Why are you comparing something both painful and unnecessary with a physical need and a loving husband?
THe question for me is whether Present A could see, be aware of , and derive pleasure from the tattoo.
@Consolation, I understand you to be saying that we ought to allow the healthy spouse to determine whether to have sex with the impaired spouse. And you say that most people would feel the same revulsion to sex with the comatose that we do, and wouldn’t want to have comatose sex even if it were permitted, so in practice, we’d be allowing a tiny amount of comatose sex in exchange for the benefit of getting rid of meddlesome government interference into the private lives of the couple. I assume you’d still prohibit having sex where the impaired person seems to object?
@Hunt, I don’t like the idea of jury nullification as a solution to laws that prohibit what we don’t want to prohibit. That is, I might well have voted to acquit Mr. Rayhons, while believing that he was guilty of the crime; I’m not criticizing the jury. What I dislike is having laws that need to be nullified. If we don’t like the laws, then rather than rely on juries to nullify them, we should change the laws.
Let’s consider whether men, in the absence of laws prohibiting it, would have sex with their wives without any consideration of their wives’ desires. Some insist that loving husbands would always take their wives’ feelings into account. I say, we’ve done this experiment before. For a long time, there was no such thing as marital rape. A wife was a husband’s possession, with no rights of her own. A man could have sex with his wife at any time, no matter what she wanted. And they did. Having sex with an uninterested party doll of a wife was a normal thing that happened in a substantial number of marriages. What makes you guys think it would be different now?
Present A will flinch, cry out and otherwise indicate that they are experiencing pain. We should take those indications seriously, just as we would for other procedures, treatments and actions we perform on or with A.
@zoosermom was the first part of your post a question for me? I wasn’t comparing a painful procedure to anything. I was answering only the hypothetical about tattoos.
Because I think guys are different now. Our society has evolved. Are there men who would still act like some of the guys did back in the “old days”? absolutely! But, it would be a far lower percentage than existed back then.
Not you, Cardinal Fang, Hunt and Consolation. I just think it’s not a great comparison. I also don’t think the comatose aspect applies here because the wife was able to communicate her desire for her husband’s company the very day.
But Past A will also do those same things and experience pain and yet wanted (and got) the procedure. In that case the pain of this procedure should have no bearing.
Past A made tradeoffs; the tattooing hurt, but the pain was worthwhile because he got the beautiful tattoo. There is no tradeoff, no offsetting benefit for Present A. Present A doesn’t want the tattoo; we know that, because Present A, by the terms of the hypothetical, is incapable of wanting tattoos. Present A doesn’t want to suffer. We should abide by his wishes as much as possible.
Men aren’t interested in having sex with people who don’t want to have sex with them? Really? It seems to me we have ample evidence that men will have sex with people who don’t want to have sex with them, unless you can tell me that there is no such thing as a prostitute any more. Now you want to give men free prostitutes?
Locked in syndrome to me is one of life’s cruelest situations. About as awful as ALS. I have in my living will that if I have been diagnosed with locked in syndrome (I think I have a time frame on the duration of the symptoms- I forget), pull the plug.
^^^There you go changing what I said . You also are going back to your habit of making HUGE sweeping generalizations.
I can answer your question with an unequivocal answer. NO, men are not interested in having sex with people who don’t want to have sex with them
Why can I say that with certainty? Because the term “men” means all men, and we know all men don’t want that. Had you said “some men”, or a similar qualifier it would have been different.
Secondly, your example and premise is also false even if you say “some men”. Why? because prostitutes DO want to have sex with their clients.
Thirdly, I was saying that in general there is a different culture now days. Did you know that the BOJ statistics show that just since 1993 the rate of violence against women by men who were their “intimate partner” has declined from 10 per 1000 women to just 3.6/1000. That is a 64% drop in just 2 decades. I promise you that if you went back a couple more decades you would see a similar drop.
You might not think so, but society (and men) have evolved (and need to continue to do so!).
But Present A is not an entirely different person from Past A. Past A–who was fully competent to make decisions–made a decision for how he wanted to be treated if he became incapacitated. He wanted the tattoo. Who are we to say that there is no benefit for Present A? What if Past A had said that he wanted to be sure to receive extreme unction if he became incapacitated and was dying? Who gets to decide whether that has any benefit to him?
Imagine this scenario: wife says that A always wanted to be sure to receive extreme unction, including being anointed with oil, if he was dying. But daughter says that now that A is demented, he gets very upset when an unfamiliar person enters the room, so she doesn’t want the priest to enter. Who prevails? After all, A will not be able to tell if he’s getting extreme unction, or even who the priest is.
Or to make it even harder: A was baptized as a Catholic, but hasn’t been to church in years, and never said anything one way or another about receiving extreme unction. Now he’s in a coma and is likely to die soon. His wife, who is a devout Catholic, wants to bring in a priest to deliver extreme unction. His daughter thinks its a barbaric superstitious practice, and doesn’t want some stranger coming in to touch her dad when he can’t express his own opinion. Who prevails?
Oh Hunt: that is so different. It depends on whether one is a believer what one thinks about last rites… imho.
cross posted with last paragraph
ETA: Once we introduce religion, the discussion changes dramatically. I can do that. I come from that background and so does my husband.
There is at least an arguable benefit of extreme unction for Present A. I’m an atheist, but I can’t be certain that A’s religion is wrong. If it’s right, extreme unction is beneficial to Present A because it gives A’s soul strength and prepares A to enter Heaven. As A’s proxy, I would certainly consent to, and in fact insist on, extreme unction for Present A if Past A had wanted it.
And even if my religious beliefs turn out to be right and A’s turn out to be wrong, I haven’t harmed Present A. Extreme unction as a physical experience isn’t painful or objectionable. I’d have to think twice about extreme tattooing or extreme bikini-waxing, if Past A had claimed those were sacraments for the dying in his religion, but I don’t need to worry about physical harm for Present A coming from a little oil on his face.
There is consideration for Past A who may not care, consideration for the wife who is a believer, consideration for the daughter who thinks it’s all barbaric.
Believers worried about a loved one’s soul usually get priority in my mind. I have relatives lighting lots of candles and this is extremely important to them.
I sympathize greatly with believers who want their beloved deceased safe in the right place. People may do rites over me when I’m gone, though I believe them meaningless. But they will be extremely meaningful to those doing the rites and I love them and am willing to put up with a lot to make them comfortable about my passing.
I guess the way I come at this is that being able to make decisions for myself in advance, and having confidence that they will be carried out, is a way of maximizing my own autonomy as much as possible. I don’t like the idea of somebody countermanding those things “for my own good.” I know that tattoos hurt, and that they will still hurt if I’m incapacitated. I don’t like the idea that some other person will judge whether it is important enough to carry out my wishes.
Tattooing and waxing always hurt. Most people aren’t into painful sex. Upthread I expressed concern that it is more likely women, than men, will perhaps endure painful sex unnecessarily if the healthy partner honors an advanced directive consenting to incapacitated sex.
I haven’t thought that tattooing was a great analogy to sex, which most people do because it is pleasurable in the moment. imho.
The term “men” doesn’t mean “all men” in that sentence. That’s not how language works. I can, and in fact I do, say, “Canadians like hockey,” in the full knowledge that there exist people in Toronto who cringe from any mention of the Leafs, the NHL, pucks, sticks or goalies. (Particularly at this time of year.)
Prostitutes don’t want to have sex with their clients, any more than my housecleaner has a burning desire to vacuum my living room. They just want the money, and the sex is the price for the money. And their clients know this. The clients know they are paying someone to have sex with them who doesn’t want to have sex with them. And they have no problem with this. So when the chance arises to have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with them, legally, for free and with no punishment, some men will do it. Some non-trivial percent of men will do it. They always have.
The way society needs to continue to evolve in this direction is by prohibiting sex with spouses who manifestly have no desire to have sex, not by pretending that a horny subset of spouses will somehow take the best interests of their spouse in consideration when they never did before. (This doesn’t apply to Mr. Rayhons. We don’t know whether Mrs. Rayhons showed desire to have sex with her husband, but there’s reason enough to hypothesize she did, or at least reasonable doubt. There’s no reasonable doubt about a comatose wife, or a wife lying there moaning, or a wife who is terrified of this “stranger” in her bed.)
We had a similar religious situation with my sister when she passed away last month. We were raised Protestant, but she married a devoutly Catholic man and raised her children as full and practicing members of the Catholic Church. She moved away from the location of our home church and only attended a handful of times for holidays after her marriage. But she intentionally never converted and we grew up in a very anti-Catholic household. She and I talked about her last wishes very recently and I knew that she didn’t want the Italian Catholic wake/viewing/funeral/repast experience because it was not our religious and cultural tradition. She also told me that she wanted to be visited by our minister. Her kids didn’t know this because she passed away 8 days after her diagnosis and it wasn’t expected to be that quick. For the last few days she was completely medicated because the cancer had spread to her bones and caused multiple fractures. She didn’t have dementia, but she was definitely not competent. Thankfully, when I spoke with her daughter about what she had wanted, her daughter (with whom I have had issues over the years) graciously agreed that her mother would have wanted to end her life in the traditions of her own religion and culture. So no conflict. But a case could have been made that my sister participated in Catholic life for almost 40 years based on assuming what she might have wanted. It’s hard to know. I learned from my sister’s final illness that there are things that a parent will not discuss with a child, even an adult child, and I have come to think that it can be the spouse or a close friend or sibling (someone of the same generation) who might have had years of conversations about things that are rarely discussed with one’s child. I wonder if Mrs. Rayhan’s daughters really knew her as a separate person as well as they might have thought.
I’m sorry about your sister, zoosermom.