Do we have a right to sex? Society will soon say we do
One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: whether that means we need a spirit of curiosity and conversation or a furious war against whichever side you think is evil.
One useful path through this thicket is to look at areas where extremists and eccentrics from very different worlds are talking about the same subject.
Which brings me to the sex robots.
Well, actually, first it brings me to the case of Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist, libertarian and noted brilliant weirdo. Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified “incel” — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved, Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?
After all, he wrote, “one might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.”
This argument was not well-received by people closer to the mainstream than Hanson, to put it mildly.
Hanson’s post made me immediately think of a recent essay in The London Review of Books by Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” Srinivasan, an Oxford philosophy professor, covered similar ground (starting with an earlier “incel” killer) but expanded the argument beyond the realm of male chauvinists to consider groups with whom The London Review’s left-leaning readers would have more natural sympathy — the disabled, minority groups, trans women and other victims of a society that, in her narrative, still makes us prisoners of patriarchal and also racist-sexist-homophobic rules of sexual desire.
I expect the logic of commerce and technology will be harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed and despairing. At a certain point, without anyone formally debating the idea of a right to sex, right-thinking people will simply come to agree that some such right exists, and that it makes sense to look to some combination of changed laws and new technologies to fulfill it.
Whether sex workers and sex robots can actually deliver real fulfillment is another matter. But that they will eventually be asked to do it, in service to a redistributive goal that for now still seems creepy or misogynist or radical, feels inevitable.