College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (24 page)

In these brief but assuredly philosophically loaded discussions of the nature and intent of his feelings for Arendt, Heidegger shows how, in tune with Socratic values, “love must needs be a friend of wisdom.” Unlike the ancient philosopher, however, who avoided all sexual dealings with his disciples, Heidegger repeatedly intimates that his affair with Arendt did not hinder his or her work but aided it, and that regardless of his adminis- trative power over her she wielded a remarkable sway over him that she, rather than he, never relinquished. He confesses to Arendt in a handwrit- ten dedication to her in his manuscript
Existence and Temporality
, “You came straight from the center of your existence to be close to me and you have become a force that will influence my life forever. Fragmentation and despair will never yield anything like your supportive love in my work.”
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Ultimately, Arendt continued to influence Heidegger as even after their ten-year break in correspondence, he in his “autumn years” contin- ued to write her poetry and repeatedly risked sparking the jealousy of his wife to remain in contact with his former pupil.To be sure, what Heidegger and Arendt illustrate in their affair is not a simple picture of the manipu- lative lecherous professor, but an image of how some affairs between students and their professors cannot be so easily condemned. In other words, Heidegger and Arendt’s affair demonstrates how the conse- quences of student-faculty relationships are not always dire, the role of power is not always clear, and that intimacy created in such relationships might not always be something to be avoided.

“So I’ll see you after class …”

In the end, instead of offering a platitude directly summing up the nature of student-faculty relationships, I thought it best to close with a joke neatly mocking Socrates, Abelard, and Heidegger’s exploits. Three lead- ing professors at a university, notably, a stalker, a eunuch, and a national socialist, walk into a freshman orientation. The eunuch turns to the stalker and asks him “What do you see in this mass of young men and women?” The stalker succinctly says, “The potential for the good. Why,

what do you see?” The eunuch, staring at the scantily clad students, says, “I perceive trouble that only God can save me from.” Finally, both the stalker and the eunuch turn to the national socialist and ask what he thinks. The national socialist gazes at a particularly attractive young freshman bending over to pick up books and smiles as he says, “I like to focus on the possibility of unconcealment.”

NOTES

1. See Plato,
   Charmides
   153d;
   Theaetatus
   143d;
   Lysis
   204b–c; and
   Symposium
   177e. For all works by Plato cited in this essay, see John M. Cooper (ed.)
   Plato: CompleteWorks
   (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).
   

2. See Plato,
   Symposium
   199a–201c.
   

3. See Plato,
   Protagoras
   309a–b.
   

4. Cf. Plato,
   Phaedrus
   255c–d.
   

5. Peter Abelard,
   Historia Calamitatum
   , p. 65. All references to Abelard through- out this section are to Betty Radice,
   The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
   (London: Penguin Classics, 1974), p. 65.
   

6 Ibid., p. 67.

1. Ibid.
   

2. Ibid.
   

3. Ibid.
   

10 Ibid., p. 70.

11 Ibid., p. 74.

12 Ibid., pp. 116–17.

1. Ursula Ludz (ed.)
   Letters 1925–1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger
   

   (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2004), pp. 50–1.
   

2. See Martin Heidegger,
   Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe
   , Vols. 56/57 (1987), p. 4, cited in and translated by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenburg, “Martin Heidegger and the University as a Site for the Transformation of Human Existence,”
   Review of Politics
   59, 1 (1997): 82.
   

3. Ludz,
   Letters
   , p. 8. 16 Ibid., p. 151.
   

17 Ibid., p. 45.

18 Ibid., p. 45.

19 Ibid., p. 25.

20 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

21 Ibid., p. 5. 22 Ibid., p. 21. 23 Ibid., p. 25.

24 Ibid., pp. 16–17.

ASHLEY MCDO WELL

CHAPTER 11

THINKING ABOUT THINKING ABOUT SEX

Goldilocks Epistemology: Not Too Soft, Not Too Firm, but
Just Right

As I recall it, on the 1980s television show
Murphy Brown
, the title character told a young colleague that sex is better in your 40s. Among other things, she said, you reach “the Big O” every time. “Every time?” the young woman asked, somewhat wist- fully. “Every time,” Murphy asserted smugly.

She over generalized, of course, but now that I’m in
my
40s, and so are most of my friends, I think I understand what Murphy was getting at. Furthermore, I have a good theory about achiev- ing better sex. I’m an epistemologist – I study knowledge, belief, reason- ing, and thinking – so I see a crucial connection: better sex comes largely from better thinking and knowing.

My aim in this essay is to lay out some views, concepts, and tools from epistemology that can help people think more clearly and effectively about sex. The focus is on college students because their circumstances, sexually and epistemically, are distinctive.To put it briefly, college changes everything, and sex is a big part of everything (especially in college). Students have virtually their whole sexual lives ahead of them, and it’s a time when they can get a good start toward healthy, enjoyable, wise, ful- filling sex – or a bad start.

I’m interested in students getting a good start. Therefore, this essay is aimed primarily at them, or those who care about them, rather than people interested in thinking about the issue in the abstract. I’ll necessar- ily gloss over or leave out details important to philosophers, just as a physicist would in a paper about college, sex, and physics (which strikes me as an entertaining idea, by the way).

Before we get down and dirty with epistemology, I should clarify a couple of other things. To make general points, I’ll illustrate using spe- cific genders, sexual orientations, religions, or levels of sexual activity. However, the ideas apply to sexual beings in all their marvelous variety, and to all kinds of relationships, genders, and choices to engage or not engage in various sexual activities. Most of the philosophical views here aren’t even limited to sexual matters, much less to specific sexual cir- cumstances, but I’ll focus on ones I consider especially useful in improv- ing our thinking and knowing as sexual beings. If I don’t explicitly articulate the tie to sexuality, you can play the old fortune cookie game of adding “in bed” to anything I say that’s epistemological.

So here’s my theory: if college students are to have healthy and good sex lives – in any of the many forms those can take – they must improve themselves epistemologically. To do that, an excellent source of advice is philosophical epistemology.

What is epistemology? It’s the philosophical field that examines the nature of knowledge, its presumptions and foundations, and the extent of its validity. I think of its primary question as “What is it to believe well?” This is a
philosophical
field, so we’re not giving empirical descrip- tions of things like the psychological mechanisms involved in belief for- mation, what people claim to know, or how a culture defines knowledge. We reason about the deeper meaning of knowledge and belief.

I’m going to be using “know” in a particular way, although there are other uses in ordinary speech. Sometimes when people talk about know- ing, they mean knowing with absolute certainty. This is philosophically interesting but too strict as a requirement for ordinary, everyday knowl- edge. I’ll talk about the kind of knowledge we mean when we say we know that some people are homosexual, and that men and women are biologically different. My representation of ordinary knowledge as opposed to absolutely certain knowledge is to use “know” as we do with “like” in “Of course you like him, but do you
like
him?”

On the other end of the spectrum, people commonly use the word “know” in a relativistic way that corresponds to the phrase “true for,” as

in “Joe knows that Jill wasn’t faking her orgasm – that’s what’s true for him.” The problem is that its being “true for” him doesn’t make it so. In the sense of “know” I’ll use here, if Jill (as a matter of fact) really was faking it, we can’t say that Joe knows that she really had an orgasm. There’s an actuality about whether Jill was faking or not, just like there are facts about whether condoms help prevent STDs (yes, although with some important exceptions), whether losing weight makes a man’s penis bigger (no), and whether things can get lost in a woman’s vagina (no). The epistemological “know” counts only for actually true propositions.

The best way to channel our “true for” impulse is to recognize that we can judge beliefs differently than believers. We can call people’s beliefs and rationales understandable and even internally consistent given circumstances like their cultural background or psychology.
1
Then we can hold the person blameless in holding the belief, although the belief itself isn’t true, known, or well founded.
2
Something “true for” an individual can be epistemically problematic even if we’re not judging her for believing it.

These concepts (strict certainty at one extreme, knowledge is in the eye of the beholder at the other, and ordinary knowing in between) all have a place in our thinking, but also underlie many people’s epistemo- logical confusions and weaknesses. Our language doesn’t delineate clearly the differences between them, and it’s tricky to place beliefs along what turns out to be a complex spectrum of epistemological classes. Part of epistemology’s usefulness is in clarifying otherwise vague and imprecise ideas like these.

To be known, a belief has to be what epistemologists call justified as well as being true. “Epistemic justification” means something like rea- sonableness or being well founded. Beliefs can have varying amounts of justification. To see this, think of friends talking about whether one of their professors is gay. Each has a different basis for belief, and some are better – and more convincing – than others. Some beliefs have character- istics that make them better representations of reality; they have a better chance of getting things right.

So like Goldilocks all grown up and discovering sex off at college, you ought to pursue the kind of knowledge and justification that’s just right. You don’t need to know absolutely, or to be justified 100 percent (using rigid standards). On the other hand, you should expect more than just finding what’s “true for you” or has scant justification (being too soft on yourself and others).

Sex Talk: You Should Know Better

You want your sex-related beliefs to be justified, and preferably known, if only because such beliefs can prevent harm and lead to benefits (“… in bed.” See how well that works?). Let’s look at the importance of epis- temic merit in one area of sex-related knowledge.

Many people don’t know much about sexual communication, and many of those who do have good beliefs about it don’t know how to act on what they know. Although most would acknowledge good sexual communication as a means of improving sex, people really struggle with it. Why should it be so hard to say something like, “I need you to move up a couple of inches and touch me like this”? You wouldn’t hesitate to say it if your partner were giving you a foot massage or scratching your back.

Even the names of important body parts are hard for us to articulate with our partners. In the sexuality section of the online health Q&A site “Go Ask Alice!” someone asks, “What are some respectful names for genitalia that are also ‘hot’?” Alice suggests slang terms from other lan- guages, such as the Japanese
chinchin
and the Portuguese
verga
for penis; famous landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben; food items like fish taco or fur-burger for female genitalia; and rather silly names like doodle-dandy and the winking eye.
3
The convolutions involved in using such (apparently respectful and “hot”) terms show how inexplicably uncomfortable sex talk can be.

In 1993, Antioch College instituted a famous – or infamous – Sexual Offense Policy requiring that “Verbal consent should be obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct.”
4
It is certainly hard to imagine an Antioch-policy-sanctioned sexual encounter, with partners asking things like “May I kiss your mouth?” “Is it all right if I touch your breast?” and “Can I fellate you?” But why should it be so hard to imagine using, during sex, the form of communication arguably most, well, communicative?

However difficult and uncomfortable, though, improving one’s knowl- edge of sexual communication (what, when, why, and how) is surely among the most important ways to make sex better. Such communica- tion doesn’t have to be verbal, but it should be good, as in informative, effective, and candid. If you don’t know enough about sex talk, you can be stuck using mysterious, indecipherable attempts to communicate, like subtly edging your body in the direction you want your partner to