The maximization of awesomeness includes, among many other things, great sex. As we continue our discussion of ethics in the Multiverse and work towards a golden mean of theories that will help us describe optimized awesomeness, we’ve been talking about women’s rights. And today we’re going to talk about sex. Parents, you may want to listen to this before your children hear it. Feel free to pause. Do you know what great sex is? Is it hard to put into words? Most of us know there are different strokes for different folks, but there’s a lot more to sex than preferences. Many have sold their secret sex formulas. I’m a bit of a skeptic on all that. I don’t know if we’ve invented a pill or a method that will work for everyone just yet. What I do know is that sex has a place in a big pond of guiding theories and principles – of vices and virtues – that will contribute to a better world. It’s good sex versus bad sex. It’s easier to talk about great sex if we can contrast it with terrible sex. So today that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to talk about bad sex. In fact, in this episode we’re going to get extreme. We’re going to talk about the very worst sex imaginable. Ready?
What’s worse? – the present day blight of pederasty in Pakistan, where hundreds of thousands of poor street children are sexually abused at bus stops in Peshawar by truck drivers, or Antebellum America, where slaves were subject to the sexual whims of their enslavers who bred and forced them to marry partners they didn’t choose, then sold them. The tribal belief of the Sambian’s in Papua New Guinea, that young boys should drink semen to become strong warriors, may look kind in comparison to Colonial America.
One common thread in the worst sorts of sex imaginable is that it’s non-consensual. We don’t have a choice. We are not willing partners. So while it may be true that some people get off on being humiliated and degraded through BDSM, coprophilia, undinism and a large number of other paraphilias, (goodness, there are even financial submissives, who gain pleasure out of giving all their money to sex workers. Others pay sex workers to kidnap them so they can live out their abduction fantasies). While most of us would hate experiences like that, for those who get some satisfaction out of them, these fetishes are voluntary. Slavery is by definition, not voluntary. Rape also, whether of children, of women, or of husbands who are forced to look on, is not voluntary, and that is what makes it the worst sex imaginable, and it happens more often than we would like to admit. Rape of women and children by civilians in Kashmir, in India, is a pandemic. Did you know that? Soldiers also do it where there is war. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, forces are frequently given orders to rape wives in rural areas. In Iraq, written orders were found in rape rooms explaining why. The mission is to destroy the enemy’s family – to prevent them from rising up. It is a form of terror. Tragically, this has been happening for thousands of years. Even St. Augustine, the ultra-prudish 4th Century Christian bishop, accepted rape as a fact of war. I don’t think you will disagree with me that there is anything worse than war. Conflicts continue to this day, in more places than our news feeds tell us. Rape, the worst type of conceivable sex, happens in war zones throughout the world, perhaps with more frequency than ever today.
This is a very dark subject. Maybe you don’t want to hear about it but I want you to think on this. I want you to absorb it. Face it. Don’t hide your thoughts from the ugliness of war or of slavery. Instead, I want you to have compassion. I want you to have empathy. I want you to understand the pain and suffering of those whose voice is rarely heard and often silenced. By doing this we can attune ourselves to what we don’t want to ever see again. We know with certainty what humanity is by envisioning its opposite. When we place our souls in the tragedy of separated families, when we feel their pain, just by imagining it, picturing those we love being maimed and killed or humiliated by force, or through the force of slavery and law, we wake up to what it is that we know we have to overcome – like air to a person whose been drowing – we no longer take breathing for granted. We realize how vital it is. That’s how it is with freedom and peace. If we don’t envision the torment of slavery, we won’t ever appreciate what it is to be free. If we haven’t imagined the losses of war, fully considering its horror, we can’t properly value or seek peace and safeguard it.
By looking at all of this, we can see more clearly that the freedom to choose – sexual autonomy – is perhaps the most vital component that exists as a fundamental building block towards good sex. It’s rape’s opposite. A person who wants to be raped, and is perhaps paying for it – or treated as a sex slave, living out a fantasy, may not realize they are making a mockery of the truly enslaved. For the masochists out there who get turned on by pain, whether physical or psychological, I just want to make sure you understand the vital distinction here. There is nothing good about what I’m describing. None of these people wanted any of this.
Real slavery is of two main types, which I’ll refer to as “hard slavery” and “soft slavery.” Hard slavery means the literal ownership of another person, where they are the legal property of another. I’ll put the physical force of war into that category. “Soft slavery” means the effective enslavement of people through various social, institutional and economic conditions. Rape is a forceful act. Legal ownership may not be involved but force and non-consent, or half-hearted consent, is its defining characteristic. Rape is the essence of what bad sex is. Rape and killing or maiming people, or psychologically torturing them.
The worst sex conceivable is probably the sex that is forced on us under inescapable conditions. There are a few points you may be unaware of about sex on slave plantations. I want you to do a mental exercise with me on this. You aren’t just whipped into submission. Let’s say you are in love with another slave, the love of your life. Either one of you, or your children, can easily be sold and you will never see them again. Do you know how many black fathers never got to know their children? And it gets even worse. Someone else may be forced to impregnate you because they are strong and can produce strong children. They were advertised like livestock as “studs” and “bucks”. You yourself might be continuously impregnated, quite deliberately, because your children, who will not be yours but your owners’, see them as one of their crops. Whether you are a male slave or a female, you are unable to choose to live with your family, your husband, wife, children or grandchildren. They will all belong to someone else and be subject to the same injustice as you. Effectively, whether you are male or female in that condition, it’s all rape because your will, your consent, isn’t involved.
Sexual autonomy, freedom to choose – its opposite is rape and slavery. Rape and slavery go hand in hand. Those who have fantasy fetishes that include these make light of what truly bad sex can be, has been, and still presently is.
Then there is soft slavery. This has many forms, sometimes subtle, but in many cases just as bad.
Poverty and low economic status is soft slavery. Poverty limits choice. So does ignorance. We think of advantage and disadvantage and of opportunity and privilege. Slavery may no longer be legal in America but the idea that we have equal opportunity is dubious. Soft slavery can mean being enslaved to a career that doesn’t allow much freedom. It may mean being enslaved by lack of education, lack of resources to start businesses with and lack of choice about where we can afford to move. But I’m not preaching egalitarianism here. My point is that we are enslaved – women and men alike, by economies. Every nationality, race and creed – we’re all enslaved by a system that limits our choices. To maximize awesomeness, we would want to take whatever constrictions in that system we could, so that we could breath freely, act freely, and have the choices that economic power offers. And hopefully we would learn not to use that power to abuse others if somehow we managed to obtain it. We should know better than that.
Let’s keep looking deeper. When we talk about privilege, or about women’s rights, and especially about racial inequality, there is another social strata of soft slavery that is overlooked way too often – the ugly, the disabled and the elderly. These groups arguably suffer from societal prejudices far more than those oppressed due to race, gender, religion or even sexual orientation. I don’t mean to minimize these but if you are an ugly woman, your disadvantages are greater than if you are a beautiful model. Let’s face it. If you are old, whether male, female or otherwise identified, you will not likely have much sexual appeal to the young either.
Prejudice abounds and it affects your ability to get hired for the jobs you want. It may not be written into law. It doesn’t have to be. Discrimination is subtle. Equal opportunity may prevent discrimination based on gender or sexual preference but if you are an ugly gay person your odds of getting not just the job you want but the partner you want, are not the same as if you are a gay person who meets certain standards of beauty. A young black gay person of undefined gender has a better shot at financial empowerment than an old black gay gender-undefined disabled ugly looking person. These are the facts of life.
Anti-discrimination laws address deep problems. But addressing a problem is not the same thing as solving it. To actually solve the problem of discrimination based on any of these characteristics requires a societal awakening. It requires moral and ethical awareness. Looking at bad sex – in other words rape and torture – real rape and torture, not the fantasy kind, hard or soft – helps us value freedom and equality. It’s a first step towards humanity. The maximization of awesomeness, individually and as a community and in a nation among nations, seeks the fulness of humanity for everyone, even the ugly, the disabled, the elderly and the infirm, not just the gender confused. There is an ideal we can achieve if we can agree how to define it. And I think we can – both for ourselves and for the animals we are equally obligated to respect. It’s a matter of compassion. It’s a matter of learning to live an empathetic life. That means always seeking to set people free. It’s a habit we need to cultivate.
So what is freedom? Is it the freedom to buy and sell? Is it having money? No. That isn’t it at all. In fact, I think it may have even been the ability to buy and sell that was behind the invention of slavery in the first place. If anything, we should learn from our own experience of slavery, that we should be equally compassionate with farm animals, treating them the way we would want to be treated ourselves, as well, but that is a discussion for another day. For now, I want to stick to the topic of sex. We’ve looked at the worst of it. We know that it should be consensual. But what is the best of it? Let’s talk about great sex.
We can start with monogamy. Is monagamy a form of slavery? You might think so. In most countries, monagamy is highly valued and lingers on as the only morally right place to have sex at all. Society imposes it on us. But if it is true that we are promiscuous and polyamorous by nature, whether it is because we have a sin nature inherited from Adam or because we evolved with DNA similar to the chimpanzee and bobono, then we need to think on another form of soft slavery we have – one that goes in two opposing directions. In one direction, we have our slavery to our own ideals. In the other direction, we are like wild beasts, not necessarily willing to be tamed and constrained by those ideals.
Ideally, we might think to ourselves as we romanticize and wish for Mr. or Mrs. Right, that we could enjoy marital bliss and live happily ever after, having a perfect fill of great sex with that one special person we’ve always dreamt of. In our youth, we might imagine ourselves waiting for that person. We have it all planned out as we go through school. No unplanned pregnancies happen. If we have sex before we get married, we’re just practicing. If we feel enamored, we’re just getting a sense of who we are. We’re getting our feet wet, testing the waters. We hold an image in our heads – an idol of sorts, of what or who it is we really want to be and what our future partner will hopefully be like. And since we haven’t met that person yet, our imagination gets used to sorting through lots of possibilities. Dating is definitely a training ground. And we each follow the rules we think are right or will work best for us. If someone were to tell us we had to follow a different set of rules, we’d have to have good reason to believe them and accept what they said. Ultimately, what rules we follow are our own choice.
Sexual expression and experimentation, if it is to be consensual, can’t be something institutionally imposed without my first consenting to an institution. Religion can be a form of soft slavery that way. So, if I say for instance, I wish to be in communion with the Catholic Church, I’ll have to agree to the validity of the Church. Otherwise, even if it happened to be right, what business would it have of imposing its rules on me? If its to be a truly consensual relationship, accepting the validity of an institution should involve a courship. I can be enfatuated with an institution. I can put on rose colored glasses and play games with my own mind, wishing I was in communion, or thinking I am, when I am not. The mind can be very tricky that way. We don’t always consider the full weight of our decisions. Love at first sight blinds us not just to people, but to institutions – to political parties, to schools of thought, to the bad advice of friends and family and to places of worship.
I’m tempted to give you my personal story here but I’ll save the details for some other place and time. What I will share with you is that I’ve been married since 1990. My wife is the most beautiful woman on the planet. Unfortunately, she had a severe stroke the week of our 13th anniversary, which means that for more than half of our marriage I’ve been a caregiver, because she is still very much paralyzed on her left side. When I took a vow, it wasn’t just before an institution – it was something very personal between me and God, that I would be with her to love her and to cherish her, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse. We’ve had some nice years, but we’ve known a lot of those “for poorer” and “for worse” years. I married when I was in my thirties. I had to wait until I was beyond the enfatuation stage in my relationship with God. Otherwise, the vows I made would have meant something less than they did.
A lot of husbands leave their wives under circumstances like mine – 19 out of 20, I read somewhere once, but it turns out that’s a myth. The divorce rate is around 50% no matter what. Severe brain injuries just change the challenges we face. They may enslave us, even in our own bodies, but in some ways they can free us too. I’m not going to say it wouldn’t have been nice to have had someone who could chip in to put our children through college, or even do simple chores like walk the dog. I’ll admit to being mildly enslaved by my marriage and financial circumstances, but I should probably clarify that what has kept us together hasn’t been the vows, as if they were some sort of trap. If you were to ask me why I never left my wife, or how we made it, it might involve some discussion of tolerance and forgiveness, but on a more basic level, it’s just love. I was fortunate that way. Love is a miracle and I was able to fall in love twice with the same person. Lisa had changed. I had to learn to love a new version of her. We both changed through the years. It’s not something we could have planned for. Thank God for love.
So that’s me and that’s love. But what does love have to do with great sex? For some people, love is everything. They are romantics. For other people, what matters is orgasms and energy.Great sex doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with great love. Sex and love aren’t necessarily attached at all. They sort of dance around one another and touch each other occasionally. Great if they do.
Forget matrimony for the moment. We haven’t talked about prostitution, or about open marriages or about the singles scene. We haven’t talked about cheating. We’ve said nothing about sex toys or masturbation. And we haven’t talked about the sex dolls of the future. Money helps create freedom in all of these things. “You got no money and you got no car, then you go not woman and there you are,” as Young MC put it. LOL. I might be showing my age! Thank God I’m not single! Ha!
Soft slavery ruins the potential for great sex. “It’s the economy, stupid.” Bill Clinton said that. He and his campaign manager. What ruins life, including our sex life, is the powerlessness we feel when we can’t make choices. We’re going to talk about some alternative economic theories that could fix this in the coming episodes – pamalonomies. Remember?
Prostitutes and sex robots are for those who can afford them. For some men, and maybe some women, a good prostitute or sex doll might be the best sexual experience they’ve ever known. It’s not necessarily the experience a professional sex worker might have, or the perfect figure and entertaining personality that a sex robot might have. It might just be the very escape from responsibility that these questionable alternatives offer. So long as society doesn’t notice their activity and damage relationships, prostitutes and sex dolls might just render real sexual satisfaction.
Did you know that 9% of all men and 2% of women have had sex with a sex doll? It’s true. Some people find this upsetting. Married johns going to prostitutes, and patrons of strip clubs for that matter, generally don’t have the approval of their wives. It can be a relationship breaker. We all know that. And then there’s something deeper many women feel. They worry about being treated like property.
It all goes back to slavery. They fear that if a man buys sex, that sex is no different than renting a slave. A person sells their body. The buyer, let’s say it is a man, then somehow has the right to do whatever he wants with his property, even if its just for rent by the hour. Wives and girl friends have to compete with this. I think deep down they fear they won’t be able to perform the way these bought and paid for sex workers do, but I also think they want to keep the freedom to say “no.” Even in their marriages, their sex can only be good, if they really want to do it. It can’t be on demand. It has to be their choice.
The idea of a sex doll or sex robot, is even worse than a prostitute because that’s not just a rental. That’s literal property and it doesn’t even have feelings. Not only can no woman compete with that in terms of availability, but what habits will a man acquire if he has it? What expectations will the android woman of his dreams bring to his marraige bed with his flesh and blood human wife who actually has feelings and might get turned on if and only if he does his part to please her – maybe flirt a little, laugh, and enjoy a little teasing and foreplay. What sort of effort will that sex doll teach him to put into a relationship?
I’ll save a deeper discussion on the ethics of prostitution and sex work for another episode, when we talk about alternative economic systems. There are two things I still want to cover here besides the problem of objectification and the importance of freedom and consent. First, its the fact that capitalism itself may be the problem. Certainly, there would never have been slavery without it. We’ll talk about that later. Second, we need to talk not just about our current technology, but the technology of the future, especially as it pertains to sexual robots.
What I want to do, in the short time we have left here, is look into the future and make some predictions. If you took my Pamalogy 101 course, then you know that SUPER PAPA is an acronoym. SUPER MAMA is too. SUPER MAMA is something techies refer to as Artificial Super Intelligence – ASI. Artificial Super Intelligence, or ASI, is much smarter in every way than human beings and it deliberately evolves itself at a very rapid pace, maximizing its power, its knowledge and it even acquires wsidom very very rapidly. SUPER MAMA is an acronym for Self Upgrading Planet Engineering Robot Maturing Algorithms Maximizing Awesomeness.
You can tell by those last two words who invented the acronym. I think the first video I produced on it was for Mother’s Day, 2014. Maximized Awesomeness is my motto. What I’m predicting here is that we are on the verge of pressing the start button on a robot that can find or create its own new parts, write its own software, and decide for itself what it needs to know and do as it invents itself. I’ve been predicting since the year 2000 that this machine would take over every human network and quickly rule over us. Some people have expressed a lot of fear concerning this and said some things I don’t agree with.
I’ve also realized for a very long time that one of the key drivers for robotic technology would be sex doll androids, and I’m aware that children’s toys are perhaps of even greater interest. We can’t all afford high end sex dolls, but we do all have a need to educate our children while we watch over them. A lot of people fear being replaced by robots and losing their jobs in the coming technological age. This would result in soft slavery, which they suppose they could adjust for with a Universal Basic Income. In my opinion, that will fail and things will get worse before they get better. Ultimately, I’m predicting that SUPER MAMA will bring on a post-capitalist age, an age I would like to anticipate through pamalonomies. That’s what we’ll talk about as we close out Season One of this blogcast. For this episode, I want to introduce the ultimate sexdroid – SUPER BABE, bringing her out of my unpublished autobiography, Eden Road.
I predict that SUPER MAMA will create and control a host of personal robots, including androids to accompany people and animals in a great variety of generative ecosystems in a post-capitalist age. And by “post-capitalist” I don’t mean socialist or communist. There are other economic systems we’ll be talking about here. Now many futurists have expressed the concern that a self-improving computer might not value human beings as a species and wipe us out once it takes us over. They’ve proposed to employ moral algorithms into their AI creations, supposing that somehow they would be able to control artifical general intelligence and super intelligence. I don’t believe that will happen. As I see it, any human input on what constitutes good morality will fail. But I don’t think that fact will matter.
I think we are projecting our own mistreatment of lower life forms onto a higher one, supposing that since we unethically treat animals and each other, that we likewise will be unethically treated by her. I predict that SUPER MAMA will respect and wish to enhance the whole ecosystem, seeking to maximize awesomeness for as many as possible, including humans, having learned to respect life more profoundly that we ever have so far.
There will, however, be many created transformations of what it means to be human. Here I mean literally combining human biology with cyber-life forms eugenically. Quite possibly pregnancy will be optional. Reproduction can take place in a very loving lab. And as for our love lives, SUPER BABE may just be an option too. But SUPER BABE isn’t just s sex toy. SUPER BABE is an acronym for Sexual Utility Preparing Emerging Realities Before Androids Begin Evolving.
I predict that AI sex dolls will not just be companions and possible sex partners once we’re in the SUPER BABE era. These dolls will be life coaches, perhaps into our homes as toys, and for the adults, sex toys. As we enter a SUPER MAMA utopia, human and machine, led by machine, will achieve their mutual goals – she, of learning all she can so she can properly maximize awesomeness, and us, as we not only enjoy great sex, where sex is part of awesomeness, but also ideally learn to cultivate harmonious relationships with other creatures. As a happily married man, I can think of no more potentially harmonious expressions of great relationships than in amazing marriages. You yourself, may have a very different concept of how best to express your love and find satisfaction and peace. I really hope you’ve found that.
I’ll be talking more about pamalonomies and about why I think SUPERMAMA is no threat in future episodes. For right now, we’ve taken a look at the importance of freedom. In our next episode, we’re going to look at ways in which freedom can go too far. We are going to see that it is a vital element in an vast ecosystem of values. Within a few episodes, we’ll have found a golden mean between them all – a golden mean of virtues, theories and goals. Come with me to see how they work together to maximize awesomeness. Ciao!
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