on those grounds alone. My claim is that AIDS is reason for caution regarding our sexual behavior, but the danger of AIDS is not sufficient reason for condemning all promiscuous sexual exploration, nor is it sufficient to support an argument for abstinence. On the contrary, because AIDS has been used to heap renewed abuse on a homosexual community struggling to define a sexual lifestyle that does not simply mirror traditional heterosexual norms, I argue that we should be wary of any arguments that treat the medical crisis of AIDS as a social commentary on the dangers of sexual liberation.
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In the conceptual analysis that comprises much of the traditional literature on the philosophy of sex, very little has been written on the meaning of sexual promiscuity. 7 However, what is traditionally meant by the term "promiscuity" is vital philosophical information if we are to examine any feminist attempts at its re conceptualization. For example, if promiscuity is only a numbers game, then why did polygamous Mormon men at the turn of this century, men with six or more wives, each of whom received weekly conjugal visits, rail against the evils of promiscuity? To cite hypocrisy or self-deception is too facile. If we resolve the Mormon case by claiming that promiscuity must also constitute a failure to promise a lifelong sexual commitment, then the unmarried woman, widowed three times, whose current sexual experience consists of her exclusive two-year romance with her childhood sweetheart must be considered promiscuous. 8 Compare this sexually faithful woman to her sister, a barhopper who goes home with a different man every night, and the behavior suggests a difference in kind, not just degree. Furthermore, if the dangers of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases explain our contemporary disapproval of promiscuity, then why is the disease-free woman who uses effective contraception, sleeps only with AIDS-tested disease-free men, and, like our barhopper, sleeps with a different man every night derisively considered by many people to be a "slut"?
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What these cases suggest is that exactly what we mean by sexual promiscuity will depend on the identity and context of the subject "we." What I intend to show is that it is a philosophical mistake to try to offer a single definition of sexual promiscuity, one with necessary and sufficient conditions that are designed to cover all possible contexts of its use. Rather, I will take the approach that the term "promiscuity," like so many expressions in the English language, is used in a variety of contexts with meanings related to, but not identical with, one another. Instead of the meaning of promiscuity, I will uncover a wide variety of meanings for the term derived from the particular social location of each speaker and the social context of the speaker's sexual behavior. 9 Like the "view from somewhere different'' introduced in chapter 1, this approach eschews the universal analytic categories typical of the "view from nowhere" in favor of assigning meaning on the case-by-case basis of social location. This approach is consistent with a feminist philosophy of sex that appreciates the context-specific dialectic between gender and sexuality. 10
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Consider the following propositions:
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| | 1. Distributing condoms to high school students only encourages them to be promiscuous.
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