Planned posts:
A poem that isn’t really about masturbation.
Communication and being in the loop as it comes to open relationships or polyamory.
Dominance and the difficulty in being dominant towards my girlfriend, whom I had to stay away from for a long time and who I’m used to treating as my equal.
Being fat as a guy.

I’m a bit proud of that.

But to get back to my main questions: What is it about? The legal question? Or trying to convince others to their views? And to the pro-choicers: Why is it bad that someone publicly argues that abortion is morally problematic? And why do the pro-lifers resort to terrorist tactics?

I don’t really see how romantic relationships are supposed to be meant solely to provide a space for legitimate sex.

They are not soley that. Many more things both emotional and normative come into it. But in the end that is one of their functions. Reproduction and sex are discoupled through contraception and an emotion and experience centered cultural narrative. Relationships also do not serve as economical unions of the earning husbad – housewife variaty. Nor do they serve to structure persistent, long reaching family connections. This seems to leave mainly love and sex. And with love being so epherate and rare and given that many people have many more relationships that are not centered around deep love, I do feel justified in identifying the main social function of romantic relationships: They are first and foremost legitimate means to have sex.

(In fact, I’m rather confused about what counts as “illegitimate” sex as I don’t see how such a judgment can be legitimately made. Sex is sex. You don’t have to be in a romantic relationship to have sex, and I think it’s fairly common and reasonably acceptable to have a fuck-buddy these days. Plus, I think most people will tend to say that “love” is the primary reason why they get into romantic relationships, not sex.)

Legitimate sex is just sex that is judged as ok by one’s peers. In Christianland, the only legitimate way to have sex is as a married, heterosexual couple. I guess romantic relationships in the “dating, kissing, sex, monogamy” way are the predominant way of having legitimate sex in the wider western world. But there are of course other ways and the very definition of legitimate makes it relative to some social context within which you are moving. Different context, different rules. Also, it’s normal in an individualized society that you have several institutions serving similar functions in different ways. So all I’m saying is that romantic relationships are one way, one concept that is out there.

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I don’t see how emotional bonding is intrinsically connected with sex. I don’t think it is,

Sorry for breaking up your sentence like that, but I want to say that basically you are right. Sex does not necessarily created emotional bonding and emotional bonding does not require sex. There still is a connection in that it often and for many people does play a role in creating, expressing and maintaining emotional bonds.

and for me, it’s even somewhat counter-intuitive to suggest that sex creates emotional bonds. Sex really doesn’t do that for me. It took me a couple of years to finally see how sex can even be considered intimate on more than just a physical level, but I don’t so much think it’s the sex itself that is intimate, but rather that intimacy already created through other (non-sexual) means is being expressed through sex.

I certainly feel different about this. But from what I learned about asexuality from you, it does make a lot of sense to me that our intuitions and experiences would diverge here. And you have a right to have yours respected. I would not wish to insinuate that sex should have that kind of connection to intimacy and emotional bonding. It doesn’t and that’s fine.
But I believe that you are in the minority. And for many people, sex does play that role and does create, express and maintain emotional bonds.

What really bugs me about the idea that romantic relationships are all about sex is that… it seems so… shallow. Do people really see romantic relationships that way? How could that be fulfilling? It seems like the relationship is just an excuse, just a structure that you use to make it socially acceptable to have sex. It doesn’t seem like a deep connection with another person is necessary or even desired… and in that case, why get into a relationship?

I don’t think that a deep connection is required. Sometimes it is there to begin with, sometimes it develops, sometimes it never comes. And I’m sure not many people see it quite as cynically as I may come across. (I sure don’t.) But I still think that people act the part. They try each other on like clothes and see if everything fits. That happens rarely and like with clothes, most people, most of the time take what fits well enough. And romantic relationships, unlike old-style marriage are not automatically meant to be until death do us apart. While you have good points that are well worth thinking about for each individual person, the social reality as I see it is not as concerned with deep love when it comes to relationships.

You could just have sex without worrying about it, and it would be a lot less trouble. Who cares about the stigma? That will probably go away gradually as more people actually do it… and you don’t really have to let people know that you’re having sex with someone you’re not in a relationship with, do you?

Well, the concept of legitimate sex brings with it a concept of illegitimate sex. Sex for which one will suffer social or legal sanctions. Examples of commonly illegitimate sex are: sex with children or minors, sex outside of wedlock, cheating, prostitution, sex with blood relatives. I’m sure the actual list is far longer, in particular if one considers all manner of cultures beyond contemporary USAmerican culture. Both of your points – that people can fail to care about the stigma and that people can hide their actions – hold, but do not imply that there is not distinction between legitimate and illegitimate sex made in society. People have different ways of dealing with the social norms they encounter. Adoption, subterfuge and rebellion are just three such ways.

I see romantic relationships as enjoyable and desirable because of love, not sex. Forming a deep emotional connection is what matters to me.

“For me” is the important term here. We have already established that asexuals do not feel sexual attraction and that therefore a social instution which facilitates sexual contacts does not work for them. But this is similar to how an institution that facilitates heterosexual sexual contacts does not work for homosexuals.

Economic connections follow because on a practical level, it makes sense to facilitate the emotional connection. Sex can be part of forming a deep emotional connection… or not. It doesn’t have to be. I do it because I’m okay with it and it’s enjoyable on some level, but it’s not something I crave or something that makes me feel particularly connected to my partner, any more so than just talking and laughing and sharing my life with her does. I don’t see how my relationship with her would be any less of a romantic relationship if we stopped having sex, and it bothers me that most people wouldn’t consider it a “real” or “full blown” romantic relationship. Actually, a lot of people think for some reason that I must be incapable of experiencing love after I come out to them as asexual… including M, up until almost a year after I met him. I don’t want to go on too long about this, but I think that point is important to consider, and I hope that people will keep it in mind.

To my mind, “love” and “romantic relationship” are not intrinsically linked. It can come together, but either can happen without the other. And I do not doubt at all that you can love and that you can experience a very deep, gratifying and intimate relationship based on love.
All that I am saying is that the social institution of “romantic relationships” does not work for someone, who is not interested in sexual interactions at all, because it functions as a way for people to get together and have socially acceptable sex.
This is not a statement about the depth or the value of such relationships. These are independent questions. Nor is it about whether or not romantic relationships are the best way for everyone to have sex. It is merely the observation that the vast majority of people seem to behave in this way.

I believe that The Gray Lady has a valuable vantage point on these things and that the general question of the relationship between love and sex is an important one. But her – and to generalize, the asexuals’ – discomfort with the focus on sex in romantic relationships is not to be taken as a general call to arms against seeing romantic relationships in this way. Rather, we should understand that the way we do things might not work for others. And sometimes the right answer to such a situation might be that the others need to change and adopt our way, but sometimes it needs to be conceivable and acceptable that they do it their way and we do it our way and to fight about these practices, much less the words we use to refer to them is not only futile but ultimate damaging. This, as well as most nonstandard sexualities, seems to be a paradigm example of the latter case. You do it your way, we do it our way and at least we can wish each other luck along the way, at best we can learn something from each other’s unique perspective.

I think that women should take the power to say no when they don’t want to and yes when they do. One is probably justified in making exceptions to this for people one trusts and loves. I will offer some analysis on the social institution of what I call the seduction game and try to work out how its structure – the rules and stereotypes that it contains – is problematic. I have some ideas on how to remedy these problems. Finally I talk about two likely objections.

Seduction, which is probably as “the guys” see it, is a communicative activity. And part of the problem, I guess, is that the stereotypes insists that men, who start out horny, should win over women, who start out innocent, into having sex with them. Any resistance on the woman’s part is just how it is played. It is a central part of the seduction scenario, the goal of which is to realize a sexual encounter signifying the double nature of saint and whore, which is attribute to young women. On the other hand the male stereotype is combative here, his job is to overcome those expected resistances one by one, slowly moving closer to his goal.
Both of those role patterns need changing, but that can only be done by getting people to change their behavior patterns and their expectations. Think about it for a moment. The main social function of the whole dating/flirting/seduction game is to produce pairings for sexual intimacy. That is something that people will always want to be able to do. And like any social institution, its persistence depends on providing people with a predictable environment to pursue their goals.
Breaking that predictability is important if you want to change a social practice. But then you need to construct a new institution that will produce pairings for sexual intimacy. Alternatively, change only a part of it. Take the seduction out of the dating game. But for that to work, it cannot be just men who stop taking the steps to “overcome women’s resistance”. That would result in no pairings. Instead it requires of women to assert themselves. They are not obstacles to be overcome in order to win the price of sex from them.
I do understand that the prevailing notion of womanhood implies passivity and being seduced and many women do seem to subscribe to this. That is, they like being seduced and flirted at. But again, the practice of seduction sees any resistance on part of the seduced not as a reason to abort the seduction, but as an obstacle to overcome. And the more “manly” the seducer sees himself, the more likely it is that he will interpret any presented resistance as an invitation to overcome it. The extreme of this is the “no means yes” mentality often understood to be one of the great moral failings of the male stereotype.
In simple terms, seduction has this structure:
Guy hits on girl.
Girl resists guy.
Guy overcomes resistance.
Guy gets sex from girl.

In this situation, what is one to do? As a man, one needs to learn that seduction is not a battle but should be engaged in as a kind of rational discourse. The goal is not to win someone over, but to see if two people feel good about pairing of with each other. Of course, this conflicts with the male stereotype, but that we knew all along.
As a woman, you need to say no, clearly and as assertive as necessary. It might be painful for the guy you say no to, but its a better option than engaging in very much unwanted sex with someone you don’t like sexually. Remember the rules of the seduction game that you have to overcome. You need to present your resistance not as an obstacle to overcome, but as a clear no. If you play the game all the way through, it will end up in the “Guy gets sex from girl” stage.
Sure, this implies breaking the female stereotype, but that is something we knew all along.
So guys, stop being seducers.
And girls, stop being “seducees”.

And no, this is not victim blaming. In situations like the ones presented, women do have the option of breaking the rules of the game. Many are scared and intimidated by the prospect, feeling mean, afraid that they will be called prude or a bitch, talked about behind their backs or just plain feel that as a woman, they should comply. It takes strength to break through the roles ascribed to us by our social institutions, but it can be done. You can do it. Because you are not an obstacle to be overcome in order to win sex from you.
It will make you less a “woman” as society defines these things. But I would hazard a guess that that is exactly what you should be anyway.

And to counter a second objection, the reason why I did not use the term “rape” at all is that in the very rules of the seduction game cause problems for the notion of consent and rape should be treated as non-consensual. This “gray rape” is still unwanted sex and the victim can feel very disturbed, even raped by it. I do not doubt that. But keep in mind what was said about rape culture, that a part of it was the inflationary use of rape in contexts where it was inappropriate (“the police raped me when they gave me a ticket”). And one might argue that the women subjected to this kind of unwanted sex is non-consensual inside. But consent is not an inner, mental or emotional state. Instead it is social. Consent that is not communicated does not exist. And consent can be communicated even though the consenter does not feel like it. One can lie about one’s consent to something. But for all intents and purposes, if one acts as if one consents, one consents. And playing the seductee in the seduction game is a form of giving consent. By allowing the other in – e.g. by taking his hand, when he takes yours – you communicate consent within the social institution of seduction.

Now to my mind, this could best be called consent under pressure. And indeed, the whole game seems designed to produce this kind of pressure. But the point remains. What happens happens according to the rules of the game, the script of the social interaction pattern we call “seduction”. And insofar as it does that, it is the normal, socially prescribed way of going about things. And by its very definition rape is non-consensual. But what about resistance that is intended as a serious “no” but interpreted as an obstacle? Here we hit the depth of the problem and the again it is the rules of the game that are responsible for it. Consent, as I have said, is social. It exists in the communicative space between people. The game of seduction is structured specifically to produce consent. But in that process, the seducer is set up as the active part. His consent is never in question. Instead winning the consent of the seducee is just another way of saying that he overcomes her resistance. In that way the seducee, if not interested in the seducer, is coerced by the social institution of seduction itself – by its structure, its roles and rules and by its status as a sanctioned social institution – to give consent.

And within this oppressive structure various women react very differently to their situation. Some accept that providing unwanted sex is part of their role as women, going about it stoically. Some feel that some guys are ok, but some are really bad. Experiences differ. It is, in other words a bit like prostitution in that once stated consent is given for certain acts, those acts might turn out to feel very bad to the prostitute. But that feeling alone cannot qualify the event as rape. Nor can the possibility of a bad experience qualify an act as rape. Else all sexual encounters would qualify. And finally, lack of desire is not enough either, else almost all acts of prostitution would count as rape. Rape should instead require lack of stated or implied consent as a necessary condition. But since seduction is aimed at bringing about consent it is very difficult to apply the concept of rape in this context. And this is why we are justified in speaking about this as a gray area. And given that, I propose that in order to make the analysis of the social institution and how it interacts with gender stereotypes and in considering what to do about it, we do not employ the highly emotionally and morally charged term “rape”.

This does not mean that seduction can never lead to rape, it certainly can. In fact, the rules of seduction are such as to increase the likelihood of rape, as I have tried to show. But it is unhelpful to bring in questions of blame when one tries to understand a social institution. It is after all the nature of social institutions that all who participate in them are in some way bound by and subjected to their rules. Men no less than women. It just so happens – hello patriarchy – that women get the short end of the stick. And if anything, what I tried to show above is that both men and women have to break through their gender stereotypes if they want to change the rules of the game. Because an old institution, if it fulfills a required function, can only be eliminated by replacing it with a new institution able to fulfill that function and doing that requires cooperation.

American Greetings is dusting off another of its lines, the Care Bears, which will return with a fresh look this fall (less belly fat, longer eyelashes).

My interest piqued, I decided to investigate. That is to images.google it. I found two pictures and I would like you to play a round of “find the differences” with me, because I think they are quite telling and they really bring home something important.

Number 1 – Old Care Bears

Number 2 – New Care Bears

As a shorthand, I will call the old Care Bears OCB, the new Care Bears NCB
Observations about the OCBs:

• They all looked very similar, their only visual differences were the colors of their fur and the pictures on their belly.

• They show similar behavior and posture.
• They are obviously fuzzy, their whole appearance suggest a great deal of fur.
• They are rather round and big, with their torsos a bit bigger than their heads.

Would you have been able to tell which bears where male and which were female? Yes, the pink one is female and the blue one is male. The other two? Take your guess. I don’t know.
The NCBs on the other hand:

• Their appearances differ in several ways, all of which suggest one gendered stereotype or another. Most obvious are their accessories and haircuts.
  • The green male has a wild, adventurous hairdo, suggesting a certain tame rebelliousness.
  • The yellow male wears a baseball cap, classic symbol of working class masculinity. Also notice how he tips it up.
  • Both of the females have rosy cheeks and long eyelashes.
  • The pink female has a bow in her hair, tying it in some upward pointing ponytail.
  • The purple female has a handbag and her hair is less girlish and more mature, being tied not with a bow, but with some kind of hair band.
  • The blue male finally has neither accessories, nor an expressive haircut, but he is grumbling, while all the others are smiling.
• Their postures and behaviors are markedly different, too.
  • True to form, the sad NCB is sitting, thinking maybe. I guess thinking makes you grumble. He is also the only NCB looking at the viewer. One hopes that maybe the artist has put himself in there, looking at you, grumbling: “Yeah, I have to draw this stuff”.
  • The other two males are standing and appear active.
  • The yellow male is all cool. He has a certain swagger, just oozing certainty and self-esteem. He is looking at the pink female.
  • The green male shows more activity and less cool. He is almost jumping up, very energetic, raising his fist in a rather curious gesture. He also looking at the purple female.
  • Both females are sitting and appear passive. They are also physically closer to each other than the males are.
  • The pink female has a shy, girlish posture, supported on her arms, looking inviting. She also seems to be looking at the blue male.
  • The purple female is more ladylike. Her posture is not one of innocence and playfulness. She is more refined, less sexy than pink NCB. She is looking either at at pink NCB or at blue NCB.
• Also notice how the two most sexual NCBs (yellow and pink) are connected. Yellow is looking at pink NCB, but pink NCB is not looking back at him.
• The NCBs appear much less hairy. There are some suggestions that they do in fact have fur but far less than on the OCBs. Notice how the OCBs have “furriness wiggles” at every extremity and several times around their belly picture.
• Finally, the NCBs are much more slender. Their heads are recognizably larger than their torsos, their arms and legs are thinner and longer.

All in all, while the OCBs were just bears with an ideology of care, love and happiness, the NCB are walking social stereotypes in a very thin coat of fur. But most striking is how sharp the lines between the genders are drawn. The design leaves no doubt at all who is male and who is female.
It makes me wonder how this happens. Did the people who design this and the people who control them think this would sell better? Why did they think that? Is that just the normal way children’s cartoon characters look these days? Did they follow some subconscious socialized norm that it must always be clear who is who, in particular, who is boy and who is girl? Did they just rationally decided that this would sell, based on some evidence that’s not available to me? Is there someone out there with an agenda to reinforce gender stereotypes among children? Did this already reach German children’s programs?

Reading feminist and gender blogs has given me a better and broader perspective on matters of gender, but these two pictures have driven the whole point home. So, what is a philosopher to do? Think about it, I guess. And that’s what I will get back to you about later. For now, in case you didn’t known what genderstereotyping is, there you have it.

What is the difference? Do you feel that a) is somehow more convincing and that b) lacks that sense of justification that a) provides? I don’t. I think that the notion of achievement as justifying power is circular and self-defeating and the word serves as rhetorical tool to suggest a higher degree of legitimization. Think about this for a moment: How do you measure achievement?
By success, that is by the de facto possession of power. Achievement as a goal motivates an elaborate backstory about how those who possess power deserve to possess power. But the only way to judge whether or not someone is an achiever is by whether or not they possess power. All it does it distract you from seeing that what is really happening is saying that everyone who possess power deserves that power. But, you say, do individualists not think that the blood aristocracy did not deserve the power it held? They do. Therefore it is better to qualify that analysis: Everyone who possess power deserves that power if he lives in an individualized society. Therefore the power holding individualist is motivated to make his society as individualistic as possible, allowing him to justify his power.

How does that work? By setting up achievement as a goal for everyone and insisting that achievement can be reached by everyone, if only they make the right choices. To make this make sense requires the ideological conviction that in principle everyone can achieve and that only social pressures and the detrimental influence of the government and the unjustified, because unachieved, power of bureaucrats limit people. People therefore need to be empowered against the social forces and pressures that keep them from achieving. It is right here that individualism because anti-social. It aims to remove the person from his social network as a normative notion, the social world becomes an obstacle which needs to be overcome. In removing the social world as being what the person is integrated in and reinventing it as an obstacle for achievement, the ethics of individualism put a lot of pressure on the individual. Remember, everyone can achieve once social pressures and limitations are adequately removed. Thus, if you fail to achieve, that is either because you made the wrong choices or because some oppressive social force (like public health care) is keeping you back. This forms an interesting discursive dialectic of proclaiming that society is individualistic right now and therefore no one has an excuse not to achieve on the one hand and claiming that, no, people need to be empowered more on the other hand. And if there is a black president, being black is no excuse for not achieving anymore, if Bill Gates went from poor to being, well, Bill Gates, being poor is no excuse for not achieving any more. If someone can, anyone can. The only reason why you should accept that a person is richer and more powerful than you is because you could have been there, too. It’s equal opportunity!

The sociologist Robert Merton called anomie a situation where an individual would strive to attain the common goals of a specific society (here achievement) yet would not be able to reach these goals legitimately because of the structural limitations in society. I believe that individualization, with by its ideology of achievement and by placing the responsibility for success or failure within the individual via the choices she makes, clashes with the reality that people are not islands. They are always deeply integrated in social structures. They never move outside of the demands and limitations of it. The goal of total empowerment of the individual is an impossibility. No powerholder has acquired or manages to hold onto their power without the constant cooperation of others. Success is as much a measure of social environment and other people’s failure as it ascribable to personal achievement. We get to choose, but we do not get to decide. Each of our choices interacts with the world in myriads of ways, their results being in a very real sense more often than not out of our hands. We choose, the world decides. And more than that, how we choose is not up to us, but dependent on where we come from, what context we are in, how significant others choose. Just one example: People are more likely to marry, the more relevant others are already married.
And this is how the ethics of individualism are inherently anomic. They set achievement as a general goal and insist that it is attainable by all, through individual and personal strategic and economic choice, resulting in everyone being responsible for their own success and failure and in everyone who has succeeded being justified in their success. In this they misrepresent man as something that she is not. Because in fact people like Obama and Bill Gates are very rare exceptions for very real rules. Poverty, gender, race, family, place of birth, your 5th grade teacher, even the food you eat and many other things decide over success and failure. And these things paint very clear patterns of who gets what. And sometimes these things produce effects that lie outside these patterns. But that does not imply that the patterns are not there. So the common goal is unattainable for many, creating anomie. And often people realize that those factors exist and parent who can afford it spend hundreds of thousands of dollar on making their child an achiever. They know that the ideology is faulty, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t try to cheat by supporting someone who should make it “one his own”. But they stick to the normativity, they keep up the goal, because they deeply believe that achievement not only means, but also justifies success. And that is what you have to be. An achiever.

If you want a simple expression of all this, almost ready for a political slogan, here it is: Rich people lie to you that you, too could be rich, because it allows them to stay rich.
And that is just how societies work. Power is distributed and that distribution is then legitimized in order to produce stability. That is not the central point of this criticism. It is instead the particular mode of legitimization, the ethics of individualism, that I find problematic. Because they try to desocialize what needs to be social, the human person. They try to make us see ourselves and everyone else not as parts of a structure, as related, but as individualized and singular. And society, that is the other people out there are not with us, but against us. They are competition. Those who are above us, we should seek to emulate, venerate and overcome, those who are below deserve our scorn and to be ostracized, lest we should somehow get tainted by their failure.