College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (37 page)

For Sartre, a look can be “a rustling of the branches, or the sound of the footstep followed by silence … or a light movement of a curtain.”
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The possibility of being seen is disturbing because it reminds us of the funda- mental aspect of our being in the world; we are always a potential object for someone else. It is the case that “For the Other I am seated as this inkwell is on the table; for the Other, I am leaning over the keyhole as this tree is bent by the wind.”
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For the other person, I am merely an object with certain fixed characteristics. I cannot control the traits that are being attributed to me and cannot affect the way in which I am being judged. What are the consequences of such a situation for sexual relations?

Usually, the object of sexual desire is the physical body of the other per- son. This is especially so in environments – such as college – where people are being constantly looked at and where people are therefore particularly interested in how they look in the eyes of others. Male students are worried about their abs, female students are worried about their breasts, and inso- far as one is satisfied with one’s physical appearance one wants to show it as well.This kind of environment creates a space for a desire for the other’s body, it opens the possibility for such a desire. But the desire for sex is not merely a desire for a physical body, it is not merely a physical urge waiting for release. If sexual desire were just a desire for physical pleasure, mastur- bation should be enough to satisfy it, as Sartre notes. In sexual desire we ultimately seem to desire something more; we desire the person whose body is the object of our physical desire. At least sometimes sexual desire attaches to a particular human being.This, so it seems to me, is how many of us would like to be desired. We are not satisfied if the other person lusts merely after our bodies because we desperately want the other person to desire us and recognize our existence as equal persons instead of objects merely fulfilling the other’s desire.We need the other’s desire to be special; it must be
me
– as a person – that is craved, and not the contingent body which I happen to have. Perhaps this is why failure as a lover is sometimes an extremely personal and devastating experience. Although you should think that you are being compared to somebody else and rated as “crappy” in comparison to others, this is not how you interpret the situation. It is you and only you who just won the Worst Sex Ever Award. (It should be obvi- ous that I am not talking from personal experience.)

A college student does not engage in this kind of speculation after a drunken one night stand. But students often feel dissatisfied even when their physical desires are fulfilled. I raised the question why this is so and perhaps we here have an answer. A sexual desire is actually a desire to be recognized as a self rather than merely as an object or as a tool for the

other person’s sexual satisfaction. When one desires a person sexually, one desires that person as somebody who would appreciate one’s own special character.Without being too sentimental, it could be claimed that a sexual desire for somebody is actually a hidden desire for love. It is of course not the way a college student would usually see his sexual desire. A male student sees the desire as purely physical and desires the female because she has “beautiful breasts” or a “super cute ass.” In doing so, he sees the other as a mere object and is fascinated by the physical appear- ance of this specific object. In the worst case, the consequence is that he starts to treat other people as objects. Although porn movies may be entertaining and harmless fun, the picture of sexual relations that most of them describe is not flattering. It is not just feminist propaganda that in mainstream porn women are treated as objects. Woman has been reduced to the absolute object of the male gaze.

It could thus be claimed that the reason why sexual experiences in col- lege are often dissatisfying is twofold. First, a person desires the other physically without recognizing that she actually desires a contact with another person. Although the desire for the other person may show itself physically, it is not just the body which is the true object of the desire. The desiring self feels also a kind of ambivalence when it recognizes that sometimes it seems to desire just
any
other person, whereas at times the desire is definitely fixed to a particular being. In these latter cases, the self almost gets a glimpse of the true nature of its desire, but fails to act on it because of its fixation on the physical aspect of the desire. Second, the self who is the object of the desire is apt to be dissatisfied when it recog- nizes that the other desires it as a mere object without admitting that the target of the desire is a unique person as well.

Stripped of the philosophical jargon and placed in the context of col- lege the story could go like this. A boy desires a girl. The boy is increas- ingly focused on the physical appearance of the girl and on the question how he – as a male college student – is supposed to act with respect to beautiful girls.The potential look of the others influences the way the boy desires. Potentially, he is always in sight of others who have expectations and who thereby shape his character. The desire has become the desire it is because the boy fills the role of a college student created by the envi- ronment and by others. However, I believe, part of the boy would like to recognize the girl, not as mere beautiful body, but as a person. We want to avoid alienation, we want others to treat us as persons instead of objects. Given this desire, which is familiar to a normal human being, it could be claimed that “deep down” the boy recognizes that the girl

should be treated this way – as a person. Dissatisfaction is the result of the failure to do this.Whereas sex may be physically amazing, when there isn’t anything more than just a physical satisfaction the act is dissatisfying in the end because the ultimate goal of the desire remains unfulfilled.

The girl is apt to feel the same pressure on how to fill her role, but the dissatisfaction she will feel is ultimately of a different kind. She is desired and as a result may feel desire as well, but she wants to be desired because of who she is. The look of the boy, which is the result of him not under- standing correctly the nature of his desire, objectifies the girl in a way that leaves her as a self out of the picture. Whereas the sex may be physically amazing, it is dissatisfying deep down because the girl feels she is being treated as an object and the ultimate goal of her desire remains unfulfilled. The relations between the sexes, or more generally between humans, con- tain conflict that manifests itself through the fact that each self tries to fulfill its desires and in doing so objectifies the other. It could be claimed that this objectification is especially harmful for sexual relations, which ultimately involve the desire that one is recognized as a self instead of a body.

It goes without saying that the relations between the sexes can be just the opposite; the girl desires the boy and acts upon it. But the roles that society places upon us should be taken seriously in this kind of analysis. Basically, I described the boy as a “being which desires the ass of the girl,” that is, as a being which is fixated on physical appearance, whereas the girl is a being looking for a “connection at the emotional level.” This may sound awfully stereotypical, but to a great extent we all
are
prisoners of the roles that have been placed on us. The nature of the self depends on others. Ultimately, the dissatisfaction is a result of not really understand- ing or knowing what you want; the boy wants to act in a certain way, but he is also forced to act in a way demanded by his role. He may feel that both sides are genuine aspects of him. Whereas the pressure of the role applies to us all everywhere, a place like college is, for the reasons already discussed, bound to confuse a person about his or her “true identity.” In college it is difficult to be free and act in ways that you really want.

Bad Faith or True Desire

We are almost at our journey’s end. I shall finish by introducing one more concept that is essential in Sartre’s philosophy. This is the concept of bad faith.
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This phenomenon has different aspects, but generally it

applies to situations in which a self denies its absolute freedom and chooses to behave as an object. We choose to behave like objects because we do not want to be reminded of our responsibility. We want to pretend that we are not free in order not to feel the anguish, pain, and despair of ultimate freedom. Especially on occasions when we make mistakes, e.g., engage in shameful sexual relations, we would rather be able to project the blame for the situation onto someone or something else, rather than place responsibility wholly on ourselves.

One aspect of bad faith is a person’s inability to make decisions when faced with a challenge. By doing this, a person avoids the responsibility resulting from his choice. To avoid the choice: “One
puts oneself
in bad faith as one goes to sleep and one is in bad faith as one dreams. Once this mode of being has been realized, it is as difficult to get out of it as to wake oneself up; bad faith is a type of being in the world.”
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How the moment of choice puts the self into the mode of bad faith is well expressed by the following example from Sartre.

Imagine a girl on a first date. She ignores the rather obvious sexual innuendos of her date, in the sense that she does not want to consider what they mean. This is because, like our college girl introduced earlier, she wants to understand the compliments as being addressed to her per- sonality, she wants the boy to respect her as a free self. She is trying to deny that the boy wants her as a sexual object, and imagines him focus- ing on her intellect instead. Thus, when he tells her “I find you so attrac- tive” the girl detaches this phrase from its sexual background and hears it as an innocent compliment. However, at the same time, not being naïve, she is somehow perfectly aware of the boy’s intentions and of the desire she inspires. Moreover, she would not be happy if the comment were only a compliment fitting to the context of conversation – she wants the boy to desire her. As Sartre notes, in this situation the girl does not quite know what she wants. When the moment arrives to decide how she wants to react to the situation, the girl puts herself in bad faith. The moment of decision occurs when the boy takes the girl’s hand. In order to avoid the need to decide and be responsible for the consequences, the girl chooses to remain passive. This choice is paradoxically a choice that makes the girl an object. The girl is pretending to be a passive object instead of a conscious being that is free. She acts like she is not aware of what happens to her hand or she recognizes her hand as almost a strange object not belonging to her.
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Another example of bad faith is rooted in the self’s viewing itself as the other by assuming or taking a role placed on the self by others.

Sartre’s example of this pattern of bad faith is a waiter who identifies himself in the role of the waiter. He is in bad faith because he is denying what he is, a free being, and is instead assuming a role and playing in accordance with it. According to Sartre, the behavior of the waiter “seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms.”
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The waiter resembles the boy from our previous example who is torn between his “true self” and the role that he

– as a male college student – is required to play. Both the waiter and the college student know the obligations of their roles and the rights which the role allows. There are people who are so deeply entrenched in this kind of thinking, or as one could also say
being
in the world, that there is no difference between their role and their self; they
are
their role. They mechanistically play the role that society demands of them, to the extent that they live and die having forever been only their role upon the earth. Sartre’s illustrative examples include a grocer who cannot dream because dreaming is not allowed to the grocer, a soldier at attention that does not see because his eyes must be fixed to a certain point according to a rule, or an overseer who thinks that his purpose in this world is to deny, whose social reality is uniquely that of the No.

With these patterns of bad faith available, we can end with these ques- tions: Are college students more like girls on a Sartrean date or overseers who have assumed a certain fixed role, or are they capable of rising above the many roles placed on them by the college environment? Do sexual relations in college exhibit patterns of bad faith or can they be based on true desire that grows from the appreciation of the other as an equal per- son, as a self and not an object? Instead of using a moral or educational tone of voice, we can ask in a philosophical manner: Are students who are engaging in sexual relations ready to accept the responsibilities that their own free choices bring? Are they ready to live with the consequences? Are college students ready to live in accordance with their “true self ”?

These questions must be left for the reader’s introspection. But it should be noted that a “true self” is of course a philosopher’s fantasy. The way every person evaluates his actions, fears, desires, or generally his character are in the end taken from the public categories. We are prod- ucts of our culture, but this does not mean that there could not be higher and lower levels of authentic being. Despite Sartre’s rather pessimistic view about the nature of interpersonal relationships, his philosophical conclusions are in fact optimistic: each of us has unlimited freedom that enables us to make authentic choices. In the worst case, other people

may be hell for you, but you are ultimately free to choose how you act towards others; you don’t need to be hell for them. An authentic attitude towards oneself and towards others is possible, but one has to work hard in order to realize where the root of the problem lies. One does not need to be a Sartre scholar in order to appreciate the view that “man is con- demned to be free,” that we are ultimately responsible for our own choices. As persons, as human beings, we do not have an intrinsic nature and are therefore free to determine ourselves and choose how to act towards others. We are left alone with our decisions and ultimately with- out excuses. These aspects of our being are worth considering. Perhaps opening a philosophy book and spending a little time on the analysis of the human condition could, after all, be helpful in the morning after a passionate night in the dorm.