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"Any society concerned with fairness must try to decide what general structures or modes of treatment, applied to persons who differ greatly one from another, will qualify morally as a form of equal treatment, or at least not egregiously unequal treatment. In some cases, such as the vote, identical treatment will do. In other cases, such as taxation or maternity leave, it clearly will not...
In the face of such a problem, there almost inevitably develops an opposition between liberal and radical approaches. Liberals attempt to discover a way of taking the differences into account in the design of fair institutions without hoping to transcend the differences themselves, because they are considered part of that human complexity and diversity that cannot be abolished without tyranny. Radicals are more optimistic about eliminating the source of the problem, root and branch, persuaded that differences that many find natural or inevitable are really the social product of temporary conditions, to be transformed by a revolution in conventions, mores, or human self-understanding. The conflict within feminism between liberals and radicals is an example of this classic problem...
[Nussbaum] says that Dworkin should have been “more circumspect” in her rhetoric to avoid giving the impression that she thinks all heterosexual intercourse is rape:
Examining her rhetoric with care, one may discern a far more plausible and interesting thesis: that the sexualization of dominance and submission, and the perpetuation of these structures through unequal laws (such as the failure to criminalize marital rape or to prosecute domestic violence effectively), have so pervasively infected the development of desire in our society that “you cannot separate the so-called abuses of women from the so-called normal uses of women.” This sentence certainly does not say that all acts of intercourse are abuses. It does say that the dominant paradigms of the normal are themselves culpable, so we can’t simply write off the acts of rapists and batterers by saying that they are “abnormal.” Gendered violence is too deep in our entire culture. (p. 245)
It is not perfectly clear what Nussbaum is saying, but she seems to be endorsing the claim that rape and battery are just fuller and franker expressions of the feelings present at the core of most heterosexual relations in our society.
MacKinnon and Dworkin have gotten a lot of mileage out of this charge... Anyone who does not flee from self-awareness knows that the inner life is a jungle, most of it never expressed. Apparently some women and some men are aroused by fantasies of rape and degradation, and there is pornography addressed to such fantasies, but it is simple-minded to regard this as a matter for societal concern.
The socially important features of sexual consciousness are more mainstream and closer to the surface... to overcome the maltreatment of women and the refusal to take them seriously it shouldn’t be necessary to attack all asymmetries in the sexual relation as infections of “dominance.”
Nussbaum has a lengthy discussion of the charge of “objectification,” in ‘which she comes down finally in favor of D. H. Lawrence’s way of seeing women as sex objects and against Playboy’s: “One cannot even imagine Mellors boasting in the locker room of the ‘hot number’ he had the previous night, or regarding the tits and ass or the sexual behavior of Connie as items of display in the male world.” This is rather high-minded, and uncharitable to the readers of Playboy, whose drooling over the centerfold need not be incompatible with treating women with respect and, even more important, with regarding the sexual desire and sexual behavior of women without contempt. Women’s bodies are great erotic vessels, and there is nothing wrong with erotic art that displays them as such and arouses the physical imagination...
Certainly the appeal to many women of Dworkin’s and MacKinnon’s violent images reveals something—if only that there is a great deal of sexual unhappiness out there. But as Nussbaum observes, one kind of sexual objectification, the surrender of autonomy and control during sex, can be personally and sexually fulfilling for women. Sexual dismantlement drives us all, men and women alike, deeper into our bodies and thereby reunifles the multiple layers from most to least civilized.
The mere fact that sexual desire and sexual relations are socially shaped does not mean that they have to be infected with injustice. Other natural appetites, for food and drink, are subject to elaborate, socially created forms of expression and fulfillment without carrying much of a message, except when they become vehicles for conspicuous consumption. Of course, sex is a relation bctween people and more likely to be entangled with their other relations. Yet sexual feelings are powerful enough to determine a good deal in their own right, whatever the social setting. It is not a mere convention that men and women are anatomically and sexually different and that in sexual intercourse these differences are imaginatively and physically expressed and acted out. Social structures can reach deep into the core of the self, but they usually do not replace it—certainly not in the case of anything as fundamental and powerful as sexuality...
The datum that convinces me that social construction is relatively powerless over sexual desire is the unquenchable survival of homosexuality in the face of the most severe repression and public obloquy. Nussbaum is sensibly skeptical about the social explanation of basic sexual orientation, invoking “the feeling of determination and constraint that is such a common feature of self-reports concerning homosexuality in our society.” We must distinguish, she rightly says, between the social explanation of norms and the social explanation of desires. One of her essays offers a heartfelt defense of gay and lesbian rights. It seems to me that the much-maligned desires of horny heterosexual males deserve comparable understanding."
--- Nussbaum on Sexual Injustice / Thomas Nagel
