College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits Read Online Free Page A

consequences of intercourse such as disease and pregnancy – how is responsibility to be attributed? These are the kinds of questions that most college students need to face early in their lives, and they need considered answers to them – something for which philosophy can be very helpful. 4
    There are also questions about professionals’ relations within the col- lege community, e.g., between students and their instructors. Are faculty- student sexual relationships wrong either morally or from the standpoint of institutional ethics? Do differences of age or gender have a bearing on this, or is it mainly an issue of whether the student is currently enrolled in that professor’s class, or might be in the future? Some feminist commenta- tors insist that such relations are necessarily exploitive, given the power imbalances, especially if the faculty member is a male and the student female, but others disagree. 5 And what about students who work outside the academic community in the sex industry, e.g., on computer websites or in strip clubs? Is this morally objectionable, even if it is done to pay for tuition, fees, and other expenses incurred as part of getting one’s education?
    Does using digital technology in more socially accepted ways also pose ethical issues for students’ romantic and sexual lives, e.g., meeting and communicating mainly or even exclusively over the Internet or cell phones? Moral philosophy, social philosophy, and the philosophy of technology can be very useful in finding reasonable answers.
    The essays in this book are divided into four units: Freshman Year: Hook Up Culture (experimentation, shame, and alienation), Sophomore Year: Friends with Benefits, JuniorYear: Ethics of College Sex, and Senior Year: Sex and Self-Respect. This structure loosely parallels Abraham Maslow’s (1908–70) “hierarchy of needs” – a psychological theory of motivation ranging from physical needs up to self-actualization. The themes of each unit progress as the social and intellectual skills of a col- lege student would as he developed through his college years. The first unit looks at initial experimentation, technology, and clothing, while the second unit deals with “friends with benefits relationships.” The third and fourth units revolve around more abstract ethical issues, characteris- tic of the changing and perhaps less egocentric perspective of upperclass- men. The fourth unit specifically accounts for self-respect and mutually respectful relationships, akin to Maslow’s “self-actualization.” At this stage, the freshman has journeyed through the wild space of college – experimenting with the different kinds of relationships and college cul- ture at hand – and has matured intellectually into a college graduate who understands the complexities of sexual respect and communication.
    The first unit deals with aspects of college culture, or hook-up culture , as some writers have called it. These essays explore the following: the motivations and risks of sexual experimentation, the way college dating and sexual practices are enmeshed in technologies like Facebook and text messaging, and how the clothing students wear can signal moral judgments.The first essay in this unit,“Sex and Socratic Experimentation” written by George T. Hole and Sisi Chen, describes an experiment given in one of Hole’s classes.The experiment explores ways students can make meaningful changes in their lives by reflecting philosophically on their life choices. Hole and Chen make this concrete by providing several examples in which students described the despair to which naïve experi- mentation led them and, remarkably, how they used philosophical meth- odology to recover a sense of self based on reflective thinking and action. These examples are intriguing because they show how philosophy can positively impact one’s life.
    One of the sexual clichés that runs rampant is that college students, particularly females, will