The Fascinating Seventy Year-Old Virgin

The internet loves the news of the weird.  Apparently, a lot of web browsers are clicking over to a brief story about a seventy year-old virgin.  This isn’t that interesting at first blush, especially in light of the story from a few months ago about a woman who’d remained a virgin for over 100 years.  In the latter case, though, I got the impression that the woman may have simply been asexual.  She expressed an overall disinterest in sex and suggested that her longevity could be explained by her not concerning herself with that pursuit.  This seventy year-old woman who is in the news now, on the other hand, claims to have retained her virginity as a matter of moral commitment, as she doesn’t believe in sex before marriage, but never found a husband.

This story wouldn’t be that interesting except for the fact that by being limited to a one paragraph synopsis it opens up my mind to all sorts of speculation about the surrounding circumstances.  That speculation is made all the more intriguing by virtue of two unusual facts:  The woman, Pam Shaw, performed for many years as a cabaret singer, and she’s in the news now because she’s apparently hit her virginity’s breaking point at long last, being ready now to give it up to “a tall, dark, and handsome millionaire.”

This woman seems fascinating.  The image that I get is a tight bundle of lifelong contradictions.  I appreciate that because it’s something that I can relate to, even though there are aspects of it that I admire and aspects that I’m eager to criticize.  First the praise:  Good for her for maintaining her virginity amidst a career in which she was referred to as “The Sexational Pam,” in an industry in which loose attitudes about sex are presumably the recognized norm.

It’s a unique personality type that encourages a person to eschew particular experiences for herself at the same time that she flirts with the edges of those experiences and indulges an active curiosity about them.  As a deliberate virgin, and arguably an asexual, myself, I kind of want the life that she’s led.  I felt oddly comfortable when I had an opportunity to go to an art exhibit at an S&M parlor and when I followed a drunken friend into a pornography store.   So I applaud Ms. Shaw’s commitment to a strangely indulgent sort of chastity.

But here’s the thing that strikes me negatively about her story:  She spent, let’s say, fifty-five years maintaining a commitment to virginity on the basis of not believing in sex before marriage and now she’s announced her readiness to “take the plunge” if the interested part has enough money?  That seems like freakishly inconsistent morality.  Doesn’t the decision to trade virginity for a cash-rich lifestyle sort of betray the very sentiment behind Ms. Shaw’s lifelong chastity.  I would presume that if she didn’t believe in sex before marriage, she felt that love was more important than physical pleasure.  Am I to conclude that now at seventy years old she’d determined that money is more important than both?

On the other hand, I can understand the impulse underlying her statement.  The longer you retain something that requires consistent sacrifice, the more valuable in becomes to you.  Thus, even if you have decided that enough is enough, it can take an awful lot of incentive to push you to an actual breaking point.  It may be that after years of working so close to sex, and now approaching the end of her life, Ms. Shaw has simply decided that she wants to experience something that she’s denied herself for so long.  She probably feels that it can no longer be on the terms that she’d set, so instead she’s changing the terms, compromising the rigid morality in order to cease compromising the physical indulgence.

The woman has evidently lived her life amidst contradictions.  What’s one more?

My Contribution to the Obama Campaign

Last night, I donated three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign.  I didn’t do it because I believe in the transformative potential of a second term for the current president, or because I expect good things to come of an emphasis on small-donor contributions to political causes.  I didn’t even do it because I can afford it, because there’s some legitimate doubt about that, even at the three dollar level.

In fact, my donation wasn’t in answer to my conscience; it was in violation of it.  And given what three dollars might otherwise have bought, it was an irrational violation of my conscience.  That is characteristic of playing the lottery.  Yes, I donated three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign last night because that was the minimum amount and the deadline that allowed donors to be entered for a chance to win a trip to Los Angeles to have dinner with Barack Obama and George Clooney.

I put off the donation all the way to the last half-hour before the FEC fundraising deadline, because this involved a complex economic and ethical calculation for me.  It took until after 11:30 to hit that breaking point, but ultimately, I decided that even in the faces of virtually infinitesimal chances and the certainty of being left with a bad taste in my mouth, three dollars was well-worth the long shot of being chosen to be able to have a conversation with the president.  (I wouldn’t really care about meeting Clooney – I’d shake his hand and tell him I admire his body of work, but I want to talk to policymakers.)

The economic calculation was significantly influenced by what I know about the president.  The current occupant of the highest office in the land has an admirable sense of empathy, to the extent that he has been responsible for some instances of helping private citizens to get jobs when they had spoken to him of their difficulties.  He has also been known to occasionally write personal checks in response to letters detailing hardships which the president felt he had no other way of addressing in the moment.

I wrote about those facts in the past, and though they still impress me with regards to the kind of man that citizen Barack Obama is, as I expressed then, I don’t like what it says about him as an occupant of the presidential office.  And to be perfectly frank about my own motivations, I want to have dinner with President Barack Obama so I can exploit the ear of the man and criticize the actions and policies of the president.

Donating money to his campaign for the sake of a shot at dinner in L.A. constituted an ethical compromise for me, because I recognized that I was contributing to an unfortunate trend in American politics.  We complain a great deal about the influence of big money in campaigns and policy making, the quid pro quo involved.  But as with everything else, the broader tendencies, the impulses among the powerful, have their groundwork in private, on-the-ground attitudes.

Regardless of whether it relies on three dollar donations from across the country or one terrifyingly wealthy Super PAC, no campaign and no political apparatus should be set up to encourage people to contribute their resources to it in hopes that they will be delivered some personal reward in return.  And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

I didn’t donate my three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign because I believe that he represents my views and can be trusted to carry out the policies that I think would be legitimately best for the country as a whole; I did it in hopes of gaining access to the president so that I could try to influence his policies.  And more than that, I gave my money to the campaign in the interest of trying to influence a private individual to help me personally.

I want to have dinner with the president so that I can raise questions about his education policy, about the flawed common wisdom that government cannot create jobs, and about the victim-blaming rhetoric that dominates political explanations of joblessness, poverty, and loss.  But I want to have dinner with a man with a vast network of high-level connections so that I can impress upon him the desperation of my need for a decent job, the reality of my qualifications and talents, and the fact that nothing I do on my own can connect those thing to actual employment.

I know that there have been a handful of other people who have been in similar situations, found themselves in circumstances that allowed them to bend the ear of the president, and acquired job leads by virtue of his influence.  I think it’s wrong that anyone gets that chance, but the fact is that so long as someone does, I hope it’s me.

For the time being, money in politics is a reality that we have to work with.  But the money should follow the political causes, and the system that is accepted now by both parties and at all levels encourages money to precede politics and to demand that weakly malleable views on policy answer to purchased influence.  I doubt, though, that my three dollars will buy sufficient influence to demand that that system be questioned.

Immorality of and for Children

Moving about my town this weekend, I made two markedly unpleasant observations, which were quite distinct from each other, but also meaningfully connected. They both spoke to the deplorable effect that many adults have upon the children growing up around them, in the one place through the influences they predicate upon them indirectly, and in the other through what they willfully do to them.

When I had just gone out of my home to catch a bus and go to meet a friend, I was walking down the principal street of my neighborhood and I saw a ten year-old boy turn to stare openly and at length at the backside of a seven year-old girl who had walked past him. Now, it could be that there was some other context that I was missing – he may have recognized her from elsewhere but been too shy to call out to her – but to my eye his behavior was indistinguishable from that of the appallingly many men I have seen stop in their tracks and follow with their eyes the receding course of a woman they find attractive.

The young boy didn’t appear to be simply looking; he appeared to be leering, and I know all too well what that looks like. It’s been so commonplace in recent years that there’s no longer any deluded part of me that’s willing to pass it off as an anomaly when I see another man doing it. It’s become a social trend, and in turn I’ve become pretty consistent in reacting to it in some fashion when I see it. That action only rises to the level of staring crazily at the unabashed lecher, but my hope is that by thereby calling attention to the fact that he’s not invisible to the world just because the object of his ogling has her back turned I can help to instill a slight sense of shame.

To do so seems like an even stronger imperative now that I’ve seen a young boy exhibiting the same brazen rejection of self-restraint. After all, the boy was about ten years old, and the object of his leering about seven. Unless human biology has changed far more than I realize, there’s no way that he has sufficiently developed sexuality to provide him with a strong instinctual desire to look. Even if there was, that instinct would direct his attention toward a woman with fully developed secondary sexual characteristics, not a child like himself.

The logical conclusion, as I see it, is that the boy was showcasing an environmentally learned behavior. The vulgar social trend of open displays of unchecked lust is probably self-progenitive, like many social behaviors, and will grow and worsen in communities where it is not combated. What I observed was a ten year-old boy having learned lecherousness before he ever learned about sex, and perhaps before he’d so much as heard the word “hormones.” It is a truly hideous culture that allows its youth to inherit vices before they inherit any reasons for indulging them. And that is a trend that is only interrupted by adults within the culture being mindful of the behaviors that they put on display to their children, and seeing that the indulgence of common vices never outstrips the reasons for them.

While the incidental corruption of youth by the action of a collective culture is awful, at least there is a plea of ignorance to be made. What is worse still is putting the worst of oneself on display in full awareness of the fact that a child is the main witness or the direct object of it. I was coming back with my friend from where we had met up, and we had to wait a few minutes in the Metro Rail station before transferring to a bus. Other passengers emerged from the tunnel with us and most of them headed straight out to the street. A boy who may have been as young as four, accompanied by who I presume to be his mother, was among them, but the two stopped short inside the door at the behest of the woman’s sudden and exceptionally severe shouting.

“Are you serious?! Tie your goddam shoe! I’m fucking sick of this shit! Tie your goddam shoe! And it better fucking stay tied this time, or I’m gonna beat your ass!”

She delivered these commands and threats with lengthy pauses and with repetition, so that the entire affair lasted a thirty seconds or so as the boy sat on a bench and tied his shoe while she stood imposingly over him, doing nothing but staring down with a fury that never relented. I stood nearby and glanced repeatedly in their direction with a similar, but I think righteous, fury in my eyes. But that was it; I reacted in the same way that I tend to react to lechers on the street, which I steadily realized was not good enough as I watched them go.

As always seems to be the case when there is a subtle but significant opportunity for me to stand up for something, I found myself regretting my prolonged silence for a long time after the fact. When these demonstrations of immorality spring themselves upon me, it tends to take me time to process what I am witnessing. And in this case, I wrestled silently with the situation for too long. It’s one thing when someone is harassing a stranger, but another when some public conflict is between friends or among family. The lack of known circumstance makes me reluctant to insert myself into a situation that does not concern me. Perhaps there are issues involved that I don’t understand.

In this case at the rail station, my moral compass wobbled terribly because of the fact that it was the woman’s own child at whom she was directing her aggression. I’ve always found that there is a common but flawed cultural assumption that people have special rights and privileges in dealing with their children, and that it’s almost never the place of the community to insert itself into another person’s parenting. But recognizing the common assumption as flawed doesn’t mean that I entirely avoid being influenced by it. The effect is evidently that I feel I must be quite sure that a situation rises to the level of unjustifiability, as by involving physical violence, before I confront wrongful actions against one’s own child.

Unfortunately, when the aggression doesn’t cross the line from threats to physicality, I’m compelled to make moral, rational, and probabilistic calculations before my perception of the situation reaches a breaking point at which my mind exclaims, “of course there’s no justification for that!” Of course there was no justification for this woman screaming at her four year-old child because his shoelaces had come undone. He’s four. He probably learned how to tie a bow just months or weeks prior, and clearly he wasn’t getting any help from his mother in perfecting the craft. Her assistance took the form only of demeaning criticism and public humiliation, and even if that isn’t the normal dynamic between them when the child is struggling with something, her response isn’t justified even in an isolated case.

I wanted to defend the child against the maternal onslaught he was absorbing, and it would have been worth doing so not just for the sake of protecting his fragile emotions, but perhaps more so for the sake of protecting his malleable mind from being warped into the image of the insanely hot-headed, irrational woman who is raising him. The aggression hurts the child in the short term, but he’ll get over it. Kids are resilient. But at the same time, dealing with his problem by doing nothing more than shouting at him to fix it or suffer the consequences gives the impression that that’s the best – perhaps the only – way to solve further problems. One day, that child will grow into a man who has the power over someone else in a situation, and if his mother’s treatment of him is indicative of the overall environment that he’s living in, there’s a definite risk that he’ll command that power without reason or restraint.

At a higher level, there’s a terrible social consequence to the message that’s sent by the parenting techniques that the woman put on public display that night. The black mother and son, being in Buffalo, were almost certainly from a background of low socio-economic status. A cycle of enforcement that says “solve your problem or suffer the consequences” is indicative of a tragic victim-blaming tendency that even operates inside of disadvantaged communities. Rather than doing anything to help the boy become more practiced at tying his shoes, his mother merely insisted that he do it better, implying that worse consequences of failure would be as good as greater opportunities for success. One wonders if she will offer the same message when he needs help on his homework, or when he’s looking for a job, or when he needs a social support system. There is an implied resignation there, accepting the assertion that there’s something wrong with the individual, or the race, or the community, and that until such time as that changes, there’s little point in trying to help them to better outcomes.

Everything moral choice that we make – with respect to our children, our neighbors, within ourselves – begins the alteration or supports the preservation of the way things are at the level of the family, of the community, and throughout the culture. I failed to decide quickly to step up to the woman and insist that she stop screaming expletives at her child and start actually raising in hopes that he’ll be even better than she. And in that failure, I missed an opportunity to put a new nick in the structure of the world as it is. I feel as though had she stayed around another moment I would have been past my breaking point, but as it was she stalked off quickly enough that I barely raised my voice before she was through the door. However, her child trailed behind her, and I saw that he looked squarely back at me as he was going out. In absence of having truly stood up against an example of horrible stewardship of our children, I comfort myself with the hope that the boy himself recognized my indignation for what it was, and that even as he followed his raving mother, he realized that not everybody is the same, that there are other sorts of people that he can grow into.

Suicide and Deontological Ethics

This is interesting. I’ve hit a rare breaking point in my philosophical beliefs. Yesterday, Jack Marshall wrote about Don Cornelius’ recent suicide, and today he took it as an opportunity to recall a post from years ago regarding Hunter S. Thompson having killed himself in 2005. In the first place, Marshall was making the point that the social ethics regarding suicide may have to change as a deeply flawed health care system makes the last years of people’s lives burdensome to their families and communities. But Marshall reposted his comments about Hunter S. Thompson in order to make it perfectly clear that he has an unforgiving attitude towards suicide outside of the special cases of extreme old age and infirmity.

I appreciate the pointed focus on ethics of Jack Marshall’s blog, and I read it frequently, but I find that I am often at odds with his politics, as he is quite conservative, and I am sometimes at odds with his ethical theories, as he is unambiguously utilitarian. That latter fact explains why Marshall is able to conceptualize ethics as so flexible that suicide may be wrong in every case for one generation, but circumstance-dependent in another. I have never been comfortable with the idea that the rightness or wrongness of actions can change. I don’t believe that ethics are so flighty and inconsistent, so I have always subscribed to a deontological outlook, considering actions to be right or wrong entirely unto themselves.

Thus, I disagree with Marshall about the idea that the ethic of suicide may be different in the future than it was in the past. But as it happens, I also disagree with his aggressive assessment of the current ethic. I think the cultural revulsion at the idea of taking one’s own life is overblown and lacking in compassion. Despite using the term “victim of suicide,” we frequently tend to portray such people only as perpetrators, never as victims.

Most people, Jack Marshall certainly among them, describe suicide as the ultimate selfish act, but I consider that claim to be irrational. For something to be selfish, one must be able to expect that he will personally benefit from the act, but what personal benefit can there be if the end result of the act is that you cease to be, and thus cease to be capable of either benefitting from or being harmed by anything? I would say that in all probability, suicide is generally neutral with regard to self-interest, and indeed that the vast majority of suicide victims genuinely believe that other people will either not be affected by their deaths, or will be affected positively. Thus, I would ascribe the same motivations to most or all suicides that Jack Marshall ascribes to the theoretically defensible suicides among the elderly of the future.

As far as I can tell, I’ve always felt this way, though it recent years my forgiving stance on the issue has been helped by being on the other side of it. I have contemplated suicide extensively, and while I certainly would not encourage anyone to follow through where I have held back, I also would not pass judgment on anyone who did so. There are motivations, and mental states, and circumstances to consider, and the entirety of what drives a person to forfeit his own life cannot be adequately known. But I suppose that the essential reason to give a suicide victim the benefit of the doubt is an ethic of live and let live, live and let die. That is, there’s something to be said for the idea that one’s life is one’s own to either hold onto or cast off. And since I don’t believe in utilitarianism, the incidental, secondary consequences of suicide are not sufficient cause to judge it as unethical.

But my breaking point comes of realizing that it’s hard to make deontology mesh with attitude that says suicide might be okay. After all, my aversion to utilitarianism is clarified by any thought experiment in which murder is made okay by the promise that it will save other lives. Now, that’s the very thing that helps to convert others to utilitarianism, because it’s hard for people to imagine how a worse outcome can be associated with a better moral decision. But it is my strong intuition that we are morally culpable primarily just for our own actions, and if there are exceptions to the hierarchy of right and wrong, the entire system of morality falls apart.

I realize now that by allowing for the ethical rightness or neutrality of suicide, I am contradicting my belief that killing is wrong in its own right, rather than because of its outcomes. My natural inclination is to equate killing with murder – to think of it as an externally directed act. Yet suicide is barely different; it is an act of murder in which the same person is both victim and perpetrator. Unless I go to great lengths to explain why a self-contained act of murder is morally different from an externally directed one, it seems rationally incumbent on me to accept that suicide is wrong not only in general, but even in cases where it would end severe pain and suffering.

It’s not impossible to make that distinction. I could say that actions contain their own normative value only by virtue of their being externally directed. That’s tempting and I’ll give it some more thought, but it also seems like a manipulation of my own moral theories. To build such an exception into the concept of the intrinsic wrongness of a type of action is to approach dangerously close to utilitarianism and thus to be left with what I consider an incomprehensible moral code. And in fact, my willingness to consider circumstance in eschewing moral judgment of suicide could itself be easily labeled as utilitarian.

So it’s not easy for me to reconcile my intuitions toward suicide and self-harm with my belief in deontology. Now that the two ideas have been brought into conflict, I’m inclined to drop my existing attitude toward the specific case. The only other options are demolishing my ethical framework or twisting it to accept a contradiction, and either such action would be rationally unjustifiable. At least until I come up with a better solution, I feel compelled to declare that suicide is wrong no matter what. That extends even to the exceptions that Jack Marshall is willing to make for elderly people who feel they must take their own lives to avoid becoming a burden within the healthcare system.

However, I can see no intrinsic moral value in declining to preserve or prolong life, and that should adequately reconcile the deontological view of suicide with the utilitarian concern about becoming a societal burden. No moral imperative compels the elderly and infirm to pursue treatment, or even to actively keep themselves safe and healthy. And fortunately for my intuitions, the same goes for anyone who has motivations for suicide other than old age. It’s wrong to kill oneself, but it is not strictly wrong to accept one’s own death, to will it, or to actively pursue it.

This too is the sort of hypothetical which will drive some people fast away from deontology but that recommits me to it. It will strike others as inconsistent that euthanasia can be considered wrong while allowing yourself to die by other unnatural means is considered acceptable. But as far as I’m concerned, at a sufficiently deep level of analysis it is the only view that is consistent. And in fact it’s delightfully consistent because it appears to reconcile not only contrary intuitions but also deontological and utilitarian theories. Not only that, but it satisfies both my rationality and my romanticism. The idea that courting death can be right even as forcing it is wrong gives moral weight to the way that I hope to one day die. It means that Hunter S. Thompson, who left a suicide note lamenting the end of football season and shot himself at 67 while on the phone with his wife, is subject to ethical judgments, but that I should admire Ambrose Bierce even more than I already do for getting involved in the Mexican revolution at age seventy-one and disappearing after leaving behind a final letter that said in part:

Good-by -- if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!