What's so heinous about looking up a sex site? It's certainly a lot less reprehensible than robbing bank customers, writes Kieran Fagan
We have become sex mad. We are the new Victorians. We have invented a new way of covering the legs of tables lest our men folk become inflamed with lust at the sight of their brazen nakedness.
We accept without a dissenting murmur the resignation of the chief executive of our second largest bank. Not because he has been fiddling his taxes, as senior colleagues in our largest bank have been caught doing. Not because of lack of oversight of the bank's business, of which counterparts in our largest bank stand fairly accused.
Did Michael Soden, by tax dodging, take one penny out of the pocket of those who pay their taxes? No, not that we know.
Did he overcharge anyone for foreign exchange? No, not that we know.
When in trouble did he try to shift the blame to junior colleagues? No.
You don't lose your job over that sort of stuff.
Michael Soden did much worse than that. He - you find it hard to comprehend the enormity of it - looked up an escort service on an American website in a city he may or may not be about to visit. He looked in a shop window where most people would expect prostitution to be on offer. It is clearly worse than anything that was done in AIB Bank Centre, because he has paid for it with his job.
At a time when one of the main pillars of our commercial banking sector is seriously weakened by real corporate misbehaviour at the highest levels, we have allowed the last man left standing commit suttee on the funeral pyre of our new-found righteousness.
Would every executive in every company in Ireland who has looked at an adult website now please hand in their resignation? Would the self-employed who have done the same please desist from their toils? (I'll just finish writing this piece, if you don't mind . . .)
We live in a society which is obsessed with sex. Look at our billboards, our newspapers, particularly our magazines. But we are confused by it. We try to eliminate sexual discrimination but confuse it with sexual difference.
We muddle up sex and sexism. The person who buys glossy magazines to feast their eyes on hunks or buxom babes is not standing on very solid ground when it comes to throwing stones at Michael Soden.
The opposite sex is attractive to most of us. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.
But in junking the straitjacket of organised religion, which most of us seem to have done, we have invented the New Sex Lunacy. It consists of maximising opportunities for near-sex encounters and pillorying those we catch availing of them.
It is worth reminding ourselves that there is a difference between looking and doing. Any woman who dresses up for an evening out knows it instinctively. Somewhere among the many admiring glances there may be the person she wants to know better.
She also knows that by presenting herself attractively men will respond and she - and they - will enjoy that interaction. She is not inviting everyone in the restaurant to have sex with her.
As young women, and sometimes now children, dress in more sexually provocative ways, we have become more obsessed with policing the sex boundaries and finding new boundaries for transgressors to cross.
We reduce a complex, sensuous and wonderful experience to idiot proscriptions and guidelines.
Recently The Irish Times reported "University tackles issue of sex in country parks".
Readers learned that there is a growing problem with "anti-social behaviour" in what are being called Public Sex Environments (PSEs). Note the weasel words in this. When did sex become anti-social? By definition it is the opposite, surely?
And note the new jargon, essential for the sex police to have the crime defined in terms that are - on examination - meaningless. In this case, Public Sex Environments. Now children, can any of you name the very first Public Sex Environment? No, nobody. I'm disappointed. What about the Garden of Eden?
Please don't start listing all the more urgent problems that could profit from the attentions of university research departments. We'll be here all day.
Just hold on to the certainty of our new morality. Crooked commerce good, sex bad.
Spare a thought for Michael Soden, the man who accepted responsibility for his actions. Shed a tear for us, the moral quagmire we have swapped for our old certainties, for the hypocrites we have become.