College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (29 page)

Deflowering is Empowering: Feminism or False Consciousness?

Natalie Dylan has put her virginity up on the auction block, claiming it as research for her upcoming master’s thesis in marriage and family ther- apy on the value of virginity. She assures a curious public that “my study is completely authentic in that I am truly auctioning off my virginity but I am not being sold into this. I’m not being taken advantage of in any way.”
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Rather, Natalie contends that her actions “flip the equation, and turn my virginity into something that allows me to gain power and oppor- tunity from men.”
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Natalie, an intelligent and educated graduate of Sacramento State University where she majored in women’s studies, insists that her auc- tion-deflowering is empowering. She denies that her proposed prostitu- tion is exploitative; rather, she asserts that she is turning female-oppressing capitalism on its head – using her virginity as a tool for her liberation.

Further exploration in women’s studies might provide Natalie reasons counter to her prostitution-as-liberation thesis. One might question whether her justifications may be representative of a “false conscious- ness.” In Marxist theory, false consciousness is defined as “a failure to recognize the instruments of one’s oppression or exploitation as one’s own creation, as when members of an oppressed class unwittingly adopt views of the oppressor class.”
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One mundane example of false consciousness is when women elect to wear high heel shoes. Many women want to buy and wear high heels, even though these shoes are often designed contrary to function and comfort. This desire to wear high heels stems from a male-dominated society that promotes women as sex objects: high heels are a soft-core version of the archaic Chinese foot-binding tradition that subjugated women. Chinese women would endorse having their feet bound, as it made them more attractive to men: it made women valuable commodities to be married off in arranged matrimony. High heels have the same function, a feminist might extrapolate, as foot-binding did: to make women valuable as

commodities to men. Women, however, have internalized this oppression and have adopted the views of the androcentric society, freely subjugating themselves, and even spending their hard-earned money, to fill their bed- room closets with instruments of oppression.

Prostitution, of course, is far more severe than wearing high heel shoes – an example which seems trivial by comparison. Prostitution rep- resents the commodification of a person’s entire body in a complete, intimate, and violating way. To assert that prostitution is a path to libera- tion, a celebration and furtherance of pro-choice values, seems to beg some thoughtful reconsideration.

One might consider why Natalie, an attractive 22-year-old woman, who reports having had several boyfriends in her life, never engaged in sexual intercourse itself, though expressing that she has engaged in other sexual activities with these partners. Perhaps a reasonable conjecture is that, at that time, Natalie viewed sexual intercourse as an intimate expe- rience that was not to be casually regarded. If so, it appears she has changed her mind, or has sufficiently rationalized that prostituting her- self to a stranger for money is a triumph for women’s liberation. It seems dubious that most feminists would agree.

Agreeing to Be Exploited

Imagine a woman named Helena who lives in Singapore, where there are few employment opportunities – especially for women. When Helena turns 18, she can legally become a prostitute. Prostitution is one of the few jobs available to women that pays a living wage. Helena realizes the associated dangers with prostitution: physical violence, disease, emo- tional trauma, bodily ill-health, and so forth. Nevertheless, knowing that she has no comparable options, Helena elects to become a prostitute. Sadly, there are many women in impoverished nations that have stories just like Helena’s, though their stories are typically worse.We might char- acterize Helena’s decision to become a prostitute as a “free” decision, but is it truly? It seems, rather, that Helena is coerced by her circumstances to exploit herself in order to survive. True consent requires that Helena had other reasonable alternatives available to her.

Contrast this example with Ashley Dupré: the prostitute at the Emperor’s Club in New York who had several sexual rendezvous with former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer. Dupré moved to New York

City to pursue her dream of becoming a singer. She explains the reasoning behind her high-end escort prostitution: “I really didn’t see the differ- ence between going on a date with someone in New York, taking you to dinner and expecting something in return … whereas, you know, being an escort, it was a formal transaction.”
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After the media exposure of their affair, Dupré received several lucrative offers, including $1 million to pose in
Hustler
magazine, but she turned them all down, explaining, “You stop and think, but that’s not who I am.”
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We might question if Dupré’s casual attitude toward her prostitution is indicative of false consciousness. Is she rationalizing her oppression into her own internal desires? In her defense, it does appear that she draws a line, albeit an odd one, respective of her identity: she will not pose for
Hustler
or participate in a reality show because it’s not authentic to who she is as a person. The fact that she turned down $1 million for a nude photo shoot suggests that Dupré feels as if she has reasonable alterna- tives available to her, and that she needn’t cross any lines that are untrue to her integrity and commitments intimate to her identity.

Helena and Dupré’s decisions to prostitute themselves might both be characterized as consensual. Helena’s decision, though, seems less free than Dupré’s decision – and more ethically troubling. Any perspective that regards both women’s decisions as
equally
free seems to suffer moral myopia: a blindness to differences we recognize as morally relevant.

Our case of college prostitution lies somewhere between the two cases: more circumstantially coercive than Dupré’s but less than Helena’s. I proffer that the degree of our moral concern should be proportionate to the degree of circumstantial coercion that motivates the prostitution. Venerable feminists make similar points: sexual intercourse is rape to the degree that it occurs in a context that is not truly consensual.
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Our legal system tends to recognize that context can diminish or undermine con- sent. For instance, a licensed psychologist is prohibited from having sexual relations with an adult patient who has been under his care, as such sexual relations can never be purely consensual. There is such an imbalance of power between psychologist and patient, that there can be no such thing as patient consent – even if patients attest that they are consenting.

College students who prostitute themselves are not patients, of course, but they do exist in an imbalanced power relationship in a similar way to Helena (though not to the same degree).They have a bleak choice: strug- gle through life with limited opportunities or sexually exploit themselves in order to afford college.

Higher Education: A High Personal Cost

A paradox confronts college students of today and tomorrow: the path to liberation first demands their exploitation. A higher education affords the student greater knowledge, wisdom, and training. It imbues them with a greater autonomy: the ability to rationally and successfully direct their own lives. Graduates are empowered to thrive in careers that fulfill them and enable them to gain greater economic stability. The growing irony, however, is that to achieve this flourishing, autonomy, and empow- erment, many students are discovering that the only way to achieve these mantles is to sexually exploit themselves.

In today’s economy, a college education is necessary to achieving eco- nomic freedom and stability. As of 1999, young women with a college degree earned 91 percent more than young women with no more than a high-school degree or GED.
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According to a 1997 study, the lifetime income of families headed by an individual with a bachelor’s degree will be about $1.6 million more than those headed by just a high-school diploma or GED.
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College has become unaffordable for many young Americans. From 1982 to 2007, college tuition and fees increased 439 percent, while the median income of families only rose 147 percent.
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In 2008 the net cost of attending a four-year public university was 28 percent of median family income; it was 76 percent to attend a four-year private university.
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Student loans have more than doubled in the past decade, and students from lower-income families tend to receive smaller grants, on average, than students from more affluent families. Many students do not receive much, if any, financial support from their families. If tuition increases at the current rate, we can expect that sex exploitation will increase with it.

Prostitution as Voluntary Slavery

The skyrocketing costs of college are increasingly impelling students to sell themselves sexually. Prostitution is a form of voluntary slavery – even if temporarily. And selling oneself into slavery is both illegal and immoral in that it is irrational.

Legally, the Supreme Court concluded in Paris
Adult Theatre I v. Slaton

(1973) that while “most exercises of free choice … are explicitly protected

by the Constitution,” there are some disallowances. Some laws protect “the weak, the uninformed, the unsuspecting, and the gullible from the exercise of their own volition.” For instance, one cannot legally sell one- self into slavery as it violates one’s own
inalienable
right to liberty: “inal- ienable” means that no one is to alienate you from that natural and inviolable right – including yourself.

Predating these formal legal arguments, eighteenth-century philoso- pher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) argued that “to alienate another’s liberty is contrary to the natural order.”
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Further, Rousseau denies the validity of any contract that creates a master and a slave, for initial fair- ness must not exist for the individual to consent to becoming a slave. In essence, Rousseau states that “to renounce one’s liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties … such renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all lib- erty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.”
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For voluntary slavery “there is no possible compensation”
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– even for a limited time. In
On Liberty
, John Stuart Mill (1806–73) joins Rousseau’s denouncement of slavery as illogical: “The principle of freedom cannot require that he [the voluntary slave] should be free not to be free. It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom.”
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Sacrificing One’s Identity for Higher Education

Sex exploitation extends beyond commodification and coercion and cor- rodes personal identity. Rosie Reid, an 18-year-old college student, is a les- bian who auctioned off her virginity to a 44-year-old man, via the Internet, so that she could pay for her college education. She received £8,400 (approx- imately US$15,525) for her deflowering from this mid-40s engineer, with whom she had sex in a hotel room. Reid reports: “It was horrible … I felt nervous and scared.”
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Reid’s partner, Jess Cameron, stayed in the same hotel in a show of support. Reid told the
News of theWorld
: “I felt obliged … to please him as he had just paid all this money.”
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After the affair, Reid and her partner met up and “just cried and cried.”
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Reid cites her motivation as an attempt to avoid years of relative poverty. She had been working exten- sively so she could pay tuition and living expenses and found herself without sufficient time to study. Her partner, who was supportive of Reid’s decision, states: “I feel angry that Rosie has to be in this position at all.”
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Rosie Reid’s torment contrasts with that of Ashley Dupré, previously mentioned, who did not seem to be coerced by desperation and did not appear to be sacrificing her identity in her high-end escort occu- pation. Dupré resisted the financial allures of
Hustler
magazine and other lucrative offers after the story broke in the press, citing that these offers wouldn’t be true to herself: authentic to her identity and integrity.

Reid’s experience, however, did violate her personal identity and integ- rity. This deep violation resonates in Reid’s report of her experience as sexual trauma: “It didn’t feel like it was happening to me. I felt like I was watching it happen to someone else.”
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This description matches a typi- cal symptom of sexual trauma called disassociation: an extreme coping mechanism where the traumatized subject retreats from what is occur- ring to them in the present, until the traumatic experience passes. Of course, one never quite gets over such an experience. Reid compromised the integrity of her identity in this desperate and miserable experience, but faced with college costs, she found herself with little choice. The words of Reid’s father probably echo with her today: he told her she was “selling her soul.”

Religious identity can also be compromised by the sex exploitation that high college costs induce. John Gechter attended Grove City College, a Christian liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, where students commit themselves to attending a minimum of 16 services in the college chapel each semester. Though Gechter hasn’t publically made statements regarding his faith, it seems clear that he is a Christian, and he attests that he never sought to become an actor in gay pornography.

Gechter states that he nonetheless engaged in the enterprise in order to finance his education: “Instead of working 40 hours a week as a bus- boy or waiter, you do a scene and then you have time to concentrate on your schoolwork.” Gechter had tried working in low-wage jobs – a desk- clerk, a cook, a waiter – and became too “burned out” given the full-time hours.