May 10th, 2013 by JasonStotts
by Jason Stotts
Diana Hsieh recently did a really great job discussing the issues surrounding abortion and parental consent. These are complicated issues and Diana does a great job cutting to their core. I recommend you take a listen:
Should minor girls be required by law to obtain parental consent for an abortion? Normally, parents are legally empowered to make medical decisions for their minor children, and minors cannot obtain medical procedures without parental consent. How should that apply in the case of pregnancy? Should pregnancy and abortion be treated differently from other medical conditions? Should parents be allowed by law to force a daughter under 18 to carry a pregnancy to term or to abort against her will? [LINK]
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April 30th, 2013 by JasonStotts
by Jason Stotts
The deadline for CatalystCon West speaker submissions is coming up soon and I’m planning on attending after hearing so many good things about the prior Catalystcons. However, I need some feedback on my proposal. I feel like it’s just a little off and needs some fine-tuning. Take a look at it and if you have any suggestions, let me know!
Requirements http://catalystcon.com/call-for-speakers/
Speakers should prepare for sessions that run an hour and ten minutes, including at least 20 minutes of open discussion. Panel submissions should consist of no more than four speakers (including a moderator, if applicable) and all speakers for panel sessions must be confirmed prior to submission.
Speaker submissions should be sent in plain text in the body of your email. Email all submissions to: CatalystConSubmissions@gmail.com.
Session description: (250 word max)
Speaker Information
Name: Jason Stotts
Email: Jason(at)JasonStotts.com
URL: www.JasonStotts.com
Facebook: www.Facebook.com/ErosophiaBlog
Twitter: @jstotts
Bio: (200 word max)
Photo (300-500px wide)
Prior Conferences:
- Conference of the Atlanta Objectivist Society (ATLOSCon): 2012, 2011
- Chicago Objectivist Society Conference (COSCon): 2011
- University of Northern Florida Philosophy Conference: 2006
AV requirements: None.
Session Information
Title of Session: Reclaiming the Sexual Moral Narrative
The war against sex rages on with fundamentalist christians on the offensive and us on the defensive, against the ropes. But, it doesn’t have to be this way. The weapon they are using against us, against which we have no defense is morality: they have claimed the moral high-ground and we are defenseless without it. Consequently, in the field of sexual ethics, we see nothing but a bleak landscape: prohibitions against this and condemnations about that. But, isn’t there more? Couldn’t sexual ethics actually tell us how to incorporate sex into our lives in a healthy way that serves to improve our lives? It can and it should. Moreover, it was our ceding of the moral high ground to the anti-sex side that weakened our position and forced us to always argue on the defensive. By reclaiming the moral narrative, we can not only have better sex lives, but we can help to reclaim sexual ethics from those who hate the body and our enjoyment of it. We can, in one fell swoop, improve our lives and put the arguments about sex back on fundamental principles.
In this talk I’m going to lay out what a philanthropic (pro-human) sexual ethic looks like and show how this foundation can restructure the field. I will also show how restructuring the arguments in different fields of sexual ethics can take us from being on the defensive to making real headway in the culture. We may not be able to “win” against pundits who would never change their minds anyway, but if we can change the culture, it doesn’t matter. We will have won what we really wanted: a world where sex is a real value in human life.
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April 28th, 2013 by JasonStotts
by Jason Stotts
I’ll be attending this event on Thursday and you should come check it out if you’re in the Temecula area.
I Am Not A Christian So Why Do I Act Like One?
by Darrel Ray author of Sex & God
Thursday, May 2, 2013 7:00 PM
Why do non-believers continue to behave like Christians when it comes to their sexual beliefs?
Darrel Ray, author of Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality, will tell us how and why non-believers continue to think and behave like Christians when it comes to sexuality.
I saw Darrel speak a couple of years ago when his book The God Virus had just come out. It’s a pretty good book and definitely a good metaphor, even if I think the metaphor is a little stretched in places. Either way, Darrel is a good speaker and it should be a really interesting talk!
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April 24th, 2013 by JasonStotts
by Jason Stotts
When I first started studying philosophy, I was surprised at how committed I was to beliefs that I had never really considered. In fact, I seemed to be trapped in a web of ideas that I had obtained through the culture through a kind of mental osmosis. I was committed to this and that, but had never considered the issues and whether I was right to be so committed. Now, some of the beliefs I stayed committed to after reflection, like my beliefs in the sovereignty of the individual, the value of capitalism, and the ethics of egoism. With these views, I came to understand them at a much better level and in a clearer way. I no longer believed them merely because I had believed them at one time, I had reasons for my beliefs and arguments to support them.
Other beliefs, I shed completely. I was never a religious person: I had always questioned the existence of any sort of god, but I still thought that there was a possibility that there might be one. Moreover, I thought of religion as a benevolent force and as something that, while I didn’t participate in it, was a force for good in the world. This, obviously, I have seen past to the true nature of misanthropic nature of religion (especially the Abrahamic religions).
Another belief that I used to hold, and which may surprise some of my readers, is that there was something wrong with “the homosexuals.” I didn’t know many gay people growing up and had this vague idea that they were somehow “broken” in some way. Of course, how could I not think this, since they were living in a violation of nature and flatly flaunting the biological functions of their bodies? Yet, once I learned even just a little about human anatomy and psychology, I quickly realized how silly and ignorant homophobia really is.
Unfortunately, few people ever question their beliefs and I think one reason is that they are afraid to see how little justification they really had for them to begin with and how ignorantly they had actually been living their lives. However, ignorance (lacking knowledge) is not necessarily a moral failure. While there are some things that a person can reasonably be expected to know, and evasion of things that one should know is a moral failure, one cannot be expected to know everything. The moral obligation a person does have is to be constantly learning and growing as a person and to not evade looking into issues that will impact their lives.
I preamble like this to set the context for this: one of my major realizations as I started to study sex in a serious way was how little I actually knew about it. The more I learn about sex, the more I realize I didn’t know and how much of what I did “know” was actually just wrong. Not only that, but my thinking about sex was locked into our cultural assumptions and a very definite conception about what sex is and should be.
I think the ignorance that surrounds sex is absolutely astounding. People tend to think that the way we think about and view sex here in our culture and time is the way it’s always been and the way it has to be. That’s just silly. For example, did you know that:
- In ancient Greece, males were the symbols of beauty and females were not?
- There are cultures where the family name passes through the female line, because any child of the woman is definitely in the genetic family whereas a child of a man may or may not be (this solves the problem of lineage).
- Biologically our bodies evolved to be polysexual (non-monogamous) and the evidence for this is overwhelming (cf: the coronal ridge of the human penis, the size of the human testicles, the different functions of sperm, the cervical crypts in the vagina, the signaling function of breasts, etc).
- Men who do not orgasm frequently enough are much more likely to die of prostate cancer?
- Men have not always been the more sexually aggressive sex? In some cultures (including our own), women were the more sexually active sex and the sexual aggressors.
- That in ancient Greece, a man who only had sex with women or only had attractions to women would have been a cultural outcast?
I think that people who don’t consider sex from a broader perspective are simply being ridiculous. How can you claim any sort of legitimacy about a sexual position when all you understand is your own culture in your own time and place?
Consider this article by Alyssa Goldstein “When Women Wanted Sex Much More Than Men: And how the stereotype flipped.“
In the 1600s, a man named James Mattock was expelled from the First Church of Boston. His crime? It wasn’t using lewd language or smiling on the sabbath or anything else that we might think the Puritans had disapproved of. Rather, James Mattock had refused to have sex with his wife for two years. Though Mattock’s community clearly saw his self-deprivation as improper, it is quite possible that they had his wife’s suffering in mind when they decided to shun him. The Puritans believed that sexual desire was a normal and natural part of human life for both men and women (as long as it was heterosexual and confined to marriage), but that women wanted and needed sex more than men. A man could choose to give up sex with relatively little trouble, but for a woman to be so deprived would be much more difficult for her.
It’s a short overview of some of the ways in which our Western views about the nature of sexuality have changed in the last couple of hundred years. There are lots of books about this kind of thing like Sex at Dawn. There are also lots of books about changes in human physiology and cultures like Sperm Wars, Dover’s Greek Homosexuality, etc.
The problem, though, is that people who are woefully ignorant of sex, nonetheless feel entitled to talk at great length about it as though they were experts. These people often can’t name the parts of the body involved in sex and don’t even understand basic bodily functions like reproduction (like those idiot christians who think that a woman who is raped can’t get pregnant, because their god would never go down into that tainted uterus to deliver a soul). Nevertheless, these ignorant people feel entitled to opine about the morality of sex.
Morality does not come from an imaginary sky-friend. Morality is about helping people live the best kinds of life open to them and this involves understanding human nature and the facts surrounding it. Unless someone understands the physiology of sex, the psychology of sex, the history of sex, and even the philosophical implications of sex, then they shouldn’t be trying to construct a system of sexual ethics. Yet, this is precisely what is going on. These…”experts” can’t even understand their own urges and bodies and yet, try to tell us how to live our lives. They can’t understand that sex has changed throughout the ages and think it has always been the same. Their ignorance leads them to have a particularly pernicious kind of myopia where they can’t see that their simple-minded views are not necessarily true.
The point I’m trying to get at is that ignorance, not knowing things, leads you to not see the broader picture as you often cannot see what you don’t understand. In sex, this is particularly problematic as people try to reason from the way things are right now to human nature and try to posit immutable laws on little to no evidence. This is just completely intolerable.
So, ward yourself against the myopia from ignorance by trying to learn as much as you can and challenging your beliefs and making sure you understand the reasons why you believe things. Especially with regards to sex. Just because things are a certain way in our culture right now does not mean they have always been this way or that this is the best way to live. You need to look at sex throughout time and different places and then decide what works best in your life.
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April 13th, 2013 by JasonStotts
In this episode of the newly relaunched Erosophia Podcast, Jason, William, Devin, and Joia talk about same-sex marriage.
News
1. Herpes Strikes Two More Infants After Ritual Circumcision
2. Judge orders morning-after pill available without prescription
3. Bet You Can’t Tell The Difference Between These Actual Anti-Interracial And Anti-Gay Marriage Quotes
4. Introducing the Condom of the Future
5. Kansas and Anti-Abortion Legislation
Questions
No questions this episode.
If you want to ask a question, contact us at Podcast@JasonStotts.com, on twitter via @ErosPod, on this page here on Erosophia, or via our Facebook page.
A question for you: do you want a “sex tips” feature in the podcast?
Tonight’s Topic: Same-Sex Marriage
For a thorough debunking of the sadly terrible arguments against gay marriage, check out episode #205 of Diana Hsieh’s Philosophy in Action podcast.
Our take away from this podcast: gays are real people with real rights who should be able to marry just like anyone else.
Subscribe to the Podcast
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If you want to advertise on the Erosophia Podcast, please contact us at Jason@JasonStotts.com or on twitter via @ErosPod.
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April 4th, 2013 by JasonStotts
by Jason Stotts
I recently started reading Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (if you don’t know who he is, he’s very important for sexual theory; see the wikipedia article linked). So far, I’m greatly enjoying them and I’ve only just begun! In fact, I think I may love Ellis. Here’s some of my favorite quotes so far:
- A resolve slowly grew up within me: one main part of my life-work should be to make clear the problems of sex.
- As a youth, I had hoped to settle problems for those who came after; now I am quietly content if I do little more than state them. For even that, I now think, is much; it is at least the half of knowledge. In this particular field the evil of ignorance is magnified by our efforts to suppress that which never can be suppressed, though in the effort of suppression it may become perverted.
- Let my friends try to transfer their feelings and theories from the reproductive region to, let us say, the nutritive region, the only other which can be compared to it for importance. Suppose that eating and drinking was never spoken of openly, save in veiled or poetic language, and that no one ever ate food publicly, because it was considered immoral and immodest to reveal the mysteries of this natural function. We know what would occur.
Amazon has all of Ellis’s Studies in the Kindle edition for free right now, so hurry up and get them!
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1: The Evolution of Modesty; The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-Erotism
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2: Sexual Inversion
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4: Sexual Selection In Man
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5: Erotic Symbolism; The Mechanism of Detumescence; The Psychic State in Pregnancy
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to Society
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April 4th, 2013 by JasonStotts
by Jason Stotts
I was interviewed by the Radically Candid Podcast again recently and the show is now up!
As is always the case with Radically Candid, we talked about a lot of different topics, but we primarily talked about polysexuality and various issues as related to it. It was a lot of fun recording and there’s some interesting info in it. Head over to Radically Candid to check it out!
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April 4th, 2013 by JasonStotts
by Jason Stotts
Summary: Our language related to sex must be expanded to capture all of the variations that we see in real life. And we need to understand this because sex is good and a valuable part of a human life. The way we structure our relationships and sex lives has a lot of optionality that depends on the people in the relationship and can include multiple loving relationships or multiple sexual relationships, the right way for any particular couple may not be monosexual monoamory, and this would be fine because polysexuality and polyamory are natural and can be perfectly moral choices. As long as we observe some simple guidelines, leaving societally structured relationships and constructing our own can help us to live the best kind of lives possible.
Continue reading ‘On Polysexuality (Revised)’
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