By John Ince

Do you like sex?

Seems like a stupid question.

Of course you like sex. Everyone likes it. That is why our society is obsessed by it.

Wrong.

Here at the Sex Party, we have a contrarian view. We think that most folks in our culture are secretly frightened of the organs between our legs, and the things we do with them.

Yes, that is a downer idea, but please hear me out.

We think that sexuality in our culture is mostly bravado. Trumped-up enthusiasm that sits on top of a ton of insecurity.

And it shows up not just in people’s private lives, but on the public stage, such as the bizarre controversy that is happening in Manitoba right now.

It involves a senior female judge who has had to step aside from her post because sexual photos of her taken many years ago appeared on the Internet before her appointment as a judge, until they were recently removed.

Nobody is alleging the sexual acts in the photos, or the photos themselves or the publication of the photos, depicted anything unlawful.

The problem with the photos is that they showed a judge as an overtly sexual being.

Merely for exhibiting a playful sexual appetite, the poor judge is now the object of righteous scorn from a host of legal experts.

Get this from Prof. Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, as quoted by CBC: If a member of the legal community were to pose for risqué pictures, even in the privacy of their own home, it would be “wildly imprudent and reckless behavior for a lawyer, nevermind for a potential or future judge”.

And: “it is inconceivable that a lawyer who discloses this would become a judge.”

Or hear this from another legal expert, Annalise Acorn, a law and ethics professor at the University of Alberta: “I don’t think that a person would have the authority to judge others”¦when they had that kind of compromising materials about themselves out in the public sphere.”

So according to these recognized experts in ethics, just by taking sexually explicit photos of yourself, or having them published anywhere, you are not fit for the high office of a judge.

Photos of a judge expressing himself in other recreational ways, such as playing tennis or the piano or riding a motorcycle would elicit no ethical issue to these folks.

But disclosing sexual recreation would bar them from the bench.

In our society we have no secret fears about playing golf or piano or riding a motorcycle. And so judges who do those activities, and publicly, suffer no stigma.

But society does have anxiety about sexuality; and because of that, we are deeply troubled that a person in authority should be outed as an overtly sexual being.