"The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong"
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Adorno’s line lands like a provocation dressed up as a maxim: the “first and only principle” of sexual ethics isn’t consent, care, or reciprocity, but distrust of the person who speaks up. The shock is the point. He’s not offering etiquette; he’s staging a collision between private life and the social machinery that judges it.
Read in context, it fits Adorno’s larger suspicion that bourgeois morality often functions less as a guide to human flourishing than as an instrument of social control. “Sexual ethics,” in this frame, isn’t about reducing harm; it’s about disciplining desire into approved forms, then mobilizing shame and scandal to enforce compliance. The accuser becomes a stand-in for a wider prosecutorial culture: the neighbor, the institution, the state. Adorno’s subtext is that the very act of accusation is already entangled with power, resentment, and the pleasure of punishment. The “always” is deliberately excessive, a philosophical overreach that exposes how moral crusades like to speak in absolutes.
That absolutism is also the line’s vulnerability, especially post-#MeToo: taking it straight turns a critique of punitive moralism into a blanket discrediting of testimony. The useful reading is narrower and more Adornian: he’s warning that sexual “ethics” can be weaponized as spectacle, where public condemnation replaces understanding and where outrage becomes a socially acceptable form of domination. It works because it’s barbed enough to force the reader to ask who benefits when sex becomes a courtroom and morality becomes a performance.
Read in context, it fits Adorno’s larger suspicion that bourgeois morality often functions less as a guide to human flourishing than as an instrument of social control. “Sexual ethics,” in this frame, isn’t about reducing harm; it’s about disciplining desire into approved forms, then mobilizing shame and scandal to enforce compliance. The accuser becomes a stand-in for a wider prosecutorial culture: the neighbor, the institution, the state. Adorno’s subtext is that the very act of accusation is already entangled with power, resentment, and the pleasure of punishment. The “always” is deliberately excessive, a philosophical overreach that exposes how moral crusades like to speak in absolutes.
That absolutism is also the line’s vulnerability, especially post-#MeToo: taking it straight turns a critique of punitive moralism into a blanket discrediting of testimony. The useful reading is narrower and more Adornian: he’s warning that sexual “ethics” can be weaponized as spectacle, where public condemnation replaces understanding and where outrage becomes a socially acceptable form of domination. It works because it’s barbed enough to force the reader to ask who benefits when sex becomes a courtroom and morality becomes a performance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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