he radio talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger holds a quite simple view about sex, namely that a man is apt to swim through shark infested waters to protect a woman who provides him with good sex and, moreover, he will worship the ground upon which she walks. Of course, the context here is marriage.  At first blush, one might suppose that Dr. Laura’s view regarding sex, as developed in her book The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, treats sex as a form of bartering: If a woman wants X from a man (to wit, his undying devotion), then she should give him Y (to wit, sex). 

Fortunately, that is not Dr. Laura’s thinking at all.  Nor, a fortiori, is she recommending some form of servitude on the part of women. 

Let’s face it: anything can be recast as a form of bartering.  The best way to keep a friend is to be friendly towards the person and do something kind for the individual from time to time.  But no one thinks for a moment that kindness towards a friend is none other than a form of bartering.  Yet, it is unmistakably true that kindness towards a friend is one sure way to keep the friendship healthy.  Only a fool would think otherwise. 

What is more, kindness towards a friend has to come from the heart; and this requires being mindful of the friend’s interests and needs.  There is no point in giving a friend a gift of chocolates in the name of friendship, if from the outset one knows that the friend does not like the stuff.  To state the obvious, one needs to give the friend something else.  The self-evident truth here is that good friends are mindful of one another’s different interests.  Each does not simply project her or his interests on to the other.

This brings me back to Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s view about sex.  She thinks that on biological grounds women and men are not identical when it comes to sex.  And she further thinks that one of the fundamental mistakes of feminism is to maintain that women and men are the same in this regard, and that all differences between the two in this area are merely owing to socialization.  She thinks that women and men typically bring to marriage different strengths, and that sex is no exception to this.

On Dr. Laura’s view, sex might be understood as a gift that only women can offer to men.  And this gift of sex on the part of a woman to her man motivates him out of gratitude to offer gifts that will flatter his woman. 

The Dr. Laura argument might be put as follows:

P1 Men absolutely and unequivocally enjoy sex

P2 A man cannot have sex with his wife in the absence of her consent; otherwise, what we have is rape

_____________

C3 The woman’s consent is the gift of sex

Another way of putting (C3) is that women have a power that men do not have. 

To be sure, men consent to sex also.  Indeed, even an aroused man can be forced to have sex against his will.  But we must be careful not to let philosophical imagination get in the way of reality.  It takes a very unusual story to make sense of an aroused husband having been forced to have sex against his will with, of all people, his wife.  That is to say, the probability of this sort of situation occurring is very, very low. 

This is where the truth of (C3) proves to be a most significant consideration.  A woman’s consent is always relevant.  It is never the case that an unusual story makes it otherwise. 

So guess what?  It looks like we have a difference between women and men that feminism has most certainly not eliminated.  Quite the contrary, feminists insist upon a quite different wording of (C3), namely the following:

(C3*) In the absence of consent, all sex between a female and a male is rape.

Please notice that both (C3) and (C3*) are equally true.  What is more, Dr. Laura is as committed to the truth of (C3*) as any person I know.  Indeed, the argument the Dr. Laura argument constructed above formally entails (C3*).  Notice (P2).

But Laura Schlessinger’s idea is truly sublime.  From the fact that we would have rape if a woman’s consent is not freely given, what most surely does not follow is that her consent cannot be freely given.  And Schlessinger’s quite straightforward view is that a woman’s consent freely given to her man makes a most dramatic difference in his behavior of gratitude towards her and his appreciation of her.  And if this were not enough, Dr. Laura is quite straightforward in her view that sex is enjoyable and that married women ought to avail themselves of it more rather than invoking every excuse to avoid it.

I have a friend who brings chocolates back from to Paris for various friends of his in the United States.  Imagine that one of those friends were to steal a box of chocolates on the grounds that she was going to be given a box anyway.  It is too obvious for words that this would be wrong.  Taking chocolates (or whatever) without consent constitutes theft.  That truth, however, does not change one iota the reality that those very same chocolates can be freely given as a gift. 

Feminists focus upon one reality about sex.  Dr. Laura focuses upon another.  The differences is that Dr. Laura’s reality encompasses the feminist view about sex, whereas the feminists have become too myopic to see the veracity of Dr. Laura’s view. 

Sex may not be the elixir of life.  But when it comes to psychological uplift, its properties are certainly ever so potent.  Generally available to all married couples regardless of this or that background, sex can be an extraordinary form of relief for the weary.  Thus, Dr. Laura continues to wonder why so many married women put down sex and refuse sex to their husband in the name of being too tired and having worked too hard during the day when sex may very well be just the thing that floats the concerns of the day out of the way. 

It is generally held that men are rarely too tired for sex.  Dr. Laura makes two points in this regard: (i) However tired a woman may initially be, the truth is that good sex invariably brings about an immeasurable psychological uplift.  (ii) Given the knowledge that (i) is true, then it is rather shortsighted for married women to be so adamant about refusing sex, since in the end they would be helping themselves. 

Needless to say, consideration (i) makes the Dr. Laura argument even more efficacious.  For then a woman’s gift of sex is the gift that gives back—and immediately, at that.

Dr. Laura does not deny that a woman’s consent is hers to give.  But with everything in life that is clearly ours, the question that inevitably arises is this: How shall we use it?  The wherewithal to offer what others do not have constitutes a moral power.  And the refusal to acknowledge and to be gracious in that regard can constitute a form of viciousness.

To understand a man, Dr. Laura holds, is to understand that for a man sex is one of the most fundamental forms of sharing between a man and his woman that can take place.  In this regard, Dr. Laura draws attention to a mind-boggling irony: Outside of marriage, many women seem to think that licentiousness is good thing: the more sex the better.  Yet, these very same women, as the years in marriage pass, seem to think that just about anything constitutes a good excuse not to have sex. 

Here is the irony.  The idea seems to be that it is fine for unmarried women to offer themselves to one man after another who does not treasure the gift of sex.  And then when women are in a committed relationship, offering the gift of sex to the man who most values it, namely the husband, is some how seen as a burden—nay, a sexist imposition on the part of that man. 

It is in regard that Dr. Laura thinks that feminism has hardly been a friend to women.  We need not deny that men, too, can offer sex as a gift to their wife.  It suffices that between women and men there is an irrevocable asymmetry between them with regard to offering sex as a gift, in that men will never have this power to anything like the extent that women have it. 

The very idea of sex as a gift is at odds with the idea of sex being performed merely as a conjugal duty.  As everyone knows, mere conjugal duty sex is extremely unsatisfying.  And if tomorrow there were a pill that gave men a 4-hour erection while he slept, I doubt if many women would find that attractive.  After all, the point of sex, as opposed to masturbation, is the sexual energy between the two parties that charges each other. 

Like it or not, it would appear that this asymmetry between women and men is anchored in none other than nature itself.  One option is to curse nature, and brood about the asymmetry.  Another option is to acknowledge this reality and to build upon it in a very constructive way.  If insanity consists in banging one’s head against the same wall time and time again, all the while expecting different results each time, then arguably Dr. Laura’s view has the virtue of being remarkably sane. 

Multiculturalism is the view that we embrace rather than eliminate differences between various groups.  And this many embrace, although there cannot possibly be any biological basis for cultural differences.  Dr. Laura, then, might be understood as the most basic of multiculturalists; for she starts with, of all things, the differences between women and men that would seem to have an ineliminable basis in biology.