According to a recent article in the Age newspaper, a Melbourne woman used a Twitter account to share comments about sex and to post photos of herself. Nothing unusual or unlawful in that. The woman is or was a teacher at a Melbourne school. This is largely irrelevant to her personal life, as is her personal sexual expression to her job. I don’t understand why this is ‘news’.

The article indicates that the woman used a pseudonym and did not name her employer, which was sensible, but made reference to her career and the suburb in which she lives and/or works, which was not sensible. The key to achieving a clear separation of work and personal lives is to not do what she did, which apparently was to make it too easy for her to be identified in relation to her employment.

But this silliness is no reason for dismissing an employee, or pressuring them to resign. Furthermore, it is no justification for irrational moralistic judgement and shaming someone for lawful behaviour. Being sexual is not a crime.

When the president of Parents Victoria is quoted as describing tweets about sex as ‘offensive’ and suggesting that ‘Tweeting messages like these is unacceptable from anyone’, it is obvious that these opinions are subjective moral values, not objective facts. Tweeting about sex is not intrinsically offensive.

Sex is normal and natural and lots of fun. Consenting adults don’t need the fun police imposing their negative, hateful anti-sex propaganda on everyone else. If they don’t like reading about sex on Twitter then they don’t have to follow such accounts.

It is relevant to note that all the members of the executive of Parents Victoria are women. Their organisation’s opinion, as expressed by their president, amounts to nothing more than the common practice of a group of woman policing each others’ sexuality.

Women commonly make sex scarce in order to have something valuable to exchange with men. They police each others’ sexual behaviour in order to maintain this artificial scarcity across society. When other women undermine this artificial scarcity by being sexually active and assertive, effectively giving it away, their behaviour devalues the sexual assets of other women, whose power in bartering with men declines.

In a 2002 paper ‘Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality’ published in the Review of General Psychology, Roy F Baumeister and Jean M Twenge examine the various social forces influencing women’s sexuality and conclude that:

We reviewed all of the evidence we could find … [and] This evidence repeatedly favored the female control theory… Adult women feel more disapproval from female peers than from men over engaging in sexual activity beyond the current norms. Women support the double standard more than men; in other words, women are the main supporters of a moral system that condemns acts by women more severely than identical acts by men.

The members of the executive of Parents Victoria are doing nothing more than slut shaming a woman whose sexual values and behaviour is probably different from their own. It is Healy’s behaviour that is offensive.

This is the latest in a series of examples where teachers have been unjustly treated by their employers, school communities and a judgmental media for engaging in lawful sexual behaviour that is commonly enjoyed by many people. Placing such unreasonable expectations on teachers is unnecessary, unproductive and discriminatory and it needs to stop.

Parents Victoria posted a link to the Age article and reiterated their ‘unacceptable from anyone’ comment on their Facebook page. Why do they think they are the Twitter police? By that time the feminist response had coalesced around the concept of ‘slut shaming’ on Twitter.

The best analysis so far comes from the Pesky Feminist, who focuses primarily on the actions of the Age journalist and his apparently biased and unethical article.

Addendum 17 December 2012

I’ve read through the advice the Victorian Department of Education gives to its employees about their use of social media in their personal lives. It is unlawful, discriminatory and disgraceful. They’re based on subjective and undefined social concepts like ‘reputation’:

DEECD Recommends: DEECD employees in schools do not post images of themselves on social media sites that have the potential to negatively affect their reputation.

In other words, teachers are being told to not doing anything that anyone else may not like in case they are judged negatively for it. This is simply the Department’s way of encouraging discrimination and slut shaming. Reputation is not professional competence. Reputation is a subjective, biased and contested notion that has no place in assessing the professional competence of any employee.

DEECD Recommends: DEECD employees in schools do not post photos or messages of a sexual or offensive nature in an open forum.

Sex is not intrinsically offensive. By constantly associating lawful sexual behaviour with being offensive, the department is engaging in slut shaming and discrimination. What employees do in their personal lives is none of their employer’s business.