Thinking back only a week or so ago, the Family Sex show was little more than a listing on
a Bristol Theatre website, and since then, a sizeable amount of attention has been drawn
to the event which intends to have adults, recruited via social media, expose themselves to
children. However, in much of the discussion on the content of the play itself, there have
been scant references to its glossary of terms and the references that do exist have
focused explicitly on the sexual content.
Except the content within the glossary is not just sexual, but political as well, with
references to anti-capitalism and white supremacy and typical leftist tropes. Much of the
content of the Family Sex Show was repugnant in its own right, but what drew me to
challenge the show (back when the only opposition to it was a few tweets) was that this
trend of the sexualisation of children and leftist politics not new but, like so many things,
existed once in academia—and now in plain sight.
A great many want the show to be an isolated incident, Guido referred to the show as
“cultural claptrap”, as though this can be parcelled away as rubbish to be chucked out, and
not a weed with roots extending into the ground we stand upon. Like it or not, many of the
most popular intellectuals of the 20th Century (Foucault, Sartre, Derrida) paved the
intellectual grounds for the Deconstructionism that terms like ‘white privilege’ grew out of,
arguing that power was generated via discourse and the role of philosophy was to ‘expose
power structures’ via deconstruction.
Looking at the list of citations by academic, you’d be forgiven for thinking that people like
Foucault managed to philosophically prove God’s existence, with more citations than
Charles Darwin, Foucault is the closest thing to an intellectual rockstar. And yet despite his
repute in academia, Foucault and all of the aforementioned figures signed a letter to
French Parliament calling for the abrogation of age of consent laws.
Removing the philosophy from the philosopher in this case is impossible, Foucault
recounts in his ‘The History of Sexuality Volume 1’, the story of a farm hand who pays a
child for “sexual favours”, and how when the village discovers this, he is subjected to an
‘authoritarian investigation’ by the community that victimises the farm hand, using this as
an example of his own beliefs. Deconstructionism and post-modernism are dual efforts to
undermine our past and reframe it as an illegitimate system of power privileging a small
few, with the same deconstructionists who argue that society privileges the views of whites
over minorities being the same deconstructionists who argue that society privileges the
views of adults over children, and deconstructs this paradigm accordingly.
What is being proposed here is an event where children are treated with a degree of
consent they do not have. Instead of the very obvious fact that children cannot consent,
and educating them on the basic scientific facts of the matter so they are aware of them,
instead we see children being taught about fetishes and treating them as though they not
only have a sexual nature, but one nuanced enough to know about and engage in things
like pegging. No limits exist for these people, because limits are perceived reinforcements
of an unjust social order in need of abolition. Shows like Cuties, the Family Sex Show, or
even more mainstream shows like Big Mouth, demonstrate how we have, as a society,
already accept many of the tenets that lead to these kinds of displays.
British society has enjoyed undoing its past, its morals, and its culture in the name of
progress and convenience. Inevitably, we’ve reached a point where it is no longer convenient to undo any more. Thinking of the social mores of the past as outmoded and celebrating a consent-based ethics is easy when want to do what you want and not be
questioned for it. Consent-based ethics immediately beg the question of who can consent,
the Family Sex Show is giving its answer: anyone, and they have the intellectuals of
Deconstructionism nodding in agreement. How can the social liberals, who already agree
so much with the Deconstructionists on every other issue, respond?
