Last week Gabacho concluded his post with the following comment, “The woman commentator was reading off the national and international headlines of freak-show oddities and she came across the work of two inventors that were designing a robot to take the place of prostitutes, which would put the women from Cartagena out of work.” Here is part II of the “Secret Service post.”
II.
Leaving aside all the questions related to sanitation and the dangers of power tools on human flesh, the big question of was if married men used the machine would they be cheating on their wives? Is it cheating if the person isn’t real? The inventors explained their invention in purely ethical terms. They reasoned that prostitution was dehumanizing so what better solution that create an already non-human sex object to meet the needs? This of course would make an odd addition to every basement, right between the Bow Flex and Treadmill.
I’ve know a lot of feminists over the years and–despite the fact that they are happily married–they frequently remind their partners that sex is already dehumanizing. Maybe they’re right. What the radio show didn’t answer was if the dehumanization applied to non-paid sexual relationships (that is, the straight, gay, lesbian and whatever crowd). By this, I don’t mean dehumanization in a negative way; it is just that becoming someone’s fetish object doesn’t appear in the Bill of Rights. But seriously, if sexuality is so mediated with fantasy is it possible that the person we sleep with can ever be the same person we wake up with in the morning? Now, we’ve all had those “where am I moments.” The moment you wake up in a strange apartment and find a (live) naked body next to you in bed, you grab whatever clothes you can find and run to the bathroom, try to get your bearings by looking into the mirror and seeing the fear in our own eyes. Yes, it has happened to all of us. But can the experience tell us something about our everyday lives as well?
There is an apocryphal story of Sigmund Freud walking through the primate section of the Viennese Zoo with his daughter Anna. Suddenly, they come across two adult chimpanzees engaged in a sex act. Anna holding her balloon in one hand, tugged on her father’s sleeve and pointed at the two: a large male taking a female from behind while she nonchalantly ate a banana. She said to her father, “Look, father! She’s really not that into it.”
The father quickly noted his daughter’s insightful comment, “Dis is true.”
Sigmund also noticed that the male wasn’t really into the female either. As he carried out his duty, he calmly looked off into the distance as if he were wondering if it would rain later in the day. Like all men, Sigmund suffered from “Acute Male Answer Syndrome,” the incurable desire to explain everything, and thus, he began a lengthy digression regarding the differences between primate and human sexual desire.
To be continued…
Cross-posted at B2L2: http://jimmygabacho.com/?p=796
Poor Anna.