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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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This argument would seem to imply that you are entitled to demand sex from anyone unless they can give you a "desert-based" justification for their refusal to consent. Doesn't this argument contradict commonly held beliefs about the importance of consent and bodily autonomy?

To put a slightly starker point on it: doesn't this argument imply that "nice guys" (assuming they are genuinely nice and don't have "desert-based" flaws) are entitled to demand sex from any woman?

Sure, if that woman is otherwise putting out it would be logically consistent.

It’s blatantly obvious that this argument is that it’s immoral not to sleep with trans, and it’s blatantly obvious that that applies to, say, cis men not wanting to sleep with gay men too. Sure, it also applies to women not wanting to sleep with ugly men, but I suspect that most women in practice can come up with non-ugliness related reasons. They probably already say things other than just ‘you’re ugly/short/poor, sorry’.

It’s blatantly obvious that this argument is that it’s immoral not to sleep with trans, and it’s blatantly obvious that that applies to, say, cis men not wanting to sleep with gay men too.

It's obvious this is the professor's intended conclusion, but other (presumably unintended) conclusions also follow from the same argument, and I think it's worth pointing those out as a way of testing the veracity of the argument.

I suspect that most women in practice can come up with non-ugliness related reasons. They probably already say things other than just ‘you’re ugly/short/poor, sorry’.

I suspect it would be surprisingly hard to justify those reasons, and at a minimum the professor's argument implies that such reasons can be wrong in an objective sense if they are not "desert based."

If a "nice guy" walks up to a random woman and politely asks her for sex, what sufficient "desert based" answer can she realistically give? Perhaps she says "you're a stranger and the fact that you would randomly proposition me for sex makes me uncomfortable, so I decline." But being a stranger is not a "desert based" flaw; the man did not choose to be a stranger. And respectfully propositioning a woman for sex does not seem like a "desert based" flaw either. In fact, the professor's argument implies that refusing sex is generally inappropriate except in specific cases, and therefore propositioning a random woman for sex would seem to be a reasonable request in most circumstances if the professor's argument is correct.

‘I don’t want to sleep with strangers’ would be consistent with both the professor’s argument- next to no one thinks it’s wrong to prefer the company of people you actually know- and the real world behavior of most women- even the ones having casual sex are mostly doing so with their friends, not strangers from a bar.

How would such a rule be consistent with the professor's argument? First, many people live in relatively racially homogeneous communities, such that "I don't sleep with strangers" would by default mean "I don't sleep with members of other races." This is explicitly forbidden. Second, the status of a person as a stranger is an immutable characteristic and not a desert-based characteristic, so the professor's argument does not permit discriminating against people based on the fact that they are strangers.

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