College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (5 page)

The final unit, Senior Year, examines notions of self-respect, mutually respectful relationships, and personal freedom. Robert M. Stewart’s “Meaningful Sex and Moral Respect” uses Tom Wolfe’s title essay in
Hooking Up
and his recent novel
I Am Charlotte Simmons
to examine the view that much of the sexual activity that involves students with other students – as well as with faculty – on college campuses today is devoid of meaning in addition to being self-destructive or abusive in many instances. This leads to a broader exploration of meaning as it relates to sexuality and respect in general. Stewart argues that, in the strict sense, sexual activity need not have meaning in order to have value, i.e., to contribute to the participants’ wellbeing in some significant way. Love, Stewart concludes, is not the only value that makes sex objectively meaningful, and these meanings are not dependent on the meaning, or lack thereof, of life as a whole.

“Can Girls Go Wild With Self-Respect?” This is the question John D. Draeger asks in his essay. From skinny dipping, strip poker, and spin the bottle, to posting raunchy pictures online and “Girls Gone Wild” videos, Draeger examines different ways young women experiment with their

sexuality and discover the sexual selves they want to become. This essay develops an account of self-respect through a discussion of various modes of experimentation, with a focus on highlighting gender asymmetries (“boys gone wild” doesn’t carry nearly the same connotation). Navigating through “raunch culture” and depicting circumstances that often pit self- expression against self-respect, Draeger argues that girls
can
go wild with self-respect if they are conscious of their decisions and those choices are in line with informed standards and values.

A common question after sexual encounters during college when part- ners aren’t as experienced is: Was it good for you too? “Mutual Respect and Sexual Morality: How to Have College Sex Well” by Yolanda Estes offers philosophical reflections on mutually respectful sexual relations. Estes first provides a brief account of sexuality and morality framed by human freedom and dignity. She then defines and defends reciprocal consent, desire, and concern as standards of mutually respectful sexual relations. Mutually respectful sex requires that each person clearly com- municates voluntary participation, a concern for the wellbeing of their partner, and a willingness to attend to their partner’s sexual desires. Estes then presents and applies a criterion of mutual respect to various sexual activities, including some commonly viewed as morally problematic, such as non-exclusive relationships, fetishism, and the combination of sex and alcohol. Estes concludes by providing additional reflections that broach the possibility of a morally sound, intellectually tenable, and per- haps even joyful account of human sexuality.

Do you ever deny your own freedom? Have you ever pretended to be someone else, or have you hidden your true potential? “Bad Faith or True Desire? A Sartrean View on College Sex” by Antti Kuusela explores the nature of sexual desire in college through the philosophy of the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre claimed that sexual desire is quite different from strictly physical desires. According to him, sexual desire is something more than a desire for physical release. Kuusela asks that if students constantly have “sex on the brain” are they expressing real desire or is this desire better understood as an expression of “bad faith,” a denial of one’s freedom and choosing to behave like an object? This essay is able to get past philosophical jargon and clearly present some of Sartre’s most influential concepts in relation to sexual desire and college students. Kuusela concludes via Sartre by underscoring the unlimited freedom college students have to be authentic individuals.

We hope that you enjoy the essays and that the philosophical perspec- tives within will help inform safe and morally respectful decisions.

NOTES

1. Thomas Nagel, “Sexual Perversion,” reprinted in Robert M. Stewart (ed.)
   Philosophical Perspectives on Sex and Love
   (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
   

2. See Katie Roiphe,
   The Morning After
   (New York: Norton, 1993); Camille Paglia,
   Vamps and Tramps
   (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); and Rene Denfeld,
   The New Victorians
   (New York: Warner Books, 1995); for an oppos- ing view, see Adele M. Stan,
   Debating Sexual Correctness
   (New York: Delta Books, 1995).
   

3. On current campus sexual mores, see Kathleen A. Bogle,
   Hooking Up
   (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Regarding the influence of religion in our colleges and universities, see Donna Freitas,
   Sex and the Soul
   (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
   

4. For detailed treatments of the issues involved in sexual consent, see David Archard,
   Sexual Consent
   (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), and Alan Wertheimer,
   Consent to Sexual Relations
   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
   

5. For a dissenting view from a prominent feminist scholar, see Jane Gallop,
   Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment
   (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
   

PA RT I

FRESHMAN YEAR

Hook-Up Culture

SISI CHEN AND GEORGE T. HOLE

CHAPTER 1

SEX AND SOCRATIC EXPERIMENTATION

Where It’s At

Young people have been experimenting with sex for a long time. Since the 1960s, colleges have become a laboratory for sexual experimentation. In addition to a perennial curiosity about sex among the young, social conditions have changed to allow for a wider range of experimentation. In college, students are free of parental supervision, and colleges no longer act
in loco parentis
.With stu-

dents of the same age, with the same urges, and now often living in coed dorms, the conditions are ripe for experimentation not only with sex but with varieties of sexual relationships. Alcohol and drugs are readily avail- able that can lower inhibitions for experimenting. (It is important to note that experimenting with sex and sexual relationships occurs at younger ages from high school even into middle and elementary school.)

Changes in social mores and technology have also affected attitudes about sex. Divorce no longer carries the stigma it once had. In light of the high divorce rate and second marriages, parents of current college stu- dents have had more sexual experiences than their parents and are likely to espouse more liberal attitudes: witness the surge in acceptance of gay rights. Sexual explicitness is evident in films, advertising, and contempo- rary dress. Significantly, the discovery and easy access to the contracep- tive pill freed women from fear of pregnancy, so they could more safely

engage in sex. Only the deadly reality of AIDS slowed the free love movement. Pornography is now easily accessible on the Internet that shows varieties of sexual acts that in earlier times were available only in esoteric books and art works, and so are “how to” books more graphic than the
Karma Sutra
.

Not only have attitudes changed about sex itself, there is a subtle change between sex and romantic love. In the “old days,” sex was legit- imate only within marriage. It then became acceptable (with grudging parental acceptance) for couples to live together, to have a love-sexual relationship that mimicked marriage except for the absence of state or church sanction. Living together, like marriage, presumed commit- ment, especially sexual fidelity, for both parties. Now, it seems, there is a further development in the connections between sex, love, and mar- riage or committed relationships: not only is there widespread accept- ance of sex outside marriage, sex has become detached from both love and committed relationships. “Hooking up” and “friends with benefits” are new phenomena in the history of sexual relationships. Sex is no longer doing something special with someone special – it is a matter of “getting off” or “busting a nut,” even if you have to “put a pager bag over his head.”

The Internet has affected changes in sexual practices. If a student wants to check out a potential love or sexual prospect, Facebook will give information about whether the person is hot or not. Facebook has also changed the meaning of “friend.” When many people on Facebook have long lists of friends, sometimes in the hundreds,“friend” no longer means a person one knows intimately and can count on for support. Also, tex- ting has changed the landscape of human expression, closeness, and privacy. If a student can find a hot Facebook person and immediately text a brief message about hooking up, the landscape of relationships has certainly changed. Hooking up differs from wife swapping of an earlier generation, insofar as swapping maintained the marriage commitment and presumed a love commitment even as it allowed for variety in sexual partners. Hooking up is sex, free of love expression and relationship commitment.

In this essay, we will use the practice of hooking up to consider in what sense college students experiment with sex. Since experiments can go wrong, our main focus will be on a different kind of experiment, a Socratic one, as a way to make a significant healing change in one’s troubled sexual life. We will describe the experiment format and give examples of two students’ experiments.

Let’s Experiment

Generally understood, experimentation includes any action motivated by curiosity or the intention to change something old or experience something new: for example, to try being a friend with benefits. A more carefully constructed practice of experimentation occurs in the sciences. It includes such general components as a field of inquiry with a back- ground of theory and history, a scientific community with standards for data, objectivity, and, more specifically, evidentially supported inferences about hypotheses, based on controlled and replicable experiments that result in new knowledge or modification of accepted knowledge. At first glance, a student’s experimentation with sex seems quite different from scientific experimentation; however, like scientists, students are moti- vated by curiosity. They seek new knowledge. They have a community that shares background beliefs about sex and relationships, shares “data” about sexual experiences, and makes inferences based on the results of their sexual encounters. So, a practice like hooking up at the individual level looks like a kind of experimentation, although it differs from Masters and Johnson’s experiments that involved hooking up: they hooked up monitors to a female subject’s anatomy, like a Plexiglas dildo (named Ulysses), to document a vaginal sexual response.
1
They also hooked up people, in the contemporary sense, for further experimentation that included watching subjects having sex. Their objectified approach to sex in
The Human Sexual Response
is more like college students’ practice of hooking up and both are different from another attitude-changing book,
The Joy of Sex
.
2

College students may not be objective like scientists. If they were sub- jects for self-experimentation, their self-interest in sexual pleasure would bias results that have general scientific credibility, though they may make discoveries about what pleases them. In contrast, a social scientist might study hooking up as a group phenomenon with conformity pressures. Accordingly, hooking up might also be seen as an individual’s initiation rite into an elite group, “bad” college student or “cool” individual or, more simply, being a real student, not a “goody-goody.” As a different kind of initiation rite, hooking up allows females to enter into the males’ world of power and privilege by acting like horny males eager to get it on with virtually anyone.

When females start to realize the power over men that they hold in their loins – they do not have to “give it up” unless they choose to – a

power struggle often ensues. Nonetheless, a female may still feel pressured or obligated to hook up so that the male does not move on to the next easy lay or so she does not feel guilty for frustrating him for not “getting any.”

It seems many college students do not realize that experimentation can go badly wrong. Among the many examples we know about, this one is not unusual. Denise, a freshman, from a strict home, quickly became a sex performer. After she got wasted every night, she would invite guys to her room to give lap dances and strip tease, only to be confronted, nearly naked, by her hometown boyfriend of five years. After a public fight and failed classes, she returned home under even stricter supervision.

One of the authors (Chen) conducted an experiment, based on a dare, to abstain from sex during her freshman year. A male friend predicted “the guys are going to jump all over you.” So she decided “if a guy is willing to wait a whole semester to have sex then he will prove himself worthy of being laid; the circumstances will wean out the assholes who only want sex (and want it now).” She realized the risk: “I would be missing out on the complete sexual freedom of my first semester at col- lege; someone else may get to the guy I want first since I cannot offer anything sexual.” Although it was a hard bet, she won. Her account is as follows: