Our world is a strange place. Everyone is talking about the bizarre case in Austria where a father kept his daughter as his sex slave in a cellar for 24 years and had seven children with her. This is a crime. A lesser known and seemingly far less disturbing event occurred in Australia recently where a male politician was caught sniffing the chair of a female staffer. This is not a crime, at least not yet. Are these two very different situations related?

Humans, over millenia, have set up rules to enable their society to work smoothly. Incest has been a strong taboo partly because of the problems of birth defects and partly because children need to be protected from a predatory parent or parents. Sexual relations between members of the same gender, while it has occurred in some societies (like that in Ancient Greece), has been taboo in most societies partly because it threatens the structure of the traditional heterosexual family and because it also disrupts the normal human reproductive cycle, the one which ensures the survival of our species.

One thing that is clear is that humans driven by sexual desire are capable of many activities some of which might be classified as normal, some as merely naughty, and some of which are clearly depraved. However, worryingly, the meaning of the word ‘depraved’ appears to be becoming ever more blurred in Western society.

Interestingly, the sniffing of a chair and the imprisoning of a daughter for sex on demand certainly differ in degree but not in intention. Sexual stimulus followed by eventual physical gratification are the objectives. Now what humans find sexually stimulating is infinite. Most men, when driven by their testosterone…well, as most people know, even a hole in a fence is not safe!  Some women, although perhaps a lesser number, are also highly sexed and will engage in normal and ‘unusual’ sexual activities on their own, with a partner, and even in large groups if they are turned on sufficiently.

The bottom line of all this is where does a society made up of sexually charged, imaginative creatures like humans draw the line in the sand for what is ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ and what is ‘deviant’ and ‘destructive’? Let’s take chair-sniffing. Now I found this incident bizarre, even sickening yet slightly amusing. However, I guess if it turned the person doing it on and no one was harmed, then, so what? But then what if more and more men in a large office were turned on by this unusual activity? Where might it end? Would all the men end up with sore knees? Would they be able to claim Workers Compensation?

The daughter imprisonment is more clear cut but how many men might there be in the world who harbour sexual fantasies along a similar line? How many girls and women have suffered or, at this moment, are actually suffering a similar fate in countries right across the world? Remember the infamous Rosemary West case in Britain where husband and wife were into imprisonment, torture, rape and murder of twelve young women including their own daughter! Humans are such delightful creatures, aren’t they?

The truth is that few people really know the full extent of deviant or abnormal sexual thoughts and images that cross most people’s minds each day let alone what humans do sexually when they are alone or with other humans or animals. I feel that what we know about human depravity is just the tip of a very black iceberg.

Where our society is headed regarding sexuality I do not know. I have grave reservations about some of the changes in society that have taken place already and others that are being mooted. Surely it is obvious that you cannot throw out the rule book and expect that there will be no negative impact. You cannot permit people to turn their more bizarre sexual fantasies into reality just because they claim that that’s the way they were born. You cannot put children or even adults at risk of becoming the victims of sexually deviant predators. And people, especially children, need clear guidelines as to what is acceptable and what isn’t until they achieve sufficient maturity to make such decisions for themselves.

In our current world where hardcore porn is readily available in every home and unusual relationships flourish like spring flowers, what is deviant? Indeed, what is ‘normal’ behaviour these days? Where do we draw the line? Should we? What are the implications if we don’t?

Even a cursory knowledge of history suggests that most societies fall apart from the inside, that is they decay morally when they throw out the rule book, when they eschew the traditional family and its conventions, when they accept and embrace more and more deviant sexual behaviour.

Should anything be acceptable or, once again, do we need to draw a clear line in the sand to stop our society from disintegrating further?