College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (14 page)

If pleasure results from getting what you want and displeasure results from failing to get what you want, then two strategies suggest themselves

for dealing with any desire that arises.You can try to satisfy the desire or you can work to get rid of it.
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If a certain kind of desire cannot be elimi- nated because it arises from the natural constitution of human beings, then that desire counts as natural for the Epicureans. Natural desires may be either natural and necessary or natural but non-necessary. Of natural and necessary desires some are necessary for life itself, some for freeing the body from troubles, and some for happiness. When one is hungry or thirsty, it is because one’s body lacks food or drink necessary for its healthy operation.All animals require food and water. Consequently, desires to eat and to drink are natural and necessary for life itself. Eating eliminates the lack of food, thereby removing the pain of hunger and satisfying the desire to eat. Eating thus has a natural limit. Drinking water eliminates the lack that is dehydration, thereby removing the pain of thirst and satisfying the desire to drink. Drinking, too, has a natural limit. Similarly, wearing clothing and inhabiting shelter to protect oneself from the elements satisfy desires natural and necessary for freeing the body from troubles. But so long as one’s clothing and shelter remove the trou- bles of being too hot, too cold, or too wet, these desires are satisfied, since they too have a natural limit.
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Sex, Shoes, and the Needs of College Students

Now the ordinary college undergraduate won’t worry much (or at all) about suffering from lacking the clothing, shelter, food, and drink needed to survive. Yet she may still have a host of concerns about certain
kinds
of food, certain
kinds
of drink, certain
kinds
of clothing, and various kinds of fun possessions and entertainments. Moreover, the ordinary college student is likely to have urgent concerns about whether, when, and with whom to engage in sexual activity of one kind or another. Is having sex with a friend a good idea? Other concerns may include grades, papers, lab reports, deciding on a major, roommates, friends, drinking alcohol, and how to behave at parties. All these concerns and associated desires can easily generate many serious worries and thereby threaten her tranquility.

Are all these desires on the same footing? The Epicureans hold that vain and empty desires are not natural desires because they do not arise from any depletion of the body and so have no natural limit. Consequently, desires for political power, fame, wealth, luxuries, jewelry, toys, art

works, and the like count as “vain and empty” for the Epicureans. All too often the more of these things one gets, the more one wants. Consider an example. A person can wear only one pair of shoes at a time, so want- ing to own many pairs of fashionable shoes is vain and empty, from the Epicurean perspective. A pair of feet does not hunger for more than one pair of shoes at a time for shelter, yet one can be fooled by advertisers and fashionistas in our materialistic society into falsely believing that getting more shoes will make one happier. But in fact wanting more shoes than one’s feet need endangers one’s
ataraxia
. Fancy, trendy, expensive clothing keeps one’s body no more comfortable than basic, cheap, readily available clothing. Jewelry, iPods, gaming stations, stereo systems, and plasma TV sets provide neither calories nor nutrients for, and remove no pains from, the body. Therefore, desires for such things are neither natural nor, Epicureans would argue, necessary for happi- ness. Since inability to satisfy desires for these kinds of things frustrates and perturbs us, the Epicureans urge us to eliminate all such vain and empty desires and limit ourselves entirely to natural desires and mostly to necessary desires.

To maximize our chances of achieving
ataraxia
, wouldn’t the Epicureans advise us to limit our desires
entirely
to the natural and necessary ones? Here they make modest room for natural but non-necessary desires. These include expensive, gourmet foods and beverages: truffles, caviar, filet mignon, lobster, fine wines, elegant desserts, pricey chocolates, and the like. After all, champagne, espresso, and milkshakes fail to quench thirst better than water. One can enjoy these delicacies if they happen to be available, since as food and drink they do remove the physical pains of hunger and thirst by replenishing the body.
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But to foster a habitual desire for extravagant goodies so as to make one’s happiness depend on getting them inevitably causes mental distress whenever such treats are unavailable. Consequently, harboring such a psychological dependency is wildly imprudent because it considerably and unnecessarily risks one’s
ataraxia
. So the Epicureans recommend that we be wise and cautious about our natural and non-necessary desires. The pleasures they afford are real, but they are necessary neither for our survival nor for our peace of mind. Being ever mindful of this reality enables us to be happy in both plentiful times and lean times. We must not allow occasional indulgence in a special treat to undermine our habituated satisfaction with simple food and drink.To believe that we ever
need
rich foods or costly beverages is to be deluded.

The Dangers of Sex

The Epicureans considered sexual appetite to belong in the class of natu- ral but non-necessary desires. Sexual appetite arises from the body and its hormonal activity, and so it is natural. But one can live serenely with- out satisfying sexual desires, the Epicureans believed, so they are not necessary. Orgasms are undeniably pleasant, but in order to preserve one’s
ataraxia
one must be careful and selective about satisfying one’s sexual desires. Epicurus writes:

I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclination as you will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste your posses- sions.That you be not checked by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not receive harm.
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First, notice that Epicurus’ friend’s natural inclination toward sexual passion is
excessive
. Passions are dangerous because of their extreme intensity, and this extremity usually creates trouble. One kind of trouble would be violating the law, since excessive sexual passion could lead one to commit adultery, incest, or other illegal acts like date rape. Another kind of trouble is disturbing those well-established customs that facilitate harmonious, cooperative, and pleasant social living.The pursuit of sexual passion could also result in harm to one’s neighbor, either physical harm through a minor sexually transmitted disease, or emotional damage, or both, say through a serious STD or an unwanted pregnancy. Indulging one’s sexual passion could also result in injury to oneself.This could take the form of an STD, an unwanted pregnancy, or emotional anguish when one is spurned or betrayed by one’s lover, or physical injury at the hands of one’s lover’s jealous ex-lover, or even an assault by a lover one has jilted. Finally, Epicurus warns that excessive inclination to sexual passion could result in squandering your possessions and money in wooing the person(s) you lust after. Epicurus thinks it impossible to avoid every sin- gle one of these possible harmful consequences. Sooner or later, at least one of these harms will afflict the person who gives in to his excessive erotic inclination. Though the
appetite
for sex in itself is natural, accord- ing to the Epicureans, sexual
passion
is fraught with many dangerous

consequences. So not only is it not necessary to satisfy sexual passion to live a happy, untroubled, peaceful life, it is wiser still to
eliminate
this hazardous disposition. Epicurus concludes that a person never gets any good from sexual passion, and is lucky not to receive harm from it. In short, sexual passion is of no benefit.

The Roman poet Lucretius, inspired by the wisdom of Epicurus, elab- orates on this topic in his magnificent poem
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
. The third book of this monumental work includes an account of the annihilation of the mind in death and an extended attack on the superstitious fear of death and the afterlife as anathema to rational living. At the end of Book Four, Lucretius’ exploration of the inexhaust- ible human capacity for delusion leads him to target what he takes to be the most debilitating of desires, sexual passion.
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Lucretius begins the finale of Book Four with an account of how images received in dreams cause sleepers to groan, struggle, speak, and wet their bed clothes. Adolescent boys whose bodies are beginning to produce semen receive images of fair faces with beautiful complexions that trigger ejaculations in wet dreams. Lucretius describes how “the desire arises to emit the seed toward the object of our dire craving” (line 1048),
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and “the body seeks the object that has wounded the mind with love” (line 1049). So while sexual arousal and climax are harmless, pleas- ant biological events, Lucretius considers love to be a wound injurious to the mind. He compares a body pierced by a weapon gushing blood in the direction from which the wound was inflicted to the man “wounded by the darts of Venus” moving toward the beautiful (male or female) body that fired those darts into him. Love is not a benign pleasure unmixed with pain; rather, love lacerates the mind. Though love might seem sweet at first, it is in reality pernicious because even when your loved one is absent, images of her continue to invade your thoughts, and her name rings incessantly in your ears. These relentless stimuli plague the mind with emotional turbulence, robbing it of peace. They are so aggravating, so disruptive of mental calm that Lucretius urges the afflicted lover to shun these images and to abstain from all that feeds the affliction. The treatment he prescribes is drastic:

… turn your attention elsewhere: you should ejaculate the accumulated fluid into any woman’s body rather than reserve it for a single lover who monopolizes you and thus involve yourself in inevitable anxiety and anguish.The fact is that feeding the ulcer increases its strength and renders it inveterate: day by day the frenzy grows and the misery is intensified,

unless you obliterate the old wounds with new blows and heal them while still fresh by taking at random some random-roaming Venus, or unless you divert the motions of your mind into some other channel. (Lines 1064–73)

Lucretius sees love as a psychological obsession that must not be fueled. Feeding the obsession makes it grow into a frenzied madness. Lucretius prescribes two possible cures for the lovesick lover: either have inter- course with any woman
except
the object of his monomania, or think about something other than passionate love and sex.

Sexual activity with any partner satisfies the desire for orgasm, but sexual activity with the individual who inflames one’s erotic passion only serves to intensify that agitating, passionate love without extin- guishing or even diminishing it. By hooking up with any random part- ner, Lucretius thinks the lovesick lover can divert his mind from its obsession and heal the old erotic wounds of that obsession with “new blows.” Alternatively, the fixated lover can divert his mind from its obsession by simply thinking about any subject other than sex. He can watch sports, play sports, walk in the park, do manual labor, play video games, listen to tame music, do laundry, or, what should be a daily pri- ority for college students, work on one of his classes. This second strat- egy seems quite sensible.

Regarding the first strategy, however, we may wonder how getting new wounds could help old ones heal. How can casual sex with random- roaming partners quell an erotic obsession with one lover? Epicureans sharply distinguish the desire for physical gratification through orgasm from the passionate desire to fuse with one special mate. Since this fusion is both physically and psychologically impossible, such a desire is futile. The biological desire for orgasm is simple to satisfy and fully satisfiable since it has a natural limit. Any comely body can satisfy it equally well. It can even be satisfied solo. But I think it would be a mistake to derive from Lucretius’ comments an Epicurean policy recommending to col- lege students a series of meaningless sexual encounters with random strangers. Lucretius suggests this
only
for the lovesick and only as a means of diverting the mind
away
from its obsessive, lustful fixation. One-night stands with passersby would be particularly reckless today because of the much greater likelihood that they would run afoul of most of the troubles Epicurus detailed. Ignorance about most facts about one’s unloved sex- partner greatly increases the chances of laws being violated (e.g., unwit- tingly committing statutory rape), or beneficial customs being disturbed,

or the parties involved (or their future sex-partners) getting harmed, especially by STDs. I argue that Epicureans today would reject sex with strangers as far too risky to be compatible with
ataraxia
.

Sex and Sensibility

Perhaps erotic obsession with a special individual stems from the opinion that
only
one person is a fully satisfactory sex-partner. The problem is that this fixated passion cannot be satisfied by any sex act because it is a stubborn, disordered condition of the
mind
, a delusion, not an innocu- ous, transient impulse of the
body
. Psychological obsession cannot be healed by sex with that body that is the very object of fixation. Sex satis- fies the body and is a natural pleasure. Love crazes the mind and leads to heartache. So Lucretius thinks the lover’s impassioned mind can be dis- tracted by means of physically gratifying sex with persons that do not make it lovesick.This prescription aims to disabuse the mind of a fantasy, namely, the false belief that sex with she who monopolizes he who is love- crazed is a good thing because it heals the lovesickness and returns his mind to a calm, unfrustrated, happy state.