Laissez-faire in sex leads to all kinds of expensive negative-sum signaling and other games. Why not crack down on those, which would lead to a clear improvement by any utilitarian metric?
Are there liberals who try to crack down on commercial advertising wars? As far as I know, some liberals may grumble about the social waste of Coca-Cola and Pepsi spending millions to expand their relative share in a zero-sum competition, but they don’t actually try to suppress it.
If it’s OK for the government to ban smoking and other activities harmful for public health, why not extend such treatment to sexual activities that have obvious and drastic public health implications?
Smoking bans are not absolute, just in closed public places where the smoking affects nonconsenting third parties. Liberals tend to favor legalization of recreational drug use when no third parties are affected. They also would, I think, support criminalizing having unprotected sex if you knowingly have a STD and you don’t tell your partner, which is the closest analogue I can imagine to smoking bans. So I don’t see the inconsistency.
If the alleged vast inequality of wealth is a legitimate complaint against economic laissez-faire, why is it not legitimate to complain about the vast inequality of sexual and romantic opportunities (and of the related social status) under sexual laissez-faire? (The problem is by no means limited to men, of course.)
This is difficult to argue for or against unless you specify what concrete government measures to alleviate sexual and romantic inequality you think liberals should support. If prostitution was legal (and many liberals support that, especially if there are regulations to avoid coercion and exploitation) the “purely sexual” chunk of the problem would be subsumed under economic inequality, which liberals are concerned about.
Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction? Especially since liberals make analogous arguments in favor of paternalistic regulation of practically everything else.
You could make the same argument about many other things than sex. E.g. if people are free to choose where to live, they might make self-destructive choices (like buying a big house and then being crippled by mortgage payments and not being able to take vacations or enjoy life; or deciding to live in a “bad” neighborhood because it is cheap without considering the impact on their children, etc). Or you could argue that people should not be able to choose their jobs, their college degrees, etc.
The fact is, liberals do not support paternalistic regulations of “virtually everything else”. It is quite likely that the pattern of which regulations they support and which they do not is not logical, nor based entirely in harm/fairness considerations, but based instead on a mixture of harm/fairness considerations, autonomy considerations, status quo bias, path dependence effects on which causes are suitable for political action, tribalism (opposing things conservatives like and vice versa), and some sanctity/purity impulses. But I don’t see a reason to single out sexual autonomy as an area and ascribe to liberals a strong sanctity foundation on it, at least not in the arguments you have provided.
Are there liberals who try to crack down on commercial advertising wars? As far as I know, some liberals may grumble about the social waste of Coca-Cola and Pepsi spending millions to expand their relative share in a zero-sum competition, but they don’t actually try to suppress it.
Smoking bans are not absolute, just in closed public places where the smoking affects nonconsenting third parties. Liberals tend to favor legalization of recreational drug use when no third parties are affected. They also would, I think, support criminalizing having unprotected sex if you knowingly have a STD and you don’t tell your partner, which is the closest analogue I can imagine to smoking bans. So I don’t see the inconsistency.
This is difficult to argue for or against unless you specify what concrete government measures to alleviate sexual and romantic inequality you think liberals should support. If prostitution was legal (and many liberals support that, especially if there are regulations to avoid coercion and exploitation) the “purely sexual” chunk of the problem would be subsumed under economic inequality, which liberals are concerned about.
You could make the same argument about many other things than sex. E.g. if people are free to choose where to live, they might make self-destructive choices (like buying a big house and then being crippled by mortgage payments and not being able to take vacations or enjoy life; or deciding to live in a “bad” neighborhood because it is cheap without considering the impact on their children, etc). Or you could argue that people should not be able to choose their jobs, their college degrees, etc.
The fact is, liberals do not support paternalistic regulations of “virtually everything else”. It is quite likely that the pattern of which regulations they support and which they do not is not logical, nor based entirely in harm/fairness considerations, but based instead on a mixture of harm/fairness considerations, autonomy considerations, status quo bias, path dependence effects on which causes are suitable for political action, tribalism (opposing things conservatives like and vice versa), and some sanctity/purity impulses. But I don’t see a reason to single out sexual autonomy as an area and ascribe to liberals a strong sanctity foundation on it, at least not in the arguments you have provided.