The ethical corollary of “sex is a basic human need” is that rape is justified.

(Trigger Warning: This post discusses rapist logic and rape.)

Some men argue that when women “withhold sex” from men, we are depriving men of their basic needs:

A sense of entitlement? That’s what you want to call the basic human need for love, companionship, approval, and sex? [...] And then you wonder why guys perceive hostility from women. Gee, I wonder.

— unapproved comment from a Geek Feminism post

If a woman declines to have sex with a man, is she violating the man’s human rights, his alleged “right to sex”, or is the man’s experience of being deprived of his rights actually evidence of his sense of “entitlement” over women’s bodies?

This visual representation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs puts “sex” at the bottom base of the pyramid (falling under the category “Physiological” needs, which are the most basic needs), but “sexual intimacy” is also at the third rung from the bottom, falling under the category of “Love/belonging” needs. “Security of body” is at the at the second rung from the bottom of the pyramid, falling under the category of “Safety” needs, which is above “Physiological” needs but below “Love/belonging” needs.

If the “right to be not raped” falls under “Safety” and “security of body”, then is the alleged “right” to obtain sex a more basic need than the “right to be not raped”? Or does “Safety”/”security of body”/the “right to be not raped” have higher priority than fulfilling everyone’s alleged “need” for sex?

Of course, if one assumes that sex is a more basic need than security of body, then the ethical corollary would be that rape is justified. If you accept “rape is wrong” as an axiom, then you should agree that a person’s security of body/the right to be not raped has a higher priority than a person’s “need” for sex.

Men who lack basic empathy for women (in same the way that white people lack empathy for brown people and rich people lack empathy for poor people) might imagine that a world where everyone who wants sex receives it is a better world than one in which sexual consent is required. They might even invoke a Fallacious Flip, arguing that they would not mind if the gender roles were reversed, and that they wouldn’t mind being raped.

What is wrong with this argument—besides heterosexual men’s tendency to incorrectly visualize the thought experiment as the heterosexual-male-fantasy trope where the man is chased by only the women who look like models—is that they fail to take into account the power imbalance between men and women. A better analogy would be imagining whether the need for security of body or the “need” for sex has a higher priority within a male prison, where men have a high chance of being raped. If you are a man and you do not understand why the claim that sex is a basic need is rapist logic, then imagine being in a male prison where about half the prison population is larger and stronger than you, and where rape is a real threat. Imagine that when you resist the sexual advances of an inmate who is larger and stronger than you, the inmate asserts that sex is a basic need, accuses you of violating his human rights, claims that you have social power over him because you reject him, and states that you are being hostile.

Statistically, men have the power to deny women sex through physical force, which is why a world where everyone has the ability to rape everyone else would benefit men. Unfortunately, this “hypothetical” world is hardly a thought experiment; it is very much the reality we are living in. Women are much more likely to be raped than men, despite the requirement of sexual consent being encoded into law. Thus, when men assert that sex is a basic need, they are not making some philosophical, abstract, or theoretical argument about what counts as a “basic human need”. They are advancing the status quo of rape culture in a society where men rape women because they do not prioritize consent.

Sex is not a basic need. Unlike breathing, food, and water, having sex with another person is not necessary for survival. Asexual people exist, live full lives, and are complete human beings. To argue that sex is a basic need is indeed a display of both entitlement and privilege. Women are not being hostile towards men when we complain about men feeling “entitled” to sex. Men are being hostile and threatening to women when they make elaborate arguments about why their libido is more important than our security of body.