The logic of doability: sex theory within set theory

A singleton March 13, 2013

Introduction
I want to nd the logic of the sex laws Beck, Sexx Laws

In this paper, I will start a dialogue between sex studies and logic. I will develop a logical system, doability logic (also called sexilogic), which is based on interesting but controversial axioms about sexuality. The primitive notion of sexilogic is doability. This is a very common and intuitive notion. Of course, we dont think that doability is a monadic predicate; in general, people are not objectively doable. Instead, it is a relational notion: x would do it to y. We know that we would do it to some people, but not to other people. We also know (or at least hope) that some people would do it to us. Doability can be said in dierent ways. The one I will choose here has two particular aspects: It is human. Therefore, nothing not-human will appear in the theory. Some theorists could nd this extreme, since people sometimes would do it to animals or to artifacts. I admit this point, but including it in sexilogic would make it very complicated. It has an individual subject and a possibly collective object. Generally when we say that x would do it to y, we mean that x and y and individuals. But sometimes not: imagine Jennier, who would like to do it to David Bowie and David Beckham at the same time. That is why doability has enough expressive power to represent this kind of doability. 1

A very big issue is which kind of relation doability is. According to my view, there are two options: Strong doability: x would do it to z i if z oers x to have sex with him/her/it, he/she/it accepts the oer. Weak doability: x would do it to z i if z oers x to have sex with him/her/it in a possible world where x and z have no other attachments or sentimental commitments to other people, he/she/it accepts the oer. I will choose the second option, although I think that there could also be a theory about strong doability. The weak notion of doability simply reects the fact that people can feel slightly attracted to other people but not in a sense in which that could break a couple. Nobody cares about so modally distant dispositional attitudes. Lets start with the technical part. Sexilogic will be modelled inside a very simple set theory with urelements. The basic elements are all the human individuals (around 6 billion). We can construct the other sets by operating by the following operations: 1. Singleton formation: if a is a human individual, {a} is a set. 2. Union: If x and y and sets, x y is a set. 3. Empty: there exists an empty set With axioms 1 and 2, we can construct the set of all human beings, Hum. We can also have separation over human beings: (Separation) Xx(x = {a Hum|Xa}) In conclusion, we will have individuals such as John, Laura or David, and nite sets such as {Laura, David}, {Laura} or {Laura, David, John} Let x D y express that x would do it to y. D relates (formally speaking) individuals with sets of individuals. The translation between the intuitive meaning and the formulas is simple: Paul D {Mary} Paul would do it to Mary Paul D {John, Pete} Paul would do it to John and Pete together Sara D {x: Jessica loves x} Sara would do it to every person Jessica loves I will use a,b,c. . . as human variables, and x,y,z. . . as set variables. For every individual a, we have the doability set (Dset[a]), which is dened as the union of all the sets z such that a D z. The theory has the following axioms:

Sexually empty individual a( y( yD{a})) [there is a person such that nobody would do it to him/her/it] Sexually desperate individual a y( y e (aDy) [there is a person that would do it to every other person or human set, except for the sexually empty individual] Threesome principle abc((aD{b}) (aD{b}) aD{b, c}) [there is a person that would not do it to two dierent people by separate, but would do it to both of them together] Brangelina set aaD{BradPitt, AngelinaJolie} [everyone would do it to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie together] Doability union a y(aDy aDz aDy z) [If someone would do it to two dierent groups, then he/she/it would do it to them together] Of couse, all the axioms should be justied: 1. Sexually empty set and sexually desperate set. We all know (or sometimes are) this kind of people, therefore this doesnt need further justication. 2. Threesome principle. I think this is the most intuitive of all the axioms, so it doesnt need justication. Because of this principle, sexual choice (if x would do it to z, then x would do it to a particular individual of z) fails: sometimes you would do it to a group but not to a particular person. 3. Brangelina or Brad and Angelina? For those who know about set theory, Brangelina is a maximal set. This has to face at least two objections. First, some sex theorist think that there is nothing such a maximally doable set, because of cultural reasons, for example. Some people would not do it to Brangelina. Second, the maximality of Brangelina assumes that everyone is bisexual at least in a weak sense, i.e. is disposed to take part in a threesome with two people of diferent genders. To the rst objection I answer that there is cultural diversity in a lot of senses, but anyway any human being would do it to Brangelina. Its just common sense... The second objection is dicult to ask, since some people say honestly that they wouldnt do it to Brangelina. I simply dont trust them. 3

4. Doability Union. Some people think that this is sexually supererogatory, since from this axiom we can infer that we would it to all our doability set together. You may think Nice party!, but others think its too much. The principle seems intuitive but most people nd orgies unattractive. We could then modify the axiom: (Minimal Doability Union) (x D y x D z y and z are singletons) x D y z [If someone would do it to two dierent individuals, then he/she would do it to them together] Still, this axiom seems to fail in some particular cases. Suppose for example a girl that likes extremely timid boys. Maybe she would do it to the shy guy x, and the shy guy z, but doing it to the two together would be terrible: they would feel uncomfortable and nobody would enjoy the situation.

2
2.1

Sexilogic. Additional topics

Narcicism and sexual reexivity.

In sexilogic, we could say that someone would to it to him/herself (c D {c}). Isnt that metaphysically problematic? Well, if c would do it to him/herself, then in a possible world c has a doppelganger. Maybe metaphysicians should solve this problem. However, as I see it, it is not very complicated to nd people that would do it to themselves: we call them Narcissistic. In fact, the set of narcissistic people can be dened as this: Narcissistic set = {x | x D {x}} For sure, many people are not narcissistic, and that is why doability is not reexive. Yet, there is still an open problem: would someone do it to him/herself together with other people? Narcicism is usually not regarded as a virtue, so most individuals that would do it to him/herselves, would prefer to make it in secret. Though Im not sure.

2.2

Gender, orientation and cardinality issues

By this moment, I did not talk about gender. My examples were about men and women, but we know that those are not the only options. There is a strong discussion about the notion of gender, and some sex theorists even claim that gender does not exist. Nevertheless, I think that talk about gender is sometimes useful, so I will suggest a way to represent it in my

theory. The idea is simple: we just make a partition between the individuals in (provisionally) four sets: men, women, neutral and androgens. In the same way, we can dene sexual orientations. There is a huge debate about what is a sexual orientation and how many are there. As I see it, a sexual orientation supervenes over your doability set. One can determine which sexual orientation does someone have only by looking at his/her/its doability set and analyzing the gender of the individuals in it. Looking at this, we can state a ratio (lets suppose, over 10) in this way a: m: w: n where a represents androgens, m represents men, w represents women and n represents neutrals. For example, if the Dset of d includes only women, the ratio would be: 0 : 0 : 10 : 0 If the Dset of d includes 2 androgens, 4 men, 6 women and 3 neutral, the radio would be: 1,33 : 2,66 : 4 : 2 One interesting question if: what is the relation between the number of sexual orientations and the number of people? There are two possible answers to this. On the one hand, trivially, if you only take actual sexual orientations into account, there are less or equal sexual orientations than people. On the other hand, if you just include possible sexual orientations, the number of them will be greater than the number of individuals. The proof is easy (and Ill try to make the simplest as possible): Simply take the number of males and females (lets say, 2.500 millons each one). Lets call <m,w> the ratio of m doable men and w doable women. You can just take <1,1>,<1,2>,<1,3>, etc. in total, 2.500 millons of pairs. Add <2,1>,<3,1>,<4,1>, etc. in total, 2.499 pairs. Now just add <2,3>,<2,5>,<2,7>, etc., which sums around 1.250 pairs. Thus, only considering sexual orientations that wouldnt do it to androgens or neutrals, one can get more than 6 billion of them. I dont know how deep is this result for sex theory. I guess it is really deep. But it clearly assumes a ne-grained conception of sexual orientations that many people wouldnt share.

2.3

A dierent approach: preferential doability

The notion of doability I used by now is discrete: people are doable or not doable, simpliciter. This can be more complex, giving rise to interesting distinctions. As a matter of fact, we have some preferences: some people

are more doable than other. Using this intuition, we can dene, for each agent s, a relation x <s y, which means x is more doable than y in the perspective of s. The order will be irreexive, transitive and modular, so the people or sets of people will be ordered in levels. The main problem is how does this preferential notion deal with the discrete one. As I see it, we can enumerate the s-levels of sets of people. The rst one includes the sets which s would mostly do it to. The last one includes the least doable sets. For every agent, there is a pair (n,k) such that n, k . We can thus dene some notions of doability: Desert island doability A set belongs to this set i it does not belong to the last level. Even in a desert island some people would not do it to certain people; although the range of doable entities needs to be enlarged in this situation. Alcoholic doability A set belongs to this set i it belongs to a level less or equal than k. As we know, with a bit of alcohol, people get less exquisite and more open to sexual options. Minimal/hypocrite doability A set belongs to this set i it belongs to the rst level. When someone adopt a very exigent standpoint, this notion of doability comes into play. Standard doability A set belongs to this set i it belongs to a level less or equal than n. Alcoholic range The alcoholic range of s is k-n in the s-order. It represents how drastic is the change which alcohol causes in that person. With these notions in mind, we can also state the old axioms: Sexually empty individual There is a person that belongs to a level higher than n for every s-order. Sexually desperate set There is a set s such that n+1 is the last level and includes just e (sexually empty individual). Threesome principle There is a set s such that a and b belong to a level higher than n for the s-order, but a b belong to a level less or equal than n. Brangelina set For all sets s, the set {AngelinaJolie, BradPitt} belongs to a level less or equal than n.

Doability union For all sets s, if a and b belong to a level less or equal than n for the s-order, a b also belong to a set less or equal than n. This new standpoint is better for the sexually empty set. Even if nobody would do it to him/her/it in a sober state, maybe someone would do it to him/her/it after some drinks.

Conclusion avenues of research

I suggested a formal theory of doability that helps us to solve a large number of problems in sex theory. This is just the start of a possibly huge number of papers about the topic. Some avenues for future research are: Probabilistic sexilogic, where you can say x would do it to y with a 90% of probabilities. Epistemic sexilogic, i.e. how much does our knowledge about the others inclinations aect our own inclinations. Action sexilogic, i.e. in which sense our doability set could change because of our actions, (for example, after taking some beers).