Still concerned as I am to discern the ways and means by which the trained philosophers among us have been thinking about sex, I’m going to dig deeper.

From the collection, The Philosophy of Sex, I’m picking out the essay by Alan Goldman, the one whose hopeful title is “Plain Sex.” To see it plain, he’ll want to lift sex out of its “layers of cultural, moral and superstitious superstructure.”

He wants to get at the thing itself, sex itself. And thus to strip away all that is extraneous: the “cultural layers,” as he calls them. 

As a woman, I’ve already tensed up. What’s left after all the layers of meaning are lifted? What’s he gonna say in the morning? “Slam, bam, thank you ma’am?” 

Parenthetical note: Aristotle distinguished four ways in which anything becomes real: material cause (what it’s made of), efficient cause (what sets it going), formal cause (what constitutes its structure) and final cause (what purpose or aim it serves). Here Goldman seems to be stripping away the formal and final causes of human sexual relations, leaving only material and efficient causes – thus, our bodies and their prompts. He calls the other two layers “cultural,” as if those layers were extraneous or unnatural for that reason. However human beings are not the only species whose life is supported by their cultures – by the surround of assumptions and signals, from which the young learn from their elders how to behave.

Anyway, Goldman proposes to strip away any “external goal or purpose to sexual activity” – purposes such as love, communication, awareness or reproduction – and get down to the sexual desire plain and unadorned: this would be the “desire for contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces … .” Happily, that desire is quite fulfillable – by “sexual activity.” 

He then spends some time disposing of other contenders for a definition of human sexuality. In the days before contraception, it was possible to confuse the definition of normative sex with its reproductive purpose. However, although questions about child rearing and parental responsibility remain consequential, these, he believes, no longer come attached to any values that pertain to the sexual activity per se.

With reproduction disposed of as the raison d’être for sex, the author next turns his analytical hose on love. Although love can benefit a marriage, just as monogamy can, love can also be responsible for “disastrous marriages” prompted by “adolescent confusion.” It can also produce “damaging jealousies.”

What is more, invoking love has been associated with the “double standard which has curtailed the freedom of woman” and has led (by some pathway obscure to me) to "using sex as a political weapon." As for tying sex to “intimacy,” the embarrassment that intimacy can include is “too often the result of artificial sexual ethics and taboos.”

Huh? What’s going on here? Obviously any human activity can be done badly, from painting the side of a barn to riding a bicycle. The danger of doing it wrong does not by itself discredit the activity! To assert that it does commits what logicians call the slippery slope fallacy. As for “the double standard,” that’s never needed “love” to be invoked. Re “sex as a political weapon”? I’ve known of sex used for social or professional advancement. I’ve never heard of it being used as a weapon. Not in literature and not in real life. 

What’s he thinking of? The whole peculiar rundown finally ends on a denunciation of “artificial sexual ethics and taboos.” Which ones would he like to get rid of? Show your cards, Alan!

Anyway, although any norms applicable to human activities generally would also cover sexual activities, the author identifies no sexual acts as abnormal or perverted as such. The sometimes fascinated unease which people may feel about acts socially forbidden may come from “latent desires we are loathe to admit.” But no act can be labeled perverted on exclusively sexual grounds.

So finally, at the beginning and the windup of this essay, sex is still about “the satisfaction of desire and the pleasure it brings.” No more and no less.

So what do I think of all this? Well, I don’t like it. But why not? Well, for Aristotelian reasons, funnily enough. Pleasure, that ancient philosopher defines as “the bloom on the rose” of any activity, not the reason to do it.

It’s a side effect, inherently. This would probably be true for our species as well as for any other. Pleasure doesn’t define the action; it’s an abstraction from the entire context and purpose of the action. You could never write a novel in which your lead character does whatever he does just for the sake of pleasure. 

Pleasure – in the context where Goldman takes it to explain and justify the sexual action – does have a partner. From his account, we don’t know who she is, or what she thinks, whether before or after. Has this activity affected their relationship with each other? Or with others whom they know or who know of them? Goldman assures us that any requirements otherwise obtaining between decent human beings would still be in force. However, the participants and other people close to them would not be affected by the sexual connection between them.

They’ve just done the most intimate thing that two people can do with each other and it adds no new quality to their relationship? With regard to the sexual connection – and with regard to the people involved in it – all I can say is,

I’m sorry to hear that.

 *. *. *

What does the second of our three philosophers have to say on The Big Subject? She’s Elizabeth Brake, with an essay that asks the question, “Is ‘Loving More’ Better? The Values of Polyamory.”

Her notion of polyamory is flexible as to the number of participants in such relationships, also whether those she considers would be exclusively heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual or any mix of these options.

As to objections, on the grounds that these plural partners might occasion jealousy, or – to avert that – secrecy and subterfuge, she stipulates certain virtues as required by polyamorous relationships: honesty, mutual consent, open discussion, nonpossessiveness, and so on.

And she’s expecting to find these outstanding traits among people committed to forming and mutually agreeing to novel and original sexual combinations? And these arrangements will stay in place for as long as any children (from these or previous group comings-together) will need them?

Okay. You believe this and – as they say in Brooklyn – 

I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.

*. *. *

We come now to our third philosophic contributor, Robin Dembroff, with an essay that asks the searching question, “What Is Sexual Orientation?” 

Dembroff is concerned to resist presumptions that the man/woman attraction “should be privileged within society.” Any new categories she supplies should “reduce or eliminate” that presumption, be in line with “relevant social scientific research” on sex and gender, support legal and social protection for “queer sexual orientations” and help to bring about a new “taxonomic schema of sexual orientation.”

So her aims are avowedly political. They are about transforming society. Her particular concern is to protect those disposed to act along queer, transgender or “gender nonconforming” lines. 

Since “someone may be attracted only to transgender men who have not had gender-confirmation surgery, or only to cisgender men and women,” she wants concepts broad enough to take in all the conceivable variations. Nor can her concepts be based solely on behaviors, since social factors might lead individuals to behavior that conceals their actual preferences. So ascription of sexual orientation should be restricted to circumstances where sexual behavior can be engaged in, or not engaged in, willingly. The object of such a preference (not the person acting on the preference) should be what determines one’s classification.

The most flexible concept Dembroff can find is one of her devising: “Bidimensional Dispositionalism.” This gets rid of heterosexuality as the norm, allowing for all kinds and degrees of sexual orientation, and for changes in an individual’s choices. Sexuality is expressed along a continuum. Sexual choice is not irrevocable.

So, what do I think of Dembroff’s solutions to the problems of sexual orientation? Several objections come to mind.

• Sexual desire is competitive. Not everybody wins. It includes losers, frustrated people, heartbroken people. This is true within a category such as man/woman sexuality, and also between categories. I recall a young brother and sister whom I knew in Australia complaining to me that the then-new fashion of homosexuality had created an atmosphere at social gatherings unfavorable to heterosexual flirting and courtship. Could it be that Dembroff doesn’t stand above the intricate game of desire? Rather, she is simply loading the dice?

• When men claim to have become women, or to be “transgender,” they can spoil women’s competitive chances in sports previously restricted to biological women. They can also intrude on women’s privacy in locker rooms and bathrooms. Finally, they can constitute a physical threat to women when housed with them in prison cells. The scientific basis for changing biological sex surgically and chemically seems unclear.

• It may work well in some cases. But I know of two instances where such surgery was performed with tragic results. In one case, the girl who decided to become a boy had been the victim of incest. Needless to say, her condition was not cured by mutilating surgery. In the other case, the young man was disvalued on account of his race, and of course surgery did nothing to heal that social problem. Eventually, both of these traumatized and surgically wounded young people committed suicide.

In her essay, Dembroff presents all her social and biological distinctions as capable of being redrawn free from all harmful consequences – with a mere stroke of her computerized pen.

That’s not true. Her proposed changes are profoundly consequential and certainly not harm-free.

*. *. *

Meanwhile, the eros of human relationships – the eros of loving purpose animating our society as such – that fundamental and profound desire is neglected and forgotten. No one remembers 

what sex is and can be.

____________

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