On Moral Inarticulacy

A brief follow-up to Tuesday’s post about how we are living in “morally inarticulate” times. In today’s New York Times, Pamela Paul compellingly and persuasively argues that we should not abandon the term “prostitution” for the supposedly more dignified and dignifying term “sex worker.” Calling a whole toxic ecosystem that feeds on poverty, addiction, violence, lust, and predation “sex work,” Paul argues, does not change the reality. This is not a job like any other and we shouldn’t describe it as such.

I could hardly agree more enthusiastically. One need not really think much farther than to ask the question, “Would I want my daughter to consider ‘sex work’ as a viable career path, no different than engineering or plumbing?” I would hope the answer is too obvious to be worth stating.

The strange part, for me, was near the end of the article when Paul quoted a certain Alexander Delgado, the director of public policy at PACT, an organization working to end child trafficking and exploitation:

We are not here out of a sense of morality about sex. The sex trade is a place where violence occurs and not a place where work happens.

If I understand this person correctly (and it’s entirely possible that I don’t, because the quote sits oddly in the article and it is not immediately clear what it’s purpose is), they seem to be saying, “Don’t worry, we’re not making any moral judgment on sex itself—we’re all on board with the sexual liberation train, it’s the violence that we’re concerned with.” Um. Ok. So, if violence could somehow be subtracted from the equation, we’d still be fine with buying and selling bodies for (almost exclusively) male pleasure?

The entire article is a moral argument about sex. It relies upon profoundly moral assumptions about the nature of sex, its connection to love and intimacy, the damage that is done to often very young girls when this connection is ignored, and the fact that purchasing human bodies for sexual gratification should not be viewed as akin to buying a slab of meat over the counter. I would even argue that this is a moral argument that relies upon transcendent categories related to the dignity of human life and of human bodies (as opposed to the animal kingdom where sex is, well, animalistic), but that’s probably another post.

At any rate, the fact that there is a felt need to assure readers, “Don’t worry, we’re not talking about the morality of sex” is indicative of our morally inarticulate moment. We try to assure ourselves that we’re not talking about morality even as we moralize.