Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…That’s not to say that in a kind of utopian society, you wouldn’t have people who operate as sexual surrogates. Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist, imagined precisely this. He thought that there would be a class of people, a kind of amorous nobility, who would have sex with elderly and infirm people who wanted to have sex but who weren’t otherwise sexually desired. These people would do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They would do it because they were amorous nobility, a kind of noblesse oblige. The problem is, thinking about something like that, or thinking more generally about the redistribution of sex, or thinking about sex as a thing to be potentially redistributed, is that we’re working against a background, a patriarchal backdrop on which men routinely think that they are sexually entitled to women’s bodies. When that’s the real social backdrop, it becomes, I think, very difficult to have these further questions about things like sexual surrogacy in a way that doesn’t problematically feed into the reinscription of women as having a role to play in the sexual servicing of men. This is the view you get from sex workers. Radical sex workers like Juno Mac and Molly Smith, who are the authors of Revolting Prostitutes, are very uninterested in answering the question of should we, in an ideal or even in the real world, have sex workers being subsidized by the state to have sex with disabled people, because they think it’s a massive distraction from the reality of sex work for the vast majority of sex workers, which is true. It seems there’s a simple David Braybrooke-like basic-needs argument that disabled individuals in the Netherlands — there’s something very good we could do for them that also lowers the stigma from them having this kind of fulfillment or enjoyment. Then to cite this big external ideological debate and say, “Well, we’re not going to do this for you because we don’t like its symbolism in some other set of debates that we think are more important for you” — that strikes me as wrong. Tyler, let me ask you this: Why are you interested in the question of disabled men having state subsidies?…

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