Now, ridicule and moral imperatives aside, I believe that Attorney Karle and the self-declared Good Citizens of Erie have a point of legitimate concern, however inappropriately they focus their consternation on the owners of Klub Kandyland. Uncontrolled or badly managed sexual arousal does have the potential to cause a great deal of personal and social misery and confusion. Sexual arousal, like any other important aspect of being alive, needs to be taken seriously and pursued with intelligence, maturity, and responsibility, as well as with imagination and passionate enthusiasm. But before we can exercise this complicated balance of passion and responsibility, we must first understand, honor, and appreciate sexual desire clearly, which means taking it on its own terms. Being horrified by this is something akin to being horrified every time we drop our shoe and it falls on our toe.
Gravity is a fact of nature.
Get used to it. The freewheeling nature of sexual desire is also a fact of nature. Get used to that, too. The only way to keep sexual arousal confined to home and marriage is to prevent people from encountering the world. Indeed, this is one of the prime reasons that men for so long insisted on isolating women from the world at large. looking back to a hundred years ago, we can perhaps think of this condescending antisexualism as a quaint, if entirely debilitating, form of sexual censorship, but it is certainly not a very practical path to social order as we enter the 21st century.