Watch out. According to the manufacturer, Sin-a-Yum Bun ice cream — sold at AJ’s — is “sinfully” sweet.
The premise here is that if something is enjoyable enough, it must be morally wrong. This is a rather common theme in advertising, but it reflects a dangerously confused understanding of ethics.
While Ashby’s condemnation of their own ice cream is pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek, actually conflating pleasure and sin is scandalous.
Such conflation is a stumbling block. It wastes time and effort that could be spent avoiding actual sins, it makes ethical living seem less attractive, and, ironically, it can lead to a dwelling upon sin that makes sin itself more likely.
Because “wretched Kantianism” is unwieldy and perhaps unfair to Kant, I’m going to refer to the conflation of pleasure and sin as “prudery.”
It’s dangerous to think that innocent pleasures are sinful. It leaves you exhausted. If you worry that everything is sinful, you can’t focus your energies on fighting those deeds and thoughts that really are. This sorry state — scrupulosity — is like an autoimmune disease of the conscience.
Prudish scrupulosity drains the energy of those trying to follow proper ethics, but prudery can also drive people away from those ethics themselves. Think of all the people who write off a proper approach to human sexuality because they think it’s only for boring fogeys.
As I learned it in public school, the mainstream view of sex is as follows: Sex is great. Like, super great. Therefore, old people and Christians think it’s scary and bad — because they hate fun.
Here’s the actual story about sex. Sex is indeed really, really great (or so I’ve been told). It’s not only enjoyable, but also a uniquely unitive act that can lead to new life. Because of its unitive and procreative features, it’s only suitable for marriage. There are rules for sex not because it’s bad, but because it’s so good.
Sadly, the “traditionalists are fogeys who hate sex” meme has a fragment of truth in it. Few traditionalists actually hate sex, but the fear of lust can become such an overriding concern that they almost might as well. Take, for example, the Duggar family’s rule that their children must always be chaperoned while dating, or various efforts to codify modesty into a non-prudential set of measurements.
The sexual prude’s confusion of pleasure with sin puts him at greater risk of lust. If the whole conversation about the human body revolves around lust, what do we really expect to think about when we see a shirtless man or a woman in yoga pants? What is supposed to be a protective concern becomes a dangerous obsession. The lech only sees a person as a pleasurably sexy object. The prude avoids looking because he thinks he’ll only see a terrifyingly sexy object. Both overlook the other person.
Of course, people who are struggling with lust ought to avert their eyes from temptation. The problem is a culture that views the body as nothing but a temptation.
Prudery is not prudence. Prudence forsakes pleasures that we’re tempted to value more than other worthier things. Prudery fears the pleasures themselves.
In addition to causing all these scandals, this fear also robs you of the opportunity to fully enjoy good things. As such, prudery runs counter to a liberal education, which teaches one to enjoy things that are worthy for their own sakes.
Silly ice cream names aren’t destroying civilization, but such marketing is a symptom of a prevalent prudery. We live in a world that is very confused about both how to live well and how to be happy. Digging a moat between the two only makes things worse. In their own little way, prudish slogans dig that moat.
