men and women

More on the most recent Flanagan article I discussed:

Flanagan is particularly concerned with the feminine perspective on a certain practice: non-romantic unreciprocated teen female-to-male oral sex. She feels that it ignores the emotional needs of young women. Their ideal relationship to sex would find it

"...in the middle of a committed relationship, with the boy treating the girl as if she were a fragile piece of glass, and their love so powerful that it threatened to blot them both out..."

Instead, they are treated as disposable, interchangeable means to mere physical pleasure, which is not good.

It is interesting that Flanagan notes that the conception of the practice found in the popular culture requires more or less impossible things of the young men involved - such as the capacity to receive five or seven blow jobs in a row. She doesn't take this very far, however; as I previously noted, she's primarily concerned with the female perspective.

My complaint is that this practice, if it is bad - if it indeed involves the objectification of women, the promotion of a false image of femininity, the degrading of sexuality, etc - then it is as bad, from a moral perspective, for the men as it is for the women. I don't mean to say that the boys get nothing out of it - which is evidently not the case - but that what they get out of it is bad for them, despite the fact that they enjoy it: it makes them worse people.

I mention this because, if we want to understand what an ideal world would look like - what gender relations in the kallipolis would look like - then we need to understand the totality of what is wrong with the current world. Otherwise, we'll just end up with a reversal of roles, with women being serviced by anonymous men - which will be as bad for all concerned as the original practice.

(You must notice how I've avoided complaining about Flanagan's conception of love again...)