Disturbing and Predicted

In a Public Discourse article today, Jean Lloyd, a teacher, discusses her experiences at a conference she attended years ago as a sexuality researcher. Much of the article leaves one at the edge of the shudders. At one point, Mrs. Lloyd recounts another attendees comment:

To further the discussion, another researcher mentioned a situation where an entire school sports team of teenaged boys received fellatio from a group of twelve-year-old schoolgirls. According to the speakers, this was perfectly good and healthy, as long as neither the girls nor the boys were coerced but rather were exercising their own rights to sexual agency and fulfilling their sexual desires. The only real problem was how a buttoned-down society reacted to it.

Is this not all of it? The entirety of the modern view of sex? Of emotion? The only important impediment is consent (expressed as lack of coercion), the only critical component is sexual desire, the only problem is prudishness. Surely, others may dress it up more carefully to conceal and mollify; as Chesterton noted when dealing with eugenicists:

Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly.

Can one not be struck by the parallels with Alduous Huxley's world?

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed. (Chapter 3).

And so, in a way, the religious and secular prophecies of Humanae Vitae and Brave New World continue to show us the effects of the attempt to separate sex from reproduction, and reproduction from marriage.