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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 44
identity in a male-dominated society rests in their associations with, and approval by, men often become desperate to "find a man" before discovering what they really want in a sexual partner. Such women compete fiercely with other women for the best "catch," only to languish in loveless relationships whose sexual exclusivity has become a curse instead of a blessing.
37
A woman's desire to submerge her identity in such relationships makes promiscuity unthinkable, since a woman has only one identity to offer. Robert Nozick believes that sexual love demands exclusivity precisely because such love requires us to "share an identity,'' of which each of us has only one. What he fails to recognize is that in a society in which sex is a vehicle for men's sexual subordination of women, women
lose
their identity in romance as often as they share it.
38
Shulamith Firestone suggests that women's "sex privatization" by men under patriarchal conditions is nothing more than a ruse to convince women that they are each man's one and only when women are in reality generically dehumanized, stripped of any semblance of individuality. Men devalue all women but idealize the women they fall in love with to "justify [their] descent to a lower caste."
39
Combine these concerns with the suggestion that one person may simply not be able to satisfy any one person's sexual needs, and it would appear that the private nature of sexual intimacy, far from being a requirement for female sexual satisfaction, is antithetical to a cultural feminist program for women's sexual fulfillment.
When a cultural feminist claims that good sex for women is
personal
sex, she is claiming that women's sex is person-centered, individuated, and personalized in the way she believes that the body-centered, performance-oriented, and dehumanizing sex of men is not. Men's sex, in Susan Minot's words, makes a woman "begin to feel like a piece of pounded veal."
40
The sex that a cultural feminist values is sex defined by what Robin Dillon calls "care respect." This respect includes (1) responding to others as "the particular individuals they are" instead of merely generalizing over persons in search of some abstract capacity that all persons share; (2) understanding others by trying to see the world from their point of view; and (3) actively caring about the well-being of others by helping them pursue their own wants and needs.
41
To help a self-centered pleasure seeker pursue his own wants and needs would be precluded because to do so would be to encourage a disregard for the care respect of others.
The high incidence of wife battering around the world is evidence enough that monogamy does not have a lock on the personal side of sex defined in terms of Dillon's care respect. Indeed, the sexual frustration that often accompanies sexual scarcity is one of many factors contributing to unhappy monogamous marriages. Could we expect promiscuous "cruising" relationships to fare any better? Premarital sex and fornication with a single partner can certainly be as particularizing, understanding, and caring as a loving monogamous marriage. But what about the repetitious pursuit of different sexual partners who become no more than scores for the confident Don Juan, or adultery whose stereotype is the errant husband sneaking off for a tryst that his doting wife knows nothing about?
While it is true that like monogamy, promiscuous relationships can lack care respect, the case of Joan in the previous section tells us that promiscuity can also be defined by care respect. We described Joan as having lovers none of whom feels un-
 
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attended or unloved by Joan. Suppose, for the purposes of this argument, that none of Joan's lovers are longtime acquaintances, but different men she has met in singles' bars and dance clubs that she frequents during various business trips. (Joan need not be affluent: we can imagine her going to the same club in her hometown on weekdays when the bar and entry prices are lowest.) If cultural feminists require that good sex for women involve
long-term
emotional commitment, then such relationships will fail by definition. But the time frame appears to be less important to cultural feminists than the quality of the relationship itself. My contention is that we can well imagine that Joan responds to her one-time lovers as "the particular individuals they are" by trying to discern what kind of sex they like instead of assuming that one man's sexual needs, interests, or style will be just like any other's. Indeed, this individuation can help facilitate an open discussion of safe and satisfying sex in terms of the particular sexual experience of each person, instead of Joan's perfunctorily passing each partner a condom "just like all the rest." She may also know that being sensitive to the needs of each one of her lovers individually means that she will have a more satisfying sexual experience herself. Indeed, Joan may be promiscuous precisely because sex with different partners on a regular basis gives her the opportunity to discover and experience a wide variety of sexual styles and tastes and so come to know what she likes best in sex. Even if each of Joan's lovers is a one-night stand, she can communicate to all of them that she regards them as special, that she is interested in what they want out of sex as they can best express it, and that she is interested in sex that fulfills her partner's needs as well as her own. Such efforts on Joan's part take a personal commitment of time and emotional energy, energy that perhaps the typical "cruiser" does not have any interest in expending. Indeed, there is good reason for thinking that much, if not most, ''cruising" sex is much less personal than Joan's, because straightforwardly pleasure-seeking, self-gratifying, and anonymous sex is a large part of what attracts many people to cruising. Moreover, it might be objected that Joan's affluence, education, and mobility afford her the opportunity and self-confidence to initiate successful sexual encounters and request sexual feedback that many women from more humble circumstances may lack. However, as I argued in the previous section, none of these caveats makes it a conceptual mistake to describe some cases of promiscuous sex in terms of care respect. It simply means that as in monogamy, some promiscuous lovers will treat their partners with care respect and some will not.
Likewise, whether adultery can be defined in terms of care respect will depend on the context of its occurrence. Extramarital sex can be the sex of the gay and lesbian couple who are married in order to raise their children from previous marriages or from their own marriage. Their affairs are understood to be a part of their sexual fulfillment as homosexuals. Extramarital sex can be the sex of a woman who marries an American man to establish her U.S. citizenship, both of whom care deeply for one another and who have an active sex life together but who did not marry with the intention of restricting each other's sexual choices. Even the adultery of deceit can be particularizing, understanding, and caring of the partner outside of the marriage. Trying to make adultery wrong by defining marriage as a commitment to sexual exclusivity ignores these special cases. Even if we were to define marriage in these terms, as Michael Wreen does in his article "What's Really Wrong with Adultery?,"
42
 
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the Kantian imperative that Wreen invokes (that we must be able to universalize right conduct without logical contradiction) has no
moral
force beyond Kant's insistence that reason direct right action. In matters of sex and love in particular, Kant has been taken to task by feminist and nonfeminist moral philosophers alike for refusing to give the partiality of one's emotions a place in moral decision-making.
43
Our stereotypes of adultery and the repetitious pursuit of different sexual partners may be that they involve callous and dehumanizing sex, but this may be as much a function of the failure of monogamy as the failure of promiscuity.
We can offer similar arguments concerning a cultural feminist's desire for comfort and trust. Monogamy is no guarantee of sexual security or honesty. Promiscuous Joan, on the other hand, is characterized in previous examples specifically as someone who makes every effort
not
to make her partners feel either insecure or anxious. Whether or not her lovers have other lovers of their own, her expression of emotional support and understanding is one that she has personalized so as to make each of her partners trust their physical exposure and emotional access to her.
Even so, can any of Joan's relationships properly be called "romantic"? Paradigms of romance in Anglo-American culture are Romeo and Juliet or Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, lovers who believe of their partners that this partner is the one and only person in the world who will love them forever. Indeed, romantic love is based on the notion that one's lover is extraordinary, ideal, perfect in every way, such that slander directed against such a person is intolerable and unbelievable. In Robert Solomon's words, "It is the elevation of
one
otherwise ordinary person to extraordinary heights with extraordinary privileges" (my italics).
44
Even if Joan is an emotionally understanding and caring lover, if Joan's promiscuity is the repetitious pursuit of
different
sexual partners, her sex cannot consistently be called the
romantic
sex characterized here.
According to Shulamith Firestone, however, Joan should be thankful that her relationships with her lovers are
not
romantic, if by being romantic they instantiate the possessiveness and sexual subordination of patriarchy. For Firestone, romance under such conditions includes not only the deceitful sex privatization that I mentioned earlier but also a man's possession of a single woman under the auspices of true love for the sole purpose of making her his sexual subordinate. According to Firestone, the availability and social sanction of birth control combined with the influx of large numbers of women into the labor market decrease a woman's dependence on any one man for economic support and sexual security. From her view, the sexual domination of women under the pretense of romance serves the needs of a patriarchy weakened by women's increasing economic and social status. For Firestone, there can be no heterosexual sex other than male-dominated sex, when men's economic power and social privilege under patriarchy are threatened without it. The mutuality, vulnerability, and interdependency that Firestone believes is essential to sexual love simply do not exist, she contends, amid relations of inequality.
45
Furthermore, according to Firestone, the idealization of each partner, particularly of women, only dooms the partners' sexual relationships to failure, as each partner inevitably fails to live up to the other's romantic ideal. According to Firestone, women
must
fail to match this ideal, since their sexual access symbolizes their inferiority to a sexually inaccessible, idealized Freudian mother.
46
Firestone contends
 
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that a woman's fall from the pedestal is particularly painful, as she often becomes economically and emotionally dependent on the man whom she regards as the love of her life, with few of the same economic and social resources to recoup her losses when the relationship flounders. In an article where she argues for a necessary relationship between love and monogamous (not polygamous) sexual exclusivity, Bonnie Steinbock dooms monogamy from the start by admitting that after "the first throes of romantic love[,] it is precisely because this stage does
not
last that we must promise to be faithful through the notoriously unromantic realities of married life."
47
Were Steinbock to appreciate the ways gender informs sexuality, she, like Firestone, might regard this fact as good reason for
not
entering into a relationship of sexual exclusivity.
The Don Juan who obsesses over, pursues, and ultimately possesses each of his lovers is an impersonal lover precisely because he does not love each of his partners for her own sake as a unique and particular individual but regards each one as a means to sexual conquest, to add to his list of conquests. He pretends to love them for themselves alone, detailing each perfection that he attests is theirs, promising an indefinite future of affection and attention. In other words, he
pretends
to be romantic, luring women with the bait of true love. Once lured to his bed, his partners become interchangeable, and so expendable, sexual objects. Here I disagree with Søoren Kierkegaard, who says that the Don Juan is not deceiving his lovers; he is only fickle and truly believes, in his momentary sexual frenzy, that he will marry each one of them. This way of describing the Don Juan makes his peccadillos purely aesthetic, quite distinct from the ethical stage to which, according to Kierkegaard, he must ultimately aspire, if he does not wish to become bored. My point is that the Don Juan is a cad and a bounder precisely because his sexual behavior is intentionally deceptive, and to regard his behavior as purely aesthetic is to excuse an immoral promiscuity. (I wonder, would Kierkegaard have given solely aesthetic content to an equally promiscuous
woman's
behavior?)
48
The promiscuous man cannot flaunt his promiscuity among women for fear of being rejected as a profoundly unromantic gigolo by the very women he has convinced of the value of monogamy and whom he wishes to possess. On the other hand, sexual conquests are the stuff of serious conversation among many men ready to snicker and boast of a promiscuity encouraged in their peer group. Such conversation has historically been the type that so-called ladies are too delicate to hear, when women's discovery of the pretense, obfuscated by a compliment to our femininity, would ruin the game. Ever in search of new women to conquer, the promiscuous man must
appear
to be romantic even while he "plays around."
According to Firestone, romantic love is a male invention designed to make women into men's legitimate sexual property. If a woman can be convinced that romance is her only source for sexual intimacy, she will avoid promiscuous affairs for fear of losing access to that intimacy. Ironically, the supposed depersonalization of promiscuity that cultural feminists seek to avoid directs them toward a vision of romantic love that is often neither personal nor affectionate. On the other hand, women's promiscuity, according to Firestone, is typically no more than a false imitation of patriarchal power and another instance of women's co-optation by a system of sexual subordination. Under such circumstances, women are confronted with

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