Contemporary philosophical discussions of sexual ethics focus heavily on questions of autonomy, agency, and the moral power of consent. Since the late 1980s, moral and legal theorists have debated the conditions of moral validity for sexual consent, while feminist social and legal theorists have for even longer criticized social practices and institutional structures that undermine the agency of women to steer their sexual lives. Common across these discussions is the hope that respect for another's freedom, autonomy, or will can prevent the harm of objectification, that is, treating another merely as a sexual object or means. The task of sexual ethics, on the conventional view, becomes reconciling one's grasp of another as an object of erotic desire with the moral authority of their subjectivity. This generally involves placing their subjectivity above their status as object, so as to avoid the danger of objectification. However, we are always both subject and object in our encounters with others. As a result, theorists disregard essential, morally relevant features of intimacy when they locate the moral significance of another only in their active subjectivity. In this chapter, we argue for a methodological adjustment to sexual ethics that widens the narrow focus on freedom, autonomy, and agency to address the moral significance of being an erotic object as well. Drawing on phenomenology, particularly the insights of Simone de Beauvoir, we propose an approach that recognizes a constitutive ambiguity between the freedom appropriate to subjectivity and the phenomenon of being an erotic object in intimate encounters. While we are committed to the Preproof.
The ethics of reciprocity offered by Simone de Beauvoir is founded upon an irreducible epistemic gap between self and other. This gap is often overlooked by commentators, who have tended to imply that the ethics of reciprocity requires recognition of oneself in the other. I claim that Beauvoir's ethics forecloses such recognition of oneself in the other and reveals that it is at once illusory and dangerous. Recognition in this sense is based upon a false notion of self and constitutes a violation of the alterity of the other. I argue that Beauvoir stages this dangerous form of recognition in her novel She Came to Stay, while her claims about reciprocity in The Second Sex provide an image of a different, more positive recognition capable of respecting alterity. Finally, I claim that the epistemic gap characteristic of reciprocity also holds with respect to one's self-relation.
Eros is often considered to be a desire or inclination for what is irreducibly other to the self. This view is particularly prominent among philosophers who reject a “fusion” model of erotic love in favor of one that foregrounds the difference between lovers. Drawing from this “difference” model, I argue in this essay that autoeroticism is a genuine form of Eros, even when Eros is understood to involve irreducible alterity. I claim that the autoerotic act is not adequately captured by traditional views of masturbation, where it is seen as distinct from the erotic encounter with another being. Instead, I employ Derrida and Irigaray to argue that the autoerotic act is auto-hetero-erotic, which depends on a view of the self as self-othering and heterogeneous.
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