Philosophy 1490: Schedule

Although Nagel's paper is ostensibly concerned with the notion of sexual 'perversion', the real topic of the paper is the nature of sexual desire, specifically, what makes it sexual. That said, it is important to appreciate that, while the notion of perversion has a moral flavor, Nagel does not mean to use it in that sense but rather in the sense of 'contrary to the nature or purpose of'. (There's a discussion about the relation between perversion and morality at the end of the paper.) It's easiest to understand this notion from the point of view of a traditional understanding of sex as being for the purpose of reproduction: Any sexual act that does not have reproduction as among its goals would, on such a view, be 'perverse', but that need not imply that there is anything wrong with such acts, though of course there might be. But Nagel dismisses the view that sex is importantly tied to reproduction, at least in so far as it might bear upon the notion of perversion.

Nagel does nonetheless think that 'perverse' is an evaluative term, in particular, remarking that "the judgment that a person or practice or desire is perverted will constitute a sexual evaluation, implying that better sex, or a better specimen of sex, is possible" (p. 16). And he describes himself as offering a picture of what an ideal sexual interaction would be like.

Nagel begins by considering an argument that there is no such thing as 'sexual perversion'. This argument depends upon what is known as a hedonistic conception of sexuality: Sex, on this view, is to be understood in terms of sexual pleasure; a desire is sexual in so far as it is directed toward the creation of sexual pleasure. And if that is all there is to something's being sexual, Nagel's interloctutor suggests, then no sexual desire is, in and of itself, perverse, though of course they might be criticized on other grounds. (As Nagel formulates the view, it involves the claim that sexual desire is an 'appetite', "like hunger or thirst", which seems to suggest that it is a need. It is unclear to me how much of a role that is meant to play, however.)

Nagel then observes that even forms of eating might reasonably be described as 'perverse'. This, he suggests, is because eating, although it begins (as it were) as a biological necessity, is also imbued with cultural and personal meanings. Nagel insists that hunger is not just an unpleasant feeling that is relieved by eating but "an attitude towards edible portions of the world..." (p.7). (Put so baldly, that seems wrong: What we should say here is that hunger is part of a larger psychological complex that also involves such atittudes.)

Similarly—and this is a theme to which we'll return time and again—sex begins, as it were, as a biological function, but it too is imbued with cultural and personal meanings. It is precisely what those meanings are or should be that is so contested. And while there is a sexual 'appetite' comparable to hunger (i.e., horniness), it too is bound up with attitudes that are outwardly directed, typically towards other people. Nagel denies, however, that sex should be understood as the expression of some sort of attitude, such as love, towards others. (Solomon, in one of the related readings, develops a view close to this one.) Nagel wants us to think, rather, in terms of what we might call a 'primitively sexual' form of attraction or desire. And he thinks it is important that "the object of sexual attraction" is ordinarily a particular person, and not just certain features of that person. (This is a point often made about love: One might love someone because of certain of their features, but it is the person one loves, not just anyone with those features.)

Borrowing from Sartre, Nagel suggests that the 'natural' development of sexual desire involves a complex interplay between embodied agents. At the first stage, the potential lovers experience just their own sexual attraction to the other. But then they become aware of the other's attraction to them, and of their own effect on the other person. This awareness of one's own capacity to evoke sexual desire in someone else is then itself a source of further sexual arousal. "Sex", Nagel tells us, "involves a desire that one's partner be aroused by the recognition of one's desire that [they] be aroused" (p.12).

Nagel suggests that this same sort of pattern will repeat as we move from the visual to the tactile realm, but he does not develop the idea. Can you?

This sort of 'reciprocal arousal', however, doesn't yet seem sexual, unless what makes it so is the fact that the arousal one experiences and intends is sexual arousal. But then, of course, we would need to say what sexual arousal is. One thought might be to do that in terms, again, of some notion of sexual pleasure. But Nagel does not seem to go quite that route. Rather, he emphasizes the bodily nature of the arousal involved, suggesting that "All stages of sexual perception are varieties of identification of a person with [their] body" (p.12). It is not entirely clear to me what that is supposed to mean, but Nagel goes on to suggest that sexual arousal and desire involve "submission to spontaneous impulses" and "domination of the person by [their] body". Indeed, he goes so far as to say that, "ideally, deliberate control is needed only to guide the expression of those impulses" (p.13). What does he mean by that? How attractive is that as an ideal?

In one of the related readings, Janice Moulton complains that Nagel has said quite a lot about fliration and seduction, but not much about sex. Is that a fair complaint? How should we think about what sex is, on Nagel's view?

Nagel says at one point that "...sexual desire leads to spontaneous interactions with other persons, whose bodies are...producing involuntary and spontaneous impulses in them. ...[A]t each step the domination of the person by [their] body is reinforced, and the sexual partner becomes more possessible by physical contact, penetration, and envelopment" (p.13). There is a picture of sex implicit in these remarks to which one might want to object. Why?

Here, then, is Nagel's picture of what an ideal sexual interaction would be like: It is one in which the partners are engaged in a complex form of mutual awareness and arousal. Sexual perversions are then forms of sexual expression that do not have this kind of mutuality. Nagel discusses a number of specific perversions on pp. 14-5. I'll leave it to you to consider how plausible his accounts of these are. But one large question is what, according to Nagel, makes these so-called perversions sexual. What does?

In some ways, Nagel seems to be responding to a tension that we'll spend a good deal of time discussing later. The 'appetite' view can make it seem as if, in sex, we make use of other people to relieve our own sexual unease. But that looks morally objectionable, and it does not look much better just because we're both using each other; nor does it obviously help if I've consented to being used by you. Are there aspects of Nagel's view that might be thought to help with this problem?

It seems as if Nagel has to regard masturbation as a perversion. (Perhaps that is what he means by "narcissistic practices", on p. 14.) Why? Is that a bug or a feature of his view? (Historically, masturbation very often has been regarded as a perversion. The standard euphemism, for a long time, was "self abuse".)

Goldman's central goal is to offer an account of what sex is that "neither understates its animal pleasure nor overstates its importance within a theory or system of value" but still accounts for both elements (p. 267). His main target is what he calls `means-end analysis' or what Priest, in one of the related readings, calls a `teleological view': Such views characterize sex is a means to some independent (or "extraneous") end: reproduction, say, or the kind of mutual reflective awareness of which Nagel speaks. Goldman's preferred view "is that sexual desire is desire for contact with another person's body and for the pleasure which such contact produces; sexual activity is activity which tends to fulfill such desire of the agent" (p. 268).

Goldman refers here to "reflective equilibrium". The term is taken from John Rawls's Theory of Justice. It means establishing a balance between one's stable considered judgements about, in that case, what is just and some set of principles that characterize justice. So, in this case, the idea is that we want a balance between our considered judgements of what is sexual and some philosophical account of what is sexual.

Goldman emphasizes "physical contact" as an essential element of sex. Should he?

One objection here is that a desire for physical contact is not in itself sexual. How good is Goldman's response to that objection (see pp. 269-70)? Might we say that a desire for such contact is only sexual if it is accompanied by a desire for "the pleasure which such contact produces"? What might be meant by the latter phrase? (Goldman explicitly says that he does not mean to limit this to orgasm (p. 268). But see also p. 283, on which Goldman says that "the satisfaction of desire and the pleasure this brings [are] the central psychological function of the sex act for the individual".)

Section II briefly argues against any conceptual connection between sex and reproduction. The principled objection is that such accounts regard far too much as `perverse'.

Section III discusses the view that sex is (or should be) an expression of a certain kind of love. There are several objections Goldman makes: (i) This is at best a necessary and not a sufficient condition; (ii) The sort of love involved is relatively permanent, whereas sexual desire can be fleeting; (iii) The view does not lead to a consistent sexual ethic. All these objections really need more elaboration. In the case of the second, I think Goldman has in mind that the view leads to an implausible account of what sexual desire is. How would that go? Must the view be interpreted that way?

Section IV discusses the views of Nagel (whom we read) and Solomon (whom we did not), which are more complex forms of the view that sex is a communicative activity. Goldman's discussion focuses mostly on Solomon (and he does a good enough job explaining Solomon's view). He notes that other acts can communicate the same sorts of things that Solomon thinks sex does. But Goldman's deeper criticism is that such views over-intellectualize sex and fail to ackowledge that it is "a physical activity intensely pleasurable in itself" that can be desired and enjoyed simply as such (p. 276). He makes a similar objection to Nagel and suggests, in section V, that a discomfort with anything "purely physical" is behind many of the views he has criticized.

What place does 'casual sex' have in Goldman's analysis? How is that similar to or different from the place it has in Nagel's account or in the other teleological accounts that Goldman discusses?

Goldman begins to contrast his own view in Section VI. He first notes that his account has no moral implications. His view is that "There is no morality intrinsic to sex..." (p. 280), i.e., that sexual acts should be judged in the same terms, and on the same sorts of grounds, as other acts. E.g., Goldman claims that "...the fact that an act is sexual in itself never renders it wrong or adds to its wrongness if it is wrong on other grounds..." (p. 280). Does that seem right? At the end of the section, though, he considers a broadly Kantian worry that sex often involves using one's partner as a means towards one's own sexual pleasure. He responds that an appropriate sort of reciprocity is enough to address this worry. How so? (We'll spend a fair bit of time discussing this issue later, but it is good to start thinking about it now.)

In Section VII, Goldman insists that sex, though pleasurable and fun, should not be over-valued. In particular, it does not have "the lasting kind of value which enhances one's whole life" (p. 283). It is "essentially self-regarding" and has no connection to deeper values such as love (p. 284). Yes or no? And is this a straightforward consequence of Goldman's view or an optional add-on?

In section VIII, Goldman sketches the concept of sexual 'perversion' that emerges from his analysis. These are cases in which there is a desire that has "the typical physical sexual effects upon the individual" but is not a "desire for contact with another person's body and for the pleasure which such contact produces..." (p. 268). Voyeurism, sado-masochism, and shoe fetishes are gestured at as examples. Goldman says, confusingly, that these are perversions only because they are statistically unusual. That seems wrong, even on his own view, since he has given us an account of what makes a desire sexual, and these desires are supposed not to fit that model. Indeed, it's not clear why Goldman should think that voyeurism is sexual at all (see the bottom of p. 284). So I am a bit puzzled here. If anyone has any ideas about how to interpret these remarks, please do say so.

One other obvious perversion, on Goldman's account, is masturbation (though it is hardly statistically unusual but is, in all likelihood, the most common form of sexual activity). He regards it as "an imaginative substitute for the real thing" (p. 270) or "a release or relief from physical desire through a substitute imaginative outlet" (p. 277)? Is that right? Is masturbation a perversion in the very literal sense of a 'turning away' from the proper object of sexual desire?

The central claim of this paper is that Nagel and Solomon leave open the possibility that rape is "good sex", that is, good in whatever way sex as such can be good. It does not immediately follow that rape is not wrong, but Ketchum argues that it does threaten to undermine that claim. Moreover, Ketchum claims, this illustrates a more general failure to recognize that there can be sex that is genuinely bad. What Ketchum wants is "an account of the goodness or badness of sexual relations" (p. 140).

Ketchum distinguishes the question whether sex is good (qua sex) from whether it is moral. As she notes, adultery could be great sex qua sex, but still immoral. Still, the notion of 'good' sex is meant to be evaluative, or normative. She criticizes Nagel of misappropriating the term 'bad sex' for sex that simply isn't as good as it could be (isn't 'ideal') and thereby ignoring genuninely bad sex, of which Ketchum gives several examples, rape being the most salient (p. 142).

Ketchum argues in Section I that, on Solomon's view, rape can be, and probably often is, good sex. On his view, sex is a way of communicating feelings. But surely rape is an excellent tool for the communication of such feelings as dominance and hatred, on one side, and submission and fear, on the other (p. 143). That seems right, but it's obviously dependent upon Solomon's allowance that such feelings as these are appropriately communicated by sex; but it's also not clear that there's a principled way for Solomon to say what feelings are appropriately communicated by sex (see pp. 143-4), so that only consensual sex could count as 'good'. It is more difficult to say what Nagel's view implies, since he is unclear at crucial points (pp. 144-5). But Ketchum suggests that Nagel's emphasis on the bodily aspects of sex might get him into trouble.

In section II, Ketchum tries to explain better what she means by 'good' sex. She tends to explain the normative notion she has in mind by asking whether 'bad sex' is always preferable to no sex. One helpful suggestion is on p. 145, where she asks whether someone who was raped would have "gotten some good out of the experience". Of course, she concedes that Solomon, e.g., might allow that there are other things wrong with rape, but Ketchum wants to insist, reasonably enough, that there need be no positive value at all to the person raped, in such cases. And I do not think she her mind would be changed if she were to learn (say, from the Levin and van Berlo paper in the related readings), that many women experience sexual arousal during rape, and quite a few experience orgasm. (Indeed, one can easily imagine that experiencing orgasm during rape might make the experience worse.)

It is perhaps worth noting that this paper, like the others we have read so far, was written before date-rape became a widely discussed phenomenon. It first enters public conscicousness with the publication of the article "Date Rape: A Campus Epidemic" in Ms. magazine in 1982. A more complete report was later published as Robin Warshaw, I Never Called It Rape (New York, Harper Collins, 1988). So Ketchum may well mostly have 'stranger rape' in mind in these discussions, though the example at the end of Section I might be read as date rape.

In Section III, Ketchum offers a modification of Nagel's view that will allow us to distinguish good from bad sex. She distinguishes reciprocity, as Nagel uses that notion, from mutuality, which additionally requires a kind of symmetry (shared desires and intentions, roughly speaking). Rape can be reciprocal, in so far as the two parties are aware of and responsive to the feelings and intentions of the other, but it isn't mutual: the desires of the parties are not shared but conflict. By contrast, although it might initially seem as if (in Nagel's example) Romeo and Juliet want different things, in fact what they want is the same: that the two of them engage in a sexual interaction together. Ketchum also claims that this explains why it is more appropriate to express love through sex than hatred: love more plausibly leads to symmetry and mutuality.

Ketchum doesn't say very much about what happens within a sexual interaction but is focused on (as we might put it) the overall goal. And one might think that parts of an overall sexual encounter might be good, and others bad (or less good). Can Ketchum's analysis be extended so as to encompass such finer-grained judgements?

Section IV turns to the issue of perversion (in the context of interpersonal sexual relations). Ketchum first argues that accounts of perversion in terms of the 'natural function' of sex should be rejected on several grounds: (i) They implausibly make rape unperverted and oral sex perverted; (ii) They "ignore[] the existence of female sexual organs" while elevating "the male sexual function (impregnation)...to the status of the paradigm of sexuality..." (p. 151). In effect, Ketchum is claiming that such accounts embody standards of normative heterosexuality that one might want to question. We'll discuss this further shortly, but feel free to comment on this claim now.

Ketchum distinguishes sex that is "merely bad" from sex that is perverse: which does not just fall short of but which reverses the ideal. She gives some examples to illustrate the distinction.

• Bad sex is illustrated by the 'contingent rapist', who is unconcerned with whether their partner consents to sex, enjoys themselves, or what have you.
• Perverted sex is illustrated by the 'sadistic rapist', who takes pleasure in the fact that the encounter is not mutual.

Actually, though, Ketchum's own account is of perverted and bad preferences, as her example of a "merely unfortunate" preference (shoe fetishism) makes clear. So there's actually some need here to say what bad sex is, and how bad preferences give rise to it. To see the problem, imagine that Juliet is madly in love with Romeo, but he decides to have sex with her, whatever her preferences, which (at least in the moment) she welcomes. Good sex or bad?

So good sex is supposed to be sex that is both reciprocal and mutual. It seems, then, as if we have at least three cases of divergence from mutuality: (i) A failure to share desires, but not necessarily to have desires that conflict; (ii) Conflicting desires; (iii) An absence of reciprocity. Can you give examples of these? How do they fit or conflict with Ketchum's categories? How 'good' or 'bad' do the various cases seem? Is there uniformity within the categories? Are there counterexamples to Ketchum's claim that 'mutual' sex is 'good'? I'll tip my hand a bit: I think there's something important about the idea that sex should be mutual, but I'm not sure that what Ketchum calls reciprocity is an important aspect of mutuality. What exactly does reciprocity mean here? Is it really essential to good sex?

In Section V, Ketchum argues that 'sadism' is a perversion, on her account, since it necessarily involves asymmetric desires. That is not so clear, but we'll talk more about BDSM later. (Do feel free to comment on this now, however, if you wish to do so.) It also isn't clear that merely asymmetric desires always make for bad sex. Suppose one partner wishes to give oral sex to the other, without any reciprocation. Need that be bad sex? (It might be, of course; the question is whether it has to be.) Has Ketchum perhaps gotten mutuality mixed up with symmetry?

Koedt's paper is a classic of second-wave feminism. Her concern is to debunk the idea that so-called 'vaginal' orgasms (orgasms achieved purely through intercourse) are somehow superior to 'clitoral' orgasms. In this form, the idea derives from Freud, though the idea that women ought to orgasm from intercourse has deeper roots (as we'll see). The paper is a clear reflection of the anger many women have felt about their inability to live up to cultural expectations about how their bodies should function sexually. Many of the themes of this paper are reflected in those by Moulton and Fortunata, though neither of them cites it.

It is worth emphasizing that the clitoris should not be confused with the glans clitoris, the latter being the 'tip' or 'nub' that protrudes from the clitoral hood. (This was not widely known when Koedt was writing.) The clitoris itself, as the Wikipedia article on it explains, is a much larger structure, most of which is internal (not unlike an iceberg). It is, therefore, possible to stimulate the clitoris without stimulating the glans clitoris, and this may be responsible for some women's ability to orgasm from intercourse.

Moulton argues that there is something confused about (quite common) concerns about "the infrequency of female orgasms in sexual intercourse" (p. 34). This is not, note, because she thinks one should not be concerned about the so-called 'orgasm gap': the fact that women are much less likely to orgasm during heterosexual encounters than men are. Rather, she thinks there is something confused about the form that this concern often takes.

Specifically, Moulton argues, "The continued belief...that intercourse is the appropriate sexual activity to bring about the orgasms of both male and female involves a conceptual confusion" (p. 35). She outlines the structure of the argument at the end of Section I: Male arousal is essential for intercourse, and male orgasm is its typical aim; there tends to be an assumption of symmetry or reciprocity concerning intercourse; but neither women's arousal nor satisfaction is required for intercourse to take place. (Indeed, as is noted in some of the related papers, people will often not say that people have 'had sex' if intercourse does not result in male orgasm.)

The next few sections offer evidence for these claims. Section II addresses the assumption of symmetry. (One might add that there are obvious moral reasons to think sexual relationships should ordinarily be symmetric.) Section III discusses the importance of male arousal and orgasm for intercourse, noting that while "...intercourse formally begins when the primary focus for sexual stimulation in the male (the penis) is inserted in a container particularly well suited to bring about the male orgasm (the vaginal orifice)...[t]he female locus of stimulation [i.e., the clitoris] and the female orgasm are not even part of the definition of sexual intercourse" (p. 37). Somewhat acidly, Moulton writes:

From this view, one might wonder why anyone ever thought the female orgasm had anything to do with sexual intercourse, except as an occasional and accidental co-occurrence. Sometimes the telephone rings, too. (pp. 37-8)

Section IV explains how the assumption of symmetry, combined with the fact that male orgasm is all but a necessary part of intercourse, leads to an assumption that women ought to orgasm as a result of intercourse (i.e., with no other stimulation)—with the result that the great majority of women who do not so orgasm are regarded as dysfunctional.

Section V concludes that women's not orgasming during intercourse should therefore not be regarded as a problem but simply as a fact. It only seems to be a problem if sex itself is understood in a way that treats intercourse as central (as the 'real thing'). Section VI somewhat confusingly insists that patriarchy is not responsible for women's not orgasming during intercourse. I take it that Moulton wants to insist that it is, by contrast, responsible for the centrality of intercourse to our understanding of heterosex. Section VIII dismisses the suggestion, often made, that women's not orgasming during sex is compensated by emotional satisfaction.

Fortunata charges that much of what we have been reading has a distinct male bias. She is also particularly concerned about the way most theories denigrate masturbation—an issue to which I've drawn attention in the questions about the previous readings. Fortunata claims that such theories "implicitly devalue women's sexuality" (p. 390). She offers several reasons, most of which involve opposition to normative heterosexuality, especially the way in which intercourse is regarded as the 'real thing' and other forms of sexual interaction are regarded as 'foreplay'. Many of these points are backed up by empirical work, such as that done by Shere Hite in the optional reading. The central observation here is that intercourse is not a particularly good way to arouse most women to orgasm.

The main point of pp. 390-1 is to explain why Fortunata thinks it is important to distinguish solitary sexual activity, for which she will use the word "masturbation", from partnered sex, even when the latter involves manual stimulation of oneself or one's partner.

Fortunata wants to develop an understanding of sexuality will "help us organize, interpret and evaluate the experience of sex" (p. 392). She begins by mentioning two types of such theories. The first describes sex as having a typical narrative structure, beginning (say) with kissing and undressing, then progressing through 'foreplay' to intercourse, and ending with male orgasm. She charges that this theory is sexist and heterosexist, not just because male orgasm is taken as the goal, but because orgasm is taken as the goal. She also notes that this theory regards masturbation as a mere imitation. A second theory regards sex as a kind of competition and has similar problems. (Sex here is seen as a kind of commodity: something women have and men need.)

By contrast, Fortunata proposes that we regard sexual acts, ideally, as a form of aesthetic inquiry into bodies and their responses, especially, their capacities for pleasure. She insists, though this seems to be a separable point, that such activites should be respectful of the rights and desires of all involved, and she does not focus on that issue. Rather, she attempts to articulate what it would be like to be an "artistic inquirer" sexually. Such a person's focus, Fortunata claims, would be on the sexual activity itself and on the people involved in it, as unique individuals with their own unique responses.

Fortunata notes, importantly for her purposes, that masturbation can have the same structure, as an inquiry into and exploration of one's own body: "I can be an attentive, inventive lover of myself" (p. 395). In partnered sex, however, there is more to explore and to learn: "Making love modifies my knowledge of my lover and myself" (p. 396). She also notes that this conception does not require there to be any 'closure' of the sort that male orgasm typically signifies and that it suggests no determinate or preferred narrative structure.

This paper is primarily concerned with the nature of sexual desire and sets out to argue against, and offer an alternative to, Goldman's 'hedonistic' or "reductionist" account, which takes the central focus of sexual desire to be sexual pleasure. A different sort of view, which Morgan calls "intentionalist", and which is represented for us by Nagel and Ketchum, takes sexual desire to involve complex psychological attitudes ("intentional states") that are directed at oneself and one's partners. Morgan's own view is meant to be a kind of synthesis of these.

Before we get into this paper, let me note that one of the things that is so striking about it is the way Morgan describes certain erotic moments. This kind of detail is, it seems to me, important, and the authors we've read so far have not included much of it.

The central objection to intentionalist views, as Morgan sees it, is that, in at least some cases, people engage (and want to engage) in sexual relations without any desire to communicate, or to express love, or whatever the intentionalist says that sexual desire involves. His response, which begins with section 2, is that such objections assume that sexual pleasure itself is a single, uniform phenomenon, consistent across different sexual encounters. His view is that sexual desire is rooted in a very basic sort of sexual appetite (one that would be comparable to hunger), but that sexual desire as we find it in humans is shaped and transformed by conscious, rational thought.

As Morgan sees it, this is what intentionalist views are trying to get at: the fact that, while pleasure is a crucial element of sexual desire, the desire may not be just for pleasure from any source but e.g. for pleasure from contact with the body of one's life partner. The deeper point, though, "is that sexual relations can be and frequently are meaningful for their participants, and this significance feeds into and shapes the nature of the pleasure taken in them" (p. 6). I.e., the pleasure itself that one experiences has (or can have) an 'intentional' element. In effect, the claim (argued on pp. 6-7) is that reductionists have wrongly imagined that there is some 'purely bodily' pleasure that is sexual pleasure, whereas pleasure, in general, is a more complex phenomenon that integrates the bodily and the mental.

In section 3, Morgan argues that his view is better able to encompass the full range of human sexual experience than alternative views are. First, since he does not make 'meaningfulness' essential, he can happily allow for casual sex. But, on the other hand, he can recognize the ways in which sexual desires can be more complex than Goldman allows, incorporating complex intentional elements. Morgan gives a number of examples to illustrate this point. But perhaps the most interesting is the one on pp. 8-9, about 'anonymous' sex among gay men. In effect, what Morgan is claiming is that, even in the case of casual sex—the best case for hedonistic views—both sexual desire and sexual pleasure are more complex than they might first appear to be.

It's crucial to Morgan's case here that anonymity (say) is not just a cause of enhanced sexual pleasure but actually affects the character or nature of the pleasure itself ("...this significance feeds into and shapes the nature of the pleasure taken..." (p. 6)). To put it more directly: Is there really a difference between "the physical sensation of a moving penis penetrating [one's] anus [and the] sensation of the moving penis of a stranger penetrating [one's] anus" (p. 9)? The second example, "Victory" (p. 8) has a similar problem. (Can you elaborate?) But then it's not clear that these are really counterexamples to hedonistic views. (Why not?) How might we try to disentangle these two features and figure out whether certain factors are making merely a causal or a more robust constitutive contribution?

Section 4 strengthens the argument by noting, first, that many of our sexual desires involve "contingent products of human culture" and so cannot possibly be regarded as 'purely animal' (p. 9). But Morgan suggests that intentionalists have also tended to go wrong by trying to find some single, common element besides a desire for sexual pleasure in all of the desires we call 'sexual', which seem to be endlessly variable—though each of the many proposals does serve to identify something that "can play the meaningful role that transforms [animal desire] into something more complicated" (p. 10).

Morgan also addresses here the sort of question I asked above. He considers an example in which one has sex with an old flame. In this case, he claims, their smell and taste might be especially erotic. But Morgan himself says that one "finds the sensation [smell or taste] pleasurable because it is the scent of that particular person" (p. 10, my emphasis). Is that enough?

Section 5 raises some initial questions about the moral significance of this analysis of sexual desire. We'll explore this topic further later, when we read Morgan's paper "Dark Desires". But for now, it is worth noting just this much: Since Morgan's paper characterizes sexual desire in terms of pleasure (contrary to what Morgan says in footnote 3, then, I think his view probably has more in common with the hedonistic views), there's no guarantee that the 'intentionalist' elements shaping this pleasure will be in any way good. So we might wonder whether a form of the same objection that Ketchum brings against Goldman might not apply here: Can there, on Morgan's view, be sex that is good qua sex but not, in fact, at all good? (Remember that Ketchum's objection had specifically to do with whether rape can be good for the person being raped.)

Jacobsen explicitly sets out to explain what makes certain sorts of desires sexual. As he notes, and as we have seen, there are a bewildering variety of options here, in part because so many different activities can count as sexual.

Jacobsen begins by discussing Goldman's hedonistic view: sexual desire is a desire for a distinctive sort of sensation (sexual pleasure). He recalls Nagel's criticism that such a view has no place for the concept of perversion. But Goldman simply agrees with this. I am all the more puzzled when Jacobsen says that Goldman's view has trouble accommodating "sexual surprises and delights, originality, novelty, and experimentation" (p. 618). Jacobsen seems to think that Goldman has difficulty even characterizing the perversions as sexual (see p. 620). But I don't see why: Shoe fetishism is sexual, when it is, because it's a means toward the end of sexual pleasure. What is Jacobsen thinking here?

A deeper criticism of Goldman's view is that it seems to make it obscure why sexual interaction should be any better, qua sex, from "sexual turn taking". Yet worse, it seems to make our sexual partners mere "instruments for our own pleasure" (p. 619).

While Goldman himself does seem fixated on the desire that one experience sexual pleasure oneself, might his view not be amended so that the desire to help someone else experience sexual pleasure was not also counted as sexual? What problems might such an amendment pose?

Jacobsen's strategy is going to be to deny that what makes a desire sexual is something about the object of the desire. It's easy to see how a type of desire can be individuated in terms of the type of its object: A desire for pizza is a desire for a specific kind of thing. Note how the views we have been considering fit into this scheme: A sexual desire is a desire for sexual pleasure, or a certain kind of communication, or a certain kind of reciprocal recognition, or whatever. Jacobsen thinks that all such views are doomed. But what other sort of way of classifying types of desires could there be?

To begin outlining it, Jacobsen recalls some basic features of desires: Desires are always desires for something; the object of desire has some features that make it desirable to the agent. Desires might differ not because their object is different, but rather because of the features of the object that make it desirable: I might want to drink a glass of water because it is cool or because it is wet. So perhaps sexual desires should be characterized not in terms of their object, but in terms of what features of such objects make them sexually desirable. (One might call this an 'adverbial' strategy.) Thus, "The task of saying what makes a desire sexual now becomes the task of saying what that feature is in virtue of which sexually desirous agents desire" (p. 624).

Jacobsen gives as an example of a 'feature-based' grouping desires to swim, eat, and sleep, if what makes them desirable is their health-promoting features. What other reasonable examples of this kind might be given?

In section III, Jacobsen argues for a certain way of thinking about the appetites: hunger, thirst, and the analogue in the case of sex (horniness, perhaps). Specifically, he argues that these appetites should not be understood as themselves being desires. E.g., being hungry is not the same as wanting to eat. The argument is that there is an important distinction between two ways a desire can cease. The most obvious way is for the desire to be satisfied: One wanted to Φ (phi), and now one has Φd, and knows that one has, so one no longer wants to Φ. If one had Φd unknowingly, the desire would normally persist. But appetites seem different: One's hunger could be satisfied by one's being nourished, even if one did not know one had been nourished.

There is lengthy and somewhat convoluted response, on pp. 626-8, to an objection to the foregoing. The basic idea is that, if thirst is a desire to drink, then it has to be a desire to drink the specific amount that would quench one's thirst. But someone who thinks thirst is a desire cannot put it that way, since then the desire is to drink exactly enough to satisfy the desire, and that is circular. Nor does it seem plausible that there is any independent characterization of how much one wants to drink. The solution is to say that thirst is not a desire, though being thirsty does often give rise to a desire: to drink enough to quake one's thirst. For our purposes, though, we probably do not need to dig into this argument. What Jacobsen calls "aroused sexual appetite" is, he claims, like hunger and thirst in this way.

In section IV, Jacobsen provides his account of sexual desire:

...[A] sexual desire is a desire the object of which is an act or activity of an agent desired in virtue of certain effects which that activity has (or is taken by the agent to have) on her states of sexual arousal; the relevant features of the activity which make it desirable are that it will (or is taken to be an activity which will) initiate, heighten, sustain, or assuage states of sexual arousal. (p. 629)

I take it that "assuage" here means something like "satisfies" (rather than "make less intense"): the desire for a cold shower would not count as a sexual desire if its purpose is just to make the feeling of arousal dissipate.

Obvious question: Are there counter-examples to this analysis? Sightly less obvious question: How does this account avoid the objection, which Jacobsen brought against Goldman, that it makes our sexual partners mere instruments of our own arousal? Jacobsen does discuss this question, in the last paragraph of the paper. How convincing is his response?

As Jacobsen notes, this leaves us with the question what sexual arousal is, where that is understood as an aroused (bodily) appetite. His proposal is to understand it in terms of arousal (sensory and physical) of the sexual organs. It may well be an advantage that sexual arousal is here connected to 'sex' in a more basic, reproductive sense. But what is supposed to stand to sexual arousal as drinking does to thirst, and eating to hunger? I also worry that this definition of sexual arousal is too narrow and, worse, that it may reflect a male bias. (It's common, in sex research, to make a distinction between physical arousal and psychological arousal.) Thoughts?

Bringing sexual arousal rather than sexual pleasure to the foreground might well be a good idea. But it would only be a minor modification of Goldman's view to say that sexual desire is a desire for sexual arousal. Now, as Jacobsen notes, this is still different from his view, for the following reason. Suppose that Alex desires to engage in some form of sexual play with Tony. On Goldman's account, that desire is not itself a sexual desire, since (as stated) it's not a desire for sexual arousal (or pleasure). On Jacobsen's account, this desire can be sexual, if Alex's reasons to want to play with Tony are connected to how doing so will "initiate, heighten, sustain, or assuage [their] states of sexual arousal". But it seems as if Goldman can easily enough mimic this move. How? How important are the differences between Goldman's and Jacobsen's views, then, in the end?

Bigger question: A we have just seen, Jacobsen's view is close to Goldman's, in many ways. That raises the question to what extent the criticisms Morgan makes of such views apply to Jacobsen's. Can Jacobsen recognize the ways in which 'intentional' states shape the pleasures of sex? What might Jacobsen make of Morgan's main examples: anonymous bathhouse sex; Johnny Drugs; the 'victory' example; and the smells and tastes of an old flame?

The main topic of this paper is a question about the nature of sexual orientation. Many theorists nowadays take sexual orientation to be a matter of the gender of the people to whom one is sexually attracted; one's own gender is irrelevant. So both lesbian women and straight men are gynephilic (attracted to women). Bettcher argues that this account is inadequate and that one's own gender does play a role in sexual orientation. For our purposes, however, what is most important about Bettcher's argument is her conception of the nature of sexual experience.

Bettcher calls her view 'erotic structuralism', and its central feature "is that is that sexual attraction to a person possesses an internal, constitutive structure that includes the eroticized self as an element": a self that is interacting sexually with an eroticized other (p. 606).

Bettcher also argues that her view helps us to understand what is wrong with the claim (still sometimes made) trans-women suffer from 'autogynephilia': sexual attraction to a feminine version of themselves. We won't focus on this part of Bettcher's argument, but her basic idea is that this view itself suffers from a failure to recognize, first, that one's own eroticized self is an essential component of sexual attraction to others and, second, that one's own gender may well figure in this 'structure' without one being attracted to oneself.

In the first main section, Bettcher argues for a distinction between what she calls "erotic interest" and "sexual attraction". This latter term she uses in preference to "sexual desire", because of ambiguities in the latter (some of which we have encountered ourselves). So Bettcher is particularly interested in "the actual experience of sexual attraction to a person" (p. 608), and note here that this experience is meant to be "occurrent", as philosophers say—something one is actually experiencing.

I find Bettcher's terminology here a bit confusing—I'm not entirely sure how she is using the terms "erotic interest" and "erotic content"—but the central question, basically, is whether what one experiences as erotic—as stimulating, or arousing—when one is sexually attracted to someone involves only that person (e.g., their body) or also involves oneself. Bettcher gives a simple example to suggest that it ought to be the latter. The basic point is that, in such cases, one very often is aroused by the possibility of a sexual interaction with the person to whom one is attracted, an activity in which one is oneself a participant. And, of course, one's body figures crucially as well.

Bettcher then proceeds to give an argument for this claim. The argument concerns an example in which a trans-man (Sam) is being fellated by a woman (Kim). The argument is:

1. The fantasized penis is a significant part of Sam's erotic content.
2. Sam is not attracted to his fantasized penis [i.e., it is not a source of sexual attraction for him].
3. Therefore, some significant erotic content is not reducible to "the source of attraction".

Bettcher gives sub-arguments for the two premises. Do they work?

Bettcher goes on to suggest that the argument generalizes, since there are other practices of similar structure in which trans people engage. Is it also true that the typical sexual practices of cis people (i.e., people who are not trans or genderqueer) have this sort of structure? What would corresponding examples look like in that case? (Set aside cases like the one about David, Wendy, and Jeremy, where one is fantasizing being with someone else.) The worry here, note, is that, while Bettcher has identified a real phenomenon, it may not be particularly central to most people's experience of sexual attraction. (This question is addressed, obliquely, around pp. 615-6.)

In the next section, Bettcher turns to the question how to distinguish those elements of the 'erotic content' that are 'sources of attraction' from those that are not. The rough idea is that "to be sexual[ly] attracted to a person is to be aroused by increasing physical intimacy" with the other person, or at least the prospect of it (p. 612). Here, physical intimacy is understood in terms of (i) "sensory access to bodies" (p. 612), where this can be visual, tactile, etc, and (ii) the crossing of boundaries that would ordinarily deny sensory access to certain parts of other people's bodies. (As Bettcher notes, these are culturally defined.)

Now, that much leaves it open that what one experiences as erotic in such cases is simply (the prospect of) increased sensory access to the body of the other. If so, then one's own self has no special role to play in the story. (Compare the question, if you are familiar with this issue, whether Decartes's "I think" really involves an "I".) But Bettcher notes, quite rightly, that it can be arousing to become more available, sensorily, to another person, e.g., when being undressed by them. And, in this case, one's awareness of oneself as naked is part of what one experiences as erotic, although one need not experience, at such moments, an attraction to oneself. (In more typical cases, one experiences both of these aspects at once, as both partners become more `available' to the other. See p. 615.)

Bettcher denies that it is so much as possible to experience attraction to oneself. I'm not at all sure about that, but it doesn't seem central to her argument. The 'boundaries' of which Bettcher speaks apply to my access to my own body, too, at least when I am in public. And they apply, in a different way, on the basis of social norms around masturbation, for example.

Bettcher argues further that one's awareness of oneself as gendered may figure importantly in erotic experience, since the 'boundary structure' of one's body is a gendered matter. (She explores that topic in more detail in the related reading, "Full Frontal Morality".) And, of course, it was already obvious that the gender of one's partner could be erotically important. Moreover, however, Bettcher claims that these are (or at least can be) interacting rather than independent elements. E.g., it might be a very different experience for a bisexual woman to be naked in front of another woman rather than in front of a man, due to the different norms involved.

What, then, is it for some erotic content to be a "source of attraction"? The claim, recall, was that "...to be sexual[ly] attracted to a person is to be aroused by [the prospect of] increasing physical intimacy" with them (p. 612). Or, as she puts it later, "...sexual attraction is the eroticization of gendered intimization between self and other" (p. 616). But has Bettcher really given us reason to regard sexual attraction in the way she describes? If so, what is her argument?

As Bettcher notes (see note 1 on p. 619), her account bears some similarities to Nagel's. That makes it a nice question whether it shares some of the weaknesses of his account. Does her account have difficulty explaining "plain sex"? How might sexual pleasure fit into her view? How might she account for fetishes? Can she make room for the sort of 'intentional' phenomena to which Jacobsen draws attention?

As you'll note, this paper is more polemical than analytical. MacKinnon is not a philosopher (by training), but a lawyer. That makes it especially important, with this reading, that you try to read it sympathetically and charitably. Our goal at present is more to get some ideas on the table—ones that have been very influential—than to evaluate the arguments offered for them.

MacKinnon argues here that gender 'difference' is really gender domination, and that this domination is sexual, ultimately expressed through rape, domestic violence, and even intercourse itself. As she summarizes her view towards the beginning of the paper:

The meaning of practices of sexual violence cannot be categorized away as violence, not sex, either. The male sexual role...centers on aggressive intrusion on those with less power. Such acts of dominance are experienced as sexually arousing, as sex itself. They therefore are. (p. 316)

This conception of intercourse is developed in the related reading from Dworkin.

Part of what makes MacKinnon's perspective important is that she does not take sex, in any sense, as a given, but demands that we see it as shaped by social forces (see esp. pp. 317-20). The central place that vaginal intercourse has in our conception of heterosex, for example, is contingent, something that could be otherwise. Probably this is due, causally speaking, to the role that vaginal intercourse plays in reproduction, but it simply does not follow that it must have the same central role in recreational sex (i.e., quite probably, in most partnered sex). So when MacKinnon asks, "What is sex?" she means to be asking a question about the social norms that shape our everyday experience of sexuality in all its aspects.

MacKinnon is calling, then, for a feminist theory of gender and sexuality that puts sexual domination at its core. As she sees it, the sexual domination of men by women is fundamental to sexuality as it exists in our society. (The obvious example is the sexual double standard.) But MacKinnon also holds that sexual domination is fundamental to gender, too: What it is to be a woman, in our society, is (in part) to be sexually subordinate to men, to be 'a thing for sexual use' (cf. p. 318). As MacKinnon sees it, standards of appropriate behavior for women—from clothing and dress, to conversational norms, to dating rituals, to (continue the list?)—all express aspects of "what male desire requires for arousal and satisfaction" (pp. 318-9). In particular, women's submissiveness is not just an accidental feature of contemporary heterosexuality but an integral part of it: part of what is seen as sexy in women.

Our topic in this course is not gender, but sexuality, but it is important to understand how MacKinnon uses the term "gender" here. She does not have in mind quite the same distinction we would draw with that term today—she is not thinking of 'gender identity'. Rather, MacKinnon means something like "the social meaning of biological sex", the system of norms and expectations through which biological sex comes to have significance in a culture. See the optional SEP article on sex and gender, especially §1.2.

On pp. 320-2, MacKinnon discusses 'liberal' attitudes towards sex that view sex itself as, generally speaking, a good, and the political problems surrounding it as primarily concerned with repression. Here she is, in effect, echoing a then-common feminist criticism of the so-called 'sexual revolution': that its main effect was to make women more readily available to men. What it did not do, MacKinnon argues, is do anything to restructure sex itself, which is still defined in terms of intercourse and male orgasm.

Much of this discussion is a manifestation of the so-called 'feminist sex wars'. Many of the authors MacKinnon criticizes were explicitly on the other side of that conflict. We'll read one of them later, Gayle Rubin.

It starts to emerge where MacKinnon is going when she discusses the common claim rape is not a sexual crime but a crime of violence (pp. 323-5). MacKinnon disagrees. She wants to insist that sexual violence (the threat of it, if not the reality of it) is part of women's experience of sex, not something that can be separated from it. That includes not just rape but sexual harassment and everyday objectification and sexualization. All of these things, MacKinnon wants to insist, are part of what sex is in our society, and no feminist theory of sexuality can ignore them. (My own sense is that MacKinnon gets carried away by her own rhetoric in the full paragraph on p. 325. I'm not sure it is possible to make good sense of these remarks.)

Thus, MacKinnnon writes: "Force is sex, not just sexualized; force is the desire dynamic, not just a response to the desired object when desire's expression is frustrated" (p. 324). What does she mean by that? What sort of criticism of, say, Nagel and Goldman might be suggested by this remark?

On p. 326, MacKinnon begins a discussion of pornography as a window into 'what men want' sexually. We'll discuss pornography later, and it is a serious question whether MacKinnon's description of pornography as it was in 1989 is accurate, let alone whether it reflects the reality of pornography today. But there is a relevant aspect of mainstream heterosexual pornography that is still common, namely, the asymmetric roles of men and women: Men are the doers; women are the done-to; men are active subjects, while women are passive objects. (Strikingly, this is often true even regarding fellatio.) As MacKinnon puts it elsewhere, "Man fucks woman; subject verb object" (Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 124). Woman's role is thus not to choose but to consent (or not) to a choice not her own (pp. 329-30). This is the model of heterosex with which (most mainstream) pornography presents us, and it is, I think it fair to say, also the model of heterosex most prominent in our cutlure. The very term "consent" encodes it (as we'll discuss more later).

If sexuality is asymmetric in this way, is there something naïve about the accounts of sexual desire we have discussed? Ketchum, at least, is clear that she means to be presenting an 'ideal' to which actual sex might only approximate. But MacKinnon, presumably, would want to argue that such an ideal is quite irrelevant to the actual sexual experience of women, especially. Why?

MacKinnon connects this to the objectification of women: Women are seen as vehicles for the exercise of men's sexuality, instruments of men's pleasure. Note, crucially, that MacKinnon vehemently denies that women's consent to such unequal treatment excuses it. That would be true even if the terms under which the consent were given were not themselves unequal, though that is, in many ways, what MacKinnon is trying to call attention to: the unequal structural conditions that shape heterosexual interactions.

On p. 335, MacKinnon returns to the issue of rape and its relation to 'sex'. As she sees it, rape is not qualitatively and categorically distinct from 'sex' but only an extreme manifestation of how sex is conceived in our culture (or maybe one that is not so extreme). MacKinnon argues that this is manifest in the way we actually respond to rape: In the low conviction rate; in the way women who claim to have been raped are treated; in the way the experience of sexual abuse affects women themselves. It is not, note, that MacKinnon thinks there is no difference between rape and consensual sex. It is that she thinks there is more in common between the two than is usually recognized. In particular, men's power over women is every bit as present in consensual sexual interactions as it is in non-consensual ones, and it structures women's choices in both cases.

What are some of the specific ways in which MacKinnon thinks (or might think) that men's socio-sexual dominance structures women's sexual choices?

Herman's central goal in this paper is to argue that remarks that Kant makes about the nature of sexual relations reinforce the analysis of sex and gender that we find in MacKinnon. Kant, as one might expect, is particularly concerned with whether, and under what circumstances, it is possible to treat one's sexual partners as 'ends in themselves' and not merely as means to one's own ends.

Kant's so-called Categorical Imperative is often taken to be central to his moral theory. There are a number of distinct formulations of it (see the SEP article linked above), but one of them is that one must never act in such a way as to treat others merely as means to one's own ends but must always treat others as 'ends in themselves' (that is, roughly, as persons with intrinsic and not merely instrumental value).

The paper opens with some very general, orienting remarks. Herman makes two main points. First, Kant's emphasis on 'impartiality', and his conception of agents as independent rational actors, can be called into question on a number of grounds, including broadly feminist ones. Second, if we see ourselves as fundmentally social beings, then the significance of our actions are partially determined by the social structures within which we act. If so, then even an account of the morality of individual actions will be enmeshed, in a certain sense, in politics. And, despite Kant's own misogyny, Herman suggests that it will be worthwhile to look at how Kant attempts to reconcile sexuality with the demands of his own moral theory.

Section I sketches some relevant background about Kant's moral theory. For our purposes, the central point here is that Kant's account of the institution of marriage, and his argument that sex is only permissible within it, parallels his argument that civil society is necessary if there are to be any property rights or corresponding obligations. The fundamental question with which Kant is concerned, in the latter case, is how the use of coercive state power—e.g., to prevent and punish theft—can be justified, given that, prima facie, such coercion does not seem to respect the autonomous wills of citizens.

Kant thinks that, "Given the conditions of human life, there are things we each must be able to do that are not morally possible absent certain coercive political institutions". This includes, most notably, "mak[ing] use of things", that is, taking things for our own private use, which means having some moral claim to those things, e.g., to food we have gathered for the winter (p. 58). But Kant thinks there is no 'natural' right to property (contra Locke, e.g.); such rights can only be bestowed by a civil society that treats the rights of each party with equal, and reciprocal, respect. We need such a society because we need to "make use of things"; we are bound by its dictates for the same reason.

Do not worry too much here about the correctness of Kant's account of the necessity of civil society. That is a topic for a very different course (on political philosophy). Our interest is in the structure of Kant's position: the way in which what would otherwise be a violation of individual autonomy is morally justified not just by practical necessity but by the existence of an institution that, so to speak, fairly distributes the benefits and burdens that are required if we are to meet those practical needs.

Section II begins the discussion of marriage. The central worry is that "sexual interest in another is not interest in the other as a person" (pp. 59-60, my emphasis) but only in their body. But that amounts to an objectionable form of objectification: "According to Kant, the objectification of the other is both natural and inevitable in sexual activity" (p. 60). Herman proceeds to note that there are strong echoes of this line of thought in the work of Andrea Dworkin, though Dworkin's emphasis is, of course, on the objectification of women by men, especially in heterosexual intercourse.

Recall the various views we have considered about the nature of sexual desire. Do some of them seem particularly vulnerable to this kind of worry? Are there ones that seem particularly well placed to respond to it?

Now, it is clear enough why, on Kant's view, objectification is likely to be problematic (though we will spend quite a bit more time considering this issue). But it is less clear why Kant thinks that sexual relations are inevitably objectifying. Before we address that question, however, it's worth noting the pressure this puts, if it is correct, on the notion of consent. It simply is not sufficient to solve the moral problem posed by objectification that both parties consent to be used as objects. It is wrong to treat someone as if they were an object, and consent alone cannot make it permissible (any more than one consent to be a slave).

So, again, why think that the bodily character of sexual attraction is incompatible with an appropriate sort of regard for the person? Kant draws a distinction between human love and sexual love. Here, it is important to recognize that what Kant means by 'sexual love' is, in the first instance, purely sexual desire. Think here of seeing someone at a party to whom you have some deep and visceral sense of attraction. The attraction itself "makes [them] an Object of appetite" (Kant), and what one wants is, as part of the nature of the attraction, "pleasure of a certain sort to be had from the sexual use of [their] body" (p. 63). (Where have we heard that sort of thing before?)

Note that the crucial claim here is that (other-directed) sexual desire is, at some fundamental level, a desire for a certain kind of sensual pleasure to be derived from bodily interaction with that person. It's again worth reflecting on how the various views about the nature of sexual desire that we've discussed relate to this claim.

What's most obviously problematic, for Kant, then, is casual sex (all the more so anonymous sex). But even sex with someone one 'loves as a person' is, Kant thinks, still problematic. In effect, what Kant thinks is that, if Romeo loves Juliet, then this might temper the ways in which he uses her to give himself sexual pleasure. But it does not change the fact that he is using her for his own purposes. Nor is it clear why his allowing her to do the same would make things any better. Two wrongs do not make a right, right? And consent, once again, does not help, either.

As Herman notes, while there are clear parallels with MacKinnon, there is also a clear difference: MacKinnon is particularly concerned with the way heterosex, as it is now structured in our society, objectifies and subordinates women. That means there is some work to be done modifying Kant's discussion to fit this new context. How, for example, might Kant's discussion of human versus sexual love be adapted for MacKinnon's purposes?

Section III concerns Kant's solution to the problem so far developed: Sexual activity is inherently objectifying (and so prima facie immoral), yet sex is essential to the continuation of the species and, for many of us, an essential part of a satisfying life. It will likely seem implausible (if also unsurprising) to many of you that Kant's solution to this problem should involve marriage—all the more so given the history of that institution (though, as Herman mentions, Kant's argument needn't be thought to justify marriage in any particular form). But we can, perhaps, set aside the issue about marriage and ask whether Kant's arguments might justify a weaker (and much more widely held) claim: that sex is only morally permissible in the context of a loving or committed relationship. Perhaps only some weaker, yet morally significant, conclusion follows. But it is not all that difficult to see how some morally significant conclusion might be obtainable, even if it is not quite the conclusion Kant draws.

Herman discusses two arguments Kant gives for why marriage can make sex permissible. The first she dismisses on grounds we've already discussed: Symmetry cannot solve the problem. But the second argument—one that parallels the justification of civil society—she finds more promising. We have a need (be it personal or, so to speak, species-wide) for sex with other people (a need "to make use of them", as it were). But morality demands that we treat people as people, not as things:

Although the sexual appetite leads me to regard and so treat another as a thing suitable to yield sexual pleasure, morality opposes this. One may grab a piece of fruit seeking its sweetness; one may not "grab" a person for sexual pleasure. That is rape. (p. 68)

Utlimately, Herman suggests that Kant's solution to this problem is to insist that "sexual interest in another person [is permissible] only where there is secure moral regard for that person's life", so that "acceptance of obligations with respect to that person's welfare [is a moral pre-]condition of sexual activity" (p. 68). And, as Kant sees it, that is only possible with marriage.

Herman claims, on Kant's behalf, that "human love will...not do the job of marriage" (p. 68), i.e., that human love between partners cannot guarantee the right sort of moral regard. Why not? Note that the issue here is largely whether some institutional structure is required to solve Kant's problem. What might be the alternative? One important question is how long the "moral regard" that is required for ethical sex is supposed to endure.

Herman also suggests a different reason Kant might think an institution is required if sex is to be moral: that there is no unique solution to the problem thus posed (p. 68). That clearly doesn't work. Why not?

Rubin's paper "Thinking Sex" is sometimes credited with birthing the entire field of sexuality studies, although, as she herself points out in "Blood Under the Bridge", there were many antecedents, especially in the work of gay male scholars. Her ultimate goal is a "radical theory of sex [that will] identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression" (p. 275), much as feminism identifies, etc, gender oppression.

The paper was written at a time of intense disagreement, among feminists themselves, about sex: in the middle of the so-called 'feminist sex wars'. There was a particularly intense disagreement about BDSM. (Much of this history is recounted in "Blood Under the Bridge".) Many self-described 'radical feminists', such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, were fiercely opposed to BDSM, seeing it as celebrating the very sorts of power imbalances—dominance and submission—that feminism is committed to eliminating. Rubin, by contrast, was a founding member of Samois, which was a San Francisco-based collective devoted to lesbian BDSM (the first such organization in the US). In many ways, Rubin's interest in the topics explored here emerges from what she saw as the 'erotic oppression' of people who practice BDSM, especially lesbians, at the hands of other feminists. What she is claiming is, in effect, that much of the feminist opposition to BDSM results from a confused attempt to interpret all sexuality through the lens of feminist theory. Indeed, one of Rubin's main claims (argued in section VI) is that feminist theory cannot, by itself, provide us with the 'radical theory of sexuality' for which she is calling: Although gender is surely relevant to some modes of erotic oppression, it is not, she is arguing, relevant to all of them.

In section I, Rubin discusses the various forms of erotic oppression with which she is concerned. She begins by recounting some of the history of the cultural and legal regulation of sexual behavior in England and the United States. Much of this is horrifying—and yes, she is saying that 'female genital mutilation' was practiced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the United States, as a 'cure' for masturbation. Happily, that has changed, and of course there have been substantial changes in recent years in the laws governing homosexuality (though the matter is still hotly contested, and in many places there are still no employment or housing protections for people in same-gender relationships). But you'll note that still today there is a great deal of conflict over many of the political issues that Rubin mentions, e.g., pornography, funding for Planned Parenthood, and teenage sexuality.

One of the more difficult, and radical, aspects of this paper concerns Rubin's attitude towards child pornography and what she calls 'inter-generational sex'. Rubin is largely concerned here with the regulation of the sex lives of teenagers, rather than children; you are probably aware yourself of some of the broad public concern about sexting, the sharing of nude pictures, and so forth among teenagers. So when she speaks of 'boy-lovers', she is talking about men who are attracted to post-pubescent teenage boys, not about padeophiles, and her claims about the way in which concern about children is used to justify other modes of oppression are prescient. See the discusson in "Blood Under the Bridge", pp. 37-9.

Rubin's main task in section II is to sketch some of the unspoken cultural assumptions that structure thought about sexuality. The first is that sex is a 'purely natural' phenomenon. This idea still surfaces in a variety of forms, e.g., that men's sexuality is, by nature, aggressive and promiscuous whereas women's is gentle and monogamous. Rubin insists, by contrast, and largely following Michel Foucault, that "sexuality is constituted in society and history" (p. 276). If such a claim seems strange to you, it may help to think of it as primarily concerning socio-sexual norms: standards regarding proper sexual behavior, which shape our own individual sexual desires and experience. Rubin wants to bring the social and political forces that determine such norms into view.

One example worth considering here might be changing attitudes about heterosexual anal intercourse. As Rubin mentions, until not very long ago, sodomy laws in many states made even consensual anal intercourse a crime. Such laws were struck down, and many people nowadays would regard anal sex as 'acceptable', whatever their own preferences. But it remains the case that anal intercourse is regarded as sufficiently different from vaginal intercourse that 'special consent' is required for it. (A woman who has consented to vaginal intercourse has not thereby consented to anal intercourse.) But that is a contingent fact about our culture's understanding of sex. It is something that could change, and there is some indication that many women now feel some cultural pressure to engage in anal intercourse, because it's begun to seem like part of what women are 'supposed' to do sexually. See the paper by Fahs and Gonzalez, in the related readings, for more on this issue.

Rubin proceeds to list five "ideological formations" that shape American culture's thought about sex. I'd encourage you think about ways in which they still do so, for all that may have changed otherwise since 1982.

Note that Rubin's account not only allows for but implies that sexuality will take different forms in different cultures. She is not as aware as she might have been of the fact that the culture of which she's speaking is largely white culture and that something quite different might need to be said about African-American culture, say, and the forms that sexuality takes in it.

The first of these is sex negativity and a more general distrust and discounting of 'the flesh'. Rubin bemoans the way in which our culture demands that "the exercise of erotic capacity, intelligence, curiosity, or creativity all require pretexts...". What she means, in part, is that there is a widespread suspicion of, as it were, sex for sex's own sake. One case worth thinking about here might well be mastubation, which Rubin mentions herself. Though no longer (widely) regarded as abnormal or harmful, it is still shrouded in secrecy and shame, especially where women are concerned. (See e.g. this controversy over the inclusion of sex toys (in particular, vibrators) at the Consumer Electronics Show.)

What does it say about our sexual culture that what is probably the most common form of sexual behavior, masturbation, is still so stigmatized? Why is it so stigmatized? (If you think you're immune, then ask yourself these questions: How willing would you be to discuss your solo sexual adventures with your friends? How does that compare to your willingness to discuss sex you've had with someone else?

Rubin's other four "ideolgical formations" are really aspects of sex negativity. Feel free to comment on any of them. The most important, to my mind, is what Rubin calls "the hierarchical valuation of sex acts". There is a lot packed into that notion, but what she mostly has in mind is the way in which certain kinds of sexual behavior are seen as 'normal' and others are seen as deviant or perverse, to borrow a term. (It is here that Rubin's concern with BDSM emerges, though she does not focus on that directly.)

Closely related is "the lack of a concept of benign sexual variation". Rubin argues that this is due, in large part, to a tendency to universalize one's own experience. It's a matter of fact that people do have strong, visceral reactions to certain kinds of sexual acts. For any one of us, there just are going to be things that make us genuninely uncomfortable: that 'squick' us. (I'll leave it to you to think about what your own squicks are.) How could anyone genuninely be into that, it's easy to think; there's got to be something wrong with such people. It's one of Rubin's main complaints about her feminist opponents that they make precisely this mistake. (Gloria Steinem's "Erotica vs Pornography", which is one of the related readings, makes many of these moves quite explicitly.)

Rubin's argument for the claim just mentioned is mostly contained in Section VI, where she addresses the relevance or otherwise of feminist theory to the study of sexuality. In effect, Rubin argues here for what we now know as 'sex positive' feminism and against a tendency (which we've seen in MacKinnon) to regard women's oppression as largely constituted by and through normative heterosexuality.

This is probably the classic analytic paper on objectification: the one everyone else cites. Nussbaum's primary goal is just to get clear about what objectification is. She argues that there are seven things that might be meant by 'objectification', some of which go together much of the time but which are in principle distinct. Moreover, and this is the claim for which the paper is best known, she argues that some forms of objectification may be good and even wonderful parts of sexual life.

Nussbaum's discussion focuses on six putative examples of objectification taken from literature. One important distinction that she makes concerns objectification by characters in some story with objectification by the story itself (the "implied author"), and objectification by the author of that story. We'll not be too concerned with that distinction here, but it will be very important to keep in mind when we discuss whether and how pornography objectifies.

Section I lists seven types of objectification. (Rae Langton adds three more in her paper "Autonomy-Denial in Objectification", in her Sexual Solipsism. See the SEP article mentioned above as an optional reading.) All of them, Nussbaum says, are ways of "treating as an object what is not really object, what is, in fact, a human being" (p. 257). She regards the notion of 'human being' here as broadly Kantian (recall Herman's paper), but suggests that what's involved in "treating [someone] as an object" can vary.

So we have the following notions of objectification:

1. Instrumentality: The objectifier treats the object as a tool of his or her purposes.
2. Denial of autonomy: The objectifier treats the object as lacking in autonomy and self-determination.
3. Inertness: The objectifier treats the object as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity.
4. Fungibility: The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type, and/or (b) with objects of other types.
5. Violability: The objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary-integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into.
6. Ownership: The objectifier treats the object as something that is owned by another, can be bought or sold, etc.
7. Denial of subjectivity: The objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account. (p. 257)

I confess that I do not understand Nussbaum's distinction, drawn in (3), between 'agency' and 'activity'. She says, e.g., that a Monet painting is inert but not inactive and that her word processor is not inert. If anyone has any idea what these terms mean, please do say so.

Nussbaum notes that some of these seem more immediately objectionable than others: autonomy and subjectivity are not properties of things at all (in the sense in which she is using that term), so to deny them to people seems likely to be problematic. She also argues that all seven are distinct, though two of them seem to be more basic than the others. These are (1) and (2): instrumentality and denial of autonomy.

Nussbaum's claim that Rubin thinks recognition of autonomy is compatible with violability seems to me a mistake. (She does not, in my view, take sufficient notice of the importance of consent and of what consent involves in such cases.) But I would suggest we set that aside here. We'll return later to questions about the ethics of BDSM.

This part of Nussbaum's discussion is somewhat confusing, for two reasons. First, one might have expected her to argue that denial of autonomy, say, does or doesn't imply various of the other forms of objectification. What she argues, however, is that recognition of autonomy precludes the other forms, with the possible exception of fungibility. (She uses the example of a certain sort of promisciuity among gay men—roughly, anonymous sex—to make this point.) So, in effect, what we have is that, in order to obectify someone in any of the other ways (with the mentioned exception), you also have to deny their autonomy.

Second, when Nussbaum remarks that, nonetheless, there are ways in which "instrumentality seems the most morally exigent notion" (p. 261), one might have expected her to make a similar claim. Instead, she notes that denial of autonomy does not imply instrumentality and denies that treating something as a mere instrument implies any of the other forms of objectification—though she allows that, in the case of human adults, treating them as not just instruments might imply recognizing their autonomy, etc. She then proceeds to consider that specific case: the objectification of human adults by other human adults.

On pp. 262-5, Nussbaum considers the relation between her seven notions of objectification where human adults are concerned. But she does not explicitly detail those relations (e.g., which of them imply others). It would be a worthwhile exercise to try to do so.

In section II, Nussbaum applies the machinery she has developed to the case of sexual objectification. As Nussbaum notes, instrumentality is the notion of objectification with the most obviously Kantian ring to it: one is not to treat human beings merely as means to one's own ends but also as ends in themselves. And, as we saw with Herman, Kant's concern was precisely that sexual desire leads us to treat other persons as instruments of our own pleasure. Nussbaum also notes, largely elaborating on MacKinnon and Dwrokin, that in this case instrumentalization is liable to be closely connected with a denial of autonomy and subjectivity. She also suggests that it might lead to violability, i.e., that instrumentalization might tend to lead to rape.

This leads Nussbaum to the question why Kant thinks sex always involves (or even usually threatents to involve) instrumentalization. She suggests that it is because Kant thinks that sexual arousal is so powerful that, in effect, it prevents one from seeing other people as anything but tools of one's own satisfaction. How might this idea compare to Nagel's suggestion that, in sex, one is dominated by one's body and that, "ideally, deliberate control is needed only to guide the expression of [sexual] impulses" (p. 13)?

The most obvious difference between Kant's view and that of Dworkin and MacKinnon is that they do not think that sexual desire is necessarily objectifying, only that, under current social conditions, men's sexual desire for women objectifies them and women's sexual desire for men involves "volunteer[ing] for object-status" (p. 268). Nussbaum goes on to argue that Dworkin, in particular, tends to run together the various notions of objectification that she has distinguished. This raises the question whether objectification, in all of these senses, is as pervasive as Dworkin and MacKinnon claim it is—a question Nussbaum does not quite answer.

Section III is organized as a series of reflections on the original examples. We'll focus our attention just on the discussion of the passage from D.H. Lawrence. Nussbaum argues first, however, that context is crucial to determining not just whether some mode of treatment is objectifying but also whether such objectification is morally wrong. She gives an example in which W(endy) is going out of town for an interview and M(ark) says to her, "You don't really need to go. You can just send them some pictures" (pp. 271-2). This remark, Nussbaum seems to suppose, does sexually objectify, but whether it does so objectionably depends, she argues, on what relationship, if any, Wendy and Matt have, what the interview is for, etc.

Nussbaum suggests that Matt's remark slights Wendy's autonomy, treats her as inert, and "may suggest some limited form of fungibility" (p. 272). Does it? Is it, in fact, obvious that this remark objectifies Wendy in any of the ways Nussbaum distinguishes? If not, it need not follow that it does not objectify her. It would follow that Nussbaum has missed something important.

Nussbaum then turns to Lawrence. She argues that objectification of the sort we find there—including a sort of identification of a person with their genitals—can be benign and even wonderful. Perhaps the most striking remarks Nussbaum makes are these:

[For Constance] to be identified with her genital organs is not necessarily to be seen as dehumanized meat ripe for victimization and abuse, but can be a way of being seen more fully as the human individual she is. It is a reminder that the genital organs of people are not really fungible, but have their own individual character, and are in effect parts of the person, if one will really look at them closely without shame. (p. 276)

Nussbaum proceeds to make two points. First, that it exposes the role that is played in Kant's views by a devaluation of the body; focusing one's attention on someone's body need not involve ignoring their humanity. Second, Nussbaum wants to claim that sexual expression, even for women in Victorian England, can be a vehicle for self-actualization and growth. (This amounts to a kind of 'sex positivity'.)

The words "in effect", in the quotation above, are odd—unless one wanted to deny that any part of someone's body is part of the person they are. Probably one should just ignore those words.

Nussbaum expresses some sympathy for core elements of Lawrence's picture of sexuality, in particular, "the value of a certain type of resignation of control, and of both emotional and bodily receptivity", as well as a kind of willingness to be objectified by one's partner. How attractive does that picture seem? How, again, might it compare to Nagel's conception?

Nussbaum argues that some forms of objectification are "benign", but only when they are embedded in the right form of relationship. Marino argues in response that less is required: a proper respect of one's partner's autonomy, as expressed in part through consent. It follows, Marino claims, that there is nothing wrong with objectification, in and of itself. (Maybe a different way to understand what Marino is claiming is that only the form of sexual objectification that Nussbaum labels 'denial of autonomy' is generally liable to be wrong.)

In Section I, Marino asks the question what, for Nussbaum, makes objectification "benign", in the cases when it is. Nussbaum's answer, as Marino understands her, is that it is so when, first, the form objectification takes is not that of instrumentalization or the denial of autonomy; second, when it is symmetrical and mutual; and third, when it occurs in a context of "rough equality". Marino suggests that 'mutuality' involves each partner's 'use' of the other as being linked, in some appropriate way, with the other partner's use of them.

What Marino most emphasizes, though, is that consent by itself is not sufficient to make sexual objectification benign, on Nussbaum's view. Rather, what does most of the work is the broader context of the relationship between the partners. Nussbaum's view thus has some similarity to Kant's (recall his views about marriage) and thus would call into moral doubt some forms of casual sex. (Think, perhaps, of the anonymous bathhouse sex that Morgan mentions in "Sex in the Head".)

Does this account of what Nussbaum argues in "Objectification" seem right?

Marino argues against this view in Section II, claiming that all objectification involves instrumental use, to some extent, and that "intimacy, symmetry, and mutuality" can never excuse instrumental use by themselves. The basic thought is one Marino borrows from Alan Soble: How can it be permissible to treat someone as a mere means sometimes? The fact that one treats them as an end in themselves at other times cannot justify one's treating them merely as a means now. Worse, treating someone you love as a mere means seems especially objectionable.

Marino gives an example, involving typing, of how one partner in a relationship might instrumentalize the other in ways that were especially hurtful. Is the example convincing? What makes it so (or not)? Can you give other examples of the same type?

One suggestion Marino makes in connection with this example is that intimacy can cloud questions of consent (which, she will be suggesting, is what really matters here). What might a sexual analogue of this case look like?

Marino distinguishes two kinds of instrumental use. In the first, one person utterly disregards the other person's humanity; in this case, mutuality and the like clearly cannot excuse such behavior. The second is a bit harder to get a grip on. Marino says that, when she asks her partner, "May I put my head on your stomach?" she is not taking his wishes and desires into account but is simply assuming that he'll speak up if he has something else he'd rather do. It involves "treat[ing] someone in such a way that they further ends of our own, consensually, while we do not concern ourselves with their ends" (p. 351). She gives several additional examples to illustrate the difference. What she calls "weak instrumental use" is supposed, then, to "involve[] respecting a person's stated permissions, while ignoring the full range of their wishes and desires" (p. 351). It seems, that is, to involve one person's not actively seeking to determine what all the other person's needs and desires are.

This weaker sort of instrumental use, Marino claims, is common in sexual life—and, crucially, it need not involve any denial of autonomy. How good are the examples Marino uses to support this claim? She argues that symmetry and mutuality cannot excuse instrumental use in such cases. But, she further suggests, consent (that is, respect for autonomy) can. Do all these examples seem "benign", then, if they are consensual? Is it right that "...a partner who is moved by intense desire and sexual excitement to become momentarily focused on his or her self is often taken to be part of the ideal sexual encounter" (p. 352)? (Compare also the later remark mentioned in the next paragraph.)

In Section III, Marino argues that consent both can and does make objectification, sexual and otherwise, morally benign. Of course, it is essential that the consent be freely and voluntarily given, and not based upon coercion or deception. But Marino goes beyond what she styles as 'standard' views to claim that one can consent to being used, in the weak instrumental sense. In fact, she thinks that 'good sex' often involves using one's partner in this sense, and allowing oneself so to be used: "Typically, in the kind of example mentioned above, in which passion causes A to temporarily pursue A's own pleasure and ignore B's desires and wishes, B won't mind, because B wants A to have this experience; it's often part of what one hopes for in having sex with another person" (p. 356).

Marino gives two more examples: dressing in a certain way that is intended to be sexually arousing for people who see her, and putting sexualized photographs on tumblr, say (before that got banned). Is there a difference between these? And do they seem entirely benign? (The optional piece by Vex Ashley speaks to how important the latter was to some people, especially queers.)

The crucial question is whether one can really respect someone's autonomy while treating them as an instrument in the weak sense. Marino, unsurprisingly, argues that this is possible. It requires being attentive to whether one's partner's "consent is ongoing", that is, whether they continue to consent to being used in this way, while one is using them in that way. (She bases this on an analogy with the role of consent in BDSM, which we'll explore in more detail later.) Marino then argues that consent can even secure the moral permissibility of other forms of objectification, such as fungibility.

It does not yet, however, follow that casual heterosexual sex is morally unobjectionable, so long as it is consensual. (Might it follow, though, that anonymous gay bathhouse sex is unobjectionable if consensual?) The reason, Marino argues, is that social circumstances can make the question whether someone has freely consented to be objectified less than obvious. Indeed, Marino seems to allow that, as things are, such choices might not, in a heterosexual context, ever be truly free, in which case the sexual objectification of women by men might never in fact be permissible (and there might be similar problems with casual heterosex).

Bauer begins her essay by recounting some of the history of attempts by the US Supreme Court to define what counts as obscene. This particular issue will not much matter to us (even when we get to discussing pornography). Bauer's real interest is in a more general fact about the nature of such characterizations: "...[W]hen human beings make judgments about what counts as what, it's often the case, no matter what phenomenon is at stake, that, if for whatever reason we are called upon to adduce explicitly the criteria that we are using, we have great difficulty doing so..." (p. 23). Philosophy, by contrast, and analytic philosophy in particular, is often concerned precisely to articulate such criteria. Think, for example, of the question what knowledge is. Here, the standard way to think of the problem is as concerning the correct definition of knowledge. (Indeed, in most of the papers we read on sexual desire, the issue was conceived that way.)

As Bauer notes, this problem is not one that tends to arise in everyday life. We tend to agree well enough with one another about what counts as (to use her example) a wastebasket to figure out where we should put the trash. The cases that do tend to pose problems, she suggests, are ones in which a given term "gets its sense only within a particular worldview" (p. 25), that is, only if certain sorts of normative (e.g., moral) presuppositions are in place. Her specific suggestion—though, again, this won't be of great significance for us—is that "obscene" is such a term (in its sexual use).

The term in which Bauer is really interested here is "objectification". Her claim is that "if the term sexual objectification is critical in helping you make sense of the world as you see it, then, more or less, you will know sexual objectification when you see it" (p. 26), and you won't be depending upon any definite criteria to do so. As a result, "trying to specify its marks and features will only lead you down a certain philosophical garden path [and] will actually end up distorting the phenomenon" (pp. 26-7). Bauer, that is to say, is suggesting that the approach Nussbaum (and the many others she mentions in footnote 5) takes to these issues is counter-productive, at best. The point is meant to be not just philosophical but also political: There will be no convincing anyone of the importance of the concept of objectification by arguing in the way that Nussbaum and Herman do.

One way to think of what Bauer is arguing here is that she wants to claim that the question whether sexual objectification might sometimes be a "good thing"—one of the central claims for which Nussbaum wants to argue—is, in a certain sense, just confused. The term will only make proper sense to you if you see the world in a certain way: as one in which women as systematically disadvantaged and in which "certain ways of perceiving and representing women tend to cause women direct or indirect material and psychological harm" (p. 28). It's these ways of perceiving and representing women to which the term "sexual objectification" refers, on Bauer's view, and they are always bad.

Bauer proceeds to mention a number of examples of sexual objectification in the media. (Unfortunately, some of her links are now broken. See this page for the ads to which she refers.)

Think about Nussbaum's seven types of objectification. How do the various examples Bauer mentions fit into her categories, or not? (Don't forget the example mentioned in note 11.) Are they all objectifying or are some of them just stupid (and is there a difference)? What is so offensive about many of these ads?

Bauer suggests that the underlying project—which seems independent of the 'criteria listing' issue—is to explain why sexual objectification is wrong in broadly Kantian terms. (There are some useful remarks about what Kant's view of marriage actually involved: "the erasure of women as autonomous beings" (p. 32).) The assumption, that is to say, is that sexual objectification fundamentally involves treating someone as a means only, rather than as an end in themselves, and doing so in a sexual way: roughly, that is, one is treating a person as a mere thing. It is, perhaps surprisingly, this claim that Bauer wants to question.

Bauer specifically questions Nussbaum's analysis of the example from Lady Chatterly's Lover. Nussbaum claims that the mutual respect and consent present in their relationship makes whatever objectification may occur "benign". Bauer notes, however, that this assumes, contrary to what Nussbaum herself argues elsewhere, that Connie's preferences are not "adaptive". The basic idea here is that, in some social circumstances, the choices that are open to someone (especially structurally disadvantaged persons) are in some way circumscribed or limited. So one is forced to choose, as it were, among certain options, all of which may be in some way bad (at least relative to the options open to others who are not disadvantaged in the same way): "...[W]hen frank social inequalities exist, people may shrink their expectations and desires to fit within the resulting constraints" (p. 35). It follows, Bauer claims, that mutual desire and consent are not sufficient to guarantee that whatever sexual objectification is present is not of a negative sort.

As is perhaps especially clear in Marino, the concept of objectification that is under discussion is actually very general, and sexual objectification is treated as a special case of this more general phenomenon. Might it be appropriate to say that, according to Bauer, that is the fundamental mistake? If so, then how so?

Cahill's central claim in this paper is that the concept of objectification has outlived its usefulness and that a related but distinct concept of 'derivitization' is more helpful. This view encompasses more than just the analysis of sexual violence, but that is her focus here.

Cahill defines that notion thus: "To derivatize is to portray, render, understand, or approach a [person] solely as the reflection, projection, or expression of [one's own] being, desires, fears, etc", rather than as an independent being in their own right (p. 14). Note that this is related to but different from what Nussbaum calls "denial of subjectivity". It is not to see someone as lacking in subjectivity, but to distort their subjectivity for one's own ends. Cahill also emphasizes that this does not involve treating someone as a 'thing': so it is not a form of objectification, in the sense in which Nussbaum uses that term.

The first main section discusses the interpretation of sexual violence in terms of objectification. Cahill distinguishes two such accounts. On the first, rapists treat women (see endnote 7) as mere things without any desires or experiences that matter. On the second, women are seen not just as things but specifically as things for sexual use. The former approach Cahill identifies with Susan Brownmiller. It downplays the sexual aspects of rape, construing it merely as an act of violence. One main criticism of this view is that rape is not, in women's experience of it, just another act of violence and so that the view does not take seriously the ways in which sexuality itself is shaped by culture. The latter approach Cahill identifies with MacKinnon. A central criticism of it is that MacKinnon makes too little room for the possibility of resisting culturally dominant conceptions, both out in the world and in one's own lived experience. Thus, she claims that MacKinnon "collpases a distinction—that between sexual violence and other sexual experiences—that many women experience as at least sometimes clear" (p. 20).

These criticisms are familiar from the work of other philosophers. The former is MacKinnon's own criticism of Brownmiller; the latter is found in many 'sex-positive' feminists. Cahill, though, sees a common thread in these criticisms: that they underplay women's own embodied experience of sexual violence and of sexuality more generally.

In particular, Cahill argues (on pp. 20-2), Brownmiller overlooks the fact that rape would not have the significance it does for the rapist if women were seen as mere things: "In order to establish his own dominance, the assailant must have a real person to dominate; ...she cannot be a mere object" (p. 20). (Note that this is an 'internal' criticism of Brownmiller's view: She regards rape as an act of violence, but acts of violence are directed at people, not things.)

Cahill suggests that Jessica Benjamin's concept of 'intersubjectivity' might help us to deepen this criticism. As Benjamin sees it, much of human experience is shaped by a desire for 'recognition' on the part of others: to be seen as distinct people with our own hopes, wishes, fears, and desires, ones that matter and deserve some sort of respect. Domination, Benjamin suggests, thus becomes almost paradoxical: It is a desire to overwhelm someone else's subjectivity that, at the same time, requires their subjectivity (since 'overwhelming' a blowup doll wouldn't be overwhelming anything).

I wonder myself if Cahill and Benjamin do not both underplay the way in which denial of full subjectivity (or humanity) is used to justify certain kinds of domination. How might that work in the case of sexual violence?

The notion of 'destruction' is perhaps the most difficult in Benjamin's work. Cahill suggests that this means "recognition of the otherness of the other, the negation of the other as 'not me'" (p. 21). But that is the result of survived destruction, not the process of destruction itself. To understand what Benjamin means, we need to disginguish the other as I imagine or want them to be (the 'psychical' object of my own creation) and the other as they are independent of me (the 'real' other, as we might put it). Acts of 'destruction' are (I think) assertions of my own subjectivity, ones that (in a certain sense) threaten to destroy the other as an independent being. If all goes well, however, what I actually destroy is the fantasized other and what 'survives' is the other as they really are. (At times, Benjamin speaks of a need to destroy the other in order to discover them.) Thus, if I say, "I want this", the other can respond in various ways. It is the possibility of their declining that makes them truly other—but it is also what makes room for the possibility of their genuinely and freely agreeing to my request. What is not consistent with their being truly other is their simply acceding no matter what I ask. To put it differently: Their agreeing would be of no value to me if it were not free; but, for that to be a possibility, so must their declining be one. (So one can, in a way, understand the desire to force them to agree. But that desire is, in a different way, paradoxical.)

Although Cahill invokes Benjamin here for other purposes, it is perhaps worth reflecting on what Benjamin says about "erotic union" and the 'intersubjective' character of it. In erotic union, she suggests (as opposed to domination), one's actions breed not submission but a response that 'makes a difference' to what happens. Thus, Benjamin says that "The idea of destruction reminds us that the element of aggression is necessary in erotic life...". If we think of 'destruction' in the terms just described, how is it that this is 'aggressive'? (How, to see it from the other side, does it impose on one?) Why might it be essential to erotic life? And how might it help us to unpack Nussbaum's idea that objectification can be a wonderful part of sex?

Cahill then turns again (on pp. 22-4) to MacKinnon's view. Her central criticism is not unlike Nussbaum's: that it is not in general true that being "a sex object is necessarily degrading and violent" but sometimes to be treated as such "can be a vital element of a robust, healthy subjectivity" (p. 23). The problem, as Cahill sees it, is that the positions of sexual subject and sexual object are not equally available to all people but are gendered. Men are seen as sexual subjects and as the active 'do-ers'; women are seen as sexual objects and as the passive 'done-to'. (Recall MacKinnon's quip, "Man fucks woman; subject verb object".)

If so, however, then the solution need not be (and Cahill thinks cannot be) to banish sexual objectification. Rather, what we need to do is reconceive "sexual interactions...as dynamic engagements between differentiated beings" in which we are all "always already both subject and object" (p. 23). Indeed, going somewhat beyond Nussbaum, Cahill thinks that sexual objectification is, in a way, an essential part of erotic experience: Our "very sexual subjectivity involves being a sexual object for another subject..." (p. 23). If that is right, then objectification by itself is not morally wrong. Thus, Cahill concludes, "If sexual violence often involves constructing the victim as a sex object, as a thing-for-sex, this does not yet explain its harms or its ethical wrongness" (p. 24).

What does Cahill mean when she says that we are always "both [sexual] subject and object" in sexual interactions? What does she mean when she says that "To be sexual, one must be seen as a thing-for-sex" and, indeed, to some extent be one (p. 24)? How is it that this makes possible an understanding of passivity that isn't opposed to activity?

That brings us to Cahill's proposed alternative. Properly to understand the horror of sexual violence, she suggests, we need to understand it as "the attempt on the part of one subject (the assailant) to overwhelm the subjectivity of the other (the victim) in a particularly sexualized way" (p. 25): to force her to conform to his will, whatever she may want. Borrowing from Benjamin, again, Cahill suggests that such acts involve a certain sort of inability to accept the otherness of the victim: "to force the other to either be or want what [the rapist] wants, to assimilate the other to [him]self or make [himself] a threat" (quoted on p. 25). The victim is not allowed effectively to express their own sexuality but only within whatever bounds the assailant imposes. As she puts it near the end of the paper:

Rape does not turn women into things: it forcibly reduces their sexual being to that of another, thereby eclipsing their ontological distinctiveness. The two become one, and the one is the rapist. (p. 28)

One might wonder whether derivitization properly describes all forms of rape. The remarks Cahill makes in note 23 about rape as a war crime—one of the central cases for Brownmiller—do not seem entirely convincing. Is there a significant subset of cases, however, to which her analysis does apply? Might some date rapes (or marital rapes) have this structure, for example? (Cahill is, as she mentions early in the paper, especially concerned with rape as something that typically happens between people who know each other.)

Cahill writes that the problem in rape is not that the victim is seen as a thing-for-sex but that "...the ability to control, define, and force the sexual encounter lies only with" the rapist (p. 25). Are there ways in which the structures Cahill describes surface in ordinary heterosex? (Recall MacKinnon's claim that central elements of rape do so.)

The remarks just quoted, and others Cahill makes, identify the crucial issue here as being the denial of autonomy. But of course that was only one aspect of objectification as Nussbaum defines it. Is Cahill not really giving us an alternative to objectification, then? Or are there still important differences?

Over the next couple weeks, we'll be talking a lot about consent. These two (short and not very dense) papers introduce some of the issues that arise when consent is used as a standard of ethical (as opposed to legal) sex.

Corinna uses a story to draw out the way in which women's sexual desire is often omitted from standard heterosexual scripts. (The related paper by Fine discusses this in detail.) Sex—and intercourse, in particular—is typically presented as something that men want (or, in worse cases, demand) and to which women either consent or do not. Of course, that is no how things always are, but it does seem to be how things often are, and these shared 'scripts' shape our understanding of heterosex even when we do not endorse them. (How obvious was it to you what was missing from Corinna's story?)

I am borrowing the notion of a sexual 'script' here from sociology. For an introduction, see the related papers by Gagnon and Smith and by Frith and Kitzinger.

Consent, Corinna suggest, is of course important, but she wants to insist that it is "ground zero", not something for which anyone should have to settle. In a way, she is arguing for a sexual ideal, or an ethical standard, that involves what is sometimes called 'affirmative' or 'enthusiastic' consent. But what's most significant about how Corinna imagines sex might be has less to do with how it starts (though she does have something to say about that) than with what happens within a sexual interaction, with how things might be if there wasn't a pre-defined script for the parnters to follow once they got into bed. She does not go into a lot of detail, but there are many indications of what she has in mind, e.g., "No one moment in sex has been privileged as the apex..." (p. 190). She seesm to mean orgasm, but she might equally have meant something else.

Millar suggests that Western culture has tended to think of sex as a commodity: something women have and men want; something women 'give' to men or trade for other things, such physical, financial, or emotional security. (It's a good question how this model plays out in non-heterosexual contexts, but it would be much too quick to assume it is simply absent.) This plays out in different ways on different sides of the culture wars. (For more how it functions in the abstinence-only movement, see Jessica Valenti's book The Purity Myth.)

It's a fairly common response to many of Millar's and Corinna's observations that there just is, biologically, an asymmetry of sexual desire: Men just do have more of a desire for sex than women do, so it's hardly surprising that men are often the ones who initiate sex and that women are put in the position of saying "yes" or "no". What's the best response to that argument?

Millar argues that there are several problems with the commodity model. The first is that it is heteronormative—but Millar argues that it still has a effect on how homosex is conceptualized in the culture. The second is that it is a pillar of rape culture: What can be 'given' can also be 'taken', and the idea that women 'let' men have sex with them invites confusion about when that has happened and when it has not.

In place of the commodity model, Millar offers what he calls a 'performance' model: He wants to try to think of sex as analogous to group musical improvisation, 'jamming'. (The term 'performance' may not be well chosen, since the idea that sex involves 'performing' has other difficulties.) He emphasizes the ways in which sex, on this model, involves a kind of negotiation, but between equals, "communication of likes and dislikes and preferences, not a series of proposals that meet with acceptance or rejection" (p. 39). Note that Millar is focused here not just on sexual initiation—the original proposal to have sex or not—but perhaps more on what happens within a sexual encounter.

Millar frequently mentions 'enthusiastic' or 'affirmative' consent in his discussion. In some ways, the 'performance model' does incorporate such ideas: "affirmative participation is built into the conception" (p. 40). But the performance model, I'd suggest, cannot be reduced to anything we could state in terms of 'consent'. What, indeed, does Millar mean by "affirmative participation (p. 38). What aspect of 'good' or 'ethical' sex is he trying to capture here?

Millar suggests toward the end of the paper that the performance model can help us understand why rape is particularly awful sort of violation, quite different from other forms of assault. We'll discuss this question further in connection with other papers we will be reading shortly. But what is his central idea here?

Wertheimer considers here some of the difficulties connected with the concept of consent. This will be important background for further discussion of the matter.

It's important here to note that, while Wertheimer might have been more careful about how he states some of his examples, when he says "if", I take him to mean "if". Thus, when he writes, "...even if the rape of a prostitute is a less serious offense because it does not involve the forcible taking of something that she regards as a sacred and mysterious aspect of her self-identity, but merely the theft of a commodity that she normally trades for monetary gain...", I take him to mean that this might follow on certain views (which are not necessarily his) but, nonetheless, "...it does not follow that the criminal law should treat this rape as a less serious wrong" (p. 101). But there are other aspects of Wertheimer's discussion that reflect some pretty old-fashioned views about sex and gender (such as the discussion of 'coyness' on p. 107). Let's try not to get too bogged-down by these and to focus on the arguments rather than the examples.

Wertheimer argues in Section II that 'conceptual analysis' of the concept of consent will not be of much help to us. His most important point is that the concept of consent in which we are interested here is (and must be) 'morally transformative', in the sense that consent makes things permissible that otherwise would not be. Wertheimer suggests, for this reason, that "the concept of consent is fundamentally normative" (p. 91), i.e., that there are not any 'necessary and sufficient conditions' that could be stated in non-moral terms that would tell us when someone has or has not consented. So the investigation of the notion of consent will have to proceed in broadly moral terms.

In section III, Wertheimer sketches some basic elements of the notion of consent. First, he claims that "morally transformative consent always involves a verbal or nonverbal action" (p. 94). We need at least to distinguish between consent as a mental state—a kind of willingness to let something be done to one—and consent as a public action—an expression, verbal or non-verbal, of that willingness. When we ask, "Did X consent?" we are usually asking a question about consent in the latter sense. (See the related papers by Alexander and Healey for more on this.) The question what consent is thus becomes: Under what circumstances is some public expression morally transformative? Answering this question involves specifying the 'principles of consent'. This will involve issues about whether consent was informed and free.

Section IV discusses the question what the legal standard for acceptable sexual relations should be. Wertheimer focuses on two main questions. First, "...why nonconsensual penetration is such a serious wrong" (p. 98), even when no violence or threat of violence is involved; and Second, why, in some cases, expressing consent to sexual relations does not make them permissible.

The first question is connected to whether rape is merely a form of violence or also involves sex. Wertheimer argues, on grounds independent of MacKinnnon's, that rape "is at least partly about sex". He gives three reasons. The central idea here, it seems to me, is "that invasion of one's sexual being is a special sort of violation" (p. 99). Wertheimer's question is why that is. He distinguishes two options: We could regard the seriousness of a harm as 'experience-dependent'—that is, as a function of how the victim experienced it—or we could regard it as 'experience-independent'—that is, as a function only of 'objective' features of what occurred (see p. 101).

Wertheimer thinks both options have advantages and disadvantages. What are these? Does one or other of the views seem preferable to you? What is the reason that sexual violation is so serious an offense?

The second question is what forms of "consent-elciting behavior" (p. 102) should be regarded as invalidating consent. Wertheimer discusses three: coercion, deception, and drug-induced incompetence. I'll focus here on coercion, which is the topic to which Wertheimer gives the most attention. He defines coercion as involving a threat to make someone worse off (in some way) if they do not consent, where the threat is sufficiently serious that it is reasonable to think that it might elicit consent that would not otherwise be given. Wertheimer emphasizes that this need not involve making the victim worse off than they otherwise would be if one did nothing; it need only involve making them worse of than they have a right to be. He also distinguishes between coercion and 'seductive offers', which involve a promise to make someone better off if they consent.

For our purposes, the alleged difference between cases (3) and (4) is perhaps the most interesting: In (3), a professor threatens to fail a student (let us say) if she does not have sex with him; in (4), he offers her an A (when she would have gotten a C) if she has sex with him. Is there a moral difference between these cases? Should we regard the student's consent as invalid in (3) but valid in (4), as Wertheimer seems to suggest? If so, how should we understand what is wrong about (4)? (Remember that what's at issue here for Wertheimer is whether these forms of behavior should be regarded as criminal, i.e., as rape in a legal sense.)

Another interesting case is (2), in which someone threatens to end a relationship if their partner does not have sex with them. Wertheimer denies that this involves coercion, which need not mean that it is not wrong. What he means is, again, that this threat does not invalidate any consent that might be given. Does that seem right? The crucial remark is this one: "It may be regrettable that people bargain with their sexuality, but there is no reason to regard bargaining within the framework of one's rights as compromising consent..." (p. 104, emphasis original). How might MacKinnon respond to that claim?

Section V takes up a somewhat different question: What sorts of sexual behavior should be regarded as wrong even if not illegal. Wertheimer does not come to any conclusions but, rather, issues some warnings about the difficulty of the terrain.

Section VI raises the question whether there are circumstances in which someone should consent to sexual relations even when they do not wish to do so, namely, within the context of a long-term monogamous relationship. Wertheimer makes a few points that seem important: We need to have a broad view of what people 'want' and not focus narrowly on sexual desire; whether sex is a way of communicating feelings, "...sexual relations are a way of expressing affection and commitment and not simply to express or satisfy erotic desire" (p. 110). But, even recognizing that someone might have sex with someone else as an act of generosity, a different question remains: Might it be reasonable to suppose that, when we enter a monogamous relationship, we accept a duty to care for our partner's sexual desires and needs?

This class will be devoted to discussion in small groups. Our main goal will be to start to get a sense for why one might think that consent, though perhaps the appropriate standard for legal sex, might not be the appropriate standard for ethical sex. We'll approach the issue through two pieces of writing: A brief paper by Robin West that enumerates ways in which consensual sex can still be harmful (to women, especially) and a short story by Kristen Roupenian that was published about the same time that the #MeToo movement began and that resonated with many women. The notes here will be limited to the paper by West.

West states the question in which she is interested right up front: "Are consensual, non-coercive, non-criminal, and even non-tortious, heterosexual transactions ever harmful to women?" (p. 372) She begins by noting that it is common for women to consent to sex they do not want to have, and to do so for good reasons. (We'll explore this distinction in more detail later.)

Some of these reasons are ones that a man (or a person with some other gender identity) might also have and seem, in some ways, just part of interpersonal relations. But others reflect gender inequality and so seem more worrisome. Which are which? Can you think of other such reasons someone might consent to sex they don't actually want to have?

West proceeds to argue that consensual but unwanted sex can cause four sorts of harm, damage to one's sense of: agency (self-assertion); intrinsic value (self-possession); autonomy and independence; and integrity. All of these, it seems to me, involve different ways in which the person subordinates their own needs and desires to those of someone else. Of course, everyone does this from time to time, but it's well known that women are both expected and socialized to do so (e.g., for the good of their family), in ways that men are not. And it matters, too, why one subordinates oneself in this way, and whether the other person is also willing to make similar sacrifices sometimes, etc. In effect, the point is that the reasons for which women consent to sex they do not want are often gendered.

Some of West's remarks might make one to ask whether there are not subtle forms of coercion involved in some of the cases she discusses. And coerced consent is not genuine consent, or so someone committed to the 'consent standard' might say. How good is that response? (She addresses it, in some ways, later in the paper, though only obliquely.)

The next question West addresses is why such harms have not been recognized. She mentions four reasons. The first three reflect central features of what is sometimes called 'neo-liberalism': All of them center, though in different ways, upon a profound respect for individual choice. Defenders of the 'consent standard' will often accuse their opponents of being paternalistic: Who are we to question a woman's free choice to have sex and insist that she does not really want to have it? The second, though, is a bit more specific and reflects certain aspects of the 'commodity' model of sex.

Some might dismiss the last of West's reasons—that "...the considerable harms women sustain from consensual but undesired sex must be downplayed if the considerable pleasure men reap from heterosexual transactions is [to seem] morally justified.." (p. 374)—as cynical, but it surely must be a good question why women are overwhelmingly more likely to consent to sex they do not want to have than men are. (I have seen empirical data on this, but cannot now find it.)

But there is a deeper reason, namely, "that the theoretical conceptualizations of sex, rape, force, and violence that underscore both liberal and radical legal feminism undermine the effort to articulate the harms that might be caused by consensual sexuality" (p. 375). I.e., there is something about how feminists have tended to think about the mentioned topics that makes it difficult to see the potential harms of consensual sex. It's easy, West suggests, to slide from "Rape is bad because it is non-consensual" to "Sex that is consensual must be not-bad". But this simply overlooks the fact that there might be other reasons that some consensual sex is harmful. That's the criticism of 'liberal' theorists.

The criticism of 'radical' theorists, such as MacKinnon, is less obvious. The difficulty here, it seems to me, might best be understood as due to a lingering devotion to the 'consent standard': If what is wrong about rape is that it is non-consensual; and if one wants to emphasize (as MacKinnon does) "the damage and harm done to women by ordinary, 'normal' heterosexual transactions" (as West puts it on p. 375), then it is all too easy to slide into questioning the consensuality of everyday heterosex—which means that one isn't claiming, after all, that consensual sex can be harmful. What one is claiming is that what looks like consensual sex often isn't. And so, again, the harms of consensual sex become invisible.

All of that said, it remains the case that most of the harms on which West focuses are the result of ways in which women's sexual choices are restricted or, if you like, coerced, in some cases not by the men with whom they are having sex but by their socio-economic circumstances and even by broad cultural forces. This seems quite different from the sorts of harms illustrated by "Cat Person" and in the piece about Aziz Ansari. How so?

Gavey is interested, as was West, in the ways in which consensual sex can nonetheless be harmful. She is particularly interested here in the reasons for which women consent to sex that they do not actually want to have within heterosexual relationships. Gavey's discussion is emprically based: Her data comes from interviews with six women. Her larger goal, though, is to begin to interrogate how 'dominant discourses on sexuality' prescribe relatively passive positions for women and encourage compliance with their partners' sexual requests.

Gavey begins by outlining some of the background against which she operates. One key term to understand here is "discourse". In this sense, 'discourse' is something like a set of public assumptions, norms, and stereotypes about some topic that serve to structure our thinking about it. Discourse is said to define possible 'subject positions', which I take to mean: It identifies different categories of people (man and woman, for example), their relations to each other, and the expectations, rights, responsibilities, etc, that people in those categories have. But the crucial observation is that we also think of ourselves in these terms and understand ourselves and our own actions in terms of the conceptual resources that the 'discourse' makes available: That is the sense in which the discourse 'constitutes us as subjects'. (I take talk of 'language' here really to be talk about the concepts we use to understand and explain the actions and events that occur in the topic area.)

An important idea, which Gavey borrows from Michel Foucault, is that of 'discplinary power'. The basic idea here is that, because we understand ourselves in the terms the 'discourse' makes available, we regulate our own behavior so that, by and large, it conforms to the norms the discourse prescribes. (Even when we challenge those norms, we feel their influence.) This leads to a diagnosis of women's "complicity...in [their] own subjugation" (p. 327), which in earlier work had been described in terms of 'false consciousness'.

As Gavey notes, Sandra Lee Bartky had already (in one of the related papers) given an account of how women are thus led to feel a pressure from within to conform to the norms of femininity. Her goal is to extend that analysis to the norms of heterosexuality: "Women involved in heterosexual encounters are...engaged in self-surveilance, and are encouraged to become self-policing subjects who comply with normative heterosexual narrative scripts which demand our consent and participation irrespective of our sexual desire" (p. 328). This includes both the decision whether to have sex on some given occasion and what kind of sex one has. As Gavey notes toward the bottom of p. 328, the sources of such norms are various and sometimes conflicting, but also pervasive.

Gavey's goal here is to understand how ordinary women understand their own experiences of heterosexual coercion and how the terms in which they do so affect their ability to see it for what it is. She characterizes a number of themes that emerged from her interviews:

• What is 'normal': There are strong expectations about what 'normal' heterosex will look like, and the pressure to be or appear 'normal' acts to channel women's sexual behavior into those forms. In many cases, this simply involves expectations that there will be sex in certain cases, and the expectation that that means intercourse.
• A felt inability to say 'no': This discussion involves a number of subtle fears about the consequences of saying "no" to sex. The most striking is that some women sometimes feel as if, if they say "No", then they will be raped. So they don't say "No", and they aren't raped. But they end up having sex they really do not want to be having. (See the Gattuso piece for more on this.)
• Problems with the notion of 'consent': The notion of consent itself is operative only in contexts where something is being done to someone. Framing women's sexual choices in these terms thus tends to leave out the very idea of women's sexual desire. (See especially the related paper by Fine.)
• The consequences of 'abnormality': Though related to the first point, the focus here is on the penalties to be paid for not being 'normal', such as shaming. (As Struckman-Johnson et al. show, this is a popular strategy among women.) Much of this relates to a sense of women's owing sex to men, especially when in relationships with them.
• A desire to 'take care' of men's sexual 'needs': Although there can be and are cases in which people can agree to have sex when they don't really want to do so as an act of generosity, many of Gavey's subjects report also having done so out of a sense of duty, a responsiblity to care for men's sexual needs.

I'll leave it to you to comment on these different phenomena. They strike me very differently. Some of them, for example, seem more gendered than others. Some of them almost seem inherent in the structure of long-term, monogamous relationships. Note also that, in some cases (such as that of Rosemary), it seems clear that someone is to blame. But in many of these cases, there isn't anyone who is coercing the women, and yet their choices nonetheless seem constrained in the same sort of way that coercion might constrain them. What is the significance of that difference?

Conly's central question here is whether 'verbal coercion' of certain sorts, involving threats of emotional rather than physical harm, can sufficiently invalidate consent to make any sex that results rape. She is also interested in the difference between coercion and seduction.

The first section sketches some background (and you should be able to read it fairly quickly). One important sort of example to keep in mind is one in which M asks W to have sex, and W refuses, but M continues to try to interest W who, at some point agrees. There are a variety of ways of filling in the details of such a case, some of which are relatively benign. But, in some of them, we might want to use words like "pressured" or "harrangued" to describe M's treatment of W and words like "acquiescence" or "submission" to describe her eventual agreement. Conly's question is whether, in such cases, the sex is immoral (rather than illegal). But what may be what most important in this section is what Conly identifies as the central issues: "whether the motivation which decides [a woman] to have sex"—that is, the reason for which she ultimately decides to have sex—"is a result of coercive pressure" (p. 104).

Conly frames her question, at one point, as "what constitutes rape from the moral perspective" (p. 104). I am not entirely sure what she means by that. I think what she means is what we should regard as being rape in the legal sense, though if so I think the description is confusing.

Of course, that raises sharply the issue what coercion is, a topic we've already seen, to some extent, discussed by Wertheimer. (Wertheimer develops his account of coercion further in his book Coercion, and Conly largely follows him.) Conly takes it up in section II. She identifies four elements that comprise the notion and discusses whether these could be present in cases of 'emotional' coercion.

• Intent: Coercion is something done intentionally, as a means of influencing someone's decision. It seems clear that someone could emotionally coerce someone intentionally.
• Choice: It might initallly seem as if physical coercion gives the victim no choice, whereas emotional coercion doesn't. But Conly argues that, on closer examination, this is not true: A women may choose to have sex, rather than to be beaten or killed, but the choice is not free, so the sex is still rape. So it looks as if this does not distinguish physical from emotional coercion, after all.

In discussing 'choice', Conly mentions that a woman might choose to have sex rather than to be beaten. Are there less dramatic examples involving physical threats? (What, e.g,. of harm to others?) Might there also be cases in this vicinity (like ones Gavey mentions) in which a woman chooses to have sex rather than to be raped?

• Harm: For a threat to be coercive, it has to involve a great enough harm. But physical threats come in degrees, and so do emotional threats, and emotional pain can be every bit as extreme as physical pain.
• Legitimacy: The threat must be one that the threat-maker does not have the legitimate authority to issue. A simple example Conly mentions helps one get the idea: It's perfectly legitimate for an employer to 'coerce' their employee to do a better job by threatening to fire them if they do not. So the question becomes: Can it ever be legitimate to pressure someone to have sex?

This last feature of coercion is the most difficult to navigate, and Conly spends the most time discussing it. The central case she discusses is whether someone "can legitimately threaten to break off with someone if she refuses to have sex..." (p. 108). Conly distinguishes two versions of this case. In the first, the person does not want to be in a sex-less relationship and sincerely intends to end it if there is no sex. Conly argues that it is, in general, legitimate to condition one's continuing a relationship on many different things, and there is no reason that sex cannot be one of them.

Does that seem right in all cases? Or might there be ways of developing the case so that it does, again, start to seem coercive to condition the relationship on sex?

In the second version, the person "sincerely intend[s] to leave this unsatisfactory relationship but also hop[es] that his threat will motivate [the woman] to have sex, even if her other desires not to have sex remain in place" (p. 108). It is not clear to me that Conly ever discusses this version of the case. Indeed, it is not entirely clear to me what she has in mind here. Thoughts?

Section III discusses a variety of reasons for which people might have sex they do not really want to have. Conly suggests that some of these may be versions of 'weakness of will' (or akrasia, as it was known to the Greeks and is still sometimes known today). Some such cases, Conly suggests, are not morally problematic. "The problem arises when one feels that one's weakness has somehow been induced by another" (p. 112).

The first sort of case Conly considers is that of seduction, which she understands as succumbing to temptation. There are two forms of this, she thinks, involving 'positive' and 'negative' temptations. The former involves the seducer's highlighting the positive advantages of the tempting thing (sex, in our case) while leaving as little room as possible for rational thought, so that one forgets all about the reasons one had not to do the thing. Conly describes a non-sexual example with a similar structure and then writes: "...if you don't try to stop [someone] from touching you and you let him talk to you about why it is okay to have sex, changing your mind is ultimately a decision for which you are responsible" (p. 114).

The other case is the one identified as crucial earlier: threats of emotional pain. (As Conly notes, this is not what anyone would normally call 'seduction'.) Here again, Conly describes a non-sexual example with a similar structure, in which relatives ask you to invest in their business and threaten to break off their relationship if you do not. Conly remarks that these relatives are sleazy and despicable, but that they are neither "thieves" nor "extortionists". And, she insists, the cases really are analogous, so that 'coercing' someone into sex by threatening them with emotional harm is not, morally speaking, rape.

It's at this point that an issue mentioned above, what Conly means by "what constitutes rape from the moral perspective" (p. 104), becomes pressing. Is Conly's view that the sort of behavior she describes is immoral but not criminal? Or what?

Conly then turns to what she terms persuasion. Drawing on Jane Austen, she argues that "if we are to be persuadable, we will be sometimes persuaded to do the wrong thing but sometimes to do the right thing" (p. 117). It is, she suggests, inherent in the nature of loving someone that we are more apt to be persuaded by them, and not for 'reasons'. More generally, she claims, it's just a fact of life "that we want different things and that we try to get the other person to do what we want" (p. 118), and that's as true for sex as for anything else.

Continuing, Conly writes: "And where such actions are immoral, where we go beyond the normal degree of dishonesty or manipulation implicit in human relationships, the resulting intercourse may not be rape" (p. 118). What kind of immoral actions does she have in mind? What distinction between immmorality and rape is she trying to draw?

Nicola Gavey argues, on broadly empirical grounds, that there is a continuum leading from rape to unwanted but consensual sex to enthusiastically consensual sex. In this paper, Anne Cahill suggests that this provides us with a way of understanding some of the seemingly extreme claims that Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon make about the practice of heterosexuality. Cahill argues that these claims are exaggerated, but that they have a point, and that they force us to displace 'consent' from the central place it has occupied in thought about sexual ethics. In its place, she suggests, we need to put the notion of desire—recall here the piece by Corinna—but, to do so properly, we also need to think about the role that desire plays, or should play, in structuring sexual interactions.

Cahill articulates MacKinnon's position as one according to which, under conditions of patriarchy, women's freedom not to consent to heterosex is doubtful, whence consent itself is doubtful. Cahill had earlier responded, in her book Rethinking Rape, that this view fails to appreciate the phenomenological difference between rape and consensual sex—that these feel different to most women—and to acknowledge the possibility of women's heterosexual agency (however constrained it might be by patriarchy). As Cahill points out, however, Gavey's work raises questions about whether women themselves can always clearly distinguish between rape and consensual sex, as Cahill's earlier analysis had required.

Moreover, Cahill suggests, Gavey makes a much stronger case than MacKinnon did for the 'continuum of heterosexual interactions'. She argues, once again on broadly empirical grounds, that contemporary heterosexuality is shaped by norms that "work as a cultural scaffolding for rape" (Gavey, quoted on p. 308). What she means is that even ordinary, otherwise consensual interactions are governed by assumptions—that men 'need' sex, that it is women's role to 'give' it to them in exchange for emotional benefits—that all but undermine the significance of women's own sexual desire. (We have seen similar ideas in Millar.)

This desire then becomes the focus of Cahill's analysis. The obvious alternative to the view that consent makes sexual relations ethical is that desire does so. But Cahill proceeds cautiously: While consent must be present prior to sexual engagement, it is not so clear that desire needs to be. Moreover, some empirical work suggests that, for many women, sexual desire is "responsive". Indeed, Cahill goes on to suggest (following Meana, in one of the related readings) that it may well be that all sexual desire is "responsive" in this way and that the illusion to the contrary is due to our failure to understand, or even to ask, to what 'spontaneous' desire actually is responsive.

Cahill notes a number of questions worth asking about sexual desire: Does ethical sex require that both parties experience sexual desire? Under what circumstances is it permissible to try to 'generate' sexual desire in someone else? Where is the line between doing so and subtle (or even not so subtle) forms of coercion? Note that it is a good feature of a theory if it draws our attention to good questions, even if it cannot yet answer them. Are these good questions?

In some ways, Cahill's discusion on pp. 310-2 exposes an ambiguity in the concept of sexual desire as we've encountered it. In one sense, desires are just wants: I can desire (want) to see Rage Against the Machine on their reunion tour, for example. But sexual desire can also mean something very close to sexual arousal, what Basson describes as "a craving for sexual sensations for their own sake" (quote on p. 310). Which of these notions of desire plays a role in Cahill's account? Which should?

Cahill proceeds to argue that the really important question is not whether a woman desires sex, but the extent to which her desire matters: how it does or does not shape what happens. (Cahill thinks this is true of interpersonal interaction generally.) Think here of some of the cases Gavey describes in which a woman does desire sex but wonders whether, if she did not, it would make any difference. Nor is it enough, one might think, that the sex itself should evolve in ways that 'match' what someone wants. If that is just a happy accident, then one might nonetheless feel disregarded.

What matters, ethically, is the extent to which sexual partners' desires matter: That is the core of Cahill's proposal. But she does not do very much to develop it. Can you say more about just how one must recognize and acknowledge a partner's desires if sex is to be ethical?

Kukla is interested here in what she calls "the language of sexual negotiation". She is particularly interested in the question "how [good] sexual communication can effectively enhance pleasure and agency" (p. 72) and not just in how bad sexual communication can lead to negative experiences.

Kukla frames her discussion against the background of "speech act theory". A speech act is just any action that is performed by speaking. Among these are the simple cases of asserting, questioning, and commanding; but J.L. Austin famously pointed out that language can also be used to perform non-linguistic acts, e.g., to promise or to marry. Speech acts of this latter type are known as 'performatives'. These are cases where one can make something true—that a promise has been made, that two people are married—just by saying something. Consent is (plausibly ) a speech act in this sense, and a performative one: Saying "I consent" (or something similar) can make things permissible that otherwise would not be.

A basic distinction here is between 'locutionary content', 'illocutionary acts', and 'perlocutionary effects'. The locutionary content is, roughly speaking, just the meaning of the words one uses, but abstracted from the specific act one is performing. So "The door is closed", "Close the door", and "Is the door closed?" might all have the same locutionary content, though one can do different things with these sentences. The illocutionary act is the act one performs in saying whatever ones does: So, e.g., in saying "I promise...", I make a promise; in saying "Do you know what time it is?" I ask what time it is. The perlocutionary effects are the downstream results of performing that illocutionary act. So, e.g., consenting to sex may lead to one's having sex; refusing it might lead to someone's feeling hurt; etc.

Some other language Kukla uses: "felicity conditions" are the conditions that need to obtain for it to be possible to perform a given speech act; "authority conditions" are those that concern who can perform that speech act and under what circumstances. Thus, for example, the felicity conditions for sexual consent might include not being drunk or otherwise incapacitated, and the authority conditions might include not being a child.

You can skip or skim section II. Kukla argues here "our near-exclusive focus on consent and refusal when we talk about sexual negotiation has had a deeply distorting and damaging impact on our understanding of sexual ethics and communication" (p. 75). There are many insightful remarks, but we have covered most of this terrain and can't discuss everything in this paper. (The focus of much of this discussion is a paper by Rae Langton that we will not read until later. But Kukla says enough about it for her discussion to be intelligible.)

You can also skim or skip section III. Here, Kukla notes a tension in sexual communication: It's important that we express clearly what we do and do not want, and yet sexual communication is often indirect, and even non-verbal. We need, she suggests, practical tools for managing this paradox and theoretical ones for describing it. The tool she offers is the idea that communication within and about sex involves a set of assumptions (what she calls an 'alternative discursive frame') about what words are used to do in that context, e.g., that they are often used non-literally.

Section IV discusses sexual initiation. Kukla argues that this is far more complex than is usually assumed. The consent model essentially assumes, she claims, that requesting sex is the typical way of initiating sex (with all the gendered assumptions built into that). More typical, she says, are 'invitations' and 'gift-offers'.

Kukla notes that invitations are embedded in a mesh of complex social norms (which, presumably, vary). Importantly, inviting someone to have sex is supposed to express a desire to have sex with them but still leaves the person free to decline.

Kukla does not really say in detail, at least so far as I can see, exactly how sexual invitation are supposed to differ from sexual requests. Presumably, the difference lies in the associated norms. But what are these? How do invitation differ from requests, generally speaking? And is "Would you like to have sex?" typically a request or an invitation or something else?

Is Kukla right that sexual initiation, especially in casual sex, is typically characterized by invitations? Is she making a descriptive or normative claim here? How might sexual initiation vary with relationship status, e.g., someone you just met at a party versus a friend with benefits versus someone you've been dating versus someone with whom you are (to some extent) partnered?

Gift-offers, Kukla suggests, are more common in established relationships. She gives several examples, which mostly concern initiation. But better examples, it seems to me, come from within sexual activity, as when one offers one's partner oral sex. Like invitations, sexual gift-offers can be freely declined. One difference, she claims, is that "Gifts that are accepted essentially call for both gratitude and reciprocation from the receiver" (p. 85, my emphasis).

Kukla notes that what form reciprocation takes, when it should occur, and so forth, can vary enormously. But, if so, is there any clear sense in which sexual gifts, in particular, do need to be reciprocated? Is there some fact about ethical sex that Kukla is trying to expain here? How else might it be explained?

Kukla notes a number of disanalogies between 'ordinary' invitations and gift-offers and sexual invitations and gift-offers. To what extent do these disanalogies undermine her claim that we should understand sexual initation in terms of invitations and gift-offers? or, at least, undermine the usefulness of that claim?

Section V discusses the use of 'safewords' in BDSM and suggests that safewords might also be useful outside BDSM, in 'vanilla' sex. Kukla has both positive and negative reasons. On the positive side, the use of safewords can "expand the space of opportunities for sexual agency" (p. 89) by allowing us safely to experiment with activities we are not sure we will like and that might push our existing limits. On the negative side, safewords, as used within BDSM, provide participants with a way of 'exiting' a sexual interaction "without ambiguity or normative residue" (p. 89). I.e., safewords are as clear as they could be and require no interpretation, and someone who uses their safeword owes no explanation.

Leaving aside the question whether the use of safewords in BDSM has no "normative residue", is it plausible that the use of safewords in everyday sex (e.g., among "young people who are just beginning to explore sex") would have no "normative residue"?

Section VI explores BDSM a bit further and the role of 'non-consent' within it. It would be worth returning to this section when we discuss the ethics of BDSM later in the semester. (Note that the term "consensual non-consent" is often and, I think, typically not used the way Kukla uses it. In my reading, it typically refers to situations in which someone grants consent initially, for the duration of a 'scene', with the understanding that it cannot be revoked—i.e., there are no safewords. Such scenes are controversial even within the BDSM community.)

Section VII considers the question what the ethical standard for sex should be if not that everyone should 'consent' (since, among other things, no one consents to accept a gift). She considers a couple options. One is a 'negotiation model' proposed by Michelle Anderson (in one of the related readings): The idea here would be that ethical sex requires some sort of "dialogical conversation rather than passive assent or dissent" (p. 93). Another is Thomas Macaulay Millar's performance model, which Kukla sees as extending Anderson's, since it applies to 'negotiation' within sex and not just before it begins. But, while Kukla calls for a finer-grained sexual ethics, she does not herself develop one here.

Section VIII discusses sexual promises and seems somewhat orthogonal to the main concerns of the paper—except in so far as it is another example of where the focus on having sex vs not having sex, as opposed to what happens within sex, can be problematic.

Is there something "morally defective" about people who have 'racial sexual desires'? In particular, are people with sexual preferences for (or sexual aversions to) members of certain racial groups racist? Of course, such a person could be racist (for other reasons, so to speak). But Halwani here argues that there is no good reason to think they must be.

Halwani considers three arguments for the claim that People with Racial Sexual Desires (PRSDs) must be racist.

The first is that preferring only members of one racial group unfairly discriminates against members of other racial groups. The crucial question, as Halwani sees it, is whether someone's race is or ought to be irrelevant to whether one is sexually attracted to them, in the way it is irrelevant to someone's ability to perform a certain job. And, Halwani claims, it is not, since physical appearance is, for many of us, an important part of sexual attraction, and race is a component of physical appearance. We do not think that someone who is not sexually attracted to very thin people unfairly discriminates against them. Nor do we think that gay men unfairly discriminate against women by not being sexually attracted to them. It therefore isn't clear, Halwani concludes, that someone who just does experience sexual attraction primarily or even exclusively to members of one racial group unfairly discriminates against members of other groups.

The point of the term 'unfairly' here is that, in the strict sense, to 'discriminate' just means: to make a distinction. A women's-only discussion group discriminates against men, but it is a different question whether it does so unfairly.

Is the comparison to homosexuality reasonable?

The second argument is that PRSDs are "defective individuals because their desires are narrow and are not as encompassing as they can be" (p. 186). Halwani objects that this argument faces a dilemma. If the claim is that having 'narrow' sexual desires is always wrong, then it follows that having any kind of sexual preference makes one 'defective'. If, on the other hand, it is only racial preferences that are supposed to be wrong, then the argument seems to beg the question: The issue was precisely whether there is anything wrong with racial sexual preferences. If so, then we need to be told why that is, and it can’t just be because the preferences are racial.

Halwani focuses on cases in which someone who is a member of one racial group sexually prefers members of a different racial group. But the first two arguments would apply equally to someone who had a sexual preference for members of their own racial group. How (if at all) does that observation affect your evaluation of these arguments?

The third argument is that racial preferences are based upon, or importantly involve, racial stereotypes: Someone who is attracted (say) to Asian women because of stereotypes about Asian women would seem to accept those stereotypes, and that seems morally objectionable; indeed, it seems objectionable for the same reason that not being attracted to Asian women because of those same stereotypes would be. Halwani suggests that it is less obvious than it might seem that accepting certain kinds of stereotypes is morally objectionable. (Consider, e.g., the stereotype that Chinese families value education.) But, for the purposes of argument, he concedes that accepting or endorsing racial stereotypes would suffice to make one a racist.

This is one place we might note that racial sexual preferences can be morally problematic: if they are based upon racial stereotypes that one accepts. But, Halwani argues (see p. 192), in that case it is acceptance of the stereotypes that makes one racist, no anything specific about one's sexual preferences.

The question then becomes whether racial sexual preferences do require accepting or endorsing racial stereotypes. Halwani suggests that there is no obvious reason to think they do. Someone could just be attracted to Asian women because of how they look, quite independently of any stereotypes about them. And, even when stereotypes are involved, Halwani argues, they needn't be involved in a way that requires the agent to endorse them. He considers three kinds of cases.

1. The stereotype might actually figure in the agent's sexual desires. E.g., someone who prefers Asian men might, during sex with an Asian man, enjoy the thought that Asian men are (relatively) hairless. But, Halwani claims, they need not actually endorse that attitude in ordinary life, so they need not be racist.
   Halwani puts a lot of emphasis on the difference between believing a stereotype and endorsing it. What is this difference? Does it have the moral significance he ascribes to it? (Obviously, this question raises large issues about the nature of racism that are not really the focus of this course!)
2. The person might have racial sexual preferences because of the stereotype. E.g., "...the belief that Latinos are passionate lovers might [cause] Belinda to form a sexual preference for Latinos..." (p. 192). Halwani notes that someone could have originally formed racial sexual preferences for this reason but no longer believe the stereotype. Moreover, even if she does, she need not endorse the stereotype.
   Relatedly, Halwani claims that the mere fact that someone's preferences are caused by something wrong does not make the preferences themselves wrong. Is that right? Are there good examples of cases in which one's preferences are shaped by unjust social arrangements but in which the preferences are not themselves wrong?
3. The person might treat the stereotype as a reason for their racial sexual preference. E.g., "...Belinda says, 'Yes. I do like Latino men, and I like them because they are passionate lovers'" (p. 193). This is the case, Halwani suggests, that is most worrying. But it is not the racial sexual preference, he argues, that is problematic. It is the fact that the person bases their preference on a racial stereotype (which, therefore, they must accept, since they actually act on it).

Might there be cases in which one's awareness of a stereotype leads to racial sexual preferences even if one does not believe it oneself? (This might be compared to certain cases of so-called stereotype threat.) If so, what should we make of such cases?

Does the third argument also apply to sexual preferences for members of one's own racial group? Do such preferences seem less problematic? Why or why not?

Zheng argues against one of the claims Halwani made: that racial fetishes are unobjectionable so long as they are not based upon racial stereotypes. Her focus is on the experience of people who are the objects of such fetishes and the larger social effects that such fetishes have. She argues that racial fetishes are problematic even if they are only based upon aesthetic preference.

In section 1, Zheng lays out what she calls the Mere Preferences Argument (MPA), which goes as follows:

1. There is nothing morally objectionable about sexual preferences for hair color, eye color, and other nonracialized phenotypic traits.
2. Preferences for racialized physical traits are no different from preferences for nonracialized phenotypic traits.
3. Therefore, 'mere' preferences for racialized phenotypic traits are not morally objectionable.

Zheng emphasizes that the core idea here is that attraction to Asian women (for example) is simply a function "of superficial physical traits and nothing deeper" (p. 403) and does not rest upon racial stereotypes.

Zheng's claim that the MPA "supports, and is likely to be motivated by, belief in color-blind ideology" (p. 403) strikes me as speculative at best. That is very much not the kind of claim one can just make without argument—and she gives no argument.

In section 2, Zheng considers one familiar responses to the MPA: rejecting premise (2) on the ground that such racial sexual preferences are founded on objectionable racial stereotypes. As Zheng emphasizes, the effect of these stereotypes may not always be apparent to the people who have them. (There may be a kind of 'implicit bias' operating.) And she argues that empirical work suggests that racial stereotypes may have more of an influence that people are inclined to allow: "...[I]t would be utterly unrealistic to deny that lengthy exposure to a culture historically saturated with sexualized stereotypes of Asian women contributes to an individual’s sexually preferring them, even if that contribution is not obvious or accessible to introspection" (p. 406), she concludes.

How do you think Halwani might respond to this argument? (Set aside the question whether all racial sexual preferences are immoral and focus simply on the ones that result from implicit bias.)

Nonetheless, such arguments cannot show, Zheng notes, that all sexual racial preferences (for Asian women) are rooted in racial stereotypes. So if one wants to argue, as she does, that sexual racial preferences are always morally problematic, one needs a different argument.

In section 3, Zheng discusses the effects of sexual racial preferences in the context of a racist world. Her claim will be that racial fetishes lead the targets of such fetishes to "suffer disproportionate harms or burdens on the basis of their race" and to be "wrongly represented in their sexual capacities" (p. 407).

The first claim is based upon the testimony of Asian American women themselves about the ways in which the existence of 'yellow fever' as a phenomenon leads to self-doubt, concern about whether they are being racially objectified—specifically, treated as 'fungible' in Nussbaum's sense—and 'othered', in the sense of being treated differently because they are Asian. (E.g., "I never felt that I was being complimented for being myself...but rather for being an Asian female who looked exotic" (p. 408).) Having to navigate such issues is in itself harmful to Asian American women, Zheng claims, in ways for which there is no parallel in the experience of blonde women (say). So the analogy on which the MPA rests flounders.

Zheng explicitly argues that "racialized dating patterns" will reinforce racial stereotypes whether or not those patterns "are driven by racial fetishes..." (p. 410). Does anything follow about what individual people should do? Should white men not date Asian women? Should black men not date white women? (See pp. 414-5 for Zheng's reply to such questions.)

In (the misnumbered) section 5, Zheng considers some objections. One of these is that the argument seems to show as well that preference for people of one gender reinforces gender stereotypes, etc. Zheng gives two replies. Maybe gender preferences are morally problematic, given the current social meaning of gender. But, she suggests, the cases aren't really parallel: No one worries that their partner only likes them because they're a woman. But is that enough to show that gender preferences don't reinforce gender stereotypes?

Halwani responds to Zheng's paper—a bit impatiently, it seems to me—in the first footnote of his. He makes three main criticisms.

1. Much of the testimony from Asian American women concerns relationships rather than sexual attraction. So it is unclear what effects a mere sexual preference for Asian women might have.
2. The fact that one is attracted to someone, in part, because they are Asian does not imply that one is not, specifically, attracted to them, as the individual person they are. (I think that is the point. It is stated very briefly.)
3. Zheng assumes that the harms suffered by Asian American women are morally objectionable. Halwani briefly compares this case to the doubts a black person might have upon being hired for a job. Surely we do not think affirmative action is objectionable because it leads to such doubts. It's the background racism that is objectionable. Similarly, then, it might not be the preference for Asian American women that is objectionable.

How might Zheng respond to these criticisms?

Eaton is interested here much the same issues as Halwani and Zheng, but from the other side: How should we think about sexual aversions to members of oppressed groups? In this case, the group is fat people. (See the end of section 1 for Eaton's reasons for using the term "fat".)

Eaton approaches this issue through the broad frame of aesthetics. (Most of her work is in aesthetics of one sort or another.) Her focus, in fact, is on what she calls our 'taste in bodies' (she means taste as in 'taste in music') and on our 'collective' (or broadly social) distaste for fat bodies. What she calls "the standard picture" holds that this distaste is largely due to stereotypes and the like and so sees it as largely a side-effect of fat oppression. Eaton wants to argue, by contrast, that it "is an important constitutive element of the oppression of fat people" (p. 38).

Although Eaton does not discuss the matter, she suggests (on the top of p. 39) that similar considerations also apply to other sorts of sexual aversions, e.g., to members of a different race. How might that argument be developed? Note that Zheng does not quite seem to make this sort of claim and, of course, is focused on a preference for Asian women. Might this idea be helpful to her argument, though?

In section 2.1, Eaton begins by recounting various ways in which fat people are socially stigmatized and the effects that such stigmatization has. Her main goal here, however, is to argue for the importance of what she calls "sentiments". (This term largely derives from David Hume.) These are, roughly speaking, feelings that we have about other people and things, and they are to be sharply distinguished from the beliefs we have about those people or things.

Eaton says that sentiments are "occurrent, affect-laden, [and] object-directed" (p. 40). This means that they are something that happens and that one experiences at a given time (occurrent); that they are filled with feeling or emotion (affect-laden); and that the feelings are responsive to and directed at a person or thing (object-directed or 'intentional'). She also mentions that many sentiments are evaluative: They involve a sense of their target as valuable or not (and not necessarily in a monetary sense).

In section 2.1.1, Eaton explains what she means by 'taste'. One's taste, with respect to some group G, is one's "standing disposition for evaluative sentiments regarding" members of that group, "where these sentiments are partially or fully constituted by or based on pleasurable or displeasurable responses to some of [their] properties" (p. 41). That is: Your taste in G's is a matter of how you tend to feel about G's, the way you tend to take pleasure or displeasure in members of that group. (E.g., your taste in music would be a matter of what properties of music tend to bring you pleasure or displeasure, enjoyment or irritation, etc.) Summing up, Eaton remarks: "At its most general level, a person's taste in bodies is her sense of what makes a person (herself or another) physically attractive or unattractive" (p. 42).

In section 2.1.2, Eaton argues that "everyday taste has far-reaching moral, psychological, social, and economic ramifications that are nowhere more apparent than in the case of taste in bodies" (p. 42). She first notes, with reference to much empirical work, that judgements of how attractive someone is affect a large number of other, seemingly unrelated judgements—and, of course, weight is an important component of attractiveness (especially in white society). Eaton notes further that there is now a sizeable literature that explores how feelings of disgust (an extreme negative sentiment) towards certain groups can reinforce their marginalization.

Section 2.1.3 considers the objection that distaste in fat bodies is justified because fatness is so unhealthy. Eaton responds (i) that this would not justify fat oppression, even if it were true; and (ii) that it is far from clear that it is true. But our 'collective distaste' for fat bodies might be explicable simply in terms of the widespread belief that fatness is associated with ill-health. In response to that objection, Eaton argues that "the health objection is a red herring, adduced post facto to justify and disguise what is at bottom a discriminatory attitude" (pp. 45-6). Her reason is that there are plenty of other things that are at least as unhealthy as fatness but which are not regarded as unattractive, such as extreme thinness and tanning.

In section 2.1.4, Eaton discusses why an aversion to fatness is so readily internalized and then, in section 2.2, begins to discuss how it might be combated. It is a corollary of what was argued in section 2.1 that simply addressing people's beliefs is not enough: "A compelling argument for why one ought not to be repelled by a certain physical trait or body type or physical act will do little on its own to undermine one's repulsion" (p. 48). We need also to "work to undermine our pervasive collective distaste for fat" (p. 48).

In section 2.2, Eaton describes an 'Aristotelian' view on which having the right sort of moral character involves not just having the right sorts of attitudes but also having the right sorts of feelings about things. Moral education thus involves 'training' one's feelings, through a process of 'habituation': repeated exposure to a thing in the right sort of setting to encourage one to respond to it in a certain way. (The details here, though interesting, will not be our main focus.) And one important way in which this can be done is by engaging the imagination, through 'mimetic art' (that is, representational art, broadly understood so as to include popular media). A painting or photograph can help us to see something that we previously regarded as unattractive as attractive.

In section 2.3, Eaton suggests that such a strategy is needed if we are to re-educate our collective taste in bodies. She mentions several classical and contemporary works that might contribute to doing this: Peter Paul Rubens's paintings, such as Venus at a Mirror (here); and series of photographs by Leonard Nimoy, a.k.a., Mister Spock, (here and here) and Laura Aguilar (see e.g. here and here). As Eaton notes, however, all of these, and other examples that she mentions, might be criticized on other grounds.

In a paper we'll read later (and elsewhere, too), Eaton argues that much pornography distorts our sexual tastes but that it could also help to re-educate our sexual tastes. Could there be a 'fat-positive' pornography that could help re-train our collective distaste for fat bodies? (See, for example, the work of Courtney Trouble, but note that some of the links off that page are very NSFW.) What downsides might 'fat-positive' porn have? How could or might it be different from fetishizing fat bodies, as much so-called "BBW" porn does? (Here it might be worth reflecting on Zheng's paper.)

Bartky begins by making two claims:

1. "...whatever pertains to sexuality—not only actual sexual behavior, but sexual desire and sexual fantasy too—will have to be understood in relation to a larger system of [gender] subordination..."
2. "...the deformed sexuality of patriarchal culture must be moved from the hidden domain of 'private life' into an arena for struggle, where a 'politically correct' sexuality of mutual respect will contend with an 'incorrect' sexuality of domination and submission" (p. 323)

The former claim we have already encountered in such authors as Catharine MacKinnon; the latter might be understood as part of what we were assuming in our discussions of 'the limits of consent': that there is a need to transform how, culturally, we think about sex.

Bartky's first question is what we do when our own sexual fantasies or desires conflict somehow with our principles. Her focus is on fantasies of domination and submission, especially of women's fantasies of being dominated by men, including fantasies of being raped. These, she notes, are 'politically incorrect' if any fantasies are. But they are also extremely common, as Bartky emphasizes. The problem is that such fantasies seem to eroticize the domination of women by men, which, you will recall, is precisely what MacKinnon argues is one of the pillars of gender oppression. Therein lies the conflict.

Although Bartky does not discuss such fantasies here, it is worth keeping in mind that there are parallel questions to be raised about men who have fantasies of dominating women and even of raping women. To what extent does Bartky's discussion also apply to those fantasies?

The conflict is felt on a personal level by some women who have such fantasies: Their fantasies are at odds, somehow, with their politics. So it seems there are two options: One can try to stop having such fantasies, to transform one's own sexual desires; or one can accept the fantasies and try to stop feeling ashamed of them.

Bartky addresses the second option first, though her focus is primarily on the practice of BDSM (the acting out, "in controlled situations", of such fantasies). Bartky considers a defense of BDSM in terms of sexual freedom (which you may remember from the paper by Rubin we read earlier). She regards the best argument here as one based upon the idea that "sexual satisfaction is an intrinsic good" so that we should be "free to engage in any sexual activities whatsoever", so long as they are consensual (p. 326). Bartky's criticism is that this simply fails to engage the original critique: The point was supposed to have been that the desires that lead people to engage in BDSM are a result of what Rubin elsewhere calls the 'sex/gender system', that is, of gender oppression.

Bartky concludes, therefore, that the shame a feminist might feel at having submissive fantasies is, to some extent, appropriate: It reflects a genuine conflict between her fantasies and her political commitments.

In section III, then, Bartky turns to the question whether such a person ought to try to get rid of her submissive sexual desires. She reviews psychoanalytic accounts of 'feminine masoschism' and concludes that therapy is probably not the right route.

In section IV, Bartky turns her attention to what she calls "sexual voluntarism": The idea "that female sexuality is malleable and diffuse and that a woman can, if she chooses, alter the structure of her desire" (p. 329) simply by force of will. (This idea is perhaps most familiar from 'political lesbianism'.) As Bartky sees it, the idea here seems to be that since dominant forms of sexuality are 'socially constructed', they are contingent and so can be reconstructed by each of us. But, first, it is far from clear that all sexual desire is 'constructed' in the relevant sense, since otherwise it would be hard to explain sexual deviance; and second, the move from contingency to the possibility of personal transformation is a non sequitur (and, Bartky suggests, is often based upon behaviorism).

In section V, Bartky offers an alternative way of understanding the conflict between sexual desire and political commitments. Drawing on Ethel Spector Person and Robert Stoller, she suggests that the structure of one's sexual desires is probably determined at an early age and by a wide range of forces, including but limited to exterior structures of gender oppression. As a result, it is "experienced not as chosen but as revealed, ...unchanging and unique", part of who one is (p. 331). That, Bartky seems to be suggesting, is most fundamentally why sexual voluntarism is mistaken and the project of just getting rid of 'problematic' sexual desires and fantasies is doomed.

Bartky does not really offer a solution to this problem, though she does counsel that it's a mistake to blame or shame people for having 'problematic' fantasies and desires. But one might still wonder whether the 'shame' that is felt by people with such fantasies is really appropriate. What was Bartky's argument that it is? What are its presuppositions?

In her discussion of Samois, Bartky notes their charge that "critics of sadomasochism confiate fantasy and reality" (p. 325), but she does not directly respond to it. How might Friday's discussion, in Chapter One of My Secret Garden, reinforce that charge? How does Friday want us to think of 'problematic' fantasies?

Grimshaw's paper continues the discussion of 'problematic' sexual fantasies. She begins by outlining the sort of view to which she want to respond. It will largely be familiar by now, but it is perhaps worth emphasizing the way in which it involves the 'internalization', by women, of oppressive socio-sexual norms. The form of this view that Grimshaw finds in Sheila Jeffreys takes it to be incumbent upon women to attempt to transform their own sexual desires and fantasies so as to rid them of distorting social influence. Jeffreys's claim is thus that "Without eradicating what she sees as the negative forms of [sexual fantasy and] imagination,there can be no freedom for women" (p. 148).

As Grimshaw notes, this leaves us, largely, where Bartky's paper begins. And the difficulty she sees is that Bartky seems to leave us with no way forward. There are three things that Grimshaw thinks need to be clarified: the relation between fantasy and desire; the nature of eroticism; and the point of projects of 'self-transformation'.

Fantasy and Desire

Grimshaw argues that Bartky does not distinguish sufficiently between fantasy and desire. Much of her dicussion of her first option—doing away with shame—is focused on BDSM, that is, on the acting out of sexual fantasies (in a 'controlled' setting). But someone who has fantasies about bondage need not have any desire to engage in bondage play. (Grimshaw herself does not much discuss BDSM; we'll do so later, but one might well want to consider here the extent to which her discussion does or doesn't apply to that case.)

Grimshaw also claims that the notion of fantasy itself is more complicated than many writers assume. Fantasies are often fragmentary, with the position of the subject being somewhat ill-defined. This point is often credited to Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, who write in one of the related readings that "...the subject, although always present in the fantasy, may be so in a desubjectivized form, that is to say, in the very syntax of" the fantasy itself. Here, the point is that fantasies do not always even have a subject position, and even if one does oneself figure in a fantasy, one needn't identify with oneself but can take up a third person viewpoint. A related point—one much emphasized by Judith Butler—is that the meaning of a sexual fantasy cannot "just be read off from some account of the salient features of the narrative" (p. 151).

Grimshaw leaves this point abstract. In what ways might fantasies of dominance or submission not just have the meanings they bear on their face? Are their examples of such fantasies that Friday discusses that could be used to make this point?

Eroticism

Grimshaw suggests, somewhat tentatively, "that without a background of early infantile experience and embodiment, it would be difficult to make much sense of adult human sexuality at all" (p. 152). There are two broad aspects of erotic experience that, she thinks, reflect this fact. The first is the way in which power is part of erotic experience. Grimshaw mentions several respects in which this might be so. (One she doesn't mention, but which perhaps illustrates her point, is a kind of sexual 'teasing', of which 'edging' one's partner would be one form.) The other is the experience of loss of self that one can sometimes have during sex, but which is very hard to express in words (let alone to explain).

Grimshaw suggests that these are 'constitutive' (essential) aspects of huam erotic experience, so that any attempt to free it of all relations to power, domination, and submission are doomed to failure. But, she emphasizes, that is not to say that one could not or should not try "to purge sexuality of the oppressive features of certain kinds of power..." (p. 153). What Grimshaw is suggesting, I think, is that fantasies of domination and submission wouldn't disappear if gender oppression did, though they might take somewhat different forms.

Suppose it is true that (some) women would have such fantasies even if there were no gender oppression. Does that show that Bartky's assumption, that women's fantasies of being dominated 'reflect' gender oppression, is false? Does it perhaps show that there are different ways in which such fantasies might reflect gender oppression? How might Grimshaw's suggestion that the 'meaning' of fantasies isn't always readily apparent help us here?

The Project of Self-Transformation

Grimshaw notes that, if both the origin and meaning of (say) Paula's submissive fantasies is unclear, then it is unclear what, if anything, she needs to change to bring her sexuality into line with her feminist principles. But, still, there are cases where it might seem there clearly is a conflict, e.g., if Paula frequently fantasies about gang rape. Should Paula feel guilty (or ashamed) about having such fantasies? Should she try to stop having them?

Somewhat echoing Bartky's remarks about 'praxis', Grimshaw notes that, if there were no gender oppression, then the sorts of fantasies people have might well be quite different. But so what? Why does that indict the fantasies we have now? Grimshaw warns against focusing too much on extreme cases (and on people who have certain fantasies obsessively) and notes that, if the problem is that the fantasies cause Paula herself distress, then maybe "not letting oneself assume that there necessarily is any deep conflict between one's desires and one's politics" would be a solution (p. 156).

But, Grimshaw suggests, what's really behind Bartky's concern is "an ethical vision of self and community" (p. 156) or, perhaps more fundamentally, an ideal of the self as 'integrated' and 'whole'. Here, Grimshaw suggests, once again, that 'integration' or 'coherence' might be more complicated than first seems: "Don't assume that 'conflict' can easily be identified, or that the only possible meaning of 'coherence' in one's life must be the impossible dream that all elements of thought, fantasy, imagination, desire and action might fit together into a seamless whole " (p. 158).

You will recall that Bartky distinguishes two possible responses to the 'conflict' some women experience between their fantasies and their politics. The first was to accept one's fantasies as they are and to learn not to be ashamed of them. Is that what Grimshaw is suggesting?

Here again, the focus has been on women's fantasies. But consider now a man, perhaps one who identifies as a feminist, but who has fantasies of dominating (maybe even raping) women. He might feel the same sort of 'conflict'. Should Grimshaw give the same advice to him? Or are the situations so different that he really should be ashamed of his fantasies?

Do sexual fantasies that incorporate elements of racial or gender oppression help to perpetuate that oppression? That is the worry expressed by Bartky and many other feminists. The same question arises with respect to BDSM, and a similar case was made by many writers in the book Against Sadomasochism, which was published in 1982.

As Hopkins notes, the initial response to such arguments focused primarily on issues of personal freedom. Even in Rubin, however, I would suggest that there is a different thread: A rejection of the claim on which such arguments are based, that BDSM somehow undergirds sexism. What Rubin does not do, however, is really to articulate that argument. That is what Hopkins tries to do here. Much of his focus is, for historical reasons, on lesbian BDSM. It's a question to keep in mind whether his arguments also apply to gay or heterosexual BDSM.

Section I outlines some of the Anti-BDSM arguments, which Hopkins divides into three groups (p. 118):

1. Lesbian SM replicates patriarchal relationships.
   Note here the emphasis on the idea that BDSM eroticizes dominance and submission. We have seen MacKinnon argue that this is a central component of gender oppression.
2. Consent to activities which eroticize dominance, submission, pain, and powerlessness is structurally impossible or ethically irrelevant.
   Here, the issue is a general one about the significance of consent. The claim is that, although women can 'consent' to being whipped, say, that consent is (in some sense) coerced or invalid: "Consent to abuse cannot be considered justification of abuse" (p. 182). But even if one waves that point, it is not entirely obvious that the fact that BDSM is consensual makes it morally permissible—as, indeed, we have seen.
3. Lesbian SM validates and supports patriarchy, though perhaps unintentionally.
   By themselves, neither (1) nor (2) is sufficient to indict (lesbian) BDSM. (1) might make one suspicious; (2) merely implies that consent by itself cannot excuse any harm that is done. The deeper worry is this one: that the practice of BDSM rests upon the assumption that it is all right to degrade and abuse people, so long as they consent to such treatment. (Again, doubts about the moral significance of consent are wrapped up in this.)

In section II, Hopkins explores the question how we should understand what happens in BDSM. As he notes, there is a tendency in anti-BDSM writing (most of his quotations come from the book mentioned earlier) to refuse to distinguish BDSM from actual domination and humiliation. In order to do so, Hopkins suggests, we should regard BDSM not as replicating oppressive structures but as simulating them. What is the difference? Hopkins compares simulation to dramatic performance and insists that there are important differences between BDSM and "real patriarchal violence" (p. 123).

What such differences does Hopkins identify? Which of these are most important?

Hopkins claims that, in BDSM, "...violence is simulated, but is not replicated" (p. 124). But the objection is going to be that, if Alex is beating Tony with a cane to the point that Tony bleeds, that is real violence. How would Hopkins respond?

Hopkins then considers a revision of this objection. (It's present in the quote from Audre Lorde earlier in the paper.) Even if the violence, etc, is only simulated, still BDSM practitioners are taking pleasure in violence, in dominance, and in suffering (finding it arousing, e.g.). Hopkins responds that this underestimates the role of context and that we need to distinguish, sharply, between finding simulations of (say) rape arousing and finding rape itself arousing.

Who did we read before who made a similar point about the importance of context to sexual desire generally? How might their arguments be used to reinforce Hopkins's point?

In section III, Hopkins returns to the question of consent. The difficulty here is that we have, on the one hand, testimony from BDSM practitioners about the centrality of consent to their practice and, on the other, general reasons to worry about how genuine the freedom not to consent might be. Bat Ami Bar-On makes the point well: "The burden of proof is on the vindicators of sadomasochism.... [They] must show that it is not necessarily the case that a sexual practice involving the erotization of violence or domination and of pain or powerlessness does not thereby also involve a violation of the right to determine what can be done with and to one's body" (quoted on p. 128). Hopkins replies that, if only simulated violence, etc, is desired, then the objection can indeed be answered.

But Hopkins himself notes (on p. 128) that this response does not apply to the infliction or experience of pain, since that is quite real. As Hopkins notes again (on p. 129), the crucial question would seem to be: "What is a [submissive] sadomasochist consenting to?" Might there be an answer to that question that doesn't involve simulation but doesn't involve, either, consent to harm?

In section IV, Hopkins turns to the question whether BDSM somehow 'supports' patriarchal culture. The worry, as initially presented, is that the broader context in which BDSM occurs might be neglected, in which case BSDM would "contribut[e]to the general context of the disempowerment and degradation of women by reinforcing the belief that all women's innermost erotic desire is to be dominated, controlled..." (p. 130).

There is not much discussion of this argument in Hopkins's paper. (What little there is is in the first full paragraph on p. 132.) Most of his attention is given to a different worry—that lesbian BDSM, in particular, is divisive—so he is just willing to concede this objection. What is the best response to this objection?

Corvino

Corvino focuses his attention on what he calls 'naughty fantasies'. These are fantasies that eroticize acts that, in real life, would be morally wrong. The argument in which he is interested claims that such fantasies are themselves wrong—it is, at least, wrong actively to fantasize in such ways, or to act out such fantasies—because it is wrong to eroticize things that are wrong.

Corvino first considers Hopkins's response to this argument: that one does not actually eroticize activities that are morally wrong but rather simulations of those activities. Corvino responds that e.g. if someone is watching pornography that presents a fraternity hazing (a common form of gay male porn), then it is the hazing that is experienced as erotic, not the simulation of it.

Corvino argues that to be aroused by the simulation, one would need to be aroused by features it had as a simulation: the quality of the performances, say. Is there some other way to understand Hopkins's point, though?

Corvino turns his attention, then, to the claim that it is always wrong to eroticize activities that are wrong.

Corvino argues that Hopkins's response to this claim misconstrues it as a 'consequentialist' one: a claim to the effect that naughty fantasies have bad consequences. But is that right? What Hopkins says is that "SM scenes gut the behaviors they simulate of their violent, patriarchal, defining features" (Hopkins, p 216). He does not comment at all on the effects of the fantasies themselves. So what is his argument?

Corvino distinguishes two forms this claim might take. The first is that "...naughty fantasies are incompatible with good character..."; the second is "that actively entertaining naughty fantasies is wrong in itself...", and he focuses his discussion on the latter version of the claim. What underlies it is the thought that "...any seriously wrongful activity merits an attitude of disapproval, and eroticization of such an activity is inconsistent with this attitude" (p. 216). The first part of that is clearly correct; it's therefore the latter claim, that eroticizing rape in fantasy is inconsistent with disapproving of rape, that needs defense.

Corvino asks us to consider a character, Raymond, who finds stories of actual rapes to be erotic. He notes that, if there is something wrong with Raymond's doing so, then it is not because it has bad consequences: The example is designed to guarantee that there are no bad consequences. If so, however, then what makes Raymond's action wrong is arguably the inconsistency noted above: The right response to stories of actual rapes is not sexual arousal.

Obviously, one might wonder if what's wrong here is Raymond's erotic response to stories of actual rapes. But Corvino addresses this worry, obliquely, in his discussion of a video game involving ethnic cleansing. How does that apply to the case of rape fantasies? Does it show that Raymond's actions would be wrong even if he was only aroused by made-up stories of rape?

Corvino then turns to some counter-arguments. I'll focus on the first (though comments on the others are of course welcome), which is that "the object of eroticization is often non-specific". The thought here, I take it, is that precisely what Raymond eroticizes is not so clear. In particular, it might be possible to "eroticize a wrongful behavior while remaining fully cognizant of its wrongfulness" (p. 219).

It would help, he suggests, if we had a better sense for what 'eroticizing' something is. Could some of the work we read on sexual desire help here?

Card

Card raises a number of questions about Corvino's argument. The first substantive one is what we are doing when we fantasize. Card wants, in particular, to distinguish between fantasizing about something and what we might call imaginative planning. As we have seen, Nancy Friday also insists upon this sort of distinction. But it is less clear how this affects Corvino's argument, since he does not suggest that the wrongness of naughty fantasies derives from associated intentions. What might help, though, is the analogy with watching a horror movie. How?

Card's second suggestion is that there need be no conflict between the experience of arousal at fantasies of a certain kind and one's general condemnation of real behavior of that kind. In some sense, that seems right. But one might worry that this will prove too much: It would seem to excuse Raymond, above, who finds stories of actual rapes erotic and not just those who fantasize about rape.

Stear wants largely to defend Hopkins's conclusions, but he argues that Hopkins's own arguments are not sufficient. His strategy is to replace Hopkins's appeal to 'simulation' with an appeal to 'make-believe' (much as was suggested by Card).

In the first section, Stear outlines Hopkins's arguments. His main complaint is that Hopkins does not adequately answer the third anti-BDSM argument he identifies: that BDSM "validates and supports patriarchy" (Hopkins, p. 118). Part of the difficulty is that Hopkins does not tell us much about what simulation actually is. Another, which we noted, is that Hopkins just doesn't seem to answer the strongest form of this argument. Stear's suggestion is that we can do so if we characterize BDSM not as simulation but as 'make-believe', in a particular sense of that term discussed by Kendall Walton. The basic idea is that "engaging in SM scenes is relevantly similar to engaging with fictions" (p. 23).

Stear next outlines Walton's view of make-believe. As he mentions, the view has been very influential in the philosophy of art and has been applied, e.g., to metaphor in philosophy of language. The basic idea is to model engagement with fiction (stories, films, etc) on children's games of make-believe. As Walton sees it, there are 'principles of generation' which connect real things (a dark paving slab) with imaginary or fictional things (fire); these, in effect, define the game. But such games are, at the same time, open-ended, in the sense that they allow for and even invite various sorts of creative elaboration.

Stear proceeds to explain how Walton's view allows us to solve the so-called 'paradox of fiction': that we can (apparently) have emotional responses to things we know are not real. The key idea is that, in engaging with fiction, we effectively become participants in the make-believe game being played (typically, though not always, as observers).

Stear then applies Walton's theory to BDSM. He first argues, borrowing from Hopkins, that BDSM is a form of make-believe game. This might, he suggests, be what Hopkins really had in mind when he spoke of 'simulation', though some of his remarks—his comparison to performers on the stage, for example—would not fit this model. The crucial point, however, is that this leaves many of Hopkins's observations untouched: It remains the case that BDSM practitioners are not 'replicating' oppressive structures, since those structures are not actually present in their activities but only are pretend-present.

Stear then turns to the question whether, that "by eroticizing sexual dominance and submission, SM validates and supports patriarchy" (p. 30). His claim is that, since "performing an SM scene is relevantly similar to engaging with fictional works", it will follow that, if engaging in BDSM supports patriarchy, then so does engaging with fictional works such as, say, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

It's crucial to this argument that participating in BDSM is like watching a film. But one might worry that this analogy is misleading. Participating in BDSM is more like taking part in a game than it is like watching one, even if watching one (with any understanding) means entering into it in a certain way; watching a film might seem more like watching a BDSM scene. Thoughts?

Stear finds in Vadas, however—in the recommended reading—a different form of this objection, namely: "To take pleasure in SM is to make one's pleasure contingent on the actual occurrence and meanings of rape, racist enslavement, and so on" (Vadas, p. 216). That is, there would be no BDSM rape scenes for anyone to enjoy if there was no actual rape. The former seems to presuppose the latter. Stear's reply is that this is also true of much fiction: There would be no Schindler's List had there been no Holocaust.

There is a somewhat different worry in this vicinity, one that would emphasize the pleasure that is taken in domination. Someone may enjoy Schindler's List, but they do not (we would hope) take pleasure in all of its aspects. Stear mentions a form of this objection in footnote 16. How good is his response?

After suggests that what's really behind these sorts of worries is a disagreement about "appropriateness", Stear turns to some objections. The most important, I think, is the last: that BDSM "glorifies" or "celebrates" domination. One does often hear (or read) people make this kind of claim. The crucial question is what "glorify" means here. Stear suggests that, in the crucial case, it means something like: Even if a film (say) does not intentionally mean to "endorse[] some dubious principle, ...the audience will receive the film in such a way as to endorse such a principle", that is, the audience will be encouraged to endorse the principle by their engagement with the film (p. 35).

Stear notes that people who are privately engaging in BDSM do not seem vulnerable to either charge. But that leaves open the argument that BDSM pornography (be it visual or written) might unintentionally 'glorify' violence, since it might well be understood (or misunderstood) as doing so. How serious is this worry? (We'll spend time talking about pornography very shortly.)

This essay is about a lot of things, and since we'll be discussing it in small groups, I'm mostly going to let you read it and digest it on your own. But the thing on which I'd most like us to focus is what Chu has to say about desire. How might those views inform an account of sexual fantasy?

Background

The British philosopher John Austin was particularly impressed by the great variety of things we can do with words. For example, consider the sentence "A car is coming". Standing on a corner where a friend is trying to take a picture of a building with a blurry car in front of it, you might say "A car is coming" to inform them of that fact. Seeing someone about to step of the curb, you might utter the same sentence to warn them. A parent whose small child has done so might utter it to scold them.

Austin was particularly interested in a range of cases in which saying something can literally make something the case (as merely asserting it, for example, cannot). A common example is promising. Uttering the words "I promise to clean the shower" constitutes (under the right circumstances) one's promising to clean the shower: It makes it the case that one has so promised. Other examples are naming a child, appointing someone to a position, and declaring a verdict (as a judge or umpire might do). These examples illustate the fact that some speech acts have very specific 'felicity conditions'. Not anyone can issue a legally binding verdict.

These sorts of acts are related to a class of sentences known as 'performatives'. These are sentences like "I promise..." or "I find the defendant guilty" that, in some sense, simultaneously describe the act that is being performed and also constitute performing it. It was performatives that were, to a large extent, the focus of Austin's attention.

For our purposes, what we mostly need is a general sense of the distinctions that Austin makes and the terminology he introduced to describe them. The most basic of these is between locutionary content, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary effects. The locutionary content is, roughly, the proposition expressed in a certain speech act. So the locutionary content of "A car is coming" is the same in the three cases mentioned above: that there is a car coming. The illocutionary force corresponds to the kind of speech act performed: informing, warning, or scolding. The perlocutionary effects are what the performance of that speech act causes to happen. E.g., I cause someone to take a picture, to jump back from the curb, or to feel shame.

Another important notion here is that of uptake. There is, unfortunately, no agreed use of this term, but the rough idea is that it involves a recognition on the part of the audience of what speech act has been performed. So if I say "Can you chair the meeting?" and you understand me not as making a request but as asking a question, then there has been a failure of uptake. Some authors regard that as amounting to a failure for me to perform the speech act in question: That is, on this view, if you 'misunderstand' me, then I have not in fact made a request at all. (Whether I've asked a question is a different matter.) Other authors hold that I have made a request, but it simply has not been understood.

Langton

Rae Langton's focus in this paper is, obviously, on pornography, and there are many objections one make to her argument that are specific to the case of pornography. Her underlying idea, though, is that pornography is a kind of anti-woman hate speech, and both she and other authors have, more recently, developed more general accounts of hate speech based upon the ideas in this paper. So, even if Langton were wrong about pornography, we'd want to pay close attention to the structure of her argument, and not just because that's what we, as philosophers, do.

In the United States, pornography is protected by the right to free speech. In this paper, Langton—largely following MacKinnon, but also drawing heavily upon the work of Austin—proposes to take the idea that pornography is speech seriously, and to think about what kind of speech pornography is. Her claim is that it is speech that subordinates women. This claim has often been thought to be incoherent. It's the coherence of the claim that Langton most immediately wants to defend.

Discussion of this issue is necessarily intertwined with certain claims about pornography itself, and it's a shortcoming of Langton's treatment that she does not make clear to what exactly it is supposed to apply. Langton remarks (in a later reply to Leslie Green) that her "discussion has an implicit restriction to the kind of pornography for which a case might be made that it subordinates and silences women" (p. 92, fn. 7). But this is not very helpful, since different people will have different views about how extensive that class plausibly is. We'll set this issue aside for the moment, but it's worth keeping in mind.

To understand Langton's view, it's essential to distinguish it from two other views that are in the vicinity. One would object to pornography on the ground that it portrays women as subordinate. So that would be an aspect of the 'locutionary content' expressed by making a 'pornographic utterance'. Another would object to pornography on the ground that it causes women to be subordinated. That would be a 'perlocutionary effect'. But neither of these is Langton's view.

Langton's view, instead, is that pornography subordinates as an illocutionary matter: It is alleged to rank women as inferior, to endorse the degradation of women, and to legitimize discrimination against women. She gives a number of examples to illustrate what she has in mind. But a contemporary analogy can be found in Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell, finding laws prohibiting same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional. His complaint was very much that such laws rank gay people as inferior, endorse their degradation, and legitimize discrimination against them. Note that there is something factive about the notions in play here. It is not just that the law says that gay people are inferior. Kennedy's claim was that such laws make gay people inferior by denying them certain legal rights available to straight people.

What, then, does Langton mean when she says that pornographers subordinate women in the illocutionary sense? Not just that it causes women to be subordinated. Rather, pornographers are supposed to make it the case the woman are subordinated, in much the same way that an umpire can make it the case that a particular pitch was a strike: simply by saying that it is. So the illocutionary act is, in a sense, defined in terms of its effect, but the effect is not merely a causal consequence of the performance of the act (that is its perlocutionary effect) but is somehow built into the act itself (its 'constitutive'). Moreover, Langton claims, pornography does not just make people believe that women are subordinate but actually makes women subordinate.

Another important point, which first appears on p. 305, concerns the role of authority. An umpire's ability to call a pitch a strike rests upon a certain sort of authority that the umpire has; similarly for legislators, judges, and the like. So there is a question about whether pornography (or pornographers) has the necessary sort of authority (as regards questions about gender and sexuality) to make women subordinate.

Langton says there are three ways one might try to make the argument that pornography subordinates women in the illocutionary sense (by, e.g., legitimating sexual violence or ranking women as inferior).

There's something I have always found strange about these arguments. They seem almost to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. They all seem to be aimed at the question whether certain necessary conditions for pornography to be subordinating speech are met. But even if they are, it will not follow that it is. Thoughts?

First, one might try to explain the perlocutionary effects of pornography (e.g., why it allegedly makes people more likely to endorse rape myths) in terms of its illocutionary content. It is obvious, though, that this argument has all the problems the 'causal objection' to pornography has: There is no consensus that pornography actually has such harmful effects; studies disagree. (Even Edward Donnerstein, whose work Langton cites in this connection, has objected to what he regards as misappropriation of his work.) Moreover, as Langton notes, this is an argument by inference to the best explanation, and it is far from clear there are not better explanations. Indeed, so far as I can see, Langton says nothing in favor of the claim that an explanation in terms of illocution is better than any other, e.g., that these are purely perlocutionary effects.

Second, one could try to focus on the question what message viewers actually get from pornography. But, as Langton notes, different people seem to get different messages. For some, pornography is "escapist storytelling". Others "take pornography to be something that ranks them, judges them, denigrates them, and legitimates ways of behaving that hurt women" (p. 311). It would seem, then, as if the people who 'read' pornography as subordination are, basically, MacKinnon, Langton, and other opponents of pornography. But then it's difficult to see how men who regard pornography as "entertainment" are supposed to 'get the message' that women are inferior, etc. It's a very odd argument.

In any event, the third strategy is the one Langton finds most promising. This is to investigate whether the sorts of conditions that would need to be in place if pornography were to have the sort of illocutionary content Langton says it does actually are in place. The most important of these, as mentioned above, is that pornography has to have a certain sort of authority. Pornography, on her view, does not simply say that women are or ought to be subordinate. It is not supposed to be like a news host who says that Muslims ought not to be allowed to enter the United States. It is supposed, rather, to be like a President who signs an executive order saying that Muslims from are not allowed to enter the United States, and who thereby makes it the case that Muslims are not allowed to do so. Note, again, then, that the issue is not just whether pornography "has a message", nor even whether that message is (sometimes) misogynistic. The issue, at present, is whether pornography has the authority necessary, as it were, to enforce that message: to make it the case that women are subordinate.

And so, Langton says:

What is important here is not whether the speech of pornographers is universally held in high esteem: it is not.... What is important is whether it is authoritative in the domain that counts—the domain of speech about sex—and whether it is authoritative for the hearers that count: people, men, boys, who in addition to wanting "entertainment", want to discover the right way to do things, want to know which moves in the sexual game are legitimate.... (p. 312)

As Langton notes, this is an empirical question, and it is far from clear how to answer it. But some studies have found that teenagers do often think that pornography portrays sex in a realistic way. Whether that amounts to its having "authority" in the required sense, however, is a different question, one we'll discuss further when we read Louise Antony.

Still, if the problem is that teenagers think pornography reveals the truth about sex, then maybe that is the problem, and the right response would be to stop leaving sex education to pornography. (There is a reasonably balanced discussion of this issue by Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times. See also this web site which offers "tools for parents to teach the younger generations about porn".)

As noted earlier, Langton does not say much about what kind of pornography she has in mind. That does make it difficult to evaluate her arguments, in a way, because much of what she says might not seem to apply to pornography in general. But might we help her out here by focusing on some subset of all the pornography that is out there that seems especially objectionable? Could it be argued that that pornography subordinates women? Note that the tricky issue here will still be whether such pornography has the right kind of authority to do so. How might that issue be affected by how much and what kind of pornography is in question?

Here are two kinds of pornography you might consider. First, incest or 'fauxcest' porn, in which the performers are not actually related but pretend to be (ususally step-) relatives. Second, pornography in which young-looking but of-age women pretend to be young teens. Do the sorts of arguments Langton gives help us to understand what, if anything, is objectionable about such porn?

In section I of this paper, Langton argued that pornography might subordinate women. In this section, she argues that pornography might also silence women in two ways: First, it can make it impossible for "No!" to be heard as a refusal; Second, it can make it impossible for women's protests about their treatment to be heard as such.

As with the first section, it is important to separate the claims that Langton makes about pornography from the general structure of her account of silencing. Many later writers have attempted to develop this account to explain other ways in which marginalized groups can be silenced. And Langton's overall account of silencing could be valuable and important even if she were wrong that pornography silences women.

The kind of silencing in which Langton is most interested is what she calls "illocutionary disablement": A case in which one is prevented, in some way, from performing a certain illocutionary act, even though one can utter the right words. (So illocution is again central.) Langton gives a number of useful examples of this phenomenon, so there should be no question that it is the sort of thing that can happen. Langton also gives a general argument that speech acts can lead to illocutionary disablement.

Let's take the case of refusal first. Langton distinguishes two kinds of cases in which a woman might unsuccessfully try to refuse a sexual advance. In the first, the woman's refusal is recognized as such but ignored. Langton suggests that pornography could encourage this sort of behavior "by sexualizing the use of force in response to refusal that is recognized as refusal" (p. 323). But one might well wonder whether that has to much do with the illocutionary content of pornography. One might also wonder whether there is much pornography that fits this description.

In the second sort of case, the woman's refusal is not even recognized as such: Her "No" is treated as insincere. (In the empirical literature, this is known as "token resistance".) This would be a case of "illocutionary disablement": The very possibility of refusal has been eliminated. Here, Langton suggests that (some) pornography "may simply leave no space for the refusal move in its depictions of sex" (p. 324). The idea, I take it, is that some pornography portrays women as saying "No" but not thereby refusing; sex follows, and the woman is portrayed as enjoying it every bit as much as if she'd enthusiastically said "Yes!" In some way, then, such pornography is supposed to enact a norm that a woman's saying "No", in a sexual context, does not constitute refusal.

Here again, one might wonder how much, if any, pornography fits that description. That is an empirical question, of course, about which Langton does not have much to say. (The issue of pornography's authority is also still in play, as well.)

Langton herself asks the question, "How common is silencing of this kind and the rape that accompanies it?" She suggests that it may be quite common, and it was at one time the "common wisdom" that much date rape is due to men's failure to recognize women's attempted refusals as such. This sort of view, which is known as the Miscommunication Hypothesis, was very much the common wisdom when Langton was writing. The view was subjected to heavy criticism from the outset, however, especially by feminists, but it has remained an important part of popular attitudes about gender and sexuality, even in the face of empirical work over the last twenty years that has called it into serious doubt. (The optional and related papers come from the beginning, middle, and end of that work.) But if the Miscommunication Hypothesis is false, then date rape does not occur because men do not recognize women's attempts at refusal. It occurs for the same reason that what Langton calls 'simple rape' occurs. If so, however, then pornography does not silence women in the way Langton argues it does, because women simply are not silenced in that way.

As said above, even if there is not illocutionary disablement in this particular case, the idea that there might be in other cases has been very influential. Indeed, much of the philosophical discussion of the notion of 'silencing' traces to this paper. To what extent does 'silencing', as that notion occurs in everyday discussions of racism, etc, seem to be captured by Langton's notion of illocutionary disablement? To what extent does it seem to involve some other phenomenon?

Langton also suggests that there might be a second way in which pornography silences women: It might make it difficult for women to protest their mistreatment. Perhaps the most important version of this claim is one Langton mentions on p. 326: the "disablement encountered by women who give testimony in court about rape and about sexual harassment, and whose testimony, and descriptions of their experience, achieve the uptake appropriate to a description of normal sex". In these cases, that is, women's attempt to describe their having been violated fail, because what they describe is understood as 'just sex'. So, one might suggest, perhaps pornography could silence women in this way: If people's readiness to believe that 'consent is complicated' makes it difficult for women who are date-raped to convince other people that they were raped (be those people friends or jurors), then perhaps that would count as illocutionary disablement.

Some of what Langton says about Linda Marchiano (Lovelace) and her experience making Deep Throat is at best misleading. It is true that Marchiano was, as she says, physically abused during the making of the film and essentially forced to partcipate. But the person abusing and coercing her was her husband, Chuck Traynor, not anyone who was involved in the making of the film.

Bauer identifies two sorts of issues on which her discussion will focus: the question of pornography's authority, which she partly defers until a later chapter; and the question whether pornography is speech, in anything other than a legal sense. In effect, I take it, Bauer accuses Langton (and, by extension, MacKinnon) of equivocation: Pornography may well be speech in the legal sense, and hence constitutionally protected; but it simply does not follow that it is speech in the sense in which Austin uses that term (and philosophers more generally do).

Bauer turns to the question of authority on p. 76. Bauer focuses on what might lie behind the impulse to see pornography as having 'authority'. As she notes, certain kinds of pornography might well be thought to authorize certain kinds of sexual desires. One of Bauer's examples here (which she seems purposely to leave the reader to unpack) concerns a gay male teen. And, indeed, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that some gay men do experience gay male pornography as 'normalizing' their desires, in some important way. But that, Bauer emphasizes, is different from legitimating those desires. If anything has now 'legitimated' same-gender sex, it was not pornography.

A second option is that pornography's authority simply derives from its ubiquity. In this case, Bauer's objection is that pornography does not need to authorize men to regard women as sex objects: the rest of the culture already has done so, if anything has. Is that a good response? She has a deeper objection, too: "...[N]o person or institution that is not formally invested with authority has such authority apart from individuals' granting it to them..." (p. 79). What does she mean by that? How good an objection is it?

Bauer discusses two further options. Both of these are senses of 'authority' that are 'epistemic': they involve a kind of expertise, as when we say that Prof Paul Guyer is an authority on the writings of Immanuel Kant (as, indeed, he is). What is Bauer's response to the suggestion that pornography is authoritative in this sense? (There is a more developed version of this objection in Louise Antony's paper "Be What I Say", which was an optional reading for the first session on Langton: see pp. 81-2.) What exactly is Bauer suggesting when she writes that "...[W]e should shift our attention from the speaker's illocutionary acts to whatever it is that motivates his auditor to vest his words with a certain power..." (p. 80)?

The really interesting question, which Bauer discusses next, is why pornography should have special power to shape how people see the sexual world. This is, in effect, the question how and why the sexually explicit character of pornography (which is largely what defines it) should make it especially problematic, either politically or morally. Unfortunately, Bauer does not give us an answer to this question. What she actually discusses is a different question: how it is that films and photographs of people having sex have the power to arouse us sexually. Borrowing from Stanley Cavell, she suggests that "... the desire to see another human being naked is something that film is prone to adduce...", any film (p. 82).

The answer that seems to be implicit in much writing about pornography is that people like to watch other people having sex, and pornography is (or should be) 'transparent'. It's to Bauer's great credit that she avoids this trap though, again, she does not have much positive to say here. A start might be to observe (as someone once remarked to me) that actually seeing other people have sex (in the flesh as it were) is an entirely different experience, one that might bring with it certain dangers that seeing such acts on film do not. And there are other differences, too: Fantasy and imaginative elaboration seem to me to play a much greater role in the experience of watching pornography than in the experience of watching people have sex.

To be sure, there is a lot more to be said here. Have any ideas?

Dyer's paper is one of the very first to look at pornography seriously as film. Although it is concerned primarily with gay male porn, it contains much more general lessons.

One of Dyer's first points is that pornography is, in some respects, similar to other forms of "low" art, in that it appeals to the body and not (just) to the mind. He observes (somewhat as Rubin does) that this is connected to a devaluing of the body in much Western culture. He makes a suggestion here that will be elaborated thoughout the paper: that there might be a form of experiential knowledge that the 'body genres' can reveal that more 'intellectual' genres might miss. (This is also the topic of Linda Williams' paper "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess", which is an optional reading.)

Summing up this idea, Dyer writes:

A defense of porn as a genre (which, I repeat, is not at all the same thing as defending most of what porn currently consists of) would be based on the idea that an art rooted in bodily effect can give us a knowledge of the body that other art cannot.

Even now porn does give us knowledge of the body—only it is mainly bad knowledge, reinforcing the worst aspects of the social construction of masculinity that men learn to experience in our bodies. All the same, porn can be a site for "re-educating desire", and in a way that constructs desire in the body, not merely theoretically in relation to, and often against, it.

Dyer then proceeds to argue, in some detail, that such a project does not require any notion of sexuality as 'pre-cultural' or 'pre-social', as if the only effect that social norms have had on sexuality is to distort its pure form.

The second section of the paper develops an account of the narrative structure of pornography. Of course, Dyer is well aware that this will vary from film to film, but his main point is that there is narrative structure in almost all pornography—contrary to what is often supposed, that its effect is purely visual, purely bodily.

Reflect here on the project Dyer describes in the quotation just above. How might the narrative stucture of pornography affect the kind of 'bodily knowledge' it conveys?

This point gives rise to a criticism of how men's sexuality is represented in pornogrpahy: as an activity that is directed at a very specific and limited goal, that of orgasm. As Dyer sees it, this is a reflection of how men's sexuality is socially constructed: as "a classic goal-directed narrative", to borrow the terms in which he describes one film, and with an empahsis on the visual. By contrast, Dyer suggests, women's sexuality is not socially constructed in that way, and genuine lesbian pornography (as opposed to the 'girl-girl' numbers common in straight porn) often does not have the same kind of teleological structure.

Of course, we will have to take Dyer's remarks about Je Tu Il Elle on faith, and a proper evaluation of these claims would require close study of (genuine) lesbian pornography. But, if you are familiar with such material (e.g., the Crash Pad Series or the films of Jincey Lumpkin), feel free to comment on ways in which Dyer's charac terization is or is not true of it.

Dyer suggests, a bit obliquely, that in heterosexual porn women also are "attributed...this narrative sexuality", i.e., a sexuality that shares the teleological structure of male sexuality. What does he mean by that? And what is the difference between the two ways he suggests that fact might be interpreted: as "a recognition of female sexuality as desire [or] a construction of female sexuality in male terms"?

One of the most striking remarks that Dyer makes is that, at least in the gay porn of his time, "...the narrative is never organized around the desire to be fucked, but around the desire to ejaculate". It's worth reflecting on the analogous point about (most) straight porn. In the case of gay porn, what's missing is one aspect of gay sexual life. In the case of straight porn, what's missing is one person's sexual life. As concerns heterosexual porn, then, the central question is whether and how it might manage to capture central aspects of women's sexual experience.

Dyer's response to this is to call for change, both at the level of pornography itself but also at the level of our experience of pornography, so that we become more critical consumers.

Dyer continues with a discussion of the narrative complexity of (some) gay men's porn. As these films are obviously not ones we will all have seen, let me just invite you to reflect on the way in which such narrative structures might have been important to gay men of the time, and the way in which similar narrative structures might inform straight porn. (Two especially worth thinking about might be the "reconciliation of the desire for romance and promiscuity, security and freedom, making love and having sex" and the way in which pornography can call attention to itself as a kind of voyeurism. See the optional reading by Beggan and Allison for discussion of some early feminist porn that has such features.)

Viewed in terms of its social uses the erotic is, perhaps above all, a means of representing gender relations within the context of heterosexuality as an institution. (p. 87)

What Hardy means by "iconoclasm" is "the broad...current of hostility to pornography and unease with eroticism as a whole among 'rank and file' feminists and their male sympathizers" (p. 78), not necessarily among academics. Indeed, what interests Hardy here is the appeal that anti-pornography arguments have had among (some groups of) 'ordinary' women.

Hardy himself had previously studied, in his book The Reader, The Author, His Woman and Her Lover, how (mostly pornographic) sexual representation is received and interpreted by men. His main conclusion, as he reports it here, was that "...typical mass-market pornographic texts usually present a particular, though hegemonic, type of heterosexual eroticism which is strongly predicated on the symbolic power of men over women" (p. 79). Hardy suggests that what we really have here, and what feminist iconoclasts are responding to, is a "general problem of heterosexual eroticism", that is, a problematization of "the symbolic meanings by which the sexual is represented and experienced" in our culture (p. 79).

First issue: How and why did the problematization of heterosexual eroticism come about? It has its roots, historically, in the presumed relationship between (i) whether one takes an "active" or "passive" role in sex itself and (ii) one's social status and honor. (Much of this discussion, as Hardy notes, is borrowed from Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.) It was, in particular, seen as appropriate to men to take an "active" role and for women to take a "passive" one. Men thus become the (active) subjects of the erotic, and women its (passive) objects; all of that is symbolic of, and indeed historically founded upon, men's power over women.

This dichotomy takes on a new form in the Victorian era, and especially with the work of Sigmund Freud, as heterosexual pleasure is naturalized and normalized along with "its constituent erotic dualisms". (We still see this in, among many other places, evolutionary explanations of men's desire for sex and women's desire for love.) Thus, feminism is led to "question[] the way in which the constituent dualisms of hetero-eroticism are posited as natural" (p. 83).

The response, particualrly evident in queer theory, has been to call for a wider variety of erotic expression. But Hardy thinks that this response is dangerous unless accompanied by a proper appreciation of the issues that led to the problematization of heterosexual eroticism in the first place. One illustration of this is how psycho-analytic analyses, represented here by Lynne Segal (see the related readings), but one could equally include Judith Butler, construe the "erotic meanings and pleasures concerning relations of domination and submission...as expressive of essentially psychic forces rather than social circumstances" (p. 85). Hardy wants us to allow for both of these aspects: Adult sexuality may have its origins in our earliest experience, but it is transformed and shaped also by social forces. In particular, the 'sexual scripts' that essentially define our conception of what heterosex is typically like are not independent of the broader form that gender relations take in society.

The criticism of Segal here is a bit unfair: There is much emphasis on social forces in "Sweet Sorrows". I also think that there are more expressions of dis-satisfaction with "the available stock of erotic discourses and representations" (p. 86) in folks like Segal and Butler than Hardy seems to allow. But he is nonetheless right that neither of them offers us much by way of articulate criticism of mainstream erotic media (including but not just pornography).

This leads to questions about the social uses of eroticism. What most fundamentally poses the problem of heterosexual eroticism, Hardy argues, is "the principle of sexual equality" and the way it implies that intimate relationships must also become a site of contention (i.e., that the personal is political): The old assumptions about heterosexual eroticism (the active and passive roles appropriate to men and women, e.g.) are inconsistent with that principle. The problem becomes all the more pressing as intimate relationships themselves become more important to people's sense of self. Another complicating factor is the way in which sexuality has come to be seen as a "natural" force. (The most obvious instance of this might be the way in which social conservatives often appeal to the 'nature' of men and women in trying to secure certain normative claims about gender and sexuality. But Hardy suggests that it is more difficult to escape this perspective that we might like to suppose: "...[W]e define the erotic according to our lives but experience it as defining us according to our nature" (p. 88).)

As a result, it can be difficult to reconcile one's own erotic life with one's attitudes concerning sexual equality. And so, Hardy suggests, "Perhaps ultimately, any radical recasting of heterosexual relations and corresponding gender identities must necessarily enlist the naturalizing power of the sexual, which resides in erotic meaning as well as in the embodiedness of sexuality" (p. 89). That is to say: Hardy is in effect arguing not just that pornography (and other forms of sexual representation) might play a role in reshaping gender relations but that they must. (Compare Eaton.) The iconoclasts' criticism of heterosexual eroticism thus founders at this point, since it has nothing with which to replace the hegemonic form. What is required, if a new form is to be found, is to undermine the dominance of the male perspective on sexuality, to make it possible for women to "become the subjects of erotic meaning and definition as readily as men" (p. 90). This is precisely the flourishing of forms of erotic representation for which Segal, Butler, and others have called.

I think that what Hardy is trying to say in the next paragraph (beginning "My own research"), which is quite difficult, is that "the absence of a female subject within the erotic" leaves men feeling responsible for the expression of heterosexual desire, and therefore vulnerable to judgement, rejection, and ridicule in a way that women are not (or, at least, that men do not think women are). It is then this sense of "isolation, frustration and anger" that gives rise to the aggressive impulse that finds expression in pornography. (Interestingly enough, at the crucial point, Hardy starts to speculate about psychological rather than social forces.) I'm not sure whether that is the right interpretation of what Hardy is trying to say, but a somewhat similar idea is found in Scott MacDonald's "Confessions of a Feminist Porn Watcher", which is an optional reading (see esp. pp. 14-5).

I think there must be something to the idea that what one might call the "asymmetry of desire", as men experience it, plays a role here. To be sure, this asymmetry is not a natural fact (if it even is a fact) but a consequence of social forces that penalize women for expressing (let alone acting upon) sexual desire in the ways in which men are free to do. To be sure, these are social forces from which men, as a group, benefit in other ways. But Hardy's worry is that many men experience the asymmetry of desire not merely as a sociological fact but as being, at least potentially, normatively loaded: as indicting them for being 'obsessed with sex' and as leaving them responsible for its occurrence and its course. Thus, their desire itself becomes a source of shame, quite independently of any frustration they may experience in satisfying that desire. Insofar as women are seen as the source of this judgement, that fact can be expected to reinforce the power dynamic that is at the heart of hegemonic heterosexual eroticism.

Hardy ultimately comes around, then, to a view closer to that of the anti-censorship feminists: We must begin with the eroticism we have and insist that a greater variety of voices be heard. But he ends with some cautionary notes, which I'll leave it to you to comment upon.

Maybe one of the key points here is that Hardy's approach, although it pays a good deal of attention to the social meaning of certain kinds of pornography, inverts the order of explanation that is central to anti-pornography feminism. What Hardy purports to explain, in the first instance, is why men find certain sorts of pornography appealing—which is to say that it is reflective of pre-existing social arrangements more than it is productive of them.