We should not ignore alleged crimes because of the risk of compromising sexual freedom
Sex is a font of social excuses. Behaviour we might otherwise find disgusting, bizarre, or horrifying can, these days, get a pass because two (or more) adults agreed to do it in private. That cultural pass, however, should not be a justification for otherwise illegal actions.
Or at least, that’s what used to be the case, before the cult of sexual empowerment decided that sexual consent took primacy. Now, a vocal contingent argues that even severe criminal behaviour should be pardoned, lest we dare risk being judgmental of outré sexual practices.
For instance, the New York forced labour trial concerning the so-called “orgasm cult” OneTaste and its founders, Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, have been accused of gathering their largely female followers into debt traps for “courses”, moving them into communal housing, and using financial threats to get them to undertake unpaid sex acts that benefited the company.
Cherwitz and Daedone deny the overall charge of conspiracy to commit forced labour. Their defence has rested on the idea that the charges are an expression of guilt and shame at female sexual liberation. The allegations of their alleged victims are, they say, a sign of a patriarchal society forcing people to re-fashion their previous experiences, and the free labour an expression of adult decisions. If any unwise decisions were made, it might have been the sexual exploration by young and unsure participants in OneTaste’s activities; the shame and trauma they feel, per star defence lawyer Jennifer Bonjean, may just be a sign of personal growth.
These arguments are not unique to OneTaste. Online fans have put forward claims about consent and regret as defences to alleged sex trafficking of Sean “Diddy” Combs (which he denies). However, because the OneTaste defendants have always claimed to be advancing sexual liberty and fighting off societal shame, they have attracted particularly vocal supporters. In Reason, editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown argues the entire trial is a cover for the view “female sexuality is something to be suppressed and controlled by the state”, given that the underlying sex acts were individually consensual. Meanwhile, in The Telegraph, Rowan Pelling argues that, while Daedone may have “abused the trust of obsessive and vulnerable devotees”, charging her risks a world “where the state feels free to criminalise unconventional sex.”
The case, in fact, is about the alleged threat of sufficiently serious “psychological, financial, or reputational harm” to compel labour. Not sex, but the same offence of conspiracy to commit forced labour that, for instance, resulted (to no outrage) in the conviction of California restaurant owners who convinced vulnerable Guatemalans into working without proper pay. No one would seriously think that the fact that trafficked labourers could leave for Guatemala at any time and consented to wash dishes provided a defence. Sex, in fact, has taken on the status of privileged special pleading, an excuse to avoid normal consequences.
The courts will decide if Cherwitz and Daedone are guilty or innocent in law — but what can be said about commentators defending them on moral grounds? This is a symptom not of anything particular to those cases, but rather of an individualistic and selfish mindset. Freedom from societal or cultural judgment for sexual practices is so desired that the relatively privileged are willing to push boundaries such that the alleged abuse of the vulnerable is merely a matter of individual exploration — a phase gone wrong, a thing tried and failed. Even those defending Daedone, like Brown and Pelling, do not claim to believe her assertions of seeking empowerment or trying to advance sexual liberation. Rather, the worry seems to be that the mix of charges of labour coercion with consensual sex might have dangerous consequences on female sexuality later. The societal position of sexuality takes priority.
Like most bad social convictions, this one starts from a few valid premises. Legal overreach, such as when it comes to the absurdly broad English coercive control offence, is a serious worry. Paternalistic attempts to make psychologically harmful content or practices illegal (think Britain’s Online Safety Act) can hand governments excessive power. Finally, it should not be illegal to practise most foolish or bizarre sexual practices, however unwise they may be.
Sexual consent is not cover for abusers to escape the consequences of their criminal actions
Yet, the conclusion that sexual consent makes all offences okay, is one that specialises rather than normalises sex. It is not relevant to forced labour that, at the time, someone verbally accepted performing certain actions. That a failure to leave a sexually coercive situation voluntarily means no abuse could have occurred is the same tired argument used by defenders of domestic abusers (“she could have left at any time”), only recast as feminist. The scholarly idea that we ought to, for the sake of sex positivity, allow people to consent to potentially serious bodily injury privileges sexual pleasure over common sense. These arguments are the mirror of the increasingly popular idea (in academia at least) that sex crimes, as a category separate to other physical assaults, ought to be abolished as a legacy of an attempt to control and stigmatise sexuality.
To the extent that sex ought to be legally exceptional, it is because it has the potential for greater harm and aggravated penalties, not mitigation. Hence, whatever fringe legal academics claim, rape should be treated far more seriously than a comparable non-sexual form of battery. Equally, sexual consent is not cover for abusers to escape the consequences of their criminal actions, particularly where the underlying crime is not even sexual in nature (as with OneTaste). Defence lawyers, who are paid to trot out arguments that might benefit their clients, are naturally going to hop onto the Zeitgeist of sex positivity to claim it requires we ignore or tolerate alleged crimes. It should be treated with great scepticism.
