College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (36 page)

An Authentic Self

As far as sex is concerned, modern college is – to put it mildly – an interesting environment. The communal nature of living opens up possibilities for a hedonistic lifestyle. For the first time, many stu- dents find themselves freed from the norms and opinions of the outside world; it is finally possible to be what you truly are and do what you really want. Don’t be prudent, life is short, you are only respon-

sible to yourself, so “Just Do It!” as the famous commercial suggests. This captures the mindset of many students. The stage is perfectly set for the players to play the game of free love, but the whole story is not so simple. Perhaps the freedom enabled by college is often only apparent. A place such as college where one is constantly in contact with other people puts extraordinary pressure on social relationships. Could it be the case that in an overtly social setting you do not express yourself as you truly are, but instead act in a way that others think you are supposed to act? To make things worse, perhaps you truly want to be the kind of person you think others want you to be. But what then is your authentic being, your “true self ”? A philosophical analysis may help you find out the answer.

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) belongs to the group of philosophers who have been troubled by the problematic human condition. One of the main themes in Sartre’s philosophy is the question

about the relation between the self and others. When interested in sexual relations, Sartre is a good philosopher to consult. He was a known wom- anizer and admitted that his relations with women greatly influenced his philosophical views. Sartre’s views on human sexuality focus on abstract relations between different philosophical categories that are to be found in his work; he tries to rationalize sexuality. Perhaps this tells something also about the nature of Sartre’s actual relationships.

A full understanding of Sartre’s philosophy would require an in-depth analysis of various aspects of his philosophical system, a task which can- not be done here. What I will do instead is discuss aspects of college sex by drawing quite freely on intuitions that are inspired by Sartre’s philosophy.

College, the Place to Feel Inadequate about Sex

Sartre’s philosophical system is expressed in his monumental work
Being and Nothingness
.
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More familiar to non-philosophers are probably his plays and books of fiction, both of which are essentially intertwined with his philosophy. In
Being and Nothingness
, Sartre emphasized that a human being is a being that can view itself negatively. Why evolution has pro- duced creatures with this capacity is puzzling. Maybe it is just an unfor- tunate byproduct of self-consciousness. A human being is a dissatisfied being whose needs are often projected towards the distant future.Whereas the desires and needs of other animals focus on the present, a human finds himself desiring something that is waiting in the future or some- thing that is already in the past. The capability to imagine is a double- edged sword because one can always summon new desires that need fulfilling. As we all know, with every unfilled desire the risk of feeling bad about yourself increases; a human filled with desires is apt to be disap- pointed. To make things worse, we seem to cling on to our desires. Satisfaction resulting from the suppression of a desire is usually disap- pointing, after all. Moreover, it is often the case that we
do
manage to satisfy our desire but remain unsatisfied still.

Among human desires the desire for sex is one of the strongest. So powerful was his desire for oral sex that a former president of the United States was willing to risk quite a lot just to satisfy it. There are endless examples of situations in which members of both sexes have lost their mind and behaved in an absurd way just to fulfill their cravings! Sexual

desire is obviously not immune to dissatisfaction. As any college student knows, a sexual desire can be fulfilled in a satisfying way, but quite often the resulting satisfaction turns out to be dissatisfying. Why is this so? Perhaps we should start by asking what is it that we actually desire when we feel sexual desire. We desire a person, satisfy the desire by having the body of the person, but feel dissatisfied after all. This is a familiar phe- nomenon, especially in college, where sudden urges and desires are sometimes satisfied without much deliberation. One hears that in college sex should not be taken too seriously; experimenting cannot be bad. Yet in hindsight, we often conclude that the satisfying events were not so satisfying after all and sex actually becomes a serious issue. Why do we often conclude this?

This question can be explored by asking what the general nature of dissatisfaction is. Sartre noted that shame, which is an example of a neg- ative feeling, is an intimate relation of myself to myself: I am ashamed of what I
am
. But when feeling shame, Sartre notes, “I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other.”
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I recognize that I am as the Other sees me. The same can be said about dissatisfaction; it always reveals some- thing about
me
. As philosophers would put it, through dissatisfaction one can discover an important aspect of one’s being. But one can also be disappointed to oneself, so to speak, before somebody. I can be disap- pointed to myself because I do not succeed in a certain way that I take to be relevant from the perspective of others. Disappointment is thus often a feeling with three dimensions. I am disappointed to myself before the Other. This is especially true with respect to dissatisfying sexual experi- ences.The inadequacy before somebody else than oneself is symptomatic of our consumer society, in which a man is measured by his material achievements and success. We are being offered paradigms of sexual suc- cess and cannot keep up with them. Because the standards of success are ultimately set by others, an individual is never fully in charge of her des- tiny as an achiever of things. In the end nothing is ever enough because there is always somebody who is better off than you. The great gift of the Western culture is that you can always feel inadequate with respect to somebody else who has something more than you. There is always some- body who is richer, who has a more beautiful wife, who is healthier, or who works in a nicer job than you. The worst thing is that there is always somebody who is having better sex than you. Actually, there are
lots
of people to whom this observation applies.

Although philosophy aims at universal truths, a discussion about col- lege sex must acknowledge the fact that an average student is perhaps 20

years old and that college is an institution with a specific purpose. The essential purpose of college is to evaluate students by comparing them to each other. College is thus an example of a place where one encounters the feelings of inadequacy and dissatisfaction. If you are an unsuccessful student, it is because there are others who are better than you. If you are an exceptional student this is because there are others who fail. You are never really evaluated as an individual. In addition to the evaluation by teachers and professors there is the constant evaluation of an individual by her peers. This evaluation infiltrates all areas of life. Others evaluate your background, how you look, talk, and act. Sexual behavior is, of course, one of the most interesting topics to be evaluated and again you are evaluated through comparison to others. College is an environment where a person’s identity and self-image is in many ways constituted by others. This in turn has the consequence that college students become increasingly focused on the question of how they look in the eyes of these others. What matters the most are aesthetics of the surface.

Given the central role that sex has in our lives it would be surprising if the basic negative human feeling would not apply to it.
The
feeling of the twenty-first century – dissatisfaction – applies more and more to rela- tionships and to sexual relations as well. Can sexual relations in college be genuine or are they corrupted by the fact that an average student is paradoxically and tremendously self-centered but also extremely sensi- tive to outside influences and to the opinion of others? A college student is both an active subject and a passive object in the plainest sense of these words. He is active by constantly evaluating other students, but has also a passive role as a target of others’ evaluations. How is he going to deal with others in the most intimate relations?

The Look

If college is a place where people become increasingly focused on the question of how they look, what consequences does this have for the rela- tions between the self and others? Sartre claimed that one of the funda- mentally important relations between the self and others is the look or the gaze. This relation, according to Sartre, is in some sense the basis for interpersonal relations. The self’s concrete relations with others are essential aspects of Sartre’s philosophy.
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These relations are vividly and beautifully described in Sartre’s non-philosophical works. The famous

slogan from the play
No Exit
concludes that “Hell is other people.”
4
Without going deeply into Sartrean philosophy, a few things about the look are worth noticing.
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In some sense another person is always a stranger to oneself. Sartre thought that the “otherness” of others is something that is created by the subject’s awareness that she is the object of the look of another. A crucial dimension of human existence is individuals’ awareness of being the object of a look. On Sartre’s account, the look of the other is objectifying, it takes its object to have fixed characteristics and a deterministic nature. This goes against the self’s own understanding of itself as a radically free being without a fixed nature. A person feels that he is free, but the look of the other characterizes him in a certain way. There is thus a conflict between the way a person sees himself and the role placed on him by others. In our society, it is often claimed that especially the male gaze objectifies woman when it reduces woman to a mere sexual object. Women claim that men do not appreciate them as they are, they do not see the beautiful and interesting person they are because they do not see beyond the physical appearance.

Sartre’s observation about the objectifying nature of the look is much more profound. That one is being seen by another person is an inescap- able fact of personal experience. The result of the look is the subject’s realization that she is no longer a person but merely an object. By the objectifying look of the other, one is robbed of one’s freedom. The result is a feeling of alienation, which is something uncomfortable that anyone wants to escape. A vicious circle is created when somebody tries to escape the alienation by directing the look at the other person, thereby render- ing the other as having a fixed and deterministic nature. By objectifying the other person the individual tries to neutralize the other’s judgment which made him an object in the first place.The other person – now feel- ing alienated – will respond in the similar way and so the “battle of selves” continues.

The conflict between a person and others can be summarized in the following way. A person finds the objectification of herself as being uncomfortable and alienating. She tries to avoid the alienation by objec- tifying the other person in directing the look to that other person. This is done by denying that the other has an ability to conclude from behavior that a person has such and such characteristics or a fixed nature. The person thus tries to take away the other person’s capacity to objectify him. As a result, the other person becomes alienated and tries to catego- rize the person again in order to evade her own alienation. About this

phenomenon, Sartre claims the following: “While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me.”
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Conflict is thus in the center of interpersonal relations, although each person needs the other in order to safeguard their own existence. It is only through the other that I can recognize myself as a self.

All this may sound awfully confusing, and Sartre’s work is indeed notoriously difficult and frustrating to read.The Sartrean word-monsters like being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and being-for-others do not really invite us to study what lies behind them. Isn’t this just excessively heavy philosophical jargon? What could it tell us about college sex? There are three important questions worth considering. First, what is the nature of the look in college and how does it affect sexual relations? Second, how interpersonal relations essentially involve conflict and how this affects sexual relations. Third, how the self essentially depends on the other and how this affects sexual relations. In the following, I shall briefly consider these questions.

The Nature of College Sex

If college is a place where people are overtly worried about how they look in the eyes of others and if college is a place where one is constantly the object of the look, it could be concluded that college students often find themselves alienated. On the one hand, people in college are almost con- stantly being looked at by their critical peers. If, as Sartre would claim, the look is objectifying, a student in college is apt to feel alienated. She is being reduced to an object by the look of others. As a result of how one acts, others ascribe to her a fixed nature. On the other hand, even if one is not actually being looked at in a given moment she is always a potential object of the look. Michel Foucault famously suggested that once people start to believe that they can be observed it is no longer necessary to observe them.
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The behavior has already changed to one that takes into account the possibility of being seen. In an environment where a person is the possible object of the look of others, she is keen to start acting in a way which is a result of the fact that she could be seen.

In his own way, Sartre emphasized this aspect of the look by noting that “the look” does not always need to be visual. For example, an empty house staring at you from the hill may give the presence of the potential look.