Public Displays of Affection

Many people kiss and hold hands in public spaces. This is considered normal and accepted, but many people are disgusted by such displays of affection. The act of trying to prevent public displays of affection such as kissing and hand-holding is considered rude. The idea of preventing someone from holding hands with their partner or disallowing them from kissing in public on the basis that you don't want to see it is authoritarian garbage and should not be considered a valid stance for one to hold. It is ridiculous. Yet we use the same argument to prevent people from having sex in public. This is ridiculous for a few reasons.

Not only is it horribly restrictive to the homeless, (resulting in many homeless people being prevented from ever having sex,) but preventing sex in public is a form of controlling how people can express themselves with one another. As long as they aren't involving non-consenting parties in their actions, what they do should be allowed. Consent applies to all actions that involve another person but your right to claim consent ends where another person's begins. You can not claim to have the right to prevent other people from doing stuff that does not affect you simply because you don't consent to them doing that thing.

Many people use the argument that they don't consent to see it, but we never provide consent to see many things, including people holding hands and kissing which are both public displays of affection the same as public sex. The idea that you deserve to have the right to prevent someone from doing anything simply because you don't want to see it is a disgusting notion of authoritarian origins.

What is considered sex isn't well defined from person to person. There are asexuals who are perfectly fine with people rubbing their genitals against them, they don't consider it sex. There are aces who do care as well. There are allosexual people that consider rubbing or sucking the nipples to be a sex act, even though it doesn't involve the genitals at all. Everyone has a different definition of sex, and for some people the genitals are not entirely sexual, therefore the touching of one another's together is also not a sexual action in their minds. Should we ban things from occurring in public on the basis that it's considered to be within the arbitrary category of "sexual," we will leave open the right to politics to result in the ban of all public displays of affection.