in Judaism I'd call this the "shomer negiah effect"

snuggle up kids it's sunday night storytime https://twitter.com/JeffLadish/status/1340840809873063936

Once upon a time there was a thing called the sexual revolution. This involved changing expectations of what people can and will and should get away with, before marriage.

This has a lot to do with bioethics, I promise.

Halachic Judaism for 2000+ years at least has always had as a basic precept that members of the opposite sex do not touch each other unless they're married, and sometimes not even then.

In fact, unmarried Jewish men or women don't even remain alone in the same room as members of the opposite sex. So it has always been, for many centuries...

The revolution in the mores of how men and women relate to each other had a profound impact on some forms of traditional halachic Judaism, even where they did not cause the revocation of the rules.

Some people wanted to chuck out the rules anyway, but that's literally neither here nor there: they wanted to do it with other laws and for other reasons, and did. Others found a means to rewrite the laws so as to better ignore them. Yet others ignored this whole contretemps.

But some were effected only in the dialectical sense. That is, the revolution in mores did not change the rules, but they made the rules a choice, or even just a contrast: you keep the rules AS OPPOSED to going with the times.

Now, you might wonder, if I'm a Jewish guy keeping the rules just the same and NOT touching women I'm not married to, what does it matter if I don't touch them WITH THE ACTIVE AWARENESS that the outside world says dudes can and should and it's wise and righteous &c.?

An interesting phenomenon developed. There emerged, among certain observant Jews, an area of Jewish law that never REALLY existed before, called "Shomer Negiah", lit. "Guarded from Touch".

Again, what I DON'T mean is that the LAWS of Shomer Negiah are new.

The concept and the laws are ancient. What is new is the CATEGORY. A person can now be said to BE or PRACTICE "Shomer Negiah", where before no such distinction existed.

Compare the category of "Shomer Cheeseburger". This is a Jew who proudly says they are "Guarded from Cheeseburger". Jewish law has stated for millennia that milk and meat are not to be consumed together. But there is no such category among modern Jews as "Shomer Cheeseburger."

There is no such category as "Shomer Cheeseburger" because Jews do not keep the laws of Kashrut in dialectic with societal pressure to eat milk and meat together. They keep the laws as part of the myriad commandments of G-d as they have for millennia.

So: The very separation of a TOTALLY COMMONPLACE aspect of righteous behavior or The Law INTO A CATEGORY is not innocent. The making of the new category is a result of OPPOSITION TO SAID LAW.

And it goes without saying that it is infinitely easier to say "I'm not Shomer Negiah" than it is to say "I don't care about Halacha." Compartmentalization really does grease the wheels for disposal. I touch! What's so bad about such a small, normal, named thing?

Or as George R. R. Martin would say (heh), it is possible to drop a sword, but it is not possible to drop one's own arm. "Not touching the opposite sex" was once just another "finger" of Jewish ethics.

Constant awareness of one's own finger is an effect either of sickness or amputation...In a way, it becoming its own thing is a sign that something is wrong, maybe even to the extent it's died.

Now, what should your reaction be if you run into a Rabbi who says "I specialize in Shomer Negiah, I write Shomer Negiah books, I go to the Shomer Negiah conference"?

The wise reaction is to know with near certainty that this Rabbi violates or plans to violate the laws of Shomer Negiah. Because the whole category is a contrivance enabling its violation, not a natural kind.

The wise reaction is to know that one who wrestles with a dirty man becomes dirty. That solutions to a single limited problem share all the contours of the problem. That the river putrefies most often in the still backwaters that have achieved independence from the broader flow.

All this, despite the category's invention with good intentions by people fully intending to keep it, by people who saw coming danger and adapted a new category with all the intention of strengthening those laws!

In a sane world (not even a perfect one, but just a sane one) there is no such thing as "shomer negiah" or "bioethics". There is no feeling of insecurity of one's broader field facing particular challenges.

There is no compartmentalization to fight those challenges leading inevitably to the disposal of the compartment...

Perhaps it is our job to find the shattered remains of things that were once whole, wrest them from the hands of the scavengers, and build something so broad and ALIVE it cannot be mistaken for a mere solution to a problem. May G-d help us in this task, Amen.