Feelings of guilt are human emotions that may arise if a person committed an action that contradicts basic moral mores or failed to commit an action that is considered moral according to their ethical standards and values. Psychological scholarship distinguishes between altruistic guilt (AG) and deontological guilt (DG). AG results from having caused harm to an innocent victim, either by acting or failing to act, whereas DG is caused by violating a moral principle. Although physicians may be (...) expected to experience frequent feelings of guilt in their demanding and intensive work, it is surprising to find that this issue has not been explored in the professional literature on medical ethics. To that end, we conducted a qualitative study that included personal in-depth interviews with Sunni Muslim gynaecologists. These doctors provide underground infertility care and perform religiously forbidden treatments involving sex selection and gamete donation. They opened their hearts and spoke about the emotionally taxing pangs of conscience they suffer. Analysing their narratives led us to characterize their feelings of guilt as DG. We discuss the causes for their plight and the way they cope with it, compare DG to the concept of moral distress, and call for future research on clinicians’ feelings of guilt and pangs of conscience. (shrink)

For years, mainstream feminist ethics focused criticism on male supremacy. Feminist philosophers in this volume adopt a less male-focused stance to look closely at oppression's impact on women's agency and on women's relations with women. Examining legal, social, and physical relationships, these philosophers confront moral ambiguity, moral compromise, and complicity in perpetuating oppression. Combining personal experience with philosophical inquiry, they vividly portray their daily engagement with oppression as both victims and perpetrators. They explore such issues as how pornography silences women (...) and radical feminist politics' complicity in racism. Among these insightful essays, Sandra Bartky argues that women share guilt for racism when they benefit from it without protest; Susan Brison reflects on uses of narrative in trauma recovery from such experiences as being targeted for rape or murder; Joan Callahan examines fallout of derogatory speech directed at lesbians; Virginia Held proposes carrying care into marketplaces and governments; and, in her introduction, Claudia Card draws on Primo Levi's conception of "gray zones" in exploring dangers of character damage to victims of misogyny. A fitting companion to Card's highly regarded Feminist Ethics, this volume interweaves observations on character, political ethics, violence, and love into an accessible sourcebook for students. It tackles some of feminism's most pressing issues and helps readers to identify and then overcome the real damage caused by oppression. (shrink)

Plato’s work offers insights into the corrosive impact of eros, insights central for contemporary politics. The article combines an in-depth reading of Plato with a case study, arguing for the relevance of communism. This is because love also establishes a relationship of subordination to the object of desire, which can subjugate and entrap the lover in his or her feelings. Such instrumentalization of eros in communism was promoted by adherents being supposed to love the sufferers. The obligation that to understand (...) and help the sufferers one must become a sufferer turned suffering into an autopoietic system. The acceptance of such instrumentalization of love was rendered possible first by a sense of guilt due to the system of passionate interests (Tarde and Latour), connected to the rise of capitalism as a solution for the period of civil wars, and then by the liminal conditions that emerged, especially in eastern Europe, after two world wars; conditions that were purposefully perpetuated through staging a sacrificial system, paralysing social life. The character of such liminal leaders can be analysed through the figure of the trickster, developed by anthropologists, complementing Weber’s notion of charisma. While communism disappeared as a force, contemporary political life is increasingly reduced to a politics of victimhood and suffering, where the search for the good life is replaced by the double negation of eliminating all suffering from the world – an effort that only produces the opposite result, while public reality becomes torn apart by sex scandals, confirming Foucault’s insight about the investment of desire and enslavement to sexuality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PrefaceMary Jacobus (bio)Trauma theory, considered as a branch of psychoanalysis, focuses on the lasting effects on the psyche of events that—whether because of their devastating nature or because the psyche is unprepared or too immature to deal with them—cannot be integrated into the onward movement of patient’s lives. The trauma can never be undone; but perhaps the patient may be helped to live with, even mourn, its aftereffects. Some (...) approaches to trauma emphasize the event itself, along with the difficulty, and the need, to relive or re-present it. Some emphasize the structural nature of a trauma which may even be constitutive of subjectivity (castration anxiety, for instance, or primitive anxieties about separation and object loss). Still other approaches point to the meaning of the trauma to the individual, arguing that only by exploring the preexisting constellation of object relations can the significance of the trauma to that particular individual be understood. Trauma may plunge the survivor into never completed mourning, or replace an ordinary guilt with an unresolvable one. Whatever the different inflection of trauma theory, it derives its contours from psychoanalysis, past and present, and, in particular, from the impact on Freud and his successors of some of the most devastating and momentous historical events of modern times, including modern warfare, the Holocaust, and industrialization. But trauma theory also takes account of events that happen (both chronically and diachronically, so to speak) in the intimacy of the family and in the ambiguously interpersonal and social dimensions of sexuality, where events intersect with issues involving gender, power, and powerlessness as well as with preexisting psychic structures.The essays in this collection arise not only from the continuing engagement with trauma theory on the part of psychoanalysts in their clinical and therapeutic work with patients, but from the surge of interest in trauma theory viewed as a way to invest the study of literature with urgent concerns, at once topical and timeless, and to understand literariness itself. A number of essays included in this special issue focus on the notion of the archive, whether viewed as a form of record which remains in abeyance (Jonathan Elmer’s starting point for considering Jefferson’s encounter with the Native American past) or as the place of a misunderstanding, even destructiveness (the point of departure for Herman Rapaport’s reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever). Appropriately, this issue also includes a photo-essay by Laurie Sieverts Snyder, which represents not only a family archive but a collection of memories that inscribe a larger historical displacement and relocation. The intertwined evolution of trauma theory and war neurosis, and the consequent unsexing of trauma, can give rise to a post-Freudian inquiry into the writing of anxiety (such as we see in Lyndsey Stonebridge’s reading of the war novels of Henry Green, where war “is” sex). At the same time, we can glimpse how the belatedness of trauma not only gets recoded as suspension or “falling” but gives rise to a philosophic discourse of trauma (see Eleanor Kaufman’s reading of Perec’s W together with Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience). Given its centrality to contemporary literary-critical readings of trauma, it is not surprising that a number of essays should address Cathy Caruth’s work directly (many of the essays included here also do so indirectly). Her writing remains central to current literary and theoretical discussions of trauma, whether viewed as a phenomenology of trauma (as it is, for instance, by Eleanor Kaufman) or as a vantage point from which to define the modern predicament of mutually entangled histories, communities, and writings (this is how Petar Ramadanovic links Freud’s diasporic movement to the history of slavery and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). [End Page 3]The final section of this special issue returns trauma to the consulting room. Essays on pain (Mary Jacobus on the place of psychoanalysis “between” therapy and hermeneutics as represented by the writings of Wifred Bion) and melancholia (Angelika Rauch’s Kristevan essay on post-traumatic hermeneutics and problems in contemporary trauma therapy) pay particular attention to the question of interpretation in psychoanalysis. They also shift the discussion in the direction of contemporary post... (shrink)

I construct a genealogy of the principle of distinction; the injunction to distinguish between combatants and civilians at all times during war. I outline the influence of a series of discourses--gender, innocence, and civilization --on these two categories. I focus on the emergence of the distinction in the seventeenth-century text "On the Law of War and Peace", authored by Hugo Grotius, and trace it through the twentieth-century treaties of the laws of war--the 1949 Geneva Protocols and the 1977 Protocols Additional. (...) I draw out how the practices of and referents for our current wars partially descend from and are governed by the binary logics of Christianity, barbarism, innocence, guilt, and sex difference articulated in Grotius's text. These binaries are implicated in our contemporary distinction of "combatant" and " civilian," troubling any facile notion of what "humanitarian" law is or what "humanitarian" law does, and posing distinct challenges to theorizations of the laws said to regulate war. (shrink)

Research on emotion and health has tended to focus on the negative consequences of “negative” emotions. An emerging literature has begun to explore the positive aspects of negative affect, suggesting that emotion be treated in a more differentiated way by recognising the components and intensity that can promote or harm health. For example, short bursts of emotion-associated sympathetic activation can stimulate parts of the immune system, whereas more chronic activation can cause “wear and tear” on the cardiovascular system. Anxiety and (...) guilt have been associated with preventive health behaviours and care-seeking, whereas distress and depression increase symptom sensitivity, accuracy of illness perception, and can facilitate care-seeking and receipt of support. However, intense and chronic negative affects may lead individuals to engage in risky health behaviours, such as substance abuse, overeating, and high risk sex, as a coping mechanism to regulate negative emotion. They may also undermine social support systems, leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of conflict and isolation. Future research must address the parameters defining “healthy” and “unhealthy” negative emotion. (shrink)

SEXUALITY, BETWEEN SPEECH AND STAGES IN LIFE, OF HIV-INFECTED SUBJECTS AIDS, that union between death and sexuality, makes the latter non-representable and has deeply modified the world of sexual imagination. The article seeks to show how the emergence of HIV has re-defined the current norm within individuals’ sexuality and then goes on to analyse the different stages HIV positive subjects have to confront as they go through life, with the need to re-organise their sexuality ; it then evokes the transgressive (...) aspect of sexuality for some sectors of the population and, finally, gives HIV positive women the opportunity to speak out on how they come to grips with their bodies in relation to partners – soiled bodies henceforth disentitled, deprived of pleasure. HIV infection has the effect of sowing confusion between the different registers such as death, life and sex, and causes in the subject feelings of shame and guilt : so many effects that the therapist has to take on board to render the feeling that they exist in full to the subject. (shrink)

Drawing on 45 interviews, this article addresses how heterosexual men and women respond to and discuss opposite and same-sex nude images in distinctive ways. Viewing both female and male nudes provides an opportunity to observe the sexual and gender identity work men and women perform when confronted with this cultural object. Both men and women have access to shared, readily available cultural scripts for interpreting and responding to female nude images. Neither men nor women are culturally adept at the interpretation (...) and use of nude male images, particularly the man in the soft porn frame. Men respond to this male nude with overt rejection and stated disinterest. Women are more likely to reject the seductive advance or welcome it with attached feelings of guilt. (shrink)

Plato’s work offers insights into the corrosive impact of eros, insights central for contemporary politics. The article combines an in-depth reading of Plato with a case study, arguing for the relevance of communism. This is because love also establishes a relationship of subordination to the object of desire, which can subjugate and entrap the lover in his or her feelings. Such instrumentalization of eros in communism was promoted by adherents being supposed to love the sufferers. The obligation that to understand (...) and help the sufferers one must become a sufferer turned suffering into an autopoietic system. The acceptance of such instrumentalization of love was rendered possible first by a sense of guilt due to the system of passionate interests (Tarde and Latour), connected to the rise of capitalism as a solution for the period of civil wars, and then by the liminal conditions that emerged, especially in eastern Europe, after two world wars; conditions that were purposefully perpetuated through staging a sacrificial system, paralysing social life. The character of such liminal leaders can be analysed through the figure of the trickster, developed by anthropologists, complementing Weber’s notion of charisma. While communism disappeared as a force, contemporary political life is increasingly reduced to a politics of victimhood and suffering, where the search for the good life is replaced by the double negation of eliminating all suffering from the world – an effort that only produces the opposite result, while public reality becomes torn apart by sex scandals, confirming Foucault’s insight about the investment of desire and enslavement to sexuality. (shrink)

Breastfeeding is analogous to pregnancy as an experience, in its exclusiveness to women, and in its cost and the effects it has on equitable share of labor. Therefore, the history of formula feeding provides useful insights into the future of full ectogenesis, which could evolve into a more severe version of what formula feeding is today: simplify life for some women and provide couples with a more equitable share of work at the cost of stigma, guilt and a daily (...) diet of studies purporting to show the benefits of natural pregnancy. Making pregnancy an optional route to motherhood would make women's life trajectory more similar to men's and thus put pressure on women to compete with men on the ground shaped by men's preferences. Despite being a treasured experience of many women today, bearing children could become the luxury of the few, the province of the very poor and a choice working women will pay a high price for as women who choose pregnancy become stigmatized as self-indulgent or unprofessional and penalized for it in the workplace. At the same time, scarce societal resources that could be used to support pregnant women and working mothers would instead be directed toward proving to women or even forcing them to gestate children "the right way." While not necessarily threatening on its own, when added to formula feeding, IVF, stem-cell produced ova and sex robots, full ectogenesis could diminish men's stake in women's wellbeing and even existence. (shrink)

A survey form sent to psychologists (Pope, Keith-Spiegel, & Tabachnick, 1986) was adapted and sent to 1,000 clinical social workers (return rate = 45%). Most participants reported sexual attraction to a client, causing (for most) guilt, anxiety, or confusion. Some reported having sexual fantasies about a client while engaging in sex with someone other than a client. Relatively few (3.6% men; 0.5% women) reported sex with a client; training was related to likelihood of offending, though the effect is small (...) and complex. An analysis of eight national studies (data from 5,148 therapists) found significant effects for gender (more male offenders) and year of study (about 10% annual decrease in reported offenses since 1977) but not profession (i.e., no difference among psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers). Most social workers reported no graduate training whatsoever about sexual attraction; only 10% reported adequate training. (shrink)

This paper makes two essential claims about the nature of shame and shame punishment. I argue that, if we properly understand the nature of shame, that it is sometimes justifiable to shame others in the context of a pluralistic multicultural society. I begin by assessing the accounts of shame provided by Cheshire Calhoun (2004) and Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, & Fabrice Teroni (2012). I argue that both views have problems. I defend a theory of shame and embarrassment that connects both (...) emotions to “whole-self” properties. Shame and embarrassment, I claim, are products of the same underlying emotion. I distinguish between moralized and nonmoralized shame in order to show when, and how, moral and non-moral shame may be justly deployed. Shame is appropriate, I argue, if and only if it targets malleable moral or non-moral normative imperfections of a person’s ‘whole-self.’ Shame is unjustifiable when it targets durable aspects of a person’s “whole-self.” I conclude by distinguishing shame punishments from guilt punishments and show that my account can explain why it is wrong to shame individuals on account of their race, sex, gender, or body while permitting us to sometimes levy shame and shame punishment against others, even those otherwise immune to moral reasons. (shrink)

Increased participation in public affairs by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops during the highly contentious 2012 Presidential election has seemingly brought the traditions of Catholic social teaching and socialism into a high profile conflict. While it is clear that President Obama is not what most academics would consider a “socialist,” modern discourse still presents what I argue is a false dichotomy- one can be either endorse natural law (especially of the Catholic variety) or socialism, but not both. While my (...) goal in this article is to refute the alleged incompatibility, not to determine its historical roots, some speculation about its origin may be illuminating. Recent work on religious identity in the United States suggests that Americans largely identify Christianity with the right wing of the American culture war. Additional research is required to fully grasp where this perception comes from, but one can venture several guesses: the rise of the “Christian Right” in Republican Party politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the concept of “social justice” being lampooned by Right-wing talk show hosts, and decades of a Catholic Church that firmly opposed Cold War-era Soviet Communism. The contrast between left-wing and right-wing thought on social issues (same-sex marriage, abortion, etc.) is very well documented and widely discussed. Differences between leftists and natural lawyers on economic issues, however, are more often assumed than argued for. Perhaps this is a matter of “guilt by association,” with those arguing that leftist social policy is at odds with natural law simply assuming that the same must be the case with leftist economic policy as well. Thus, natural law, long tied to Christianity throughout its history, is gratuitously appropriated by right-wing political ideology. Against this claim of incompatibility, I argue that one can rationally hold both socialism and natural law to be true. In his landmark Natural Law and Natural Rights, John Finnis offers what is arguably the twentieth century’s most complete theory of natural law. I will argue that the conception of socialism laid out by G.A. Cohen in hisWhy Not Socialism? is compatible with Finnis’s account of the human goods, and that natural lawyers can therefore reasonably endorse Cohen’s prescription for socialism. (shrink)

The notion that rape is an act of violence rather than sex is a central tenet in rape crisis support and education. A therapeutic benefit of this conceptualisation of rape is that it counters shame and guilt by affirming that the victim was not a complicit partner in an act of sex. However, this conceptualisation has recently been criticised for not capturing what makes rape an especially serious kind of wrong. This raises an apparent dilemma for rape crisis support. (...) Recent work in analytic moral philosophy on the nature of rape offers a way to resolve this dilemma. It is argued that rape is not sex, but is nonetheless sexual. This distinction allows for a charitable reformulation of the central tenet in rape crisis support, which can facilitate the dual therapeutic aims of countering the sense of shame and of recognising the especially serious kind of the harm suffered by the victim. (shrink)

Is sex identity a feature of one's mind or body, and is it a relational or intrinsic property? Who is in the best position to know a person's sex, do we each have a true sex, and is a person's sex an alterable characteristic? When a person's sex assignment changes, has the old self disappeared and a new one emerged; or, has only the public presentation of one's self changed? "You've Changed" examines the philosophical questions raised by the phenomenon of (...) sex reassignment, and brings together the essays of scholars known for their work in gender, sexuality, queer, and disability studies, feminist epistemology and science studies, and philosophical accounts of personal identity. An interdisciplinary contribution to the emerging field of transgender studies, it will be of interest to students and scholars in a number of disciplines. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, has traditionally been read as an application of Sartrean existentialism to the problem of women. Critics have claimed a Sartrean origin for Beauvoir's central theses: that under patriarchy woman is the Other, and that 'one is not born a woman, but becomes one.' An analysis of Beauvoir's recently discovered 1927 diary, written while she was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, two years before her first meeting with Sartre, challenges this interpretation. (...) In this diary, Beauvoir affirms her commitment to doing philosophy, defines the philosophical problem of 'the opposition of self and other,' and explores the links between love and domination. In 1927, she thus lays the foundations of both Sartre's phenomenology of interpersonal relationships and of her own thesis, in The Second Sex, that woman is the Other. Her descriptions of the experience of freedom and choice point to the influence of Bergson, specifically his concepts of 'becoming' and élan vital. Tracing Beauvoir's shift from her apolitical position of 1927 to the feminist engagement of The Second Sex points to the influence of the African-American writer, Richard Wright, whose description of the lived experience of oppression of blacks in America, and whose challenge to Marxist reductionism, provide Beauvoir with a model, an analogy, for analyzing woman's oppression. (shrink)

We investigated the relationship between guilt proneness and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) using a diverse sample of employed adults working in a variety of different industries at various levels in their organizations. CWB refers to behaviors that harm or are intended to harm organizations or people in organizations. Guilt proneness is a personality trait characterized by a predisposition to experience negative feelings about personal wrongdoing. CWB was engaged in less frequently by individuals high in guilt proneness compared (...) to those low in guilt proneness, controlling for other known correlates of CWB. CWB was also predicted by gender, age, intention to turnover, interpersonal conflict at work, and negative affect at work. Given the detrimental impact of CWB on people and organizations, it may be wise for employers to consider guilt proneness when making hiring decisions. (shrink)

We examine whether sex discrimination contributes to the underrepresentation of female executives in large corporations. China’s strong cultural preference for sons has made newborn boys greatly outnumber newborn girls. Using the male-to-female sex ratio at birth as the proxy for discrimination against women, we find that firms headquartered in more discriminatory areas hire fewer female executives. Even conditional on a woman reaching an executive position, she faces a higher likelihood of dismissal and receives lower compensation than her male counterparts. Overall, (...) our findings suggest that sex discrimination plays an important role in preventing women from climbing the corporate ladder. (shrink)

The male gametes of most organisms lack cytoplasm. Consequently, most cytoplasmic genetic elements are maternally inherited: they cannot be transmitted patrilinnearly. The evolutionary interests of cytoplasmic elements therefore lie in transmission through the female. These elements may thus be in evolutionary conflict with nuclear genes which are transmitted by both sexes. This conflict is manifested in observations of cytoplasmically induced biased sex‐ratios. Some cytoplasmic genes avoid this fate by biasing the primary sex ratio towards females, or by inducing parthenogenesis. Others (...) kill male hosts, and either achieve transmission via dispersal, or benefit their clonal relatives in the dead male's female siblings. Still others cause the failure of zygotes resulting from pairings between males carrying specific microbes and females lacking them, causing an increase in the microbes through the sterilisation of non‐bearing females. Many, but not all, of these ‘ultra‐selfish’ microbes are closely related. Investigations of the significance of their phylogenetic affinities, or lack of them, their adaptability in terms of the methods by which they avoid, or ameliorate, the adverse effects of being in male hosts, and their importance as selective agents in the evolution of invertebrate sex determination systems, provide fertile spheres for future research. (shrink)

Previous meta-analyses support a female advantage in decoding non-verbal emotion (Hall, 1978, 1984), yet the mechanisms underlying this advantage are not understood. The present study examined whether the female advantage is related to greater female attention to the eyes. Eye-tracking techniques were used to measure attention to the eyes in 19 males and 20 females during a facial expression recognition task. Women were faster and more accurate in their expression recognition compared with men, and women looked more at the eyes (...) than men. Positive relationships were observed between dwell time and number of fixations to the eyes and both accuracy of facial expression recognition and speed of facial expression recognition. These results support the hypothesis that the female advantage in facial expression recognition is related to greater female attention to the eyes. (shrink)

America is at war with terrorism. Terrorists must be brought to justice.We hear these phrases together so often that we rarely pause to reflect on the dramatic differences between the demands of war and the demands of justice, differences so deep that the pursuit of one often comes at the expense of the other. In this book, one of the country's most important legal thinkers brings much-needed clarity to the still unfolding debates about how to pursue war and justice in (...) the age of terrorism. George Fletcher also draws on his rare ability to combine insights from history, philosophy, literature, and law to place these debates in a rich cultural context. He seeks to explain why Americans--for so many years cynical about war--have recently found war so appealing. He finds the answer in a revival of Romanticism, a growing desire in the post-Vietnam era to identify with grand causes and to put nations at the center of ideas about glory and guilt.Fletcher opens with unsettling questions about the nature of terrorism, war, and justice, showing how dangerously slippery the concepts can be. He argues that those sympathetic to war are heirs to the ideals of Byron, Fichte, and other Romantics in their belief that nations--not just individuals--must uphold honor and be held accountable for crimes. Fletcher writes that ideas about collective glory and guilt are far more plausible and widespread than liberal individualists typically recognize. But as he traces the implications of the Romantic mindset for debates about war crimes, treason, military tribunals, and genocide, he also shows that losing oneself in a grand cause can all too easily lead to moral catastrophe.A work of extraordinary intellectual power and relevance, the book will change how we think not only about world events, but about the conflicting individualist and collective impulses that tear at all of us. (shrink)

The California Verbal Learning Test-Second Edition, is a commonly used tool to assess episodic memory. This study analyzed learning and memory characteristics in a cognitively healthy Chinese population, as well as the effects of age, sex and education on CVLT-II factors. In total, 246 healthy people aged 20–80 years and 29 persons with multiple sclerosis were included in this study and completed the CVLT-II. Factors including total learning, learning strategy, serial position effects, short-delay free and cued recall, long-delay free and (...) cued recall, repetitions and intrusions during recall, hits and false positives of recognition, and total recognition discriminability were calculated. The effects of age, sex and education on these factors were analyzed using ANCOVA or independent two-sample t-tests and further confirmed by multiple regression analysis. The regression-based normative data were then computed by the equivalent scores method. Moreover, differences in learning and memory were compared between persons with MS and age-, sex- and education-matched healthy individuals. Most CVLT-II factors significantly differed between different age and education groups; in particular, better performance in total learning, recall, semantic clustering and recognition was observed in the younger and more educated groups than in the older and less educated groups. Male participants showed higher recency effect scores, more repetitions and fewer hits than female participants. Compared with healthy individuals, persons with MS showed extensive impairments in memory processes, such as learning, recall, learning strategy and recognition. These findings indicated that verbal learning and memory were highly dependent on age and educational level but not strongly affected by sex. The CVLT-II effectively assesses episodic memory impairment in the Chinese-speaking population. (shrink)

Because of an error in calculation of coefficients reported in the article “Sex Differences in the Association of Family and Personal Income and Wealth with Fertility in the United States”.

Beginning with a discussion of Kant, Schopenhauer, and others about the morality of sex and the morality of compassion, Explorations in Love and Sex offers a panoramic view of the philosophy of love from its beginnings in Plato up to the present. It examines the nature and limitations of sexual pluralism, and elaborates on Irving Singer's earlier ideas about appraisal and bestowal. The book's chapters are both philosophical and historical, and speak to general readers who wish to better understand the (...) curious set of emotions called love. (shrink)

Aggressive techniques within casual sex encounters, such as taking sexual liberties without permission or ignoring rejection, can, perhaps unintentionally, complicate consent. Passive recipients may acquiesce out of fear, which aggressors may not realize. Some philosophers argue that social norms are sufficiently well known to make this misunderstanding unlikely. However, the chance of aggression leading to non-consensual sex, even if not great, is high enough that aggressors should work diligently to avoid this potentially grave result. I consider how this problem plays (...) out in the common mating ritual of hooking up. I argue that aggressive hook ups can only be permissible if they are modeled on BDSM encounters: the participants must obtain prior consent and prepare safe words for voiding that consent during the hook up. While this solution removes the spontaneity of aggressive sex, I argue that spontaneously aggressive hook ups with strangers cannot be permissible. (shrink)