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In which I defend ‘Girls Around Me’ and Public-By-Default in general

For those people that don’t know:  A few days ago John Browlee discovered and wrote about an iPhone/iPad app called ‘Girls Around Me‘.  The app does a mash-up of publicly accessible data from Facebook and foursquare, together with Google Maps, to show you girls that had checked in to locations near where you are and some information about them.  John was not amused:

[T]he girls (and men!) shown in Girls Around Me all had the power to opt out of this information being visible to strangers, but whether out of ignorance, apathy or laziness, they had all neglected to do so. This was all public information.  […]

“It’s not, really, that we’re all horrified by what this app does, is it?” I asked, finishing my drink. “It’s that we’re all horrified by how exposed these girls are, and how exposed services like Facebook and Foursquare let them be without their knowledge.” […]

This is an app you should download to teach the people you care about that privacy issues are real, that social networks like Facebook and Foursquare expose you and the ones you love, and that if you do not know exactly how much you are sharing, you are as easily preyed upon as if you were naked.

Picking up on John’s piece, Charlie Stross took the ball and ran with it, extrapolating out into the truly horrific:

It’s easy to imagine how we could make something worse than “Girls Around Me”—something much worse. Facebook encourages us to disclose a wide range of information about ourselves, including our religion and a photograph. Religion is obvious: “Yids Among Us” would obviously be one of the go-to tools of choice for Neo-Nazis. As for skin colour, ethnicity identification from face images is out there already. Want to go queer bashing? There’s an algorithm out there for guessing sexual orientation based on the network graph of the target’s facebook friends. It’s probably possible to apply this sort of data mining exercise to determine whether a woman has had an abortion or is pro-choice.

In the worst case, it’s possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy, not only by making it easy for users to track them down, but by making it easy for users to identify each other and form ad-hoc lynch mobs. (Hence my reference to the Rwandan Genocide earlier. Think it couldn’t happen? Look at Iran and imagine an app written for the Basij to make it easy to identify dissidents and form ad-hoc goon squads to proactively hunt them down. Or any other organization in the post-networked world that has a social role corresponding to the Red Guards.)

Not surprisingly, people freaked out.  Foursquare pulled the app’s access rights to their data, Apple pulled the app from the iTunes store altogether and — no doubt to the great relief of people like John and Charlie — a lot of people started talking about internet privacy in an era of social networking (e.g. a BBC News article).

Both John and Charlie emphasise that their concern is not with the app itself, per se, but with the approach to privacy (public by default) built-in to social networking websites’ very business plans that allowed the app to exist in the first place.

I want to defend that approach to privacy.

Let me repeat the first bit of that John Brownlee quote:

[T]he girls (and men!) shown in Girls Around Me all had the power to opt out of this information being visible to strangers, but whether out of ignorance, apathy or laziness, they had all neglected to do so.

Here is Marie Connelly, one of the girls that John apparently had around him, in response to the whole kerfuffle:

I have a problem [with this], because I’m not ignorant, apathetic, or lazy.

I’ve made a choice to participate publicly in the internet. I try to be careful about what I make accessible and what I share with everyone, and for the most part, I think I’ve found a balance that works pretty well for me. […]

The whole tenor of this, however, has been that if you are in this app, if you have been posting information publicly, especially if you’re a woman, you’re doing something wrong. […]

Checking in at your office, or a coffee shop, or The Independent (which is a great bar, by the way), whether publicly or not, doesn’t mean you’re “asking” to get stalked, or mugged, or anything else. People generally don’t ask for bad things to happen to them, and by and large, I don’t really believe anyone deserves to have something bad happen to them.

Kashmire Hill captured the same point in her excellently titled post, “The Reaction To ‘Girls Around Me’ Was Far More Disturbing Than The ‘Creepy’ App Itself“:

  • All men are creepy stalkers looking for new digital aids to help them catch and rape women.
  • All women are damsels-in-distress who have no idea how much danger they are exposing themselves to with every Foursquare check-in.
  • “You’re too public with your digital data, ladies,” may be the new “your skirt was too short and you had it coming.”

Those are my takeaways from the past week’s furor over “Girls Around Me.” […]

Many of us have become comfortable putting ourselves out there publicly in the hopes of making connections with friends and with strangers, whether through Facebook, Twitter, or OKCupid. It’s only natural that this digital openness will transfer over to the ‘real world,’ and that we will start proactively projecting our digital selves to facilitate in-person interactions. (For example, KLM is now allowing passengers to link their digital identities to their seats on the plane so that people can choose seatmates accordingly.) […]

In rejecting and banishing the app, we’re  choosing to ignore the publicity choices these women have made … in the name of keeping them safe … If you extend this kind of thinking ‘offline,’ we would be calling on all women to wear burkas so potential rapists and stalkers don’t spot them on the streets and follow them home.

I’m sorry, my friends, but I think apps like ‘Girls Around Me’ are the future … We don’t fear making connections with strangers; we crave it. […]

Yes, think about your privacy settings. They’re important. But critics, also remember that some of us have thought about our privacy settings, chosen accordingly, and don’t mind showing up on geo-mapping apps. We’re not all damsels-in-distress going pale at the thought of being seen in public places and digital spaces.

I couldn’t possibly agree more.

I’m happy to require by law that all websites that gather personal information give plain-English explanations of how your information might be used under each setting.  I’m also happy to be very, very angry at Facebook for changing their policy in such a way as to change your settings from “keep this private” to “make this public” after you made an explicit choice (although, to be fair, social networks are still a new industry and should consequently be granted at least some leeway for their frequent adjustments).

But there’s a much bigger topic here.  Whether or not public exposure has negative consequences is a social norm, based on co-ordination effects.  It’s socially acceptable in America for girls to wear bikinis at the beach, for girls in France to go topless at the beach and for people to use mixed-sex saunas and public showers throughout Germany and the Scandinavian countries.  It’s not as though they have massive rates of rape or sexual abuse.

The reason I see no problem with apps like ‘Girls Around Me’ is because I believe they represent the emergence of a new social norm that supports and encourages the public sharing of information about yourself, perhaps even a step towards David Brin’s Transparent Society.  Disagree with me?  Well, I would argue that of those people that (a) are doing it; (b) don’t realise they’re doing it; and (c) would actually care if they were to discover they’re doing it, the vast majority are over the age of 30.  In other words, this is a generational development.

Here’s an excellent example of that generational change.  Earlier this year the NY Times wrote about teenagers’ new habit of sharing their passwords with their (boy|girl)friends:

Young couples have long signaled their devotion to each other by various means — the gift of a letterman jacket, or an exchange of class rings or ID bracelets. Best friends share locker combinations.

The digital era has given rise to a more intimate custom. It has become fashionable for young people to express their affection for each other by sharing their passwords to e-mail, Facebook and other accounts. Boyfriends and girlfriends sometimes even create identical passwords, and let each other read their private e-mails and texts. […]

In a 2011 telephone survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 30 percent of teenagers who were regularly online had shared a password with a friend, boyfriend or girlfriend. The survey, of 770 teenagers aged 12 to 17, found that girls were almost twice as likely as boys to share. And in more than two dozen interviews, parents, students and counselors said that the practice had become widespread.

Knowing their audience, though, they couldn’t help being a little worried about it (and, of course, nothing sells newspapers like sex):

Rosalind Wiseman, who studies how teenagers use technology and is author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” a book for parents about helping girls survive adolescence, said the sharing of passwords, and the pressure to do so, was somewhat similar to sex.

Sharing passwords, she noted, feels forbidden because it is generally discouraged by adults and involves vulnerability. And there is pressure in many teenage relationships to share passwords, just as there is to have sex. […]

Ms. Cole’s mother, Patti, 48, a child psychologist, said she believed her daughter would be more judicious now about sharing a password. But, more broadly, she thinks young people are sometimes drawn to such behavior as they might be toward sex, in part because parents and others warn them against doing so.

“What worries me is we haven’t done a very good job at stopping kids from having sex,” she said. “So I’m not real confident about how much we can change this behavior.”

Speaking of sex and intergenerational concerns, this whole affair reminds me enormously of a post I wrote back in 2008 about the increasing public acceptability of sex for it’s own sake:

These developments are not without their concerns. Sara Montague – a presenter on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme – is clearly concerned, noting that much of the movement seems grounded in the hope of empowerment and self-confidence, but worrying that this serves indirectly to promote eating disorders among girls and the acceptance of rape among boys.

The main problem that Montague faces is that for most people, embracing public sexuality is non-harmful – not every girl gets an eating disorder and not every boy contemplates forcing himself on a girl – and is undertaken by choice. Montague is, in essence, faced with Douglas Adams’ cow that wants to be eaten. […]

By all means work to increase support for those burdened excessively by concerns of body image. By all means increase support to rape victims and ease the ability of the state to bring those guilty to justice. But that doesn’t mean we should fight to stop it altogether if people choose it freely and feel that it helps them, or even if they just enjoy it.

Anyway, that brings me back to ‘Girls Around Me’.  It — and other apps like it — really are designed to be fun, to let Kashmir and people like her make connections with strangers.  Yes, of course Facebook and Foursquare can be used by creepy stalkers and Rwanda 2.0 ethnic cleansers.  So what?  I have a 20cm Global Cook knife beside me right now.  I could use it to cut chunks out of hipsters, but that doesn’t make it flawed by design.  My credit card can be used to fund the KKK, but it’s also useful for other stuff, too.  There’s nothing wrong (and there should be nothing illegal) with having information.  It’s only when somebody acts on information in a manner harmful to others that we should care.  ‘Girls Around Me’ was about sharing information; how people act on that information is up to them.

Let me finish with this incredibly relevant and, as ever, excellent comic from xkcd:

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To what extent should the media mention that somebody is from a minority?

It turns out that Tim Cook, the new CEO of Apple, is gay.

Felix Salmon suggests that this makes him the most powerful gay man on earth (an idea of which I am sceptical – surely at least one head of state among all the nations of the world has been queer at some point) and that the media ought to be celebrating this fact, or at least making mention of it:

Personally, I don’t care.  Why should I?  Fundamentally, the only relevant facts are those that inform me about his ability to do his job, and knowing whether he’s a member of ethnic group X, holds religious view Y or is turned on by Z is of no use in that regard.

In a completely post-bigotry world, those things might (or might not!) be included in a puff piece that wanted to tell you about Tim Cook, the man, as a sort of background colour (“raised a Catholic, Mary-Anne’s atheism was a source of family friction in her early adulthood, but …”), but they’d play no part in people’s opinion of him as a manager and so would never appear in a serious article about the future direction of whichever company he works for.

Salmon’s point, I believe, is that (a) we’re not in a post-bigotry world and so there is a lead-by-example case for publicising Cook’s sexuality in the same way that people discussed that Hillary Clinton is female and Barack Obama is black; and (b) even if we were, the media is going out of its way to make no mention of it even in the puff pieces, that it’s going out of its way to self-gag and so, ironically, subtly reinforcing the closet.

I dunno.  I think that stuff like this is only relevant to public discourse — even puff-piece writing — if at some point it helped shape the subject’s motivations in life.  Furthermore, I believe that for at least some queer people now, and eventually for all of them, their sexuality (will have) played absolutely no role in shaping their motivations in anything other than who to look for in a partner.

As such, I’m instinctively sceptical of a need to draw attention to it.  Not even the puffiest of puff pieces would spend time discussing people’s preferences over ice cream flavours unless the subject made a point of bringing up their obsession with chocolate-mint.

When it comes to playing a role as a societal leader, I can’t help but feel that it’s up to Mr. Cook to decide for himself.

Dani and I rewatched “Good Will Hunting” last night.  I think there’s a parallel with the kid who’s a genius.  I always get angry when Ben Affleck’s character (the well-meaning, but idiot friend) tells Matt Damon’s character (the genius) that “you don’t owe it to yourself man, you owe it to me … ‘Cause I’d do fuckin’ anything to have what you got. So would any of these fuckin’ guys. It’d be an insult to us if you’re still here in 20 years” [IMDB].  It’s Rawls’ veil of ignorance turned arse-end backwards.  It’s also complete rubbish.

I can see a moral argument for why Rawls’ veil implies that society at large should help people who drew particularly shitty numbers, but why should any one individual be required to do something just because they drew a particularly awesome number?  The whole goddamn point of Rawls’ veil is that nobody consents to it in the first place and so, as a society, we ought to not force people into the pigeon-hole that the lottery put them in.  Just because you were born into a poor family doesn’t mean you have to stay poor.   Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you have to like basketball.  Just because you have an IQ of 180 doesn’t mean you must do research.  Messers Affleck and Damon need to reread “Brave New World”.

Nobody can deny that Barrack Obama is black, but the extent to which he makes speeches to the black community declaring that they can be black, proud and successful is entirely up to him.  People working to bring about racial equality might feel he has an obligation, but he really doesn’t.

If Tim Cook wants to try to improve the acceptance of gay people in society at large, he can, but the idea of saying that he ought to just because he’s gay himself is illiberal.

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The dude at Macquarie …

The Reserve Bank of Australia just decided, somewhat unexpectedly, to keep interest rates on hold.  Channel 7 news needed to spin it into a story, though, so they did the usual thing of getting a talking head from the mythical (in Australia, at least) Macquarie Bank to say something.  Unfortunately, there was a guy in the background who chose that moment to look at topless pictures of Miranda Kerr.  Here’s the clip.  The guy starts looking at them at the 1:00 mark.

I don’t think he’ll be fired.

It looks like he was opening images from an email and that gives him a little cover.  If the sender was a Macquarie employee then they will have some serious problems, it being considered worse to send “offensive” material than to receive it.

The dude will probably get an official reprimand and he might not get the same pay rise as others in his team next time ’round (at the least, he was just demonstrably slacking off from work), but I think that’ll be about it for him.

I think that Macquarie will look at their email and web-browsing policy again and consider increasing the paranoid parameter of their filters.  There are plenty of algorithms for detecting skin tones in images and I’m 99% sure that they’ve been incorporated into email filters. It’s just a question of turning them on.

I think they’ll also reconsider their policy on having their talking heads stand in front of an office like that. I know they do it to look more important — I’ve taken 3 minutes out from my dazzlingly busy schedule to explain that your mortgage payments won’t change today, but will probably go up in a month or two. Gosh, don’t I look impressive? — but exactly this sort of stuff is the risk with which it comes.  I’ve seen other stupid things going on behind US presenters, so I don’t think they’ll stop the practice, but they might consider staging the background a little more than just sticking a big cardboard Macquarie sign in there.

In the end, it just shows what everybody working in an open-plan office already knows: the exact position and alignment of your desk is of crucial value.

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Demand for sex in Japan

Mentioning sex in a blog post is a great way to generate some interesting traffic.  The last time I filled some time writing about it (on the rise of public sexuality, the rationality of prostitution and the extent of human trafficking), I got hits via some very odd queries on Google.

Titillation aside,  prostitution is a tremendously interesting topic in economics .  As John Hempton discussed initially in July 2008 and more extensively in May 2009, the price of prostitution is enormously flexible, unlike prices (and wages) in most industries.  That means that when, as John discussed, a country is operating under a fixed exchange rate and only prices can adjust in response to a macroeconomic shock, the sex industry will almost certainly move both first and furthest.

But because prostitution has very flexible wages and prices, that also makes it a candidate proxy for estimating changes in the potential output of an economy — the output that would occur if all prices were perfectly flexible.  (Remember there are differences between potential and natural levels of output)

I mention this after reading that the Bank of Japan is conducting surveys to estimate changes in demand in the Japanese sex industry:

The survey of sex shops and restaurants was designed to better gauge demand for services, an area of the economy that’s becoming more important as exports slump. “Any study into services is most welcome,” said Martin Schulz, senior economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo. “We’ve got hundreds of studies on exports and manufacturing. What’s needed is creative thinking on services and if that includes brothels, so be it.” … While services including restaurants and retailing make up about 60 percent of gross domestic product, Japan’s economy has risen and fallen with the strength of its exports.

(Hat tip:  Tyler Cowen).

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How bad is human trafficking?

Adam pointed me to this review in the New Statesman by Brendan O’Neil of “Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry” (Foyles, Amazon) by Laura María Agustín. Here is the core of the review:

Agustín points out that some anti-trafficking activists depend on numbers produced by the CIA (not normally considered a reliable or neutral font of information when it comes to international issues), even though the CIA refuses to “divulge its research methods”. The reason why the “new slavery” statistics are so high is, in part, that the category of trafficking is promiscuously defined, sometimes disingenuously so. Some researchers automatically label migrant women who work as prostitutes “trafficked persons”, basing their rationale on the notion that no woman could seriously want to work in the sex industry. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women argues that “all children and the majority of women in the sex trade” should be considered “victims of trafficking”. As Agustín says, such an approach “infantilises” migrant women, “eliminating any notion that women who sell sex can consent”. Ironically, it objectifies them, treating them as unthinking things that are moved around the world against their will.

The reality is very different, the author says. Most migrant women, including those who end up in the sex industry, have made a clear decision to leave home and take their chances overseas. They are not “passive victims” who must be “saved” by anti-trafficking campaigners and returned to their country of origin. Rather, frequently, they are headstrong and ambitious women who migrate in order to escape “small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets and suffocating families”. Shocking as it might seem to the feminist social workers, caring police people and campaigning journalists who make up what Agustín refers to as the “rescue industry”, she has discovered that some poor migrant women “like the idea of being found beautiful or exotic abroad, exciting desire in others”. I told you it was controversial.

One of Agustín’s chief concerns is that the anti-trafficking crusade is restricting international freedom of movement. What presents itself as a campaign to protect migrants from harm is actually making their efforts to flee home, to find work, to make the most of their lives in often difficult and unforgiving circumstances, that much harder. She writes about the “rescue raids” carried out by police and non-governmental organisations, in which even women who vociferously deny having been trafficked may be arrested, imprisoned in detention centres and sent back home – for the benefit of their own mental stability, of course. It used to be called repatriation; now, dolled up in therapeutic lingo, it is called “rescue”.

For all its poisonous prejudices, the old racist view of migrants as portents of crime and social instability at least treated them as autonomous, sentient, albeit “morally depraved”, adults. By contrast, as the author illustrates, the anti-trafficking lobby robs migrants of agency and their individual differences, and views them as a helpless, swaying mass of thousands who must be saved by the more savvy and intelligent women of the west and by western authorities.

It’s fascinating stuff and goes along with what I’ve previously said about prostitution:

[Slavery] aside (and that’s what people trafficking is – slave trading), you cannot simply save or rescue a prostitute. It is not a problem, if you consider it one, to be tackled. It is not something that you solve, once and for all. Prostitutes are people like everyone else and like everyone else, they think on the margin and respond to incentives.

In that entry I labelled human trafficking as slavery and I stand by that. Nevertheless, it would appear from Agustín’s work that the scale of the trafficking problem may be smaller than we commonly believe.

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Thinking on the margin: prostitution (UPDATED)

One of the most important ideas in economics is that people think and act on the margin. By that I mean that we make our decisions as if we were looking at the costs and benefits of just one more. Just one more slice of pizza. Just one more minute on the bike in the gym. Just one more share of some stock bought. If we reckon the benefits of that one more to be greater than the cost of it, irrespective of what has come before and what may come after, we’ll typically do it. The point is that we optimise, or at least act as though we optimise. We may only optimise locally instead of globally (that last slice of pizza may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s not much good for my health in general), but it’s still what we do.

The idea is by no means unique to economics. There is, at the least, an entire branch of mathematics devoted to it. But economists just love to point out that optimisation – and, therefore, thinking on the margin – applies to human behaviour just as well as it does to equations on a blackboard, and that realisation can sometimes lead to surprising, even counter-intuitive observations with serious consequences for public policy.

As I’ve mentioned before (here and here), Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh are currently finishing a paper on street prostitution in Chicago. They were able to study the provision of prostitution services during a predictable demand shock and discovered that the supply of prostitution services is rather elastic: a 63% increase in quantity was associated with only a 30% increase in price. More importantly, that increase came on three margins: an increase in supply from existing prostitutes (who, on average, only work 13 hours a week), a temporary in-migration of prostitutes from other areas and the temporary entry into the market of women who are not ordinarily willing to perform sex acts for money. Levitt and Venkatesh estimate that 43 of the 63% increase in the number of tricks came from existing prostitutes in the area and the remaining 20 from the in-migrating prostitutes and the temporary market entrants.

That third margin bears highlighting. Typical thinking about the topic holds that the choice to become a prostitute, if it is a choice at all, is a discrete [update:  I originally had “discreet”.  It’s certainly that 🙂] one; that women and a very few men first choose – or are compelled – to be a prostitute and only then consider what money they might make. The idea that some women might choose to start or stop being a prostitute in the face of a ten, five or even one dollar an hour change in the money available doesn’t make sense in this thinking. I believe that the reason for this is founded in a moral abhorrence at the very idea of prostitution – the belief that in addition to any social or economic conditions faced by prostitutes, the act of prostitution itself is immoral. Since it has become au fait, among Western intelligentsia at least, to never accuse people of direct moral failure, it has also become the norm to conclude that all prostitutes were misled or forced into their position and thus need to be rescued. The terrible issue of people trafficking naturally lends support to this idea.

I do not want to belittle the tragedy and travesty that is people trafficking. It is a truly awful phenomenon and the fact that it exists at all, let alone in countries that are supposed to be based on freedom of the individual as a founding tenet, is abhorrent. It needs to be stamped out.

My concern is to highlight that not all prostitutes are forced into their profession. There really are women who, faced with an outside option of $7/hour, are not willing to be a prostitute for $25/hour, but are willing to do so for $35/hour. I have no doubt at all that – and this is important – the same statement would be true if you multiplied all of those figures by 10.

The upshot of this is that, slaves aside (and that’s what people trafficking is – slave trading), you cannot simply save or rescue a prostitute. It is not a problem, if you consider it one, to be tackled. It is not something that you solve, once and for all. Prostitutes are people like everyone else and like everyone else, they think on the margin and respond to incentives. If your concern is that prostitutes live in poverty, that they are compelled into their work by economic hardship, then you must work to improve their outside options. But at the same time, you should recognise that you will not be stopping prostitution from happening; you will simply be raising the minimum asking price. That will lower the quantity demanded, but it will never remove it altogether.

Update (5 April 2008):

See my new entry here. It would appear that maybe even the figures for human trafficking are overblown.

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Sex for free

Following on from my earlier post noting (via Andrew Leigh) that Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh have been researching street prostitution in Chicago, Andrew managed to find a link to a preliminary draft of the paper. You can find it here. Andrew also noted that:

Levitt cited evidence that in the 1930s-50s, a very large share of men had their first sexual experience with a prostitute. With the rise of premarital sex, this is no longer true, so the market that’s left today is much seedier than in the past.

This would seem to imply that early sexual encounters once represented a sizable, or at least influential, portion of demand, which is interesting in itself.

Many modern-day feminists despair at the way that the so called “sexual revolution” has developed and I do wonder where the current arc of embracing sexuality will stabilise.

Here is a recent story from ABC News being shocked (shocked!) to discover that college parties are both racier and boozier than they used to be at some unspecified time in the past. They report (and fret) that girls seem to drink more at themed parties, where they also tend to wear less.

Here is a story about the merging of reality television and the public acceptability of sex for it’s own sake. A Czech brothel is offering it’s services for free in exchange for the clients’ permission to broadcast the event over the internet.

I suspect that the Czech offering is just the latest in a recent push for a form of authenticity or believability in pornography. It seems to go hand-in-hand with an increase in the popularity of amateur porn, which has two broad sub-categories: the professionally arranged and the truly amateur.

Truly amateur pornography, where the participants film or photograph themselves and share the material for free is arguably the ultimate sharing of the self in the web 2.0 paradigm [1]. It is a logical extension of the attention-seeking self-affirmation that we see in people’s embracing of a public side to their sexuality.

Professional outfits that seek out amateurs who are willing to be filmed (possibly for free) and then offer the material in the traditional business model of internet porn (give out teaser snippets for free and charge for the complete set) , seem to be the adult industry’s response to this shifting demand. In a way, the Czech brothel is just a new branch of this genre.

These developments are not without their concerns. Sara Montague – a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme – is clearly concerned, noting that much of the movement seems grounded in the hope of empowerment and self-confidence, but worrying that this serves indirectly to promote eating disorders among girls and the acceptance of rape among boys.

The main problem that Montague faces is that for most people, embracing public sexuality is non-harmful – not every girl gets an eating disorder and not every boy contemplates forcing himself on a girl – and is undertaken by choice. Montague is, in essence, faced with Douglas Adams’ cow that wants to be eaten. [2]

There is a saying that seeks to advise against supporting or encouraging prostitution: “No little girl ever says that when she grows up, she wants to be a prostitute.” The idea is a variation on Rawls‘ “veil of ignorance” and implicitly argues that the framing of a choice is of vital importance: that given a wider range of options than those she faces, no woman would choose to be a prostitute.

Montague may argue that just as the prostitute is compelled into her profession by a narrowing of her options, people are lead to an acceptance of public sexuality because of social conditioning. In her article she highlights the flood of media imagery seemingly designed to associate female success with sexiness. In other words, Montague is pointing out that Adams’ cow was genetically engineered to want to be eaten and asking if the cow then truly had a free choice. That question, of course, is moot when considering the cow in front of you. Its preferences may have been implanted, but as a conscious entity, you have to respect it’s choices. At most, you can try to stop future cows from being interfered with.

But to make the same argument for public sexualisation is still predicated on the idea that it is inherently a bad thing. I am not in any way trying to belittle the tragedy of eating disorders or defend the horror of rape, but the point is to weigh the benefits against the costs in aggregate. There is a parallel with opening a country up to trade and allowing jobs to be “lost” to, say, China. It is true that some people will lose their jobs and for them, the pain is tremendous; but it is also true that the vast majority of people experience a small improvement in their material lives because of the cheaper products. It is almost always the case that in aggregate, the latter outweighs the former and the social ideal is to open up to trade but have those that benefit compensate those that suffer.

The same, I think, applies to the progress of public sexualisation. By all means work to increase support for those burdened excessively by concerns of body image. By all means increase support to rape victims and ease the ability of the state to bring those guilty to justice. But that doesn’t mean we should fight to stop it altogether if people choose it freely and feel that it helps them, or even if they just enjoy it.

[1] Yes, I hate that word too; but what else should I have said?

[2] In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Foyles, Waterstones, Amazon), Adams had his characters encounter a cow in a restaurant that wanted to be eaten, going so far as to recommend particular parts of it’s body.