This encyclopedia article on the philosophy of sexuality discusses the main themes, concepts, and debates in the field, including the metaphysics (or philosophical anthropology) of sex, the morality of sexual behavior, pragmatic and utilitarian evaluations of sexuality, and sexual perversion.

This collection joins together sixty essays on the philosophy of love and sex. Each was presented at a meeting of The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love held between 1977 and 1992 and later revised for this edition. Topics addressed include ethical and political issues (AIDS, abortion, homosexual rights, and pornography), conceptual matters (the nature, essence, or definition of love, friendship, sexual desire, and perversion); the study of classical and historical figures (Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, (...) and Kierkegaard); and issues in feminist theory (sexual objectification, the social construction of female sexuality, reproductive and marital arrangements). Authors include Jerome Shaffer, Sandra Harding, Michael Ruse, Richard Mohr, Russell Vannoy, Claudia Card, M.C. Dillon, Gene Fendt, Steven Emmanuel, T.F. Morris, Timo Airaksinen, and Sylvia Walsh. The editor, who is the author of Pornography (1986), The Structure of Love (1990), and Sexual Investigations (1996), has also contributed six pieces and an Introduction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, (...) Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

Featuring twenty-nine essays, thirteen of which are new to this edition, this best-selling volume examines the nature, morality, and social meanings of contemporary sexual phenomena. Topics include sexual desire, masturbation, sex on the Internet, homosexuality, transgender and transsexual issues, marriage, consent, exploitation, objectification, rape, pornography, promiscuity, and prostitution.

This chapter contains sections titled: Sex, Reproduction, and Love Privacy, Consent, and Homosexuality Rape and Harassment Prostitution and Adultery.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics by Alexander R. PrussBenedict M. Guevin O.S.B.One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics. By Alexander R. Pruss. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 465. $45.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-268-03897-7.As a professor of moral theology in general and of sexual ethics in particular, I found Alexander Pruss’s largely philosophical account of sexual ethics to be (...) refreshing. As much as I try to dissuade my students from using religious legalism to justify the rightness or wrongness of certain sexual practices, I find it almost impossible to break them of the bad habit of using such phrases as “Because the Church teaches...” or “Because the Bible says...”. Even when I counter by saying, “The Church teaches that something is good because it is good and not because the Church says it is good, and such goodness is grounded in the natural law and a sound anthropology,” such legalism still persists. And so, to read Pruss’s extensive analysis of sexual ethics using both personalist and Thomistic principles as well as what we have received from divine revelation is a much-needed tonic not only for students of theology and philosophy but for all those interested in discovering the role of human reason and biology in crafting a sexual ethic.After an introduction, the proper beginning of Pruss’s analysis is found in chapter 2. Here, the author discusses love and its forms with a particular focus on the meaning of agapē in the New Testament. Pruss argues that, philosophically speaking, we should love everyone. But love should not be understood as monolithic. There are various kinds of love: agapē, philia, and erōs. The New Testament understanding of agapē contains the other two, for it is love itself. This kind of love is a love that loves the other as the other is, for the other’s sake, and in a way that is appropriate to that person in the light of objective facts. Moreover, this kind of love is not simply a feeling or an emotion but is concentrated in an action that is an expression of one’s will.In chapter 3, Pruss takes up the issue of desire. He evaluates desire in two ways: (1) desire and libido, and (2) sexual desire, need, and pleasure. He [End Page 485] concludes that sexual desire is not a need in the same way that we desire food, drink, communication, love, and to be loved. Without these latter, human life would be seriously lacking or, in the case of food and drink, quickly cut short. Second, he observes that circumstances may not be appropriate for fulfilling one’s sexual desire. Finally, while human life would be seriously compromised by the lack of food, drink, communication, love, and the need to be loved, abstaining from the fulfillment of sexual desire even over a long period of time would not be detrimental to human well-being in the same way.Pruss does not imply by the preceding that sexuality does not matter. Chapter 4, in fact, deals with the meaningfulness of sexuality. There are two sets of rules regarding sexuality and its expression. Some rules are moral in nature, like the prohibition against rape. Other rules are customs, for example, the exchanging of rings after the exchange of marital vows. With respect to the moral rules regarding sexuality, Pruss highlights casual sex, sexual assault, gay rights, and romantic love. Apart from sexual assault and rape—both of which lack consent—casual sex, homosexual sex, and romantic love have the following in common, namely, that sex is indeed innately important to human beings and that sex aspires to be romantic in nature. While, as in the case of casual sex, romantic love does not necessarily give rise to true love, romantic love is often the prelude to a deep and unique form of love. Why this is so has to do with the meaning of sexual union.Sexual union is the topic of chapter 5, presented under the title “One Flesh, One Body.” Scripture, Pruss affirms, describes the person as... (shrink)

Sexual perversity has traditionally been defined in terms of violating externally imposed criteria for natural or normal sex. The theory proposed here views sexual desires in terms of their own internal structure, such that perverse desires are those which are self-defeating because they are contradictory. Sadism, masochism, and certain private acts between consenting heterosexual and homosexual adults are shown to be perverse in illustrating the use of this hopefully nonideological method.

'A dazzling treatise, as erudite and eloquent as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and considerably more sound in its conclusion' - TLS When John desires Mary or Mary desires John, what does either of them want? What is meant by innocence, passion, love and arousal, desire, perversion and shame? These are just a few of the questions Roger Scruton addresses in this thought-provoking intellectual adventure. Beginning from purely philosophical premises, and ranging over human life, art and institutions, he (...) surveys the entire field of sexuality; equally dissatisfied with puritanism and permissiveness, he argues for a radical break with recent theories. Upholding traditional morality - though in terms that may shock many of its practitioners - his argument gravitates to that which is candid, serene and consoling in the experience of sexual love. (shrink)

After #MeToo, academics have become increasingly focused on the liberal concept of consent. Either problematized as a means of distinguishing between sex and rape, or vaunted as a tool for having better sex, consent remains central to discussions of sexual violence. Returning to Andrea Dworkin’s thought, this article argues that contemporary feminists must move beyond consent and recenter the problem of violence to theorize rape. Dworkin, alongside Catharine MacKinnon and Carole Pateman, critiques consent for disguising the violence of rape, sex, (...) and pornography. By defining violence as a process of objectification, Dworkin exposes rape, pornography, and most controversially, consensual heterosexual intercourse as “a new kind of death.” She, in turn, calls for the feminist exercise of violence as a tactic of disclosure that promises to make visible patriarchal violence hidden by consent and sexualization. Moving beyond consent to recenter the problem of violence, I conclude, opens up new avenues for feminist action and brings into view the seemingly unthinkable possibility of a world without rape. (shrink)

Violation pornography is pornography where the depicted behavior includes unjust sexual acts, e.g., rape. In this paper I argue that it is unclear whether the enjoyment of violation pornography is bad for the viewer. My essay has three parts. First, I set out an account of flourishing. I adopt a composite account, whereby flourishing is a function of the degree to which an individual has pleasure and various objective-list elements. Objective-list elements are things (e.g., knowledge and meaningful relationships) that make (...) my life go better independently of their effects on pleasure and desire-fulfillment. In the next two parts, I relate violation pornography to each component of flourishing. Thus, in the second part, I explore whether violation pornography promotes or hinders pleasure. In the third part I explore whether pornography is compatible with these objective-list elements, particularly virtue. (shrink)

The liberal view that valid consent is sufficient for a sex act to be morally legitimate is challenged by three major philosophies of sex: the Catholic view of sex as ordained for procreation and properly confined to marriage, the romantic view of sex as bound up with love, and the radical feminist analysis of sex in our society as part and parcel of the domination of women by men. I take a critical look at all three, focusing on Mary (...) Geach''s recent statement of the procreation view, Roger Scruton''s theory of sexual desire as naturally evolving into intimacy and love, and several radical feminist discussions of sex in sexist society which argue that the notion of consent is unhelpful and, indeed, irrelevant. I argue that none of these lines of argument is convincing, and that consent remains the touchstone of morally permissible sex – although, dmittedly, it may not be very helpful in discussing ideals of human sexuality. (shrink)

The development of highly humanoid sex robots is on the technological horizon. If sex robots are integrated into the legal community as “electronic persons”, the issue of sexual consent arises, which is essential for legally and morally permissible sexual relations between human persons. This paper explores whether it is conceivable, possible, and desirable that humanoid robots should be designed such that they are capable of consenting to sex. We consider reasons for giving both “no” and “yes” answers to these three (...) questions by examining the concept of consent in general, as well as critiques of its adequacy in the domain of sexual ethics; the relationship between consent and free will; and the relationship between consent and consciousness. Additionally we canvass the most influential existing literature on the ethics of sex with robots. (shrink)

The standard liberal sexual ethic maintains that consent is the only requirement for ethical sexual relations. While consent is certainly necessary for an adequate sexual ethic (and it’s important to know what it involves), I argue that it’s far from sufficient. The key claims that I advance are the following: (1) The consent-only model of sexual ethics affirms a “casual” view of sex and therefore it can’t make sense of and properly combat what’s worst in the sexual domain: namely, the (...) grave evil of sexual violence. (2) The consent-only model of sexual ethics fails properly to recognize the special significance of human sexuality and the nature of erotic love and its role in human sexual fulfillment and therefore it can’t make sense of and properly support what’s best in the sexual domain: namely, a committed erotic loving relationship. A more adequate sexual ethic, I maintain, would be a more traditionalist one that involves the following: it would give proper recognition to the special significance of human sexuality, avoid dehumanization in sexual desire, and encourage and support committed erotic love and its role in human fulfillment. Moreover, it would regard this as requiring that we cultivate sexual virtues such as chastity, modesty, and fidelity, and that we encourage and support life-long monogamous marriage as the proper context for human sexual relationship. (shrink)

While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of love itself. Marion (...) begins his profound and personal book with a critique of Descartes’ equation of the ego’s ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists—“I think, therefore I am”—arguing that this is worse than vain. We encounter being, he says, when we first experience love: I am loved, therefore I am; and this love is the reason I care whether I exist or not. This philosophical base allows Marion to probe several manifestations of love and its variations, including carnal excitement, self-hate, lying and perversion, fidelity, the generation of children, and the love of God. Throughout, Marion stresses that all erotic phenomena, including sentimentality, pornography, and even boasts about one’s sexual conquests, stem not from the ego as popularly understood but instead from love. A thoroughly enlightening and captivating philosophical investigation of a strangely neglected subject, The Erotic Phenomenon is certain to initiate feverish new dialogue about the philosophical meanings of that most desirable and mysterious of all concepts—love. (shrink)

Many people have sexual fantasies about being forced to have sex, or forcing someone to have sex. Several authors have argued that it is wrong to enjoy such fantasies: They lead to harm, or reinforce oppressive social structures, are liable to corrupt our character, or, mostly interestingly, are wrong in themselves, because they involve the eroticization of things that are wrong. I argue here that all such arguments fail properly to distinguish between fantasy and desire (despite authors' acknowledgement of that (...) distinction), and between objects of desire and sources of arousal. The broader significance of this point is also discussed. -/- This paper is intended, in part, as a defense of claims about sexual fantasy made at the end of "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?". (shrink)

This paper uses a dilemma presented by David Benatar to explore the challenges that ‘Sexual Liberals’ face in giving a satisfactory account of sexual ethics. A satisfactory Sexual Liberal account of sexual ethics must be able to fully explain the wrongness of sexual assault without implying that sexual activity should be restricted to those in love. The assumption that this is impossible may be due to mistakes in our thinking about sexual assault. However, even when such mistakes are resolved, (...) producing a satisfactory account of sexual ethics requires Sexual Liberals to confront the significance of the sexual in human life. I describe an account of sexual desire that explains the significance of the sexual in human life without forcing us to endorse a restrictive sexual ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Il Mostro e il sapiente: Studi sull'erotica grecaEva CantarellaRiccardo Vattuone. Il Mostro e il sapiente: Studi sull'erotica greca. Studi di Storia 11. Bologna: Pàtron, 2004. 345 pp. 15 black-and-white figs. Paper, €24."Il mostro e il sapiente" (the monster and the wise man), referred to in the title of Riccardo Vattuone's book, are, respectively, the loathed figure of the modern pedophile and an elected official who stands almost as (...) a symbol of wisdom, the great Athenian legislator Solon. Each of them, as Vattuone observes in the introduction, "loves" boys. No one, however, has ever for this reason considered the wise man Solon to be a monster, as today's media tend to view the modern pedophile. Thus it is clear from the title and made explicit in the foreword (7–10) that Vattuone is not merely interested in the past. As he repeats several times, "It is the past that puts the most significant questions to the contemporary age, and not vice-versa" (9, and passim). In this case, the past that interrogates the present is the pederastic relationship, and the question that this has asked Vattuone is whether or not there is a relationship between so-called Greek love and modern pedophilia. According to Vattuone, from the nineteenth century on, the immense quantity of literature about the pederastic relationship oscillates between radical condemnation and attempts to defend the past by "distancing it" (8). Il Mostro e il sapiente, he declares, was written to get away from this "ideological hypocrisy" and to dispel, if possible, "the suspicion that behind the contemporary pedophile there lurk the worst vices, the most obvious repressions of Western culture... and that that person is a creation of the system, constructed as a scapegoat for the unspeakable Other" (9).The following eight chapters are therefore dedicated to this objective. In the first, "Osservazioni preliminari: i crimini di Solone" (Preliminary Observations: the Crimes of Solon), Vattuone begins with an epigram of Straton (AP 12.246) to contest—in my opinion correctly—the reading of pederasty that he calls "anesthetic," according to which the pais would have experienced his relationship with the adult as a kind of social obligation, without feeling desire or pleasure. It is not only the adult that loves and desires, says Vattuone. Pederasty implies reciprocity of affection. On this point, as I observed years ago, I believe it very likely that Vattuone is approaching the truth. (See E. Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World [2d ed., Yale University Press, 2002], xii–xiii, and, at greater length, "A proposito di C. Calame, L'Amour en grece," Annales ESC 1999.)The second chapter, "Pais kalos. Una bellezza incomparabile" (Pais Kalos. An Incomparable Beauty), argues, correctly, against the idea that the boy's attractions depend on his resemblance to a woman. The scarce contact that Greek [End Page 461] men had with women has nothing to do with the reasons for which the paides from the age of approximately twelve to seventeen years were irresistible to the Greek man. Though their face and gaze might be soft, their body structure and ethos were virile. Pederasty was a relationship between males, among other things allowed and culturally valued only within the age limits to which an ample and exhaustive part of the chapter is dedicated.The third chapter, "Eros, un 'dovere' sociale?" (Eros, a Social "Duty?"), goes into the erotic aspect of the relationship, dedicating ample space to the problem of the so-called origins of pederasty. The Greeks considered that pederasty originated with a crime (the rape of Chrysippus), and modern scholars, according to Vattuone, have followed this line of thinking, concentrating their efforts on the attempt—this is a leitmotif of the book—to save the Greeks from accusations of immorality and perversion. A long section of criticism follows, attacking hypotheses of the historic-psychoanalytic type and those that link the social role of pederasty to "rites of passage," with the objective, according to Vattuone, of distancing it from us and the present world. I do not agree, however. As I have pointed out elsewhere, to connect a sexual relationship with a rite does not necessarily... (shrink)

While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word _philosophy _means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In _The Erotic Phenomenon,_ Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of love itself. Marion (...) begins his profound and personal book with a critique of Descartes’ equation of the ego’s ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists—“I think, therefore I am”—arguing that this is worse than vain. We encounter being, he says, when we first experience love: I am loved, therefore I am; and this love is the reason I care whether I exist or not. This philosophical base allows Marion to probe several manifestations of love and its variations, including carnal excitement, self-hate, lying and perversion, fidelity, the generation of children, and the love of God. Throughout, Marion stresses that all erotic phenomena, including sentimentality, pornography, and even boasts about one’s sexual conquests, stem not from the ego as popularly understood but instead from love. A thoroughly enlightening and captivating philosophical investigation of a strangely neglected subject, _The Erotic Phenomenon _is certain to initiate feverish new dialogue about the philosophical meanings of that most desirable and mysterious of all concepts—love. (shrink)

In the law of rape, consent has been and remains a gendered concept. Consent presumes female acquiescence to male sexual initiation. It presumes a man desires to penetrate a woman sexually. It presumes the woman willingly yields to the man's desires. It does not presume, and of course does not require, female sexual desire. Consent is what the law calls it when he advances and she does not put up a fight. I have argued elsewhere that the kind of thin (...) consent that the law focuses on is not enough ethically and it should not be enough legally to justify sexual penetration. I advocate sexual negotiation, where individuals discuss sexual desires and boundaries and agree to engage in penetration before it occurs, except under circumstances in which the partners have a reasonable basis to assess one another's nonverbal behavior. I argue that not only is verbal consultation about desire ordinarily ethically necessary before most acts of sexual penetration, it should be legally required. Consultation to ascertain sexual desires and boundaries assures that both parties desire penetration. (shrink)

This is the 8th edition of the book, with eight new essays to the volume. Table of contents: Are We Having Sex Now or What? (Greta Christina); Sexual Perversion (Thomas Nagel); Plain Sex (Alan Goldman); Sex and Sexual Perversion (Robert Gray); Masturbation and the Continuum of Sexual Activities (Alan Soble); Love: What’s Sex Got to Do with It? (Natasha McKeever); Is “Loving More” Better? The Values of Polyamory (Elizabeth Brake); What Is Sexual Orientation? (Robin Dembroff); Sexual Orientation: What Is (...) It? (Kathleen Stock); Asexuality (Luke Brunning and Natasha McKeever); LGBTQ ... Z? (Kathy Rudy); How to Be a Pluralist About Gender Categories (Katharine Jenkins); The Negotiative Theory of Gender Identity and the Limits of First-Person Authority (Burkay Ozturk); Racial Sexual Desires (Raja Halwani); Sex and Technology: The Ethics of Virtual Connection (Neil McArthur); A Realist Sexual Ethics (Micah Newman); Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person (Thomas Mappes); Sexual Use (Alan Soble); Dark Desires (Seiriol Morgan); The Harms of Consensual Sex (Robin West); Casual Sex, Promiscuity, and Objectification (Raja Halwani); Is Prostitution Harmful? (Ole Martin Moen); BDSM (Shaun Miller); Two Views of Sexual Ethics: Promiscuity, Pedophilia, and Rape (David Benatar); Sexual Gifts and Sexual Duties (Alan Soble); A Bibliography of the Philosophy of Sex . (shrink)

This collection features essays from top experts in ethics and philosophy of love that offer varying perspectives on the value of a contemporary secular virtue of chastity. The virtue of chastity has traditionally been portrayed as an excellent personal disposition concerning the ideal ordering of sexual desire such that the person desires that which is actually good for both the self and others affected by his or her sexual desires and actions. Yet, for roughly the past half century chastity (...) has been increasingly portrayed as an unnecessary ideal with few secular benefits that could not be otherwise obtained. Instead, chastity is sometimes portrayed as an odd kind of religious asceticism with few secular benefits. The essays in this volume ask whether there may be advantages to reconsidering a contemporary virtue of chastity. A recovered and reconceptualized concept of chastity can offer partial solutions to problems associated with externalized sexual desire, including sweeping patterns of sexual harassment, the high divorce/relationship-failure rate, and widespread pornography use. Sexual Ethics in a Secular Age will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in the philosophy of sex and love, virtue ethics, and philosophical accounts of secularity. (shrink)

Anti-pornography feminists have famously argued that pornography silences women: specifically, pornography causes women to be illocutionarily disabled in some real-life sexual contexts so that they are unable to refuse sex by saying ‘no’. Call this view Silencing. Some philosophers object to Silencing because it seems to entail that, in some cases, a rapist’s blameworthiness is significantly diminished. If the woman cannot refuse sex by saying ‘no’, and this allows the man’s belief, that she consents, to be rational, then the man’s (...) blameworthiness for rape is significantly diminished. The objection is that something must be wrong with a view like Silencing that allows rapists to escape the moral hook when, intuitively, they should not. In this paper, I defend Silencing from this objection by appealing to insights from the literature on moral encroachment in order to argue that it is not rational for the rapist to believe (or accept) that the woman consents. (shrink)

When considering possible theoretical perspectives for an ethical conceptualisation oferotic or sexually explicit display in cinema, such as recent controversial work by Frenchfemale directors Catherine Breillat and Claire Denis, the thought of Emmanuel Levinas isperhaps not the most likely or obvious candidate. Levinas has little to say directly aboutsexuality or pornography, even though the concepts of desire and Eros are central tomuch of his philosophy.1Equally, he is notoriously suspicious of figurality and the realmof the visual, a suspicion he voices especially (...) forcefully in his essay on the work of art‘Reality and its Shadow’ . It is,paradoxically, and perhaps perversely, for this very reason that this article will considerhim as potentially the theorist par excellence for viewing sexual images in cinema. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Liberating Sexuality: Justice Between the Sheets by Miguel A. De La TorreSimeiqi HeLiberating Sexuality: Justice Between the Sheets Miguel A. De La Torre SAINT LOUIS: CHALICE PRESS, 2016. 232 pp. $27.99What lies at the heart of Miguel De La Torre's provocative and refreshing collection of essays Liberating Sexuality is his lifelong commitment to a justice-based society. He is deeply concerned with "how oppressive social structures, [End Page 191] (...) rooted in a two-thousand-year-old misunderstanding of Christian sexuality, prevent us from a more just social order" (vii).De La Torre rigorously engages with the biblical literature and considers it a vital ground for ethical reflection. He first returns to Genesis and successfully argues that "God blesses sex and declares it good" (4). He closely examines the story of the first man and woman and proposes the concept of "cleave to" in Genesis 2:24–25 as the guiding definition for a healthy marriage in our modern society. By revisiting and creatively retelling the stories of women in the Bible—Lot's wife, Sarah, Dinah, Rebekah, and Tamar—he restores the humanity and dignity of women and calls for our responsibility to dismantle the patriarchal structures that foster sexual abuse. He also provides alternative interpretations of the troubling biblical texts for LGBTQ communities to consider. After thoroughly surveying the biblical justification of patriarchy and the subjugation of women in the Hebrew Bible, he proposes that "the entire Bible should be read through the lens of the Gospel message, specifically passages like John 10:10" (13). Though a creative attempt to liberate the sacred text from oppression, this approach requires caution, as there may be possible anti-Semitic ramifications for reading the Hebrew Bible through a New Testament lens.One of the major contributions of De La Torre to the field of sexual ethics is the proposal of "orthoeros" through a liberative method that seriously considers liberation theology and goes beyond the inadequate approaches of both conservatives' sexual legalism and liberals' permissiveness toward sexual ethics. "Orthoeros" promotes a "familial relationship based on mutual giving and vulnerability" (21) and is made up of five biblically based principles: safe, consensual, faithful, mutually pleasing, and intimate.As an ethicist who is invested in the public discourse, De La Torre actively and boldly engages with issues of various sexual practices. He critiques Fifty Shades of Grey and envisions an ethical, Christian-based sadomasochism by employing "orthoeros" principles. He also examines the historical reasons against masturbation and argues for its constructive role in the sexuality of Christians.Deeply disturbed by the prevailing injustice that corrupts our society, De La Torre focuses much of the volume on exposing the sources and the detrimental effects of sexism, heterosexism, and racism. He reveals misogynist legislation by mapping out the "war on women," specifically the issues of equal pay, rape, reproduction rights, and global sexism. He reflects on his own "sin of heterosexuality" of being a macho man, conquering, and celebrating cojones. He also examines the Euro-American history of owning black bodies and critiques the stereotyping of Latino bodies in Hollywood.Another major contribution of De La Torre is the indecent approach to justice-based praxis—an ethics para joder—that "screws" with the prevailing power structures by utilizing a nonviolent survival strategy based on love, designed to liberate the abused and the abusers from the death-dealing social structure. [End Page 192]Liberating Sexuality, situated at the intersection between Christian ethics, biblical hermeneutics, and cultural studies, is a successful interdisciplinary endeavor. The essays gathered here remain highly engaged with the public reality and should benefit both general readers and scholars. Furthermore, this volume provides much-needed guidance on how a sexual ethics should be implemented and is, hence, a vital resource for those engaged in the practices of ministry.Simeiqi HeDrew UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

How should we react to the development of sexbot technology? Taking their cue from anti-porn feminism, several academic critics lament the development of sexbot technology, arguing that it objectifies and subordinates women, is likely to promote misogynistic attitudes toward sex, and may need to be banned or restricted. In this chapter I argue for an alternative response. Taking my cue from the sex positive ‘feminist porn’ movement, I argue that the best response to the development of ‘bad’ sexbots is to (...) make better ones. This will require changes to the content, process and context of sexbot development. Doing so will acknowledge the valuable role that technology can play in human sexuality, and allow us to challenge gendered norms and assumptions about male and female sexual desire. This will not be a panacea to the social problems that could arise from sexbot development, but it offers a more realistic and hopeful vision for the future of this technology in a pluralistic and progressive society. (shrink)

In this article I engage Susan Brison’s “What’s Consent Got to Do with It?” by offering multiple contributions regarding the limitations of the language and culture of consent. I begin by briefly appreciating what consent reveals to us morally about the harms of nonconsensual sex. I then offer five points regarding the language and culture of consent: (1) Conceptualizing rape as nonconsensual sex hides from view the moral harm of having one’s will subjugated by another. (2) The framework of consent (...) renders women’s desires insignificant and invisible. (3) Epistemic gaslighting represents one major and underappreciated form of epistemic injustice that consent-based views of rape propagate. (4) Consent-centered accounts of sexual violence impede our ability to imagine better sexual futures. And (5) consent not only functions to normalize gender-based violence but also to normalize other forms of violence, such as those that erupt in light of race, ability, nationality, weight, and age. (shrink)

Despite the centrality of sexuality and love to human life, western history's great philosophers have not produced anything like a detailed and systematic approach to these matters. From Plato's emphasis upon the importance of eros, to the insistence by today's feminists on gender equality, philosophy's interpretation of eroticism and love has been as diverse and explosive as the subject itself. It is this imposing variety of approach and interpretation that makes a lucid, comprehensive anthology on the subject essential. (...) Reflecting the trend over the last twenty years to examine more thoroughly the nature of love and sexuality within a philosophical context, this eclectic anthology presents numerous perspectives on sexual roles and norms, eroticism, pornography, feminism, prostitution, perversion, friendship, and familial love. Philosophical Perspectives on Sex and Love is the most up-to-date appraisal of these central human experiences, featuring the work of thinkers from antiquity to the modern era. On the subject of erotic love, the text offers insight from Plato's Symposium, as well as the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Robert Nozick, and Robert C. Solomon. There are also reflections on sexual perversion from Thomas Nagel, Jerome Neu, and Michael Ruse. The views of Aristotle and contemporary authors on the morality of friendship and family are presented in a section wholly devoted to those issues, while David Hume and Immanuel Kant investigate the ethics of sexuality in selections from their writings. Care has been taken to present different positions on the most controversial issues, and most selections are offered in their entirety. Invaluable for courses in social philosophy, sexuality, social ethics, and feminism, no other volume can give students a more comprehensive discussion of love's countless dimensions. (shrink)

Perhaps no other single moral issue today is as hotly contested, or as divisive, as sexuality. Offering a bold and hopeful vision of how Christians - and all people of goodwill - can view this explosive topic, ethicist Christine Gudorf proposes nothing less than a sweeping challenge to traditional Christian teaching on sexual roles, activities, and relationships. Deftly drawing on Scripture, natural law, historical and contemporary Catholic and Protestant theology, the social sciences, and, significantly, the lived experiences of today's women (...) and men, Gudorf presents a carefully crafted and systematic reconstruction of Christian sexual ethics. Her aim, above all, is to engender appreciation, not rejection and shame, of our bodies and our sexuality. Contending that body, sex, and pleasure are divine gifts revealing God's grace, Gudorf emphasizes the need to understand sexual desire as a positive good, a source of love and commitment. She further explores the relationship between sexuality and reproduction, arguing that "procreationism" - the assumption that the sole aim and ultimate end of sexuality must always be offspring - is unjust and oppressive. Written with insight, clarity, and compassion, Body, Sex, and Pleasure is a provocative and compelling call to all women and men to reject the damaging influence of body/soul dualism - and, ultimately, to do justice to the Incarnation, the central revelations of Scripture, and human dignity. (shrink)

In 1977 John Money published the first modern case histories of what he called ‘apotemnophilia’, literally meaning ‘amputation love’ [Money et al., The Journal of Sex Research, 13(2):115–12523, 1977], thus from its inception as a clinically authorized phenomenon, the desire for the amputation of a healthy limb or limbs was constituted as a sexual perversion conceptually related to other so-called paraphilias. This paper engages with sex-based accounts of amputation-related desires and practices, not in order to substantiate the paraphilic model, (...) but rather, because the conception of these (no doubt) heterogeneous desires and practices as symptoms of a paraphilic condition (or conditions) highlights some interesting cultural assumptions about ‘disability’ and ‘normalcy’, their seemingly inherent (un)desirability, and their relation to sexuality. In critically interrogating the socio-political conditions that structure particular desires and practices such that they are lived as improper, distressing and/or disabling, the paper constitutes an exercise in what Margrit Shildrick [Beyond the body of bioethics: Challenging the conventions. In M. Shildrick and R. Mykitiuk (Eds.), Ethics of the body: Postconventional challenges (pp. 1–26). New York: MIT Press, 2005] refers to as “postconventional ethics”. (shrink)

Research on sexual violence is fraught with ethical and methodological challenges due to its sensitive nature. This paper describes the ethical and methodological challenges encountered in planning and conducting two exploratory studies on sexual violence that included in-depth interviews of eight female adolescent rape survivors in Ibadan and four married women in Lagos Nigeria who were raped, forced to perform sexual acts and sexually deprived. The first challenge encountered was an Institutional Review Board (IRB) requirement to obtain parental permission from (...) adolescents, when such a requirement may place the adolescent at risk if a parent was a perpetrator of sexual violence. Using arguments emphasizing the Council for International Organization for Medical Sciences guidelines helped convince the IRB to provide a waiver of parental consent. Second, the privacy required to conduct in-depth interviews for rape survivors was difficult to achieve because five of the rape survivors were apprentices who work in public settings which are typically used to conduct business in the informal sector. To overcome this challenge, interviews were conducted in safe locations, investigator's offices and homes of survivors. The culture of silence associated with sexual violence posed a challenge because it encourages perpetration of violence with impunity causing rape survivors to suffer in silence. None of the affected adolescents had sought judicial redress for rape despite availability of stringent punishment for this behaviour. Referral information was provided on where survivors could seek care. Interviews with the women could not be recorded on audio-tapes because of concerns that their partners might identify their voices from the tapes and punish them for this. Although research on sexual violence poses ethical and methodological challenges, it is not only desirable but also feasible to conduct such research in ways that ensure safety of participants. (shrink)

This book's thirty essays explore philosophically the nature and morality of sexual perversion, cybersex, masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, same-sex marriage, promiscuity, pedophilia, date rape, sexual objectification, teacher-student relationships, pornography, and prostitution. Authors include Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Alan Goldman, John Finnis, Sallie Tisdale, Robin West, Alan Wertheimer, John Corvino, Cheshire Calhoun, Jerome Neu, and Alan Soble, among others. A valuable resource for sex researchers as well as undergraduate courses in the philosophy of sex.

How should we react to the development of sexbot technology? Taking their cue from anti-porn feminism, several academic critics lament the development of sexbot technology, arguing that it objectifies and subordinates women, which is likely to promote misogynistic attitudes towards sex, and may need to be banned or restricted. This chapter argues for an alternative response. Taking its cue from the sex-positive ‘feminist porn’ movement, it argues that the best response to the development of ‘bad’ sexbots is to make better (...) ones. This will require changes to the content, process and context of sexbot development. Doing so will acknowledge the valuable role that technology can play in human sexuality, and allow us to challenge gendered norms and assumptions about male and female sexual desire. This will not be a panacea to the social problems that could arise from sexbot development, but it offers a more realistic and hopeful vision for the future of this technology in a pluralistic and progressive society. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the presence of rape myths and gender stereotypes, and the norms of sexuality they reflect and reinforce, in Croatian rape laws, as exemplified by the recent practice of the Zagreb County Court. I begin with a general discussion of the gendered myths and stereotypes that have shaped the content and application of the criminal law of rape everywhere. I then briefly introduce the definition of rape under the 1997 Croatian Criminal Code which was in force (...) at the time of my research, after which I proceed to the critical analysis and the assessment of the Zagreb County Court practice. Next, I turn to the changes in the new Criminal Code to see how they address the identified problems. I offer a model of an affirmative consent standard, based on a communicative model of sexuality, which values reciprocal responsibility, communication and mutuality of sexual desire. I argue that this standard has greater potential to challenge rape myths and gender stereotypes and to promote sexual freedom and gender equality. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between sexual science and evolutionary models of human development and progress. It examines the ways in which late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexual scientists constructed the sexual instinct as an evolutionary force that not only served a reproductive purpose, but was also pivotal to the social, moral, and cultural development of human societies. Sexual scientists challenged the idea that non-reproductive sexualities were necessarily perverse, pathological, or degenerative by linking sexual desire to the evolution (...) of sociality, often focusing on forms of relationality and care that exceeded biological kinship. As a result, non-reproductive sexual expressions, including homosexual and non-reproductive heterosexual behaviours, were interpreted as manifestations of a sexual instinct operating in the service of human development. These claims were reliant on cross-cultural and historical comparisons of sexual values, behaviours, and customs that rehearsed and reinforced imperial narratives of development premised on racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies. Sexual scientists mapped diverse sexual behaviours in terms of their perceived evolutionary benefits, contributing to colonial narratives that distinguished between different cultures according to imagined trajectories of development. These contestations around the sexual instinct and its developmental functions played a vital role in allowing sexual science to authorize itself as a field of knowledge that promised to provide expertise required to manage sexual life and secure the global development of human civilization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 158 But his analysis shows how it can distinguish as well as relate opposed positions, and so shows how theology contributes to our hope for a common community in and with vigorous dissent from each other. Loyola College of Maryland Baltimore, Maryland JAMES J. BUCKLEY Religion and Artificial Reproduction: An Inquiry into the Vatican "Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity (...) of Human Reproduction." By THOMAS A. SHANNON and LISA SowLE CAHILL. New York: Crossroad, 1988. $17.95 (cloth). This volume supplies a great deal of useful information on this in· struction which it prints in full in an appendix. Chapter 1 supplies an up-to-date survey of available reproductive technologies. Chapter 2 summarizes the Catholic tradition on sexual morality. Chapter 3 an· alyzes the Instructions, and 4 compares this to the regulations of the American Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1979), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (1983), the American Fertility Society (1986), the British Medical Resarch Council (1982), the British Medical Association (1982) the Warmock Report (1984), the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (1982) and the Victoria Government Committee (1982, 1983, 1984). Chapter 5 reports American reactions including those of Cardinal Bernadin and Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk, theologians Richard A. McCormick, S.J. and James T. Burtchaell, C.S.C., and the columnist Charles Krauthammer. In Chapter 6 the authors draw their own conclusion. They think the Instruction has performed a service in calling attention to the need to set reasonable limits on the use of reproductive technologies, but they believe " The Vatican's call for legal prohibition of all reproduction technologies that eliminate sexual intercourse extends further than is morally necessary" (p. 138). They show, correctly, Humanae Vitae's principle of the inseparability of the unitive and procreative meaning of the marital act is the guiding principle by which the Instruction limits technological reproduction, but they reject this principle and propose in its stead that it is " the committed love relationship of the couple in its totality that gives the moral texture both to their sexuality and to their subsequent role as parents ", since " it is from the wholeness of the relationship that their specific physical acts of sex and 154 BOOK REVIEWS conception take their moral purpose. " Hence they would only exclude technologies that use gametes from donors other than the married couple. They omit discussion of another important principle proposed by the Instruction, namely the right of the child to be born of legitimate parents in a normal manner. They themselves seem to admit that the principle they propose to limit permissable techniques is not very helpful since after excluding donor methods they add, " although the authors recognize that further discussion may be necessary to clarify this point" (p. 138). In fact, couples consenting to insemination of the woman with a donor's sperm or contracting with a surrogate mother can easily justify their action as contributing to the wholeness of their loving relationship. Theologians who use this principle without further specification are logically forced to accept homosexual marriages and the artificial production of children for such marriages. This book simply ignores such obvious objections to their proposal. Indeed it does not seriously address in any detail the problem which the Instruction faces frankly and honestly, namely, what kind of reproductive acts are consistent with the totality of a committed loving relationship. Certainly, as the authors admit, some kinds of acts are not consistent with such a relationship, but they do not show critically how the principle they want to substitute for that of the Instruction can determine which reproductive technologies are not morally acceptable. The Instruction, on the contrary, took the necessary responsibility of proposing such a specification, by defining the structure of the marital act which is essential to this relationship. This does not mean that it defines it merely in its physical character, but in its specifying moral intention (its moral object) as an act which keps intact the intrinsic relation between the expression of love and the transmission of life. Since the authors never explain why this principle, so deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition, is false, nor... (shrink)

This article examines the development of affirmative sexual consent in Canadian jurisprudence and legal theory and its adoption in Canadian law. Affirmative sexual consent requirements were explicitly proposed in Canadian legal literature in 1986, codified in the 1992 Criminal Code amendments, and recognized as an essential element of the common law and statutory definitions of sexual consent by the Supreme Court of Canada in a series of cases decided since 1994. Although sexual violence and non-enforcement of sexual assault laws are (...) worldwide phenomena, the international scholarly literature reflects limited awareness of these developments in Canadian law. This article remedies that gap in the literature. The Canadian experience with the definition of sexual consent as communicated “voluntary agreement” demonstrates the value of this conceptualization of consent; the definition provides a well-defined set of nondiscretionary reference points for legal analysis of the facts in sexual assault offenses. The effect is to facilitate effective enforcement of the sexual assault laws and affirm the right to sexual autonomy, sexual self-determination, and equality, consistent with fundamental principles of individual human rights. For all these reasons, familiarity with the Canadian experience may be useful to those engaged with the reform of rape and sexual assault laws in other jurisdictions. (shrink)

This article proposes a rigorous method to “map” the law on to the facts in the legal analysis of “sexual consent” using a series of mandatory questions of law designed to eliminate the legal errors often made by decision-makers who routinely rely on personal beliefs about and attitudes towards “normal sexual behavior” in screening and deciding cases. In Canada, sexual consent is affirmative consent, the communication by words or conduct of “voluntary agreement” to a specific sexual activity, with a specific (...) person. As in many jurisdictions, however, the sexual assault laws are often not enforced. Reporting is lowest and non-enforcement highest in cases involving the most common type of assailants, those who are not strangers but instead persons the complainant knows, often quite well -- acquaintances, supervisors or co-workers, and family members. Reliance on popular narratives about “seduction” and “stranger-danger” leads complainants, police, prosecutors, lawyers, and trial judges, to truncate legal analysis of the facts and leap to erroneous conclusions about “consent.” Wrongful convictions and perverse acquittals, questionable plea bargains and ill-considered decisions not to charge, result. This proposal is designed to curtail the impact of pre-judgments, assumptions, and biases in legal reasoning about voluntariness and affirmative agreement and produce decisions that are legally sound, based on the application of the rule of law to the material facts. Law has long had better tools than the age-old and popular tales of “ravishment” and “seduction.” Those tools can and should be used. (shrink)

The dominant male discourse as expressed in the law of sexuality constructs the male subject. In each area — rape, incest and prostitution, it creates and extends the power which underpins the sexuality of the male subject to facilitate the non-consensual taking of women in rape and incest and the buying of them on the subject's own terms in prostitution.Further, the law constructs the female as Other not as freely consenting subject but as Other for the male subject in the (...) space of unreason, for the logic of desire.In these constructions, lie the paradox of the law of sexuality. It exists purportedly to defend and protect the “victims” of rape, incest and prostitution but even in so far as it does so, it reasserts, through its constructions, the power of the speaking male subject through and the exclusion of the woman as Other from, the dominant male discourse as it is expressed in and enshrined by that law. (shrink)

Desire, Love, and Identity: Philosophy of Sex and Love combines classical readings with contemporary articles exploring love and sex as defining features of our identity. This volume includes readings from a wide variety of perspectives, addressing topics such as sexual objectification, sexual identity, the ethics of sex work, love and sex online, friendship, polyamory, and BDSM. Alongside ancient, modern, and contemporary selections are sixteen original contributions written by emerging voices in the field. A wide-ranging, engaging, accessible (...) introduction to the subject, the text includes further readings and discussion questions to promote thought, discussion, and composition on subjects deeply intertwined with students' identities. (shrink)

When philosophers consider factors compromising autonomy in consent, they often focus solely on the consent-giver’s agential capacities, overlooking the impact of the consent-receiver’s conduct on the consensual character of the activity. In this paper, I argue that valid consent requires justified trust in the consent-receiver to act only within the scope of consent. I call this the Trust Condition (TC), drawing on Katherine Hawley’s commitment account of trust. TC constitutes a belief that the consent-receiver is capable and willing to act (...) as we expect from them. If such trust is not warranted, I argue, consent lacks the appropriate normative grounds. After establishing TC, I explore its application in the sexual arena, asserting that due to the non-contractual dimensions of sexual activity — such as the dynamic nature of sexual desires and the absence of external factors effectively binding sexual partners to the terms of consent—trust is warranted in sexual consent by means of care. I define care as a special sensitivity and attention toward the partner’s will and discuss how this approach leads to safer intimate relationships in practice. (shrink)

Through the analysis of the contents of the most recent and popular teen dramas, of the diffusion of online pornography and of data from surveys on adolescent sexuality, we hypothesise how today's adolescents live an increasingly carefree sexual behaviour with respect to the choice of sexual objects, more free from ethical and social norms, in a completely changed relationship with an adult world no longer seen as a more or less controversial reference point. This panorama urges us to renew the (...) theoretical lenses through which we look at an adolescence that is completely different from previous ones with regard to its relationship with sexuality. (shrink)

Alcibiades is one of the most explicitly sexualized figures in fifth-century Athens, a "lover of the people" whom the demos "love and hate and long to possess" (Ar. Frogs 1425). But his eros fits ill with the normative sexuality of the democratic citizen as we usually imagine it. Simultaneously lover and beloved, effeminate and womanizer, Alcibiades is essentially paranomos, lawless or perverse. This paper explores the relation between Alcibiades' paranomia and the norms of Athenian sexuality, and argues that his (...) eros reveals an intrinsic instability within the sexual economy of the democracy: the desire he embodied blurred the categories that defined Athenian masculinity; the desire he inspired rendered the demos passive and "soft." This same instability can be seen in Thucydides' juxtaposition of the mutilation of the Herms and the legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. These two episodes (obscurely linked by Thucydides) together tell of an idealized citizen body under threat. The tyrannicide story figures the democratic citizen as an elite lover, whose sexual dominance is vital to his political autonomy. The Herms, with their prominent phalloi, symbolized this citizen-lover, and thus their mutilation was an assault on the masculinity, as well as political power, of the demos. The tyrannicide legend seems to promise a defense against this threat of civic castration; but instead of shoring up the sexually-dominant citizen, Thucydides' version of the legend merely reveals his frailty and fictionality: even in Athens' heroic past there is no inviolable democratic eros to cure the impotence of mutilation and tyranny. Reading these two episodes against the backdrop of Alcibiades' paranomia (as described by Plutarch and Plato), this paper examines the nature of democratic masculinity, the (eroticized) relation between demagogue and demos, and the place of perverse desire within the protocols of sex. (shrink)

Rather than as a giving of permission to someone to transgress one’s bodily boundaries, I argue for defining sexual consent as feeling-with one’s sexual partner. Dominant approaches to consent within feminist philosophy have failed to capture the intercorporeal character of erotic consciousness by treating it as a form of giving permission, as is evident in the debate between attitudinal and performative theories of consent. Building on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ann Cahill, Linda Martín Alcoff, and others, I argue that (...) taking consent to be an intercorporeal and dynamic coexistence of desiring bodies opens up new ways of thinking about the role of consent in sexual ethics. I suggest that phenomenology’s theories of embodied consciousness, operative intentionality, and the direct perception of others provide a better groundwork for conceptualizing the role of ambiguity and subtle power dynamics in sexual encounters than attitudinal or performative accounts of consent. I also defend my view against Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa’s argument for doing away with the concept of consent in sexual ethics due to consent's stubborn and infelicitous presupposition of permission-giving. (shrink)

Is it ever morally wrong for a consumer to imagine something immoral in a work of fiction, or for an author to prompt such imagining? Brandon Cooke has recently argued that it cannot be. On Cooke’s account, fictive imagining is immune to moral criticism because such cases of imagining do not amount to the endorsement of the immoral content, nor do they imply that the authors of such fictions necessarily endorse their contents. We argue against Cooke that in fact fictively (...) imagining something immoral can be morally blameworthy, specifically in cases where fictive imagining is engaged in the service of immoral desires. Taking one potent case—namely, rape-fantasy pornography—we argue that the proper engagement with pornography requires the engagement of the consumer’s desires. Insofar as it is morally wrong to desire something immoral, or to encourage others to desire something immoral, then consumers can be held morally blameworthy for engaging in such fictive imaginings and works of fiction that are crafted to fit these purposes can be open to moral condemnation. (shrink)

Love and sex provide a fertile ground for philosophical inquiry, both conceptual analysis of the nature of love and sex and discussion of the many ethical issues that they raise. Moral issues arising from love include the permissibility of romantically loving more than one person at the same time and the moral value of romantic love and friendship. Moral issues arising from sex vary from the most fundamental question—the one addressed by Alan Soble in his paper (...) in this issue—of whether sex can be reconciled with respect for persons, to questions about the permissibility of sex in particular circumstances. Much current work in philosophy of love and sex concerns precisely such issues in applied ethics, for instance the topics addressed by the authors of four more papers in this collection—homosexuality, prostitution, relationships that cross power lines in academia, and the wrongness of rape and other sexual misdeeds. Other ethical issues about sex include the morality of casual sex, adultery and open marriage, sadomasochism, and pornography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.2 (2006) 450-470 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?Jonathan Gottschall Washington and Jefferson College (JG)Marcus Nordlund * Göteborg University (MN)ITo love someone romantically is—at least according to innumerable literary works, much received wisdom, and even a gradually coalescing academic consensus—to experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique. It is to idealize this person, to think (...) constantly about him or her, and to discover that one's own life priorities have changed dramatically. It is to care deeply for that person's well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent.But is this intense emotional experience a universal experience, something that is characteristically and quintessentially human, or is it merely a sociocultural construct that belongs to a particular time and place? On this point there is less agreement, both within and between different academic disciplines. The audacious question we want to raise in the pages that follow is whether literature—or more specifically, a large-scale, multiple-coder content analysis of thousands of folk tales drawn from different parts of the planet—can contribute something to this difficult question about love, culture, and human nature.Let us first look briefly at the theoretical problem that we aim to address. A widespread view among literary scholars and social scientists over the last decades has been that romantic love is a social construction specific to Western culture. This is part of a relentless skepticism [End Page 450] toward assumptions that important categories of human psychology and emotion—romantic and parental love, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—are "natural" rather than constructed. This position is often, if not always, linked to an ideological concern to demystify (or at least problematize) what is perceived as an essentially destructive or oppressive emotion or belief. Taking her cue from Simone de Beauvoir, Marilyn Friedman gives no less than ten reasons why it may be problematic for women to fall in love with men. 1Of course, no argument of any kind can be strictly ideological in nature since it always involves empirical assumptions—either explicit or implicit—about the nature of things. For example, the psychoanalyst E. S. Persons opines that the "best evidence that romantic love is not hard-wired into the emotional repertoire of humanity but is a cultural construct is the fact that there are so many cultures in which it is virtually absent." 2 Another frequent argument for love's constructedness has been that "there is no definition that describes love throughout the ages or across cultures." 3In some literary-critical accounts, it is even argued that romantic love is a cultural invention that can be traced back with precision to the courtly troubadour culture of twelfth-century France. 4 According to yet another school, represented by the influential literary theorist Jonathan Culler, "the notion of romantic love (and its centrality to the lives of individuals) is arguably a massive literary creation." 5While the social constructivist position on romantic love typically involves a strong commitment to cultural specificity, a weaker version is held even by some cognitive theorists who grant more to biology and panhuman traits. From the perspective of their communicative theory of emotion, Philip Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley argue that the "components [of romantic love] exist separately in different societies, but their integration into a recognizable complex is a cultural accomplishment [by the West]." 6At the other end of the romantic love continuum we find those who argue that this emotion belongs to a universal human nature: or, more specifically, that it can be attributed to specialised neural circuits whose ultimate purpose is to enhance reproductive success. Not surprisingly, this has been a favorite position among evolutionary psychologists, and it has recently received some support from neuroscientific studies.For example, the neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Samir Zeki claim to have uncovered a "functionally specialised system" that lights up in fMRI (magnetic resonance) scans of brains whose owners claim to... (shrink)

This article intervenes in a critical debate about the use of consent to distinguish sex from rape. Drawing from critical contract theories, it argues that sexual consent is a cruel optimism that often operates to facilitate, rather than alleviate, sexual violence. Sexual consent as a cruel optimism promises to simplify rape allegations in the popular cultural imagination, confounds the distinction between victims and agents of sexual violence, and establishes certainty for potential victimizers who rely on it to convince themselves and (...) others that their partners implicitly or explicitly agreed to sex. In each of these cases, the power of consent rests in its tendency to obscure sexual violence in a set of questions around victimhood and agency, rather than to clarify whether or when it has occurred. Following in the critical contract tradition, this article argues that the optimistic attachment to the clarifying power of consent helps to explain the persistent commitment to better sexual consent as a ‘solution’ to the problems of rape and sexual violence, and that this ‘solution’ is insufficient to the task. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Sex, Love, and Intimacy presents a phenomenological exploration of love as it manifests itself through sexual desires and intimate relationships. Setting up a unique dialogue between psychology and philosophy, Susi Ferrarello offers a perspective through which clinicians can inform their practice on diverse issues of human sexuality. Drawing on Husserl's phenomenology, Ferrarello's analysis of love spans a range of disciplines including psychology, theology, biology, epistemology, and axiology, as well as areas related to gender, consent, (...) and political control. Combining Husserlian perspectives on ethics with a focus on lived-experience, this text will deepen therapists' understanding of love as the subject of interdisciplinary inquiry and enable them to locate questions of sexuality and intimacy within an academic framework. With key theoretical principles included to allow clinicians to think through and clarify their practice, this book will be a valuable tool for sex therapists, marriage and family therapists, and counselors, as well as psychology and philosophy students alike. (shrink)

Many Guatemalan women suffered extreme sexual violence during the latter half of the twentieth century. Learning of this violence can evoke hatred in persons who love and respect women—hatred for the men who perpetrated the violence and also for other men around the world who victimize women in this way. Hatred is a common response to a perceived evil, and it might in some cases be a fitting response, but it is important to subject one's emotions to critical moral (...) reflection. A key task of ethics is to encourage persons to cultivate good habits of being moved. This essay analyzes the way in which two different texts manage, through the skillful presentation of experiential narratives, to help readers acknowledge the hatred they might feel, but also to think twice about the hatred to which they consent. (shrink)