Letters on Liberty: Unshackling Intimacy

Partners:

During the pandemic, public life came to a standstill. But long before lockdowns and viruses threatened the freedoms that we hold dear, there has been a problem with our belief in liberty.

Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today. Faced with this challenge, the Academy of Ideas decided to launch Letters on Liberty – a radical public pamphleteering campaign aimed at reimagining arguments for freedom in the 21st century.

In his Letter – Unshackling Intimacy – writer and journalist Ralph Leonard champions sexual freedom as reflective of a more general individual and social freedom. He argues that while taboos around sex and intimacy have shifted over time, prejudices still abound relating to ‘free love’. While the lockdowns might have had an extreme impact on our ability to be intimate, Ralph argues that it would be a mistake to see the pandemic as the sole threat to sexual freedom.

Join Ralph and respondents to ask, has the pandemic killed off our wild side? Do we need to drop our remaining prejudices about love in order for sexual expression to transcend its current fetters? And how do we rediscover love and intimacy in a world that often seems hostile to risk?