Dear Prudence, Maslow, robots, and an intentionally vague post title

Last updated on: September 19, 2015 at 3:25 pm by Jane the Actuary

Dear Prudence, Maslow, robots, and an intentionally vague post title 2015-09-19T11:22:14-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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In which I talk about sex, sex robots, and “needs”:

Here’s a Q&A from a Dear Prudence column from earlier this week at Slate.

My husband and I have been married for almost two years. We are deeply in love and have a passionate sex life. He’s amazing and I’m incredibly blessed. There’s one point of tension that pops up that I need your help with. Before we got married, he told me about his struggle with pornography. He recognized its negative influence in his life and our relationship. It was our understanding that he would work through it. There have been several “relapses,” if you will, throughout our relationship, but he keeps promising to do better. Recently, I discovered he’d been lying about his progress for months. He’d been looking every few days and would even look while lying right next to me in bed as I slept. I support him as best I can, while dealing with my own negative emotions. I do believe that he does want to conquer this, but the lies and, to me, what feels like betrayal are wrecking an otherwise wonderful marriage. Do you have any suggestions on what to do from here?

A: I was waiting for you to say your husband’s struggled with viewing child pornography, or that his obsession with pornography was such that he downloaded it at work, thus jeopardizing his job. But your objection appears to be that he views pornography. You don’t in any way explain its insidious effect on your marriage. If a husband’s erotic life is pulled away from his partner and replaced with a masturbatory response to images on his computer, that’s a problem. But you say you two have a passionate sex life. Some women believe looking at pornography is the equivalent of cheating. It’s not. You complain he looks at it in bed, after you have fallen asleep. But if you’re asleep, how do you know what he’s looking at? If your objection is that his viewing porn hurts your feelings, get over it. You went into this marriage knowing he had this proclivity. As long as it’s not actually affecting your life, ignore it.

Commenters backed up “Prudie” with statements such as “men have a biological need for sex, so if he’s getting his release by watching porn and masturbating, what’s it to her?” (I’d quote a specific comment but I read these comments a couple days ago and now there’s another thousand or so.)

In the meantime, sex robots have made their way into the news, with Professor Kathleen Richardson at De Montfort University in the UK making the news for voicing concern about them. This became something of a joke — “feminists oppose sex robots because they know that if men could just have sex with robots, they’d stop bothering with women, and women wouldn’t be able to find anyone to take care of them” (sorry, I can’t find the particular blog posts any longer — this is what happens when you let an idea percolate for too long before writing about it). But her legitimate point of concern seems to be this, though I can’t find a single quote that spells it out: men who use sex robots may come to view sex as a mechanical act, and treat living, breathing partners as property, in the same way as they do their sex robot.

Or at least that’s my take-away. I admit to not having read the “position paper“, and her concern is largely about prostitutes and concerns for greater mistreatment. But it is worth thinking about, in one respect: Prudie and her readers agree that a porn + masturbation combo is a matter of a man meeting his biological need, nothing more, and nothing that his wife or partner has any right to complain about. (The latter is not directly addressed here, but a commenter connect this to a prior letter on that subject.) How far does this go? How far might this go, extrapolating from present trends? Is a “sex robot” just another sort of masturbation? Will a future letter-writer complain that her husband has been making use of sex robots, and a future Prudie scold her that she should MYOB and it’s none of her business whether he chooses to do this, or play golf, with his Saturday afternoons?

And this “sex as biological need” bit? Yes, I know it comes from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, although Wikipedia is vague on the matter, implying that Maslow was referring to an “instinct” for sex and the need for the species to reproduce; other places I looked online didn’t provide any clarification. But Prudie’s readers take it as a given: first, that post-pubescent human beings, or at least men, need sex in one form or another, and, second, that this physiological need for “sexual release” is mechanical and of no greater connection to morality than the physiological need for food, water, or warmth, and wholly separate from human relationships.

And given that mindset, will folks who get their moral thinking from Prudie even draw the line at machines, or will they also conclude that a man who “satisfies his sexual needs” with a flesh-and-blood “other woman” is likewise in the right, and the complaining spouse wrong?

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