Commodities
Oh good, an “interesting” thought experiment. Robin Hanson, an economist, looks at envy and redistribution:
Incels obsess over their own unattractiveness – dividing the world into alphas and betas, with betas just your average, frustrated idiot dude, and omegas, as the incels often call themselves, the lowest of the low, scorned by everyone – they then use that self-acceptance as an insulation.
Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. … Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “retribution” against attractive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attractive men they would sleep with) before killing six people in 2014. (more)
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. As with income inequality, most folks concerned about sex inequality might explicitly reject violence as a method, at least for now, and yet still be encouraged privately when the possibility of violence helps move others to support their policies. (Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.)
I think his point is to mock or discredit the idea of income redistribution more than to praise or credit the idea of “sex redistribution,” but all the same the wording is…let’s say questionable. Income is not sentient; sex partners are. He’s obviously talking about one or more partner-sex, because there can’t be much masturbation inequality and if there were redistribution wouldn’t help. He’s talking about sex with another or others but he doesn’t say so, with the result that the wording makes it look as if “sex” is just something like potatoes or laptops or shoes, that can be redistributed via rail road or air – a commodity. Possibly that was his point, but I doubt it.
This sort of thinking is gob-smackingly common. After the Isla Vista murders, a woman I knew seriously proposed that state-sponsored access to prostitutes for “lonely” guys would save lives (apparently she was unaware that these narcissists scorn prostitutes.)
Decriminalizing the buying of women’s bodies can only reinforce this equation of access to women’s bodies (and women’s emotional labor) to commodities necessary for men. This is a problem for “sex-positive” types–or would be, if they bothered to analyze their position in any depth. Instead, they’re busy demonizing their critics, in terms much like those trans activists use. Support the Nordic model, and you’re a “whorephobic SWERF.”
Yeah, it brings the radical disanalogy right to the front.
Money is the most anonymous, exchangeable item that exits. One dollar is precisely like any other, and the only purpose of any of them is exchange for actual wealth in goods or services, and any good or service that is to be freely exchanged is to be exchanged for it. It’s meant to be that. That’s why and how it works.
Sex is among the most intimate experiences any of us have, and the partner(s) for it are a critical, defining element. Typically, it’s a part of a whole wide relationship with that person specifically, shared even approximately with few or no others. But even if it’s not that close, it’s still something where the partner matters, if for nothing else for having been vetted carefully for health and safety purposes and considered somewhat for attractiveness, to you, on this occasion, in this way.
It is exactly and thoroughly unlike money precisely in that it is not some undifferentiated quantity to shift around for whatever social benefit. If someone – MRA or economist – does not get that, they are clearly not qualified to offer an opinion about it worth a damn.
One of the other factors about this proposed “sex equality” is that it is equality for one group – men. It proposes that men have equal access to sex, which leads to extreme inequality for the group that they are being given access to – women. Because if women do not wish to sleep with these guys, then there is no way to enforce sex equality without forcing women to sleep with these men, thereby making the equality incredibly one-sided.
Money doesn’t have a preference who owns it, or who spends it. Human beings have a preference who has “access” to their body.
Isn’t it nice how many men can do thought experiments without having to consider the rights and desires of women?
It also ignores the fact that the massive income inequality is caused by a very few people hoarding those anonymous dollars, and refusing to pay a fair proportion to the workers who are actually creating that wealth. Poor people aren’t poor because of some character failing – they are poor because the capitalist system relies on having poverty around to scare the less-poor into working harder lest they become as poor.
The reason the obnoxious, violent misogynists are not having sex with any woman is because…
they are obnoxious, violent misogynists. No-one to blame but themselves.
For that matter, the free market worshippers ought to regard this as a great result: given unregulated, nominally unforced choices, women are not interested in this “product” and do not consume it. Left to itself, the market should naturally correct itself and, if the men really do have a demand for sex, they will improve their product sufficiently to attract customers.
These incels demanding redistribution of sex are dirty commies. (They’re also misogynists who reduce women to things, but hey, let’s see if we can find an insulting description that Hanson and his ilk will actually care about, shall we?)
Butterflies & Wheels consistently has the best comment section on the internet. Applause to all of you for your keen insight and/or snark!
I think the OP has the author’s motive pegged: he’s using “sexual inequality” as a reductio ad absurdum to attack complaints about income inequality. The opening sentence gives the game away:
The tone reminds me of an alien or robot in bad science fiction, asking the HOO-mans to explain this strange thing you call “love.”
Why, oh why, should we waste time caring about poor people in America when there are much poorer people starving in Africa? (Uh, because the fallacy of relative privation is a fallacy, my Dear Muslima, and we have more power to affect government policy in our country, and we tend to care more about people with whom we have things in common, so fellow citizen > fellow human.
The “at a time” bit is priceless. I can only assume that he’s asking why we don’t worry about the inequality between us and those who were born and died ten centuries ago? It’s just so darned puzzling why you humans — oops, I mean, us humans — would care about problems that can be solved without resort to a time machine.
So yeah, the whole thing just reads as an exercise in “oh, so you’re NOT willing to make women into sex slaves? Guess you don’t care about inequality after all! CHECKMATE, LIBS!”
You seem unfamiliar with Hanson. Given what I know about his other ideas, I am pretty sure he is seriously considering sex redistribution. As far as I know he is not particularly opposed to redistribution and his ideas, even for an economist, often trend toward the weirdly inhuman. Google “Robin Hanson ems” if you want to get a glimpse.
*googles Robin Hanson ems*
*closes window*
The weirdly inhuman indeed.
Hanson is another lightweight prophet-wannabe beloved by flibertarians and transhumorists.
Thing that has always gotten me with that argument is how inconsistent it is.
I’m a South African, our current exchange rate is $1 will get you R12.33.
Now here is the thing, in terms of buying power the dollar should only get you about R5. This of course should lead to us manufacturing more to take advantage of the difference in arbitrage but our major power utility has been run by crooks for years, so we don’t have the power infrastructure to take advantage of it.
But the upshot of this is that in terms of actual living standards, we aren’t quite as bad as you’d think if you were just looking at how many dollars we earn a month. We still have unacceptably high levels of poverty but it is important not to exaggerate the problem such that it becomes insurmountable.
And the same people who use the “Well in Africa” argument, also tend to argue against federal minimum wages on the grounds that different states and areas within states in America have different costs of living, in other words a dollar might get you more in Utah than in New York.
Well that same dollar is getting you even more in South Africa.
The toxic effect of commodification poisons the culture. The ‘incels’ embrace their own status by their blind complicity in the system they’ve lost out in.
Our models for ‘successful’ heterosexuality (male version) are Trump and Weinstein. Become a ‘star’ and they’ll ‘let you do it.’
OB, that would appear to hit the whatever right on its head.
Occasionally one reads in an introductory economic textbook of the ‘widget’, which is a term for anything being produced, distributed or exchanged. Cars can be widgets. Likewise household items like chairs, Likewise animals and plants: livestock, timber and such. Likewise anything: except people.
Herding cattle onto a truck, as any stock handler will agree, is a matter of offering them a range of progressively diminishing choices. Their natural desire to remain with their herd is also a factor used to the handler’s advantage. So they go from a choice in the field of bolt off alone over yonder vs stay with the herd, to the same choice taking place in a series of yards of diminishing size. The last choice is face the dogs and/or electric prods, or go up the ramp onto the truck. Doors shut: off to wherever.
Narrow down a person’s options the same way and we’re talking slavery or prostitution, not about ‘widgets’.
Incels are the reductio ad absurdum of right wing populism, or of socialism. Take your pick. Resentful losers who insist there be someone, somewhere, to blame for their own disappointments in life. The pretensions to ideology are beside the point.