The Ethical Significance of Being an Erotic Object

Abstract

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.

Intimate Exposure: A Feminist Phenomenology of Sexual Experience and Sexual Suppression

“…14 Anderson explicates this point in her discussion of "operative intentionality" (Anderson 2022, 10). 15 That does not rule out the possibility that, as argues, it can be deeply pleasurable for us to be taken or to take someone else as a body or a "sex object" (Cahill 2011, xii; see also Anderson and Ward 2022). 16 See Burke 2017 for a discussion of love as a hollow.…”

“…My discussion of the ambiguities of materiality and meaning and of self and other is related to the first three, though I would argue that the weight of the ambiguity between self and other is better registered by leaving the terms "subject" and "object" behind. See also Caleb Ward and Anderson's phenomenological discussion of the self as "erotic object" (Anderson and Ward 2022). 10 As Judith Butler observes, "the 'I' who sees is in some sense abandoned to the visible world, decentered in that world .…”

“…Following contemporary philosophers, I will argue that we cannot presume that we experience sexual interaction as fundamentally separate beings, or that sexual violation and oppression are effectively opposed by the assertion of bodily independence (see Diprose 2002;Salamon 2010;Cahill 2011;Alcoff 2018;and Anderson 2022). If new possibilities for existing, as Rosalyn Diprose suggests, are open to me through the ambiguity of bodily existence, then freedom is compromised rather than guaranteed by keeping my body to myself (Diprose 2002, 54).…”

A Phenomenological Approach to Sexual Consent

“…"The self," Diprose (2002, 69) writes, with reference to Merleau-Ponty, "is a lived body ambiguously caught between subject and object, inhabiting the world of the other's body even with a lived distance between the two." Erotic experiences in particular individuate the self by giving the body to itself both as a subjective site of desire and pleasure, and as an erotic object for the other (Ward and Anderson 2022). The subject-object distinction lived in erotic experience is a fluid phenomenal distinction, not an ontological dichotomy.…”