Did you know that heterosexual men, after becoming disabled, become more interested in female orgasm? Now you might think the most interesting thing to do – with this particular data point – is to explain it.
And that explanation would probably look like this:
i) after becoming disabled, these heterosexual men have a hard(er) time coming, which refocuses their priorities;
ii) or it could be – alternatively – that these heterosexual men become so dependent on their female partners’ care, that they’d better give something back, finally.
What’s interesting about both those explanations – which btw must not necessarily be thought of as alternative to each other, because they could easily both play a role – is that they nicely map a plausible version of the patriarchal wirklichkeit for the non-disabled majority, namely that:
1) on the one hand, female orgasm could be argued to be more intense than male orgasm and therefore should be prioritized on purely consequentialist grounds (here I don’t need to remind you that, empirically speaking, the opposite is the case, globally, today – the well-known ‘orgasm gap’ – also known as orgasm inequality); and
2) on the other hand, women have been caring for men ever since, so payback time is long overdue. But how is emancipation supposed to happen, if we continue to pursue a moralized understanding of care, which we should rather start to think of as the most oppressive institution since, at least, the invention of reproduction?
So there are a lot of interesting questions that come up if we try to explain the fact that heterosexual men become more interested in female orgasm when they become disabled; and as we have just seen some of these questions are methodologically fruitful beyond disability rights and ableism because, as it is often the case, show that disability is a powerful lens through which to look at ‘normal’ (bigger?) problems.
But any rank-and-file Marxist – which today means someone interested in structures – must go beyond explanation – point is to change it, remember? Wait, is he really suggesting making men disabled in order to reduce orgasm inequality, as your wenigkeit overheard one of the colleagues at the conference that inspired this post whisper to another during a break?
Well, would it be such a crazy idea?
First of all, let us dismiss an easy – but weak – objection, namely that the proposal of disabling men in order to reduce orgasm inequality would be subject to the levelling-down objection; on the standard version of the levelling-down objection, we target inequality by taking from those that have more (money, health) without necessarily improving the condition of those that have less, which is supposed to be implausible because nobody gains, apart from equality itself – and that in turn is supposed to show that, therefore, equality cannot be a good in and of itself.
Do I need to spell it out? In the scenario we are discussing, some are gaining (women), others might be losing out (men, but maybe even that’s not that simple, depending on the interpretation of disability one endorses and also on how much these heterosexual men would enjoy their partners’ orgasms). So, anyway, even in the worst case scenario, it’s just a simple trade-off, it’s not levelling-down.
So that objection is out of the way, but I guess most people will still be dissatisfied, feeling that levelling-down was a strawman and that the real problem, with the suggestion of disabling men in order to address orgasm inequality, is that it’s plain crazy. Yes, right, but why? That used to be the fun bit in philosophy – the why question.
Disabling heterosexual men against their will – whatever the gain – would be a basic rights violation, that’s why it is problematic. I guess this doesn’t go far enough, because what it also needs is that the comparable gain – or more precisely its absence – is no rights violation. So if orgasm inequality is no rights violation, but the solution to it would be, then we have a problem in defending the proposed solution for orgasm inequality.
This – and now we finally come to the point of this short comment – might be a problem well beyond disability and sexuality; namely that a lot of structural injustices cannot be cashed out in terms of rights violations or discrimination (so that for example on this picture women would not be discriminated against by the fact that heterosexual men don’t focus on their orgasms… rather just ignored, literally), so that when we propose radical change, those proposals fail on simple grounds of rights asymmetries.
Now you might think this just shows – quite effectively, in fact – why radical proposals such as disabling men in order to reduce orgasm inequality are implausible. But what if the problem was liberal rights themselves, instead? A repugnant conclusion indeed, but so are structures of oppression well beyond sexual satisfaction.
—
Ezio Di Nucci is a philosophy professor at the University of Copenhagen, with special responsibilities in bioethics.
Ezio’s post has been informed by a recent workshop on Discrimination in Dating. Andrea García-Santesmases Fernández (National University at Distance, UNED, Spain), who presented a paper on ‘Dis/ability, Gender, and Dating’ there, shared some thoughts with us:
“From my doctoral thesis to my recent book – ‘El cuerpo deseado: la conversación pendiente entre feminismo y anticapacitismo’[1], I seek to analyse in depth the intersection between gender and dis/ability. One of my main conclusions is that gender is challenged by disability. This does not mean that it is totally subverted, but it does mean that the process of de/gendering is ambivalent. It opens possibilities not only for rethinking and enriching gender roles but rethink the usual male-centered course that straight sexual relationships tend to take. Concretely, I have analysed how heterosexual disabled men become more open and flexible regarding their sexuality, putting women’s pleasure in a more central position. In this sense, Ezio’s provocative and rogue proposal is tempting when we think about the usual course that heterosexual sexual relations tend to take…”
[1] The Desired Body: a necessary conversation between feminism and anti-ableism
futura: bioethics & philosophy 