Over before it began

Should Princeton’s student body engage in a more thorough discussion of our sexual values? Yes, suggested Audrey Pollnow in her column last Thursday. “Victorian as it may seem to speak of morality in public,” she wrote, “our sexual decision-making is a striking example and one that merits more discussion.”

I believe strongly in the importance of philosophically justifying one’s actions and beliefs, so I’m willing to start the conversation.

Yet I am skeptical that there is much that can be said universally about sexual ethics. Many claim that sex has the natural purpose of procreation, and thus all non-procreative sex is unacceptable. Yet cancer, rape and war certainly seem more natural parts of the human experience than marriage for love or disease control, if we look to history.

Can sex, the product of an evolution spanning all the way back to asexual mitosis, really be said to have a purpose? It is certainly not obvious that either definition or purpose apply.

I don’t intend to give either of these points the full treatment they deserve; let’s just remember that basing ethics in nature is so generally counterintuitive in these times that philosophers named the naturalistic fallacy after it, and Robert George is a professor in the politics department.

Statistics such as the ones Pollnow cites are equally unhelpful in justifying a priori rules. If unhappiness and dissatisfaction measured empirically are what makes an action wrong, then deriving pleasure from it in a particular case would make it right. As in the case of marrying for money, the same action taken for different reasons may produce different levels of happiness, making this approach unfruitful.

Sure, there may be things that can be said about sex in the negative. Rape and sexual abuse are certainly wrong — not necessarily because sex is, but rather because violence and coercion are. Unsafe sex is certainly bad, but in the same way not washing your hands is. It is probably wrong for people in positions of authority, such as campus Outdoor Action leaders to be involved with their charges, but this has more to do with exploitation and the importance of equal power dynamics in relationships than sex.

These issues are of great importance, and the University is right to sponsor it through initiatives like Sex on A Saturday Night. However, none of these domains fall into the category of general moral knowledge about sex itself.

I’m sympathetic to Pollnow’s general appeal for discourse, but a few of her points are troubling. In order to impress upon her reader how his or her individual sexual choices affect, and thus are the business of the Princeton community, Pollnow uses two dubious arguments.

First, she claims, our actions and programs such as Sex on A Saturday Night contribute to a culture that “expects freshman women to return drunk to the dorms of their dates” and thus “has put them at a greater risk of date rape.” This is a stretch. Sex on A Saturday Night follows the various romantic choices of four couples, one of which ends in date rape. Does anyone actually think the University’s performance of a practice constitutes condoning it?

Perhaps Pollnow thinks impressionable students will be influenced by the example of the girl who drank excessively to impress a date and ended up being taken home and abused.

Yet I find it far more likely that students will be influenced by the example of the second female lead. After having what she considered to be a rewarding romantic experience on the Street, this girl turns down sex, and when pressured, reacts quite appropriately with a resounding dismissal.

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The message of the play is clear: Only you get to make your choices at Princeton. Not the University. Not the “culture.” Just you.

But what if, hypothesizes Pollnow, “the average man on campus refused to publicly date a woman unless she’d (consensually) pandered to his most dehumanizing (but legal) fetishes”? Could the degeneracy of our culture force women to choose between “dating and dignity”?

Please. I’ll shed a tear for the poor moral fundamentalists whose dating pool I shrink with my personal decisions. Until she provides justification for why only a particular type of sex is natural, throwing around words like “dehumanizing” for consensual sex acts only justifies her society’s reputation for prudishness. I can’t provide a rigorous philosophical justification for getting tied up by a doting beau, but Pollnow certainly can’t and hasn’t done the opposite.

The University and our community can do a lot through dialogue to help people know what they should avoid: coercion and pressure, violence and abuse. Yet when it comes to right choices, right people and right times, I am incredibly skeptical about the usefulness of campus dialogue. To make these decisions, there aren’t any useful rules. The best any of us can do is apply general values, such as honesty and empathy, to our lives and particular choices, and to make sure our motivations are good.

These conversations, again, already exist. They take place between friends sharing each other’s confidences and asking for advice. I commend the University for doing all it can to alert us to the important general issues of sexual safety and relationship violence. Yet when it comes to our personal sexual ethics, our campus conversation is more effectively held in private than on the Opinion page of the Daily Princetonian.

Allen Paltrow is a sophomore from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at apaltrow@princeton.edu.