Consent Is Not a Moral Standard

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In recent segments on the Balenciaga scandal and Mastodon, Harry and I kicked a digital hornet’s nest by condemning illustrated child pornography. Lolicon, a manga subgenre depicting sexualised characters with child-like features and named after Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about a paedophile, is defended as “just a drawing,” and therefore, not hurting anyone. (I would suggest that if your “hobby” shares its namesake with the Lolita Express—the colloquial name for Jeffrey Epstein’s child trafficking jet—you’re doing something reprehensible.)

The same deflections are provoked by my critique of the porn industry as being based on the reciprocal exploitation of traumatised, drug-addicted performers, and the neurologically damaged addicts who consume the material at the expense of earning wholesome relationships. The defensive position, “I’m not hurting anyone,” neglects to consider creators and consumers as capable of harming themselves and being complicit in mutual self-degradation.

But while my argument seems obvious to many, modern consent-based harm-mitigation morality has numbed some to moral intuition. Worse still, this disarmament of their ability to assert and enforce disgust sensitivity allows predators to publicly indulge in their perverse paraphilias while castigating normal people for judging them because “nobody’s getting hurt.”

Sorry to break the bad news, but consent is not the be-all and end-all of morality.

Consent is one moral foundation. Morally loaded language indicates a reciprocal preference to avoid non-consensual acts. For instance, the concept of murder acknowledges that it is always non-consensual. It is always tautologically unwanted and thus an unjust incursion on autonomy. Therefore, murder is objectively immoral between humans—the only perspective from which we can speak.

But it does not follow that all consensual acts are moral. A moral system predicated on John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian Harm Principle—concerned solely with preventing one from violating the rights of another—is incapable of asserting a nourishing normative standard of what an individual should do. Let’s start with the canard, “I’m not hurting anyone.” Appeals to minimising harm are all admissions of intent to circumvent a prohibition on vice. They are arguments from a position of weakness: admitting they are overcome with the urge to indulge, but not wanting to be judged for it. The longer they are insulated from criticism, the more unjust any judgement of their indulgence feels. They begin to resent standards and those who enforce them, and organise to abolish them permanently. 

Taboos are not arbitrary; per C.S. Lewis, man is the archaeologist, not architect, of morality. The Telos, or purpose, of sex is reproduction, and to deepen intimacy to create a bond capable of raising a family. Indulging in desires that cuckold or castrate you pervert the wholesome purpose of the act. The shame implicit in appeals to harm reduction shows that the addict possesses a gut feeling that what they’re doing is bad for them. Our disgust sensitivity, which undergirds this shame, is useful in preventing us from engaging in behaviours that could lead to disease and the discontinuation of our genetic line. It is unlikely that the crusades to rid civilisation of sexual repression have made us healthier; it is better to accept inherited constraints than to resent them.

Furthermore, “what consenting adults do behind closed doors” does affect you. It affects how you interact with others. If your desires are stigmatised (some, appropriately so), you may feel shame; which decreases your confidence and self-assurance. You may either avoid admitting your shameful tastes in conversation or lie about them, making you a less integrated and more withdrawn person. This invariably leads to the creation of a generation of Men Without Chests—emasculated, digitally castrated, and incapable of defending their community when crises arise.

The contradiction between the compulsion to indulge in ignoble desires and the shame it induces drives the Leftist dialectic of normalisation. First, the nihilistic abolition of judgement: with phrases like, “Where’s the harm?” or “What I do in private is none of your business.” Then, the push for equitable consideration: “We are valid” or “You’re just a backward moralist for opposing this.” Finally, affirmation and normalisation. This is why men in leather dog costumes at Pride parades are celebrated as an education in inclusivity for impressionable children.

The addictive substances and degenerate desires create a perverse incentive to pollute civilisation. Misery loves company. Even attempting to “moderate” one’s perverse desire by using “just a drawing” eliminates the prohibition against the desire itself, but acknowledges that it is evil in practice (or, at least, carries legal consequences they wish to avoid). Permitting exposure to evil even in incremental doses still corrupts you. To poach a phrase: microdosing in degeneracy isn’t scratching an itch, but rather picking at a scab.

Addicts don’t want to stop what is bad for them, so they wage a War of Position to abolish the stigma and command normal people to suppress the intuitions that tell them what they're doing is wrong.

Social feedback is the enforcement mechanism of standards of decency, disgust, and propriety which induce shame. Abolishing these standards would disintegrate our social fabric. The end goal of this is a static, orgastic utopia of renewable-powered vicarious experiences: fully automated luxury coomerism. This is achievable only if liberated from pesky responsibilities and relationships, as these detract from time spent plugged into VR porn or the Metaverse. The consequence is Rousseau’s Savage, a person wandering alone in a society of material abundance but devoid of metaphysical significance.

Getting there requires us to be apathetic toward adults who “consent” to things that irrevocably harm them. One example from Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is porn actress Kacey Jordan, whose appearance landed her roles in “teen” scenes, before she live-streamed her suicide attempt on YouTube. The content she “consented” to produce—which drove her to near-suicide—can never be expunged from the internet. Therefore, consent cannot be rescinded for Jordan or any of the many other former porn actresses with similar testimonies of regret. 

Another case is Armin Meiwes, the “consensual cannibal”—where both he and his victim suffered a history of childhood abuse. Is it possible that malformed worldviews made these people incapable of acting in their rational self-interest? Is consent-based morality comfortable with permitting one man to eat another because both “consented?” Should we permit mentally ill adults to chemically castrate and surgically mutilate themselves in pursuit of trans identity, despite testimonies of detransitioners urging us not to? Should we allow droves of drug-dependent vagrants to destroy themselves on pavements in “progressive” cities like Portland and San Francisco because “they aren’t hurting anyone?” The government’s approach is one of harm-reduction: providing clean needles to reduce the risk of contracting diseases and decriminalising rough sleeping. Are we not acting like the priest and Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan here?

We are inextricably social animals, and our inability to permanently sever ties of sentiment and obligation provides us with a means of breaking addiction and moving past "consent" as a permission slip for self-destruction. Addiction recovery methods for smoking and alcohol have been repurposed for the substance which inspired this piece: pornography. Alcoholics Anonymous insist on cultivating gratitude and making oneself accountable to a higher power (which need not be God.) Gratitude de-egocentrises our lived experience, reframing the abandonment of vice not as a struggle that requires willpower, but as a freedom to be thankful for. Accountability to others gives us a focus to displace chasing happiness in endless consumption. The answer to moving on from mere consent may lie in this.

An incentive to delay expedient gratification could be reminding yourself of the spouse you are wasting time not earning. If you do earn them, do you want to build a Pandora's Box of personal truths you want to conceal from an intimate partner? If not, it’s best to abandon the habits you wish to keep secret, starting now. Inversely, consider the contemptible forces your consumption habits serve. Who would want you to be docile, depressed, distracted, and castrated? Whose agenda do your addictions tacitly aid?

Consent-based morality is a means by which subversives can dismantle standards which impede socialist revolution. This has the added benefit of conscripting addicts as a revolutionary constituency as they are disincentivised to reassert standards which impede indulging in vice. The similarities between the aforementioned atomised, endless consumption, and the communist false promise of the abolition of want are no mistake. Do you want to be so enslaved to your passions that you surrender before the battle has been fought?

The chain of moral causality does not end with your consent. In supporting an industry like pornography—via direct subscriptions or being a statistic to be sold to prospective advertisers—you become an agent of agendas which we otherwise find abhorrent, but on which the industry relies. The abortion industry and widespread availability of contraception, which is depleting Western sperm counts, allows porn to avoid the annoyance of inevitable unwanted babies. The industry shows similar callous indifference to children who manage to survive gestation, factoring in the exposure of minors to their content into their projected profits and marketing strategies. There's also the implicit inability to verify the consent of the participants—an uncomfortable oxymoron often overlooked by those desperate to relieve themselves. This was the case with Linda Lovelace’s infamous film Deep Throat, revealed to be a widely-screened rape scene years later. Further complications arise with the creation of deepfakes, with many photoshopped into compromising scenarios without their consent or knowledge. Nobody is “harmed” so long as the content isn’t shared, but there is a sordidness in conscripting others into your fantasies without their awareness.

Call me conspiratorial, but I suspect some algorithmically manufactured consent on behalf of the depopulation-obsessed elites concerning the most popular porn categories. Incestuous, interracial, transgender, and loli content just so happen to serve the progressive push for low birthrates and racial homogeneity. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that they wouldn't dream of making it harder for children to access this material, but then again they do want to imprison people for tweeting mean words.

Even material which features no third party degrades the creator and consumer. Per Aristotle’s Poetics, all art is a representation of reality. Its abstraction allows bad ideas to die so that we don’t risk implementing them. Tragedy is cathartic, comedy remoralising, and historics posteric. Sexual content is a tool for catharsis and a statement of intent as to what arouses the creator and consumer. Drawing a shameful fetish lowers the moral guard against harming the real-world equivalent of the subject of your fantasy. By being attracted to a drawing of an animal or child, you are not opposed to your attraction to it; you are only curtailing it to avoid legal consequences. 

This is why Loli’s comparison to violent video games is not valid. The Telos of cultivating violence is not shameful in appropriate contexts, whereas sex with a child is always evil. It is the content of the art that matters and debases the consumer. However, the comparison to video games exposes Loli users’ intent to become more immersed in the medium than they would if they were just passively consuming a novel or movie. Their desire to be close to a sexualised child is their fantasy; thus, it discredits their effort to excuse their reprehensible desires with “It’s not real; I’m not hurting anyone!” 

You wish it was real. You shouldn’t. It’s bad for you, it’s bad for the real-life equivalent of the subject, and it’s bad for civilisation. Stop it.

(It should be noted that appealing to consent for Lolicon is oxymoronic; as the child-like characters would be incapable of providing consent if they were as real as their consumers wished them to be.)

People can consent to all sorts of things which are not good for them. We cannot afford to lack compassion for people attempting to rationalise their self-destructive habits and remain apathetic to their plight. Cut past their projections and arguments in favour of atomisation. Be frank about the fact that what they are doing is bad for them and makes them less capable of earning and caring for loved ones. Offer as much counsel to them as you do condemnation of what they are addicted to.

We must abandon consent-based, harm-mitigating morality. We must, as Jordan Peterson urged, treat ourselves as someone worthy of helping. Let us move beyond consent and toward a normative morality of personal and social responsibility. Instead of asking “Where’s the harm?”, ask “Where’s the good?”

Listen to your gut. Consent alone is not enough.