When I was at school, we once read a short story about a world that made everyone equal by giving everyone a disability.
For example, if you were intelligent, you had to wear a buzzer in your ear that stopped you from thinking about something too much, if you were strong and athletic, you had to wear weights to drag you down – everyone was equally beaten down.
Of course, this was a story about a ridiculous society, that none of us would want to live in. Or so you would think. But more and more recently, it seems people are arguing for such a society.
There is a lot of inequality in this world. But some people seem to think the answer is restricting more people’s freedoms, rather than granting further freedoms to others.
I came across an example of this on Twitter recently. It wasn’t an ideal example, but will suffice.
The author of said point correctly points out that there is a double standard here. Women have the freedom to appear topless in The Sun’s Page 3, but a man who wanted to get his penis out, would not be allowed to go to print.
It’s a classic case of discrimination against men.
But clearly, the solution is to increase the amount of freedom in our society by allowing a newspaper to publish a penis on its third page. Not to place equal restrictions on everyone on what we’re not allowed to publish.
Unfortunately, such attitudes, from people who would presumably like to think of themselves as progressive (though I could be entirely wrong there) actually play directly into the traditional political-religious structure that aims to control society though the suppression of human sexuality.
After all, rationally, there is nothing wrong with putting a picture of a penis in a newspaper. Almost half the world has one, it’s perfectly natural and maybe if we did it more, we wouldn’t have so many ridiculous taboos around sex and sexuality (and everyone would benefit from this, though especially the LGBT community).
So, if we’re actually trying to push a progressive agenda, do you think we could be progressive with our freedoms, rather than regressive?
EDITOR’S NOTE: The story was “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut.
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Tags: equality, gender, genitals, page 3, sex, the sun
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2012 at 11:05 am and is filed under Religion & Politics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.