Sexual freedom

Gertrude Stein's famous line about roses was intended to heighten the reality of the sense of a rose in the imagination of her reader. These days, the modern psycho-sophist has other aims. Aiming to regain control of a debate that is lost when normal discourse and normal sanity prevails, the psycho-sophists invent specialized terms that mean something quite different than one might expect from the meanings of the words from which they are composed. Hearing such terms, one has the sense of unreality conveyed in a play by Eugène Ionesco.

Examples that spring to mind are "sexual freedom" when referring to slavery to a pattern of sexual addiction and "reproductive health" when referring to methods of temporary or permanent sterilization. These terms are in general use today, and few people think twice about them, or even once.

It seems, however, that the psycho-sophists are constantly at work, redefining terms more to their heart's desire. The most amazing redefinition I have yet heard of is one for chastity. The 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary defines chastity as "The state of being chaste; purity of body; freedom from unlawful sexual intercourse." Of course that definition won't work today, because what used to be called fornication is no longer considered unlawful. Today, we would preserve the original intent of the meaning of this word by terming chastity to be "freedom from sexual intercourse outside of marriage," and we would now have to further qualify the term "marriage" as heterosexual. Furthermore, to get at the root of the meaning of the term, we would further qualify "chastity" as including freedom from autoeroticism.

There are people who consider the continuation of this definition as repugnant, so they have come up with something, as the people of Monte Python used to say, "completely different." Consider the following definition proposed for chastity: "Chastity is the condition of being affectively present and available to all." It strikes me that this is similar in spirit to using the term "rose" to refer to a cumquat.