewers. A tiny proportion. But to the network manager, eight complaints is 800% more than a usual ad receives.
So even though 99.999% of the viewers did not complain, the tiny number who did complain got the manager’s attention. And he sides with them, and orders the ad removed.
He is not unique.
All the time and in all western countries, decision-makers in media and government will acquiesce to the intolerant voices of a tiny number of sex-negative complainers.
Environmentalist complainers have no such punch. Nor animal rights activists. Nor feminists. Even their mass protests are regularly ignored.
Why are sex-negative complainers so effective?
Several reasons.
The most important is that antisex zealots have 3000 years of tradition behind them. They are trying to block change rather than initiate change.
Environmental, animal rights and other activists, in contrast have thousands of years of tradition to overcome. Like sex-positive innovators they have the immense weight of the status quo against them.
Bureaucrats naturally resist change. They side with people favouring the status quo. So when a new type of sex-positive ad appears and eight people complain, the media manager leaps to the side of the complainers.
Antisexual voices also have an impact way beyond their numbers because they spout messages which, though nonsensical, resonate with their bureaucratic audience.
For example, the mantra of people who are frightened of sex is to voice concern for children. A nudist on an isolated beach, a sex toy in the background of a tasteful television ad, abstract erotic art in our own Sex Party flyer, are all attacked by a tiny number of people as “harmful to children”.
There is no evidence to support their claims, and an important body of evidence assembled by Judith Levine in Harmful to Minors : the perils of protecting children from sex (2002) shows the opposite. On the pretext of protecting children, sex-negative complainers actually harm them.
Another strategy is to invoke vague terms like “immoral”, “indecent” , or “offensive” to hide phobic aversions behind seemingly objective terms.
Harm to children, immorality: nobody wants to be accused of that.
But the sex-positive ideology that refutes such accusations is, sadly, largely esoteric knowledge in our culture. Very, very rare is the bureaucrat who is familiar with Judith Levine’s work.
So the notion that the sight of sex toys or nudists might actually harm kids or be “immoral” carries weight in the mind of the decision-maker. Therefore they continue to impose the sex-negative status-quo.
Which in turn give credence to the nonsense complaints.
The antidote to this unhealthy system is to ramp up the sex-positive voice. When the tide shifts so that bureaucrats hear more from folks protesting sex-negative decisions then from the sex-neggers, bureaucrats will take notice.
Unfortunately, intolerance is a much more powerful motivator than tolerance. Reasonable people who are not distressed by the sight of a nudist or a sex toy don’t phone bureaucrats and say “I am comfortable with the sight of nudists or sex toys.” But people who are threatened by naked bodies and erotic play do have incentives to complain. For example, the complaint helps discharge their fear.
The sex-positive community needs to reverse this situation. We need to be much more vocal. We need to support bureaucrats who support sex-positive innovations. We need to protest decision-makers who perpetuate sex-negativity.
The Sex Party will assist in this process. We will spread the word when we hear of cases of sexual intolerance. We hope people reading this will inform us when they find similar examples.