Search Results

This chapter evaluates alternate expressions of sexual activity, such as pornography and oral and anal sex. It explores in some detail the preference for replacing vaginal sexual intercourse with forms of sexual expression less threatening to future prospects for material success. It concludes that there is evidence of an emerging middle-class sexual morality among some American teenagers.

Humans are subject to four kinds of moral obligation: necessary obligations, obligations necessary unless God dispenses us from them, obligations imposed by God on all humans, and obligations imposed by God on some humans. God's reasons for imposing an obligation may be either to coordinate the performance of our obligations, or to get us to engage in acts which otherwise would be only supererogatory in order to make us naturally very good people. This chapter examines some of the currently controversial claims of traditional Christian morality (about sexual matters, abortion, and the ordination of women) and some claims controversial in the past (about usury and slavery). It argues that in general, they are either necessary truths or such as God had some reason to make obligatory (at least for past generations). Hence, it is plausible to suppose that in general these traditional claims are revealed truths.

This chapter examines three of the most influential defenses of marriage; each holds that marriage is the sole permissible context for sex and the unique context for achieving certain goods. Kant held that marriage morally transforms sexual objectification, thereby making procreation morally possible. Natural law accounts argue that basic human goods of procreation and marital friendship can only be attained through marriage. Roger Scruton argues that marriage enables virtuous erotic love, which is an essential contributor to human flourishing;. These three accounts, which attribute to marriage a unique transformative role, share a failing: entry into a legal institution does not effect, nor is it required for, the psychological transformation which virtues require. Basic goods and virtues can exist outside marriage, as in unmarried relationships. Furthermore, unqualified attributions of value to marriage fail to recognize the variability of real marriages and ignore their vices.

This book aims to resolve an important philosophical and historical problem about the making of sexual morality in Western culture. There are three main reasons why many scholars emphasize apparent connections between Greek moral philosophy and Christian sexual morality at the expense of the disparities. The work directly complements the social history of early Christian sexual asceticism and related didactic ideology. It examines the arguments that Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans offer to support their respective conceptions of justifiable and unjustifiable sexual conduct. The book also focuses on the Septuagint's sexual laws and on the normative sexual poetics of the Pentateuch and Prophets. It then demonstrates how the Greek philosophical and biblical sexual principles are reworked in three very different sectors of patristic Christian thought: the sexually encratite, the proto-orthodox, and the more libertine positions. The problems with fornication are described.

This chapter discusses how a constitution ordered to public reason understood as dialogic community would resolve the tension between the individual's right of self-authorship, on the one hand, and moral norms governing sex and the family, on the other. It contrasts the medieval teleological framework for regulating sexual and familial relationships with Kant's deontological reinterpretation of sexual morality. It discusses Hegel's revision of the medieval teleology of sex so as to accommodate the right of self-authorship. The chapter argues that the new constitutional paradigm can justify to liberals the regulation of pornography, prostitution, and abortion. It proposes a teleological understanding of sexual morality that can approve of same-sex marriage, while disapproving of polygamy and incest even when these relations are consensual and harmless.

This chapter discusses the argument that although one should reject the sexual teachings of the new natural law, he/she should also have something to learn from it. The discussion presented in this chapter also includes a section where a larger point is made about liberalism.

This chapter addresses the conversion of whore culture into the Lord's veiled bride. The metaphor of spiritual fornication informs what it means to identify women as “harlots” or “whores” in the Septuagint. The biblical figure of the whore is an integral and potent feature of the Septuagint metaphor of spiritual fornication. Paul's use of the biblical harlot stereotype is discussed. The metaphor of spiritual adultery in the Prophets offers a more emotively forceful approach to inculcating the norm of biblical monotheism. The sexually possessive message of the Prophets' metaphor had a profound impact on Paul, who transformed the breadth and sexual specificity of the teaching in his development of Christian sexual morality. The Prophets shape Paul's view that God's people are a collective feminine entity whose greatest glory is to be joined in holy matrimony with God as supreme male deity.

The chapter discusses in some detail the changes in legislation and legal practice in regard to fornication and premarital sex. It looks at the economic and social situation of those women who were most likely to be punished for fornication, and examines how women defended ‘sexual honour’ or appropriated the image of the ‘desirous female’ to challenge male authority. In the early modern period, the fantasy of the desirous woman constituted a threat for two reasons. She challenged an order founded on parentally approved marriages of social equals ready to form their own households. She also tempted men into sin, which questioned their self-control and thus the legitimacy of male dominance over women. This, of course, was intolerable, and thus one function of the law was to exclude those women from society who took up the role of the desirous female.

This chapter explores how Third Reich romance melodramas attempted to form spectator desires to the benefit of Nazi imperialist aims. Nazi romance films positioned Third Reich culture as a liberation from nineteenth-century sexual morality while encouraging female participation in the public sphere in preparation for a war economy. The sexual content of Nazi films was furthermore calculated to exceed that of Hollywood in an attempt to make Nazi rule appear more attractive to German, occupied, and neutral audiences. And contrary to the assumptions that the Nazis attempted to desexualize the cinema, historical evidence shows that the erotic attractions of female performers were explicitly used in order to suppress political critique. Yet the “woman question” continually threatened to interfere with the propaganda minister's instrumentalization of the female body, and Nazi cinema's deployment of the erotic sometimes backfired.

This chapter discusses the influence of Freethought in the development of first-wave feminism, focusing on debates over marriage, birth control and sexual morality. It examines the tensions between feminism, Free Love and Freethought while showing that, despite these tensions, Freethought provided an intellectual framework in which it was possible to envisage a more radical transformation of heterosexual relations than the rest of the women's movement was willing to imagine. The Freethought renunciation of Christianity necessarily entailed a rejection of the moral authority of the Church, particularly its role in legitimising sexual relations. Secularists were therefore required to find a new basis for morality.

Epiphanes and Clement think their respective views of sexual morality and social order reflect the true spirit of Christianity. In this chapter, the historical significance of the disputation for shaping ecclesiastical sexual principles is first introduced. Epiphanes and Clement, despite their differences in sexual morality, concur on some religious and social norms that inform their disputation. However, in spite of their shared assumptions about God, his creation, and his plan for human beings, they differ markedly in the sexual norms that they each think are divinely mandated. Epiphanes's and Clement's dispute about the worth of innate sexual desire illustrates the divergent influence that Plato had on patristic interpretations of Greek biblical sexual norms. Epiphanes's paradigm failed and came to be grossly misrepresented as sheer lechery by Clement. Epiphanes challenged biblical sexual norms directly.

Literary works of both major and minor writers such as Yu Dafu, Ye Dingluo, Guo Moruo, Huang Shenzhi, and Ye Lingfend represent intimate relations between men during the 1920s and the 1930s. Historians and literary critics from China and the United States have largely ignored writings on male same-sex relations. It is, however, important that these writings be restored since these account for a period in modern Chinese history in which male same-sex love encouraged different social ideas and enabled the development of different meanings of homosexuality. Along with the protest against arranged marriage, male same-sex love challenged sexual and social morality constraints. These concepts were either viewed as a foundation for a utopian vision, or as an evil practice. Literary writers were also able to express their sadness towards the Chinese empire's decline through male same-sex love's ephemeral quality.

This chapter accounts for the scientific construction of male homosexuality from the 1950s through the 1970s in Taiwan. In delineating a normative culture of sex established by the nascent ‘psy’ industry, it demonstrates how The Man Who Escapes Marriage (1976), Taiwan's first ‘homosexual’ popular novel, emerged as a product of the mental hygiene movement. Enabled by the American Psychiatric Association's 1973 decision to depathologise homosexuality as mental illness, The Man represents, this chapter argues, a limiting case whereby the legitimation of homosexual desire is made through the author's appeal to the virtue of moral rectitude.

This chapter examines sexual revolution from a feminist perspective, with particular emphasis on how sexual morality in a patriarchal culture becomes a primary instrument of social control. It considers the debate between feminist sexual radicals and conservatives concerning a wide range of sex-related issues, including pornography, the definition of sexual consent, the nature of women’s sexuality and whether it is intrinsically different from men’s, and the meaning of heterosexuality for women. It also explores how each of these issues became a focus of deeply felt disagreement over the place of sexuality and sexual morality in a feminist analysis and program, arguing that they raise the question of whether sexual freedom is a feminist value, or whether feminism ought rather to aim at replacing male-defined social controls over sex with female-defined controls.

This chapter responds to the chapters by Christopher Tollefsen and Edwin Cameron. Although both authors argue from an understanding of human dignity in which the obligation to respect dignity is an obligation to favour the integral flourishing of the human person, the chapters are seen as offering deeply opposed and irreconcilable positions on central issues pertaining to sexual morality and marriage. The authors differ so fundamentally precisely because they have such profound differences about what constitutes and promotes the flourishing of human persons when it comes to sexuality and the choices people face and make in which sexual desire and judgements about what is intrinsically good and bad and right and wrong crucially figure. These differences reflect competing conceptions of the nature of the human person—that being whose integral good should be respected and favoured in all of our choosing and acting if, as both Professor Tollefsen and Justice Cameron believe, we have an obligation to honour human dignity.