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PerseusWizardry  1yr ago (text post)   3424 thread views

Does my Philosophy of Sexuality Professor Have a Point? (It's a mandatory gen-ed)

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So I gather your professor has not ever fallen in romantic love? Or ever experienced philia, love of friendship? In my experience, starting it is not exactly amenable to conscious control or choice. The best one can do is to choose people one hangs out with (as it is difficult to love someone who you have never heard about but only in very abstract sense of "love").

Secondly, the "proof" proves too much. There are other immutable traits for respective hypothetical partners, such as relative age difference, or permanent mental handicaps.

P.S. Furthermore, many traits are effectively immutable during time periods relevant for the purposes of dating or friendship formation. For example, one can not presume that a member of a cultural group will change their thoughts and cultural expression during the time period a decision is made (and one could make an argument that such intention that they should change is colonialist anyhow).

One particular example is music taste, which is mostly set by adulthood.

Thus, if one accepts the prof's insane troll logic, the obligation should extend to dating people who love country music.

Another angle to explore: "Bisexual" is a simply a word for certain behaviors and activities and immutable preferences for them. Thus, the argument for an obligation to be bisexual can be generalized to an obligation to disregard ones own preferences in order to reciprocate to some other person's immutable sexual preferences. But here we are in a conundrum: why some preferences are immutable that are considered to result in obligation to reciprocate, but some others are not (but are required to be disregarded)?

Can one have meaningful ability to consent in presence of such obligation to consent, anyway?

I am intentionally disregarding the "reasonable burdensomeness" criterion, as it is an obviously silly and unprincipled excuse that unravels to whole argument. Why would boredom with nonverbals be a reasonably big burden, but sex with men would not? And if distaste for sex with men is a reasonable burden, every heterosexual men with such distaste is not obliged to be bisexual, and the "obligation" is not a general obligation.

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