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PerseusWizardry  2yr ago (text post)   3914 thread views

Does my Philosophy of Sexuality Professor Have a Point? (It's a mandatory gen-ed)

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This whole thing is a dumpster fire as far as I'm concerned. I can formulate arguments against any part of this, but I don't want to go on a 4,000 word rant. For starters the premises are all non-self-evident and IMO highly objectionable, and I consider it intellectually dishonest to smuggle contentious arguments into your axioms. But whatever, premises are premises. If I was in the class, I'd ask the professor how far she's willing to go with Conclusion B. Are we obligated to date Down Syndrome folks? People born without limbs? Ugly people? Ugly people with Down Syndrome born without limbs? Has your professor personally randomized her dating experience so as to include all of these categories?

Also, Premise 1 is ambiguous. What does 'discrimination' exactly mean, in this context? If there's a black person that I don't want to be friends with, how can one say that their race is the reason for the preference? Maybe they have other negative characteristics that I don't like: they're stupid, or uneducated, or mean, or aggressively racist, or they have bad hygiene and smell. Am I required to be friends with them? If so, why? Do you think it's honest to pretend to like someone that you really dislike? How would you feel if you learned that all of your 'friends' actually detested you but were forcing themselves to interact with you in order to satisfy some sort of racial quota? Is that a world you'd want to live in?

I'd also love to hear her take on how Premise 2 interacts with her presumably very tolerant view towards kink/sexual orientation. I assume there's a very strong theme of 'everyone should be able to live their sexual truth without shame' or whatever. Well, what if your sexual attraction is towards your own race? Why is that forbidden? This all sounds very much like an ironic inversion of the 50's sexual-taboo worldview that modern notions of liberation were specifically designed to rebel against.

I could go on. Feel free to ask if you want more. Again, this class sounds like an absolute dumpster fire. If it was me, I'd get as far away from both it and the institution as quickly as I could. If you don't mind saying, what college to you go to?

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