A Regulação do Sexo

Entrevista com Eric Berkowitz autor de Sex and Punishment: 4000 Years of Judging Desire: we have come far when it comes to freedom of sexual activity without risk of undue punishment, such as the decriminalisation of adultery and homosexuality, at least in the US and the UK. I think we’ve come a long way in agreeing that one person’s homosexual life has no appreciable effect whatsoever on the lives of others. It’s still a volatile subject which comes up in a hundred different ways, and the rights won are very easily lost. But I think all societies move forward and backward at the same time. At the same time, we’ve also increased the criminalisation of other acts, such as sex with younger people and children, which no one would have ever tolerated. I pay a lot of attention to that in my book, especially in the last chapter, because it’s significant. We now have laws which make it a very serious crime to take advantage of someone of a certain age. That age changes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Sex with a 14-year-old in Germany isn’t any less immoral than sex with a 14-year-old in England [but it is a crime in one country and not in the other]. Across the Western world, we now have a sense that it is wrong to use power, influence, age or authority to extract sex from someone who doesn’t have those attributes.