Good Sex, Bad Sex: Sex Law, Crime and Ethics

I am in Budapest. Good Sex, Bad Sex: Sex Law, Crime and Ethics is the first conference I’ve been interested in attending in a long time. I swore off the whole conference genre for a while, but the description of this one caught my eye, so I got in touch with two very interesting minds and we proposed a panel. It’s a small event, 35 or so people, and no competing sessions, so you can actually relax and reflect on everything you hear. Our session is:

Monday 4th May 2009, 1600

Session 2: Breathing New Life into Old Fears: Cultural Studies of Prostitution, Pornography and Bad Sex

This panel will explore continuing impulses to criminalise and prohibit forms of ‘bad’ sexual practice. The three papers examine continuities and transformations in recent regulatory impulses to ‘protect’ the ‘innocent’ and the public from individual instances of bad sexual conduct. We ask whether fixed ethical frameworks, with concomitant laws, are appropriate in an age where diversity, autonomy and agency are prime values.

The Evil is in Paying: Sex with ‘Trafficked Women’
Laura Agustin

Prominent politicians and feminists have come to maintain that paying for sex with a ‘victim of trafficking’ is a heinous crime equivalent to violent rape. All migrant workers in the sex industry are considered subject to ‘serial rape’ and ‘sexual slavery’. The movement purposely conflates all prostitution with ‘trafficking’ and attacks those who disagree as pimps and anti-feminists. The justification is Gender Equality, a utopic vision that defines good sex as symmetrical, mutual, personally close, loving and equitable. Resulting laws criminalise the buying of sex on the grounds that introducing money creates a power relationship antithetical to the right kind of sex. This paper posits a different ethical vision in which money is not granted defining status in sexual acts.

Going to Extremes: Understanding New Online Pornographies
Feona Attwood

Online pornographies increasingly provide a focus for debates about permissible and impermissible sexual practices and about good and bad representations of sex. They have also become the focus of broader concerns with ‘extreme’ images of the body, for example in the horror subgenre which has been dubbed ‘torture porn’, in images of real violence and conflict (sometimes referred to as ‘warporn’ or ‘atrocity porn’), and in the wider set of ‘shock’ images which proliferate online. This paper considers the significance of contemporary concerns about extreme online pornographies in a cultural context where norms of sexuality and notions of obscenity are fiercely contested and where the circulation of sexual imagery is more prevalent than ever before.

Five Dominatrices and a Thrashing: the Classifications of Sadomasochism
Clarissa Smith

During 2008 two of the UK’s most august institutions resounded to discussion of activities involving pain and sexual pleasure: the House of Lords debated the rights of British citizens to possess images of ‘extreme’ sexual practices and the High Court was regaled with tales of supposed Nazi orgies starring Max Mosley (Formula 1 President and son of British wartime fascist Sir Oswald Mosley) and five women he had paid to beat him. The rights and wrongs of sadomasochism, consensual violence and the commodification and commercialisation of sexual desire were thoroughly aired across the media. This paper will consider the multiple meanings of sadomasochism and other ‘extreme’ sexual practices in public discourse and the continuing failures of the legislature to understand such practices as anything other than evidence of deviant or irrational impulses.

3 thoughts on “Good Sex, Bad Sex: Sex Law, Crime and Ethics

  1. Keith Richard Radford Jr

    Getting to maters that mater is something we seem to be able to get down to humbly; I would like to share this with you. This from my life experience is a true connection to the ties of races through our own sex laws which have been built on misconceptions and myth.

    The Supreme Court just ruled on sex offender laws where some factions of our government think by some inert reasoning that sex offender should be quarantined like some virus steaming from draconian/Islamic law sex offenders should be executed. I have seen for myself, video taken in another country where a sex offender is placed on a pole much like the Catholics use to use a pyramid shaped object and have them sit on it and spin, the pole travels through the body looking for the throat but if not found its ok cause the sharpened end of the pole will come out somewhere. The heritage of the act is in its self a throwback to troglodyte’s who are so obsessed with sex they can find that the way to deal with the issue is as revolutionary, as war, and two wrongs don’t make a right but has in fact called up deep rooted issues of people who have had to put up with this kind of “hierarchy” of historic hysteria far to long. A word taken from hysterectomy, hysteria is tied to castration used to make animals less threatening right? Good old Monty Hall. Well no wonder it’s wrong, right?

    Anyway we are supposed to be the most advanced nation and we still have a death penalty when the rest of the world except for nations we are still warring with, {think!} While other nations went home our weapons dealers and torture lovers delighting in support for the death of people they don’t know or want to simply because they don’t know how to get money with out taking it from someone by force, is that supposed to includes mutilations? In my humble opinion that alone are terrorist activities as much as severed hands, ears, heads, or making a case with nothing more than an obsession justified by lies.

    The truth about the sex offender registry will come out soon enough. When it does, People will see how the use of the registry was created, and by exactly who and why and the devastation it has created and the worthlessness of the use of it. It’s origin in the Crow laws that brought disgrace to our nation allowing thieves and murderous societal bigots who have trashed any shot at making good of a program in its design to make money destroying our nation and its people. We can not play god and we can not survive using this behavior model because we are compounding the problem.

    It’s a ruse designed by people who are getting rich off the castration/hysterectomy/health care/physic care of people through sex laws that have gone wild. What about the people who are being used by the Medicare programs that requires these mutilations for both men and woman after they take their means of support? Can’t you see? You have created the model and it is worthless! Why don’t you just indiscriminately kill people you don’t know that’s statically the next sex offender because over 90% of all new offences are people not on the sex offender registry and the numbers are increasing not decreasing so as a behavior model the chumps put together is really screwed up and they were told before they tried it. So what is the use of such laws as the sex offender registry other than to terrorize people? With the murder of so many sex offenders and the continued disregard for life by the use of the registry it’s just a mater of time before the federal government will be held liable for the deaths through federal court.

    In a nation where a statement may have a double or triple meaning and our entire linage can be traced through mud, guts, and beer it’s nice once in a while to get the picture of what is meant instead of what some thinks someone may have implied. So it is from the trenches to the hill. Remember the game where someone says something in someone’s ear then passes it the same way to the next; the person advocating such destructive laws are the ones who need to be section 8 by simple brake down of the issue not sex offenders. Best regards

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  2. Keith Richard Radford Jr

    Start a scandal then pay through the nose to sell human implantable FCC devices. The radio was designed in Italy originally and the control used by the church over sex is a failed ideology. Work the system for years and advertise sex as something abhorrent or mentally deviant when sex is necessary for human survival of the species and then attach dogma to it as if the conjuring of some binding spell/blackmailer/blackjack/death or the police force will stand by and let blood for god when the bible tells us that god does not talk to use directly? The planning of long term projects like this are flawed in that time is on the side of sensibility and that voice in someones head at the head of the class giving head to the schmo that can mark her here/hear/there in drivers education class suite is quite likely your government agent build a case to be tried by good citizens tax dollars that could have Harvard’s looking like Harvard’s and not just because they do care, and everyone could get a chance for a level playing field and we wonder if that is the world we want when the we hunt ourselves. Some small children like sex all by themselves/or entertain or just look and there are time they include/exclude/toggle the interest in others in some cat and mouse/potato/cucumber/electrical gizmo for what ever reason and we need to know if that is acting out or just natural/unnatural/supernatural/the nature of the beast/sad/happy/practical or just none of our concern? Age has nothing to do with anything concerning this subject when the process of training feeds fresh souls to the slaughter on all four ramps and the prods are held by a slew of number two’s all dead and gone while the stench lingers on the wonder is who/when where/or why cus your goina die and he/she/him/her/hummer/or pistol packing person needs that much training with the birth rate refreshes us all and that give no right/wrong or differences children themselves as we all are? The deviancy is the thinking that some magic law will make the world better with no intimacy in it toward one another when pets die without care and the intimacy of a cycle that turns again and again and again when going against the right of a child’s caregiver someone that would not clean their butt even traditionally for some cultures or whatever reason beats begetting rotten flesh for aliving caz that ain’t living unless that’s the real meaning of training day and they need their sleep too/there of/also . That selling some device to ID everyone will give the power of control to the right person when we can see who thinks they are the right person orders militiamen to burn and bulldoze a church with 1,500 people inside? We have laws based on the reasoning of this kind of thinker? Sex laws are the culprit, 6-8-2010 Rochester, New York Mr. Quinn was murdered and they called it a beating death the murders, [Yes: a small mob was their inciting a man] are free but they held one person in lieu of a 15K bail the when sex offender usually get a million dollar bail and they wont call it murder? a beating death? I was chipped as a child and chipped as an adult, used by individuals and/or unidentified corporate interests/personal/corporate gain/what but I know who has connections and some answers on a need to know bases are in order and here is where it ends? With someones Phill/tell/ltail? These laws must be obliterated world wide starting at a local level and this type of ugly is far worse than any sex act, social act, can warrant punishment when masturbation or the use of condoms were prohibited and we were told not to bath with anyone anywhere ever for health reasons yet we’re told that the sea ill give up the dead and dead will give new life so all this can make since/cents? Moms see their kids fathers in the eyes of their children in some cases the intimacy of a relationship spoken of as something abhorrent by some person/company/group/religions belief done not injuring of ones child or their neighbors child if we/they/them/us/even the mindless are to ever lean to live together in any structure of society and be at peace with all things/people/tribes/nations/provinces/tongue/lands we really need that too be/become skewed in the minds of persons listening to such teaching as some universal truth when the universal truth is sex is not murder or even punishable in it’s self. Sex is not an act, It a state of being and if someone is offended by ones being then that is their problem personally and they need to learn to control themselves, not other through laws that do no good for anyone and that could ever support life on any planet at it’s purest promotes genocides when 9 out of ten new crimes are committed by someone not on the registry and we are being born to die till a tie if any a perpetual power source till the power runs out of people to hunt for fun and profit feeding into a system were a act of submission is required for forgiveness and the bj given the judge sentencing a person to life saves that person who has been brought before the court for the density of a vial/color of skin/blessed or unblessed or just living it up in in the tent in the back yard it’s the wrong hunt for all the wrong reasons and yelled busy work that makes blood for the he said she said when more often the protector unarmed the one calling for protections and the protector is the predator connected for the wrong reasons too? People are not after us, our laws have been based on an advertised hype to sell more TV’s/to sell more advertising to feed a frenzy of fraud and promote more rhetoric about something we torture and kill so we can mine and design something to hunt ourselves to channel resources too continue to roll around from language to country all the time doing the hooch’s shuffle? End Sex Laws Now! signed the twice chipped guy.

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