As a member of the College Hill community and choker of the occasional chicken, I could not help but take an interest in the recent spate of public masturbatings. While the John Street and the copycat masturbator are doing something reprehensible, they are not necessarily doing anything unjust.
We must be clear about our aims. The purpose is not to show that the masturbators have not committed any crimes — leave that to the courts! Instead, we will see that public masturbation is not against the principles of justice, which law can come apart from. The argument clearly vindicates most types of public indecency.
We cannot pin the injustice on the fact that public masturbation violates a law. Laws should be based on what is just — not the other way around. If justice always matched law, we could never have state-sanctioned injustices.
Obviously, masturbating is not in itself unjust. Only the public nature of the act can supply the injustice. Moreover, it is masturbation's sexual nature which is purportedly to blame.
Why should this be? Sex is important to a lot of people. Seeing it outside of its expected or desired context can stir up powerful emotions. Harming people by causing these emotions to arise may be an injustice.
But not all harm is unjust. If Mary plays her music too loudly in the park, it will bother people. Mary is being a huge jerk. She has not committed an injustice.
The story does not end there. Sex produces thoughts and feelings that are different from mere annoyance. Traumatic experiences such as sexual assault can cause post-traumatic stress disorder and related maladies. An encounter with a masturbator runs a real risk of triggering traumatic memories.
This is not something to be taken lightly. A person who is triggered may face panic attacks and worse. I do not know whether anyone has been triggered by the masturbators. It is not my business to know. The reasonable possibility is enough to make public masturbation a bad idea.
Public masturbation is rightly condemned. Doing it shows a blatant disregard for the feelings of others. The masturbators are a group of real jerk-offs. But as we saw before, even in public, a really serious jerk is not unjust.
A common conception holds that justice is based on rights. An act is unjust if it violates a person's rights. What our question comes down to is this: Does each of us have a right not to be masturbated at in public? As nice as this would be, we must answer no.
Earlier I claimed that triggering experiences were different from annoyances. But the difference is one of degree, not kind. Why should an act's sexuality mark the difference between just and unjust? This can only come down to the fact that these issues are much more intense for us as people.
Good principles do not allow for arbitrary boundaries, and differences of degree smack of arbitrariness. If someone says a good movie is one that 83 out of 100 people enjoy, we laugh. There can be no reason not to say that it is 84. Similarly, exactly how much psychological harm must be incurred before we say that an act is unjust?
To recap, if public masturbation is unjust at all, it is in the same way that playing your stereo too loudly is. There still remains the question of whether these acts are unjust.
When someone goes out in public, they willfully give up some of their security in order to interact with others. Though your rights still protect you from being physically harmed, you must take your psychological health into your own hands. When you go out in public, you consent to a lot of unwanted sights, sounds and smells.
Thankfully, I do not have to show why going outside means giving a kind of consent. It is enough for me to show that this is true. And this should be obvious — again remember Mary's stereo.
Our rights do not protect us from small psychological harms. Since they do not recognize distinctions of degree, we are similarly unprotected from big and serious psychological harms. We do not have any grounds for controlling such behaviors in public. We only have that kind of power on our own property.
This means the trespassing masturbators were acting unjustly. But Matthew Hoile ("Another masturbator arrested as spree continues", Nov. 14) and an unnamed person ("DPS detains masturbator suspect in car", Nov. 10) have allegedly acted fully within their rights.
What is the moral here? Public masturbation is something only an awful person would do, but it is our right as human beings to do it.
David Hefer '12 is the new Voltaire.
