Stranger in a Strange Land

“Precisely, sir! The thing that troubles me most is whether those innocents can make their pattern fit into a naughty world. Oh, it’s been tried before!—and every time the world etched them away like acid. Some of the early Christians—anarchy, communism, group marriage—why even that kiss of brotherhood has a strong primitive-Christian flavor to it. That might be where Mike picked it up, since all the forms he uses are openly syncretistic, especially that Earth-Mother ritual.” Jubal frowned. “If he picked that up from primitive christianity—and not just from kissing girls, which he enjoys, I now—then I would expect men to kiss men, too.”

Ben snorted. “I held out on you—they do. But it’s not a pansy gesture. I got caught once; after that I managed to duck.”

“So? It figures. The Oneida Colony was much like Mike’s ‘Nest’; it managed to last quite a while but in a low population density—not as an enclave in a resort city. There have been many others, all with the same sad story: a plan for perfect sharing and perfect love, glorious hopes and high idea—followed by persecution and eventual failure.” Jubal sighed. “I was worried about Mike before—now I’m worried about all of them.”

“You’re worried? How do you think I feel? Jubal, I can’t accept your sweetness and light theory. What they are doing is wrong.”

“So? Ben, it’s that last incident that sticks in your craw.”

“Well… maybe. Not entirely.”

“Mostly. Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem because each of us has to find a solution pragmatically compatible with a preposterous, utterly unworkable, and evil public code of so-called ‘morals.’ Most of us know, or suspect, that the public code is wrong, and we break it. Nevertheless we pay Danegeld by giving it lip service in public and feeling guilty about breaking it in private. Willy-nilly, that code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck. You think of yourself as a free soul, I know, and you break that evil code yourself—but faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you unconsciously tested it against that same Judeo-Christian code which you consciously refuse to obey. All so automatically that you retched… and believed thereby—and continue to believe—that your reflex proved that you were ‘right’ and they were ‘wrong.’ Faugh! I’d as like use trial by ordeal as use your stomach to test guilt. All your stomach can reflect are prejudices trained into you before you acquired reason.”

“What about your stomach?”

“Mine is as stupid as yours—but I don’t let it rule my brain. I can at least see the beauty of Mike’s attempt to devise an ideal human ethic and applaud his recognition that such a code must be founded on ideal sexual behavior, even though it calls for changes in sexual mores so radical as to frighten most people—including you. For that I admire him—I should nominate him for the Philosophical Society. Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code—family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy that troubled you so, restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, et cetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details—even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an ‘obscene’ sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than failure to abide by the code.

“Now comes the Man from Mars, looks at this sacrosanct code—and rejects it in toto. I do not grasp exactly what Mike’s sexual code is, but it is clear from what little you told me that it violates the laws of every major nation on Earth and would outrage ‘right-thinking’ people of every major faith—and most agnostics and atheists, too. And yet this poor boy—”

“Jubal, I repeat—he’s not a boy, he’s a man—”

“Is he a ‘man?’ I wonder. This poor ersatz Martian is saying, by your own report, that sex is a way to be happy together. I go along with Mike this far: sex should be a means of happiness. The worst thing about sex is that we use it to hurt each other. It ought never to hurt; it should bring happiness, or, at the very least, pleasure. There is no good reason why it should ever be anything less.