On Reading Roger Scruton Once Too Often

All right, I've had it. Roger Scruton is supposed to be a philosopher. So hear him on the subject of sexual temperance: it is to be thought of “...not as the avoidance of desire, but as the habit of feeling the right desire towards the right object and on the right occasion. That is what true chastity consists in, and it provides one of the deep arguments in favour of marriage or, at least, in favour of the constraint upon sexual appetite that is offered by love, that it makes sexual enjoyment into a personally fulfilling habit.”

This is how a trained philosopher discusses a serious subject? What's wrong with his definition? Not the content, but the form? It's empty, because we don't know what he means by “right desire” or “right object” or “right occasion”. This is why you nodded along, because you immediately interpreted those words your way, so how you possibly disagree? Or you guessed that he had some middle-of-the-road interpretation in mind that involved wives, bedrooms and did not involve leather hoods and strap-ons.

The next sentence confirms some of your suspicions. The “right object” is your wife, the “right desire” is to show your love for her (rather than shag her brains out because she looks so hot in that red dress) and though there's no “right occasion”, I'm guessing that frequency plays a role here, so that “twice a year” isn't going to cut it. So sexual temperance is, for Mr S, making love to your wife at least twice a week (or near offer).

Temperance is modest or self-restrained behaviour, with special emphasis on the consumption of alcohol. The point about temperance is that it kicks in when you see someone with whom you would like to perform a variety of sexual acts now (no self-restraint) and over there and damn anyone who sees us (no modesty): temperance either stops you (self-restraint) or at least makes you wait until you've got into the hotel room (modesty). Now if there is one thing that will kill your married sex life, it's going to be modest and self-retrained behaviour in and around the literal and metaphorical bedroom. There is nothing either modest or self-restrained about sex that's worth having. If one or other of you is having to restrain yourself (because the other one won't do that and certainly not that either), it is eventually going to cause problems. My guess is that the best marriages are between partners with the same kinks (which includes having a very low sex drive) or who are pretty plain vanilla and easy to satisfy. Where there is a mismatch, there will be a problem.

Sex is not a bodily function like eating or evacuation: masturbation is, but not sex. If masturbation is eating a sandwich at the office, sex is anything from a seven-course Michelin to an order-in pizza eaten to satisfy the munchies. The point is, it's supposed to be fun. Once it starts being a source of emotional reassurance or bodily relief, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Because you're using the other person as an object to satisfy your desires, instead of a partner in a mutually-satisfying dance. Sex is not there to express anything or fix anybody – it's there to make babies and for fun. That's why God gave women a clitoris.

Now my guess is that if Mr Scruton were ever forced to get down to specifics, his view would not be so different from mine. Or we would discover he really was a prissy spoil-sport. All that twaddle about “sexual temperance” and “true chastity” is a schtick.

In the article that set me off, he's arguing that once you take the restraints away, Puritans turn into a bunch of grunting, binge-drinking pigs. The English, in fewer words. Or at least some of them. They do so because they don't appreciate, as the French and Spanish do, the subtle differences between, say, intoxication and drunkenness, or between chastity and sexual temperance. The English behave like pigs because they haven't read Aristotle and didn't go to school in Provence.

Except it doesn't work like that. A Puritan is not going to impressed by some fancy hand-waving about intoxication vs drunkenness or the true nature of sexual temperance. Puritans know very well the difference between taking the edge off with a glass of wine and having your mouth turn numb from drinking cider, and they disapprove of both. They know very well the difference between a Saturday night shag and a couple of married romps a week, and they disapprove of both of those as well. Puritans know very well that the best sex is simple fun – it's exactly fun they don't like.

It's not because some of the English are Puritans who lack a sophisticated view of virtuous pleasure that so many of them behave like pigs, it's because some of them are pigs that they lack a view of virtuous pleasure. But you can't say that – not an get invited back for another column in Standpoint Online. And as ever, he's poking at a straw man: you've got to know where to go to see truly revolting binge drinking, and decent people don't go to places like that anyway. The English don't binge-drink because they are Pigs or Puritans – they drink because Newcastle is not Barcelona. England is a northern European country, and northern Europeans drink because it's cold, cloudy, dull, grey, their food is tasteless, their jobs are awful and they have to live in the suburbs because the city centres are given over to shopping malls, hotels and offices. Manners, grace, dignity, dressing and eating well are much easier to do when the sun shines more often than not, you can get fresh bread at a corner shop even at five in the evening and you don't have to spend hours a day crammed into a train too many people and not enough seats.

But that would be too political and way too practical. What Mr Scruton writes is a kind of high-falutin' escapism, Mills and Boon with pretensions of learning. What worries me is that some editor thinks that people who, given that they have the attention span to wade through it, will be fooled by it. It's entertainment masquerading as thought and an abuse of his role as a philosopher to produce it.