July 10, 2013

"How can you have a right to something that would require another human being to do something with his/her body, when the other human being has a right over his/her body?"

I asked in yesterday's post about about "The developing status of sexual surrogates for the disabled, as part of a right to health and well-being." Reader MDT (who can email me if she wants her full name on the front page) writes:
But this is a problem with all "positive rights." If you have a right to shelter, then someone else has a duty to supply you with shelter. If you have a right to food, then someone else has a duty to grow it and supply it to you. If you have a right to health care, then someone has a duty to treat you. Contrast with the rights in (say) the Bill of Rights, which are almost entirely concerned with what the government can't do to you. (The Sixth and Seventh Amendments, dealing as they do with jury trials, do involve compelling other people to act in order to secure the right.)

If there is, in crude terms, a "right to get off," I don't see how it could rationally be confined to the disabled.
Even if it were limited to people suffering from named medical conditions, erectile dysfunction is one such, and therefore Viagra, Levitra, and the like would be a patient's right. And, outside the medical sphere entirely, there are any number of people who simply find it difficult to get laid. What to do about them? More surrogates? Maybe a government-employed squadron of them?

And I agree that Hamblin's conflation of love and sex is idiotic. There are people who are physically incapable of having sex who are loved. Lots of them.

So Laetitia Rebord wants to be a blonde dominatrix. She will never be that now, whether the French Government decided to spot her a gigolo or not. That is what fantasies are for.