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PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
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Does my Philosophy of Sexuality Professor Have a Point? (It's a mandatory gen-ed)
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PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
(text post)
3422 thread views
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Notes -
Premise 3 is wrong.
From the perspective of woke morality, the reason why it isn't okay to discriminate on race is not that race is an unchosen characteristic which doesn't track desert. If "don't discriminate on unchosen characteristics which don't track desert" was the rule then discriminating against adults based on religion would be fine (because American society is set up so that religion is a choice), and discriminating based on looks or intelligence would be wrong. The actual rule is "don't discriminate based on attributes which track historical patterns of social oppression in ways that reinforce the oppression", or in plainer English but woke-unsympathetic language that you shouldn't use in a college essay, "don't discriminate against members of a protected group".
The problem is that this doesn't get you out of mandatory bisexuality because women and gay men are protected groups. So a straight woman who refuses to date other women is expressing internalised misogyny (and possibly lesbophobia as well), and a straight man who refuses to date other men is expressing homophobia. (When I spent more time in woke spaces, exactly this argument was made to me by a predatory arsebandit who was sexually harassing me).
So the cleaned up argument is:
Premise 1: It is wrong to discriminate in a way which reinforces historical patterns of social oppression
Premise 2: Refusing to date members of historically oppressed groups is discriminating against them in an oppression-reinforcing way
Premise 3: Women and gay men are historically oppressed groups.
Conclusion: It is wrong for a woman to refuse to date other women, or for a man to refuse to date gay men, therefore bisexuality is mandatory.
There are then two attacks you can make within the rules of woke morality, both of which are fundamentally attacks on premise 1.
The first is that sexual autonomy overrides antidiscrimination norms. To use the language of John Rawls' Theory of Justice, sexual autonomy is a basic liberty and the principle that basic liberties should be respected takes lexical priority over the principle that society should be organised to best meet the needs of its least privileged members. Read the Cliffs Notes on ToJ before making this argument in an essay.
The second is that society recognises a number of exceptions to the rule of "don't discriminate on sex" which it does not for "don't discriminate on race". The reason for this is that men and women are actually different that don't reflect desert, but do matter. So (temporarily ignoring arguments about transgenderism) essentially everyone is in favour of allowing sex-based casting of actors, sex-segregated toilets and changing rooms, and a same-sex requirement for certain types of care work. For dating, being of the appropriate sex is whatever you call the non-occupational equivalent of "bona fide occupational qualification".
There is a third argument which should be safe to make even if it is subtly non-woke, which is that heterosexual people are dating with multiple purposes, but typically "find a life partner I can have children with" is one of the main ones, and in a world where 3 cycles of IVF costs a year's average salary and isn't a guarantee of success, a same sex partner simply can't do one of the core parts of the "job". In the trans context, the standard rejoinder from wokists is that we don't insist of medical verification of fertility early in a relationship, and screening out partners who are effectively infertile due to having the wrong sexed anatomy earlier than we screen out partners who are infertile for medical reasons is discriminatory. But this is obviously silly.
You can of course make a non-woke argument that premise 1 is wrong and it is okay to discriminate in personal contexts (friends, dating partners, roommates etc.)in ways it wouldn't be in a commercial or government context. I wouldn't try that in a college essay for a woke-stupid professor.
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