It seems to me that very often talking about homosexuality has mainly been a way of not talking about other things that need talking about.
It was not the invention of the birth-control pill, or the adoption of no-fault divorce, that hollowed out marriage: It was that we became the sort of people who desired those things. We became — Western civilization became — the kids who flunked the test in the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, unable to resist immediate gratification and, having stripped ourselves of the cultural basis for understanding the distinction, unable to tell the difference between pleasure and happiness.
Hence the sex dolls.
… Imagine, if you can — with charity, if you can — the state of a man in a silicon brothel paying to have sex (a simulacrum of sex) with an inanimate object. The act indicates a profound alienation not only from ordinary healthy sexual expression but from humanity ….
Kevin D. Williamson, The Psalmist and the Sex Doll (emphasis added).
There’s a tendency to focus on the most horrible or stupid stunts of one’s ideological adversaries, and I asked myself if that wasn’t what Williamson was doing here.
I think not. There really is a kind of enthusiasm for the idea of orgasm-at-will with a simulacrum of another person — a similacrum that will never be out of sorts or complicate one’s life unduly. The sexy dolls have been around a while, but many people have enthused here and there over the idea of taking those sexy doll and roboticizing them.
And I have no reason to think that the enthusiasts are all ideological adversaries in conventional political terms, either. Indeed, I can imagine some Christianish “incels” thinking sex dolls and amorous robots are, literally, a Godsend to satisfy one’s “needs” without fornication.
I may be overdue for another rant on the difference between non-fornication and chastity.
That it is a fairly marginal phenomenon (so far) does not mean that it tells us nothing about the decadence of society more broadly.
(The Psalmist in the title, by the way, is the late Leonard Cohen.)
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 