I recently saw an article by K.J Dover called "Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behaviour" (you can find this article in the book Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Mark Golden and Peter Toohey, Edinburgh, 2003).
The basic
argument is that in ancient Greece, seduction was a crime that was worse than
rape because it involved the capture of
someone’s affection and loyalty away from the man to whom they properly
belonged. In other words, as rape was a form of violation in which someone's
physical body was captured, seduction was a kind of violation that involved the
capture of one's mind and soul whose effects, on some levels, ran much deeper
and could potentially be more destructive.
At the moment,
most Western countries see seduction as a positive thing where the
"individual as a consumer and as a voter is subjected to a variety
of allurements through appeals to greed, vanity, envy, revenge"
(see Talal Asad, Is Critique
Secular? p. 31). I have not
researched why this is the case, but perhaps one reason is that this has been
part of a corporate agenda throughout recent capitalistic history in making
seduction and consumerism (note that Consumer in old English referred to the
Devil as he consumed the souls of man) socially acceptable. I don't need to
mention the innumerable amount of ideas, values and ethical stances that have
been ingrained in our current global culture through corporate propaganda and
media brainwashing.
There are instances, however, where seduction is
unacceptable. The greatest case in point is the (sexual) seduction of children
at the hands of adults which can lead to arrest and imprisonment (the severity
of which can almost be as bad as cases of actual rape). Yet if seduction, at
least in the case of children, can be accepted as a violation of a child's
being, why is the seduction of children through TV ads and commercials
acceptable considering that these forms of seduction capture and violate their
minds and souls by alluring them into making choices that they otherwise would
not have made? That is, choices which inculcate consumerism, materialism,
transient self-esteem through material goods, greed, selfishness, loss of
self-control etc. Why is there no outcry directed towards the corporate rapist
who violates the being and dignity of children for the sake of mere personal
profit?
Is this what
materialistic secularism (which purports to "free" people's minds)
leads to?
That's for the
readers to answer.