Steps towards normality

Samuel Helbling on sex advertisements in the NZZ-TicketAlthough the naked facts have been established since the Fall of Man, human history has known temporary relapses into the paradise of freedom from constraint. The collective sense of shame is by no means timeless. Every society searches for its emotional equilibrium, for a balance between prudery and libertinage, between strict morals and open-heartedness. "Make love not war" was the battle cry of the '68ers, who wanted to use the social revolutionary power of sexuality to make politics. According to the flower power apologists, anyone who resisted the anti-drive constraints of the capitalist system through heightened lust was building a free, anti-authoritarian society. And because the private sphere was interpreted politically, it belonged in the public domain from then on. The irony of history is that it was precisely this attitude that paved the way for the total publication of eroticism and sexuality. No matter how much the left deplored the instrumentalization of sexuality to secure power. Since then, one sex wave after another has rolled over society.
The current debate about sex ads in newspapers shows just how much public forms of shame have changed over the course of history. EPP National Councillor Heiner Studer even wants to launch a crusade against sex ads in Swiss daily newspapers with a parliamentary motion. Almost at the same time, sex ads appeared for the first time in Ticket, the weekly nightlife magazine of the NZZ.
A step towards normality, even if the "Old Aunt" was sure to attract the scorn of bourgeois rival newspapers (e.g. MittellandZeitung on January 25). However, the responsible citizen that the NZZ likes to invoke should know how to deal with the new marketplace offer. And what applies to other sectors should also apply to the erotic industry: what is legally available should also be allowed to be advertised.
> Samuel Helbling, Editor-in-Chief