“My experiences have led me to believe that one of the best things that men in a professional field can do for feminism is to learn to take sexual and romantic rejection well.”
That’s one of the observations of a philosopher, going by the pseudonym “Alex Rails”, in the following guest post on issues at the intersection of sexual and professional ethics.
That description may lead one to think this post is about sexual harassment, and in a way it is, but it is mainly a virtue-based approach to the ethics of sexual relationships and flings between people in the profession, or, in the author’s terms, what it means to be a strong or weak “player”.
Unlike most of the other posts in the summer series, I did not solicit this one. It came to me from a pseudonymous author, and, reading an early draft, I was initially uncertain about proceeding with it, for surely there are some readers who will think that Rails is talking about how to do something bad well. But I think that if that’s your view, then you might frame what follows as a kind of non-ideal virtue theory. Alternatively, you might think, for a few reasons, that the optimal amount of sexual flings among people in the profession is, as Rails says, “not zero,” and that the question of how to engage in this behavior, given its moral riskiness, is worthwhile.
I do not know Rails’ identity, but a third party I’m acquainted with who does confirmed that Rails is a tenured philosopher at a good university, writing sincerely and honestly. (If you want to reach out to Rails personally, you can do so by email to [email protected].)
Discussion is welcome, but I ask that, given the subject matter, people exercise a bit of care with their comments. The comments section is not the place to name “players,” be they strong or weak, or otherwise discuss the sex lives of identifiable individuals. If you wish to comment using a pseudonym but you’ve commented here previously under your real name, be sure to enter both a new name and a new email address when you comment, so your identity is not inadvertently revealed.
This is the ninth post in the 2025 Summer Guest Post Series. (As with the others, it will stay pinned to the top of the home page for a few days.)
To Philosophers of Easy Virtue
by “Alex Rails”
Some of us are secretly banging each other. You know who you are. Some of you make a sport out of it. Some of you bring condoms to conferences. Some of you read an impeccable paper and cannot help but check what the author looks like, because they might be hot. Since eroticism is a part of your life, it is part of how you network within your discipline. You are what I will call a player.
I am a player too. I have played some great games. Others ended quite badly. So far, I have filed two complaints for work-related sexual misconduct. One of “my victims” was forced to give up their job, due to games that involved me.
As well as a player, I am a moral philosopher, of the “do things that lead to flourishing”-type. After two such doomed escapades, I began to wonder whether my playerhood is contributing to my flourishing. What effect does my playerhood have on my discipline? I know that I am not the only player, and many of us struggle with these questions. As I have thought about this a lot, I wanted to share my thoughts—pseudonymously—with other players out there, and others who might care to learn more about us. This is not a confession or warning and I do not offer much in recommendations. This is a warm letter from one player to another.
Philosopher Players
We philosopher players are hedonists—in life, if not on paper. Some are desperate for connection, some use sex to get ahead in their careers. We are of all genders. I go for women and men, though men are generally easier to pull for me. And I attract them by defending unorthodox views with a smoky voice. In my experience, players are no less interested in philosophy than the non-players. In fact, we often burn for philosophy. For many of us, our own philosophy is intertwined with our mind and our body, and the philosophy of others often with their mind and body. A fling or romance can open a window into where someone’s philosophy comes from. Having sex can be doing philosophy. Indeed, for some of us, an ambition to philosophical greatness is a quasi-sexual desire.
It is not fair to ask the question “how does playerhood affect philosophy” without asking “how does philosophy affect playerhood?” We players are a rare species. And like any species, we are adapted to a hostile environment. Our environment is dominated by norms of monogamy, stigmas about sex, and solid walls of professional conduct and hierarchy. According to ideals that are usually tacit and rarely articulated, the discipline must be a clean, safe, sexless space. Many of us probably agree that this is a good thing for some contexts, like classrooms or PhD supervision. But the sexlessness norm applies in every other professional context too. To get around this, we have developed a variety of mechanisms that protect our ability to play, such as stealth, compartmentalization, brazenness, or our own versions of feminism. Most importantly, some of us have developed skill. We have become skillful players.
Being a Skillful Player
What do I mean by being skillful as a player? I am not talking about sexual technique. Nor am I talking about the ability to flirt and seduce. I mean the ability of the player to skillfully combine their games, such as conference flings, with professional conduct inside the discipline: the delicate before- and after-care of seducing another philosopher. Knowing how to do your thing without causing trouble. Knowing whom to seduce (for instance, generally speaking, seducing up the hierarchy is safer than seducing down.) Knowing how and when is important, too. One must also know how to resist the urge to brag too much or to publicize one’s flings. These discipline-specific sexual skills hang together with broader virtues that are important for having a good sex life in general. This includes self-reflection and honesty about what one wants and doesn’t want, and appropriate respect for what the other wants (say, discretion, using contraceptives, or having the consent of one’s partner). Such skills and virtues are important to maintain one’s habit of having flings—or the possibility of flings. This possibility loads philosophizing with an additional excitement. Excitement and sex are very pleasurable. Romances and flings can also be insightful, life-altering and meaningful. When philosophy is one’s vocation, a fling that happens in the context of one’s vocation can be especially meaningful, for oneself as a philosopher as well as a person. According to a poll on this site, many of us would prefer to date other philosophers! For this reason, the ideal amount of sex that should be had within the discipline is not zero, even though stigma and norms might seem to suggest it.
Perhaps the biggest challenge with shagging other philosophers is the fact that once one has dropped the professional masks with a given person, it is hard to look at that person again with the mask on. While this is also true of forming a friendship, or even seeing someone drunk, sex can be a particularly jarring demasker because the sexual self is generally not revealed in a professional context. While there is nothing strange about revealing your friendship with someone at a work setting, revealing a sexual affair is not done, meaning you must “act normal” around each other. A skilled philosopher player knows not to throw the mask out, because the mask can still serve its purpose. A skilled player can often put the mask on again comfortably if needed, even if it is just the two of you. A skilled player can estimate when the sex-thing with someone is over and when one mask, or another, is desired again. A skilled player can take a hint.
As a researcher, one works in an institution and in a field. The field is hierarchical. Problematic relations can happen between a senior in one institution and a junior in another. There is no easy rule for deciding who is available to you unproblematically, and who isn’t. Having sex with someone you are work-wise entangled with, or quasi-entangled with, rips a tear into the fabric of academic conduct norms. The skilled player has needle and thread ready to mend the rip if needed and the tailor’s ability to anticipate where the fabric will or won’t stretch. It is not easy to do this, and the skill of the skilled player is a product of much effort and self-development. If that’s you, bravo!
One cannot be a player alone. Shaggers require shaggees. Ideally, a skilled player gets with another skilled player. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes a skilled player has the misfortune to stumble on, what I will call a weak player.
Weak Players
A weak player is someone who has the desire to sleep around, and perhaps does, but does not yet possess the virtues to combine this seamlessly with their professional role. Academia has many weak players. In fact, academia systematically creates weak players. Academics, many of them bookish nerds, often lead a life of work and no play and might have few non-academic social contacts due to frequent moving around, which means less opportunities to have sex, but also fewer friends to whom one can talk about these things candidly. We tend to fuse our identity and our work, and our work is often disembodied and sexless.
There are many types of weak players. For instance, some find the juxtaposition of work and play so awkward that they withdraw from each other at professional events and can no longer give a talk while the other is in the room. Others cannot take romantic or sexual rejection. Some expect others to manage their feelings of rejection. Some see work-related advantages as a “labor of love” and feel entitled to intimacy after helping someone out professionally. Some assume that a casual fling must develop into a serious relationship, or that a hookup must become a regular liaison, that “once” means “always from now on at every conference” or that having sex means no longer talking about philosophy.
People sometimes tend to think of misbehaving sex pests in academia as ruthless Casanovas and Don Juans. In my experience, this picture is incomplete. Some of them are naïve or bewildered pityfuck-beggars. Sometimes they are aware of their unskillfulness and desperation, and revel in it. “I am not a Don Juan type! This is hard for me, please don’t cancel me!”
Many of these types are self-proclaimed feminist allies. But everyone is a feminist ally until they get friendzoned. My experiences have led me to believe that one of the best things that men in a professional field can do for feminism is to learn to take sexual and romantic rejection well. Sitting on committees and insisting on hiring women, citing women, making a fuss over gender balance for a conference lineup is nice. But all these things can be mere virtue signaling, if one does not take responsibility for one’s feelings of rejection. The man who obsessed over me, pestered me for intimacy at conferences and threatened my career because I declined intimacy, having accepted it in the past, is acclaimed as a feminist ally at his institution. Freeing myself of his approaches was a long and painful process. Weak players ruin the game, and they ruin careers, especially women’s careers. The skillful, strong players are not the issue, neither is the practice of sleeping around necessarily. Weak players are.
Weak players are not a problem in all games. If I asked to join the basketball game on my street corner, I would probably be tolerated, even though I suck at basketball. There is no risk here. However, if I followed a ski jumper into the tower, pretended I knew what I was doing, put on the skis and dropped onto the slope, I would cause an awful accident and that would be 100% on me, not the experienced ski jumper I went with, even if she had flirted and invited me along. She does not know my skill level. I should know better than to do that.
In our discipline we have a norm of being tolerant towards novices. We do not like it when people put down junior scholars, even if they gave a bad conference talk or wrote a crappy draft. They are here to learn, and it is the job of more senior scholars to make sure that juniors carry the discipline to the future. We take responsibility for the young ones. We give constructive feedback, we encourage, and we tolerate their mistakes. Again, here, too, there is little risk. A philosopher does not generally ruin anyone’s life by giving a bad conference talk.
The case of sex with colleagues, especially junior colleagues, is different. It can be high reward, but high risk. You can play, but if you don’t follow the safety protocols, you should be stopped, and fast. And, preferably, grandly and embarrassingly, so that you (or others like you) do not try without the proper experience.
Are Strong Players Absolved?
What I have said so far comes down to this: “I, as a strong player, am allowed to play. But weak players should practice somewhere safe first.” There are plenty of good reasons to be suspicious of a claim like this. Strong players could still cause harm with their playing. A post from a few years ago reflects on how easily an educational setting can become sexualized when lecturers let even a little bit of their sexuality seep through into the classroom. The post quotes a piece in Times Higher Education:
As highlighted by a growing body of research, “available” (usually male) faculty members advertise that fact in subtle and not-so-subtle ways in order to cast a wide net. In so doing, they hijack the learning spaces for their own purposes. In philosophy, for instance, they might let it be known in seminars and classes that they are single or party to an “open” marriage, using the example of polygamy when talking about natural rights; even arguing in favour of extramarital affairs as their illustration of utilitarian reasoning. They may be doing it unconsciously, but it in effect sexualises the learning space for everyone.
Arguably, the same goes for conferences and other academic spaces. Additionally, a strong player might stumble upon a weak player, and thereby encourage the weak player to play, which is dangerous. These risks have weighed on my conscience. I should not hurt others if I can avoid it, and I care particularly about not hurting junior scholars and women in philosophy.
Even a strong player risks sexualizing the field, by throwing out a subtle flirt to see if the other responds, or flirting with a willing participant in the presence of others, or even simply by emanating sexual excitement at a professional event. This risk, just like the risk of other types of trouble, is precisely why being a strong player is difficult. A strong player knows how to mitigate this risk. A strong player does not “cast a wide net” and signal their sexual availability to everyone in the discipline, especially if they are in a position of relative power. They cast a narrow net for particular people, in particular situations, that can easily be retracted safely if it is not wanted. Again, a strong player can take a hint and they are looking out for them, too. Rather than sexualizing the field as a whole, a strong player judiciously creates pockets of sexualization in areas where they are desired by all parties. It is, therefore, in the interest of the discipline that we set high standards for strong playerhood. We, strong players, must keep learning.
A strong player may, at times, encourage a weak player to play, for example by sleeping with someone who turns out to be a weak player or by confiding in a weak player. While the onus should be on the weak player to know that they should not play, the reality is that responsibility tends to fall on the strong players. If you are a strong player who has encountered a weak player, you might know how exhausting that can be. Some compassionate strong players, having slept with a weak player, take on the difficult and often draining task of educating weak players. “Hey, I notice that you were harsher than usual in your comments on our shared paper/ your review of my book/ etc. It made me wonder: is something bothering you?” “It would make me more comfortable if we could compartmentalize our shared work and our sexual history. Would this be possible for you?” If the weak player fails to develop, then they indeed become a risk to the whole discipline. For this reason, it is important that the strong players are able to stop weak players in their tracks, for instance by breaking off the relationship, warning others or reporting them for misconduct. A strong player must be capable of doing this too, and not succumb to pity.
So far, I have only spoken of strong and weak players. Of course, there is a whole range of medium and mediocre players in between. Some of them will develop into strong players. The rest is a risk. If anything, having strong players around is essential. Strong players can spot weak ones, when they play, and know how to stop the damage by educating or reporting weak players. We, strong players can also advise weaker players, should they confide in us. Academia creates weak players but we can foster strong players.
Having strong players is also enriching for philosophy as a whole. Many world-changing philosophical works have been informed by romances with other philosophers. Think of de Beauvoir and Sartre’s complicated romance. For Plato, philosophy was a place for eros. And later Platonists, like Murdoch, whose philosophy centres on love has, no doubt, been influenced by her own erotic experiences in the discipline, some of which were problematic. Missed opportunities abound, too. Most of us can think of a few philosophers who would probably have produced better work (at least in some areas) had they been better players (I won’t mention the names that come to my mind, out of respect for devotees of these frustrated men.) The guidance of eros has certainly enhanced my own philosophy.
I write this as a player, but also as a victim of sexual malpractice in the discipline. I have thrived through playerhood, and suffered through it, too. My experiences do not lead me to conclude that we ought to try to keep the discipline sexless. That would be an unattainable and undesirable aim. Rather, our attitudes about sex in the profession should be sensitive to the skillfulness of those engaging in it.
So, I say to you, strong players: do your thing. Enjoy yourself! If a weak player gets professionally petty on you, teach them—or if need be, torch them; you’d be performing a service to the discipline. Have fun, colleagues, but play well.
I feel bad for the multiple dudes with smoky voices being wondered about right now.
Where do you get that the author is a dude? I was inclined to think the author was a woman, though I don’t think the post is explicit.
Because Alex, um, rails.
Fair point!
I thought the bits about supposed male feminist allies needing to get better at accepting rejection made less sense on the assumption that the author was a man writing about another man he’d rejected.
You’re just not being imaginative enough, Spencer.
And saying men are easier and more common when there really aren’t so many gay men in the field also indicates to me that this is a woman.
I thought this too. There can’t be THAT many gay men in philosophy but then again, I got some stares from male philosophers at a few conferences. I suspect there are more bisexuals in philosophy. Who knows?
It’s not necessary a question of number. The bi men I know mostly have sex with other men because it’s easier, would it be different in academia?
That comment made me assume the author was a man, as did the early comment about the smoky voice, but I had a sudden switch in my imagination after this passage: “The man who obsessed over me, pestered me for intimacy at conferences and threatened my career because I declined intimacy, having accepted it in the past, is acclaimed as a feminist ally at his institution. Freeing myself of his approaches was a long and painful process.”
Still probably a guy with such a mindset
Ok, I concede the point.
I am continually confused as to why philosophers think it’s a great idea to mix work and their sexual escapades. Departments’ cultures are bad enough already and not usually improved by sleeping with your co-workers. I promise you that you can find interesting partners outside the ivory tower.
I have worked in other industries, and it’s hard to imagine any other kind of professional writing this kind of sweaty, self-aggrandizing apologetics for sleeping with their co-workers. I’m genuinely unsure what the argument is here or what this is contributing. If Sartre and Beauvoir (allegedly) jointly preying on young women is your example of a successful sexualizing of the discipline I can’t say I see the appeal. If you want to sleep with your consenting, single (or polyamorous, etc.) colleagues, go ahead. Let’s not pretend having a fling at work is revolutionary, or even a good idea most of the time.
The reason why one won’t find this type of “professional writing” in other disciplines is that philosophy is supposed to be a profession only derivatively – more fundamentally, it’s conceived of by many of its practitioners as a vocation/way of life, which is generally thought to imply that there are higher demands of frankness and explicitness upon out writing than there are on, say Professors of Dentistry.
Some of us still believe, perhaps gauchely, that this is a feature of philosophy worth celebrating, for all that it comes with additional attendant risks, both moral and stylistic. And I suspect that most such folks will applaud what Alex is trying to do here, even in spite of the occasional mild cringe.
The College of Dentists where I live is very frank about how bad an idea sleeping with your co-workers is. So too is the military, most private companies, etc. It’s telling that when I mentioned other industries your mind jumped to “other disciplines.” Only in the insular university, and (maybe just philosophy), can a pean to sexualizing the workplace be considered brave.
Philosophy is a vocation. One that should involve the rigorous examination of life. Where is that here? I don’t find this piece especially explicit or frank. The author talks around the major issues, and seems more interested in boasting about how “strong” and responsible a “player” they are. As descriptive sociology it’s poor, and as normative ethics it’s dubious. A moral and stylistic failure. There is value in an intetesting failure – but it’s not applause worthy.
“A paean to sexualizing the workplace “ – good grief. That’s like referring to a map of the night sky as a “paean” to falling into wells. And all your silly social science talk is just cover for trying to enforce a taboo against personal anecdote.
No wonder Euro-style phenomenologists hate the rest of us so bad.
[to the dean] no you see it’s actually a way of life
This approach is sometimes called “philosophy as a lay of wife”.
“I have worked in other industries, and it’s hard to imagine any other kind of professional writing this kind of sweaty, self-aggrandizing apologetics for sleeping with their co-workers.”
To be clear, the reason for this is not because, say, accountants or real estate agents are less likely to sleep with each other at conferences, but because they do not typically, by trade, write about ethics (including the ethics of their own activities). So I don’t see why your observation is supposed to be a dig at philosophy.
Is there any empirical data on this sort of thing? I’m genuinely curious, because although stereotypes abound, it may be that certain disciplines or fields create conditions where people are more likely to pursue sex with others in that field. At least it doesn’t seem prima facie implausible to me.
There are certain methodological difficulties in collecting detailed information about illicit affairs in small communities.
Agreed.
Interestingly, the one study I was able to find (conducted by an “online gaming company RANT casino”…) puts sales as the most common profession for affairs with co-workers – and academia as second, with healthcare third.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/top-industries-for-workplace-affairs-revealed/news-story/ef067c4110c3eb7ddcf888d8d7c32dd7
I’m only reading an Australian news article about the study, not the study itself, so I can’t tell how careful they were about defining the concept as “workplace affair” or “sexual relations with another person in the same profession” or “extramarital affair with a coworker” or something else, and it also looks like they lumped schoolteachers and professors in the same category.
The following does not involve good empirical data, but back when APA mtgs. were more central to the profession, it used to be said that hotel staff would say that, in contrast to other professional conferences, there seemed to be more drinking and less sex going on at the APAs. This is of course an anecdote (from the profession) about anecdotes from hotel staff. And of course there isn’t a good way for hotel staff to know how much sex is going on. But I didn’t want to be left out of the comment storm.
This reminds me of somewhat similar anecdotes I heard when working in the ‘Christian publishing’ industry (don’t ask…) — the common tale was that when large industry conferences involving Christians took place in Nashville (where I was located), the amount of porn videos purchased from hotel rooms on-demand skyrocketed in comparison to other events. Urban legends… I assume. 🙂
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the strong impression that
(1) People who work on cruise ships sleep with each other constantly (see the documentary “Train Wreck: Poop Cruise” for example).
(2) Participants at political conventions sleep with each other constantly.
(3) Olympic athletes sleep with each other constantly.
Just as some extra data points.
Two of those scenarios don’t involve work colleagues. In the above article, the author claims that sleeping with your colleagues is valuable to philosophical practice. This argument appears to me inapplicable to cruises, unless they’re staffed by philosophers. Which maybe they are, given PhD placement rates.
So, sleeping with your co-workers on a cruise has all the drawbacks and seemingly none of the benefits aside from the pleasure of the experience. And I thought the author wanted to make a case for somehing more than “sex is fun.”
Meta-Observer: my point is that other industries recognize this as a generally bad idea and discourage it without complicated rationalizations for why it’s good, actually. People just have or don’t have their flings.
Not all of us are lucky enough to be happily partnered up. I’m not defending what the original author is doing at all; I have no interest in whatever game she thinks she is playing. But I do think that if you are lonely and looking for a life partner, it makes a lot of sense to consider other philosophers. I have been dating people for the past 29 years–not trying to “play a game,” but looking for someone to settle down and spend my life with (to no avail)–and I have dated all kinds of people, including philosophers and people who are not philosophers. I tend to have more in common with philosophers. I’m sure the same is true for athletes; they have more in common with other athletes. And I’m sure the same is true for politicians. Even people who are temporarily working together on a cruise ship will have a lot in common with each other.
I’m very sympathetic to this, and I wonder sometimes whether the “don’t date/sleep with coworkers” idea is just another way that work in contemporary society dehumanizes and degrades us. Like, obviously you shouldn’t be sleazy, you should be respectful, you should watch for power imbalances, etc. But work is where many people spend most of their waking hours. Especially as it takes up increasing time in people’s lives, and “third places” become less affordable, you might have no other realistic chance of meeting someone with shared interests (and the like). People—especially in jobs less cushy than academia—are supposed to just accept that? Even when, for instance, they feel a strong and reciprocated connection with a coworker? Idk man. Seems inhuman.
I think we’re actually more or less in agreement. I’m not in principle opposed to people finding love or fun at work. It’s just that if we want an ethic for that, I have objections to this one.
“ Even people who are temporarily working together on a cruise ship will have a lot in common with each other.”
Especially since one of the things they have in common is that they are currently stuck on a cruise ship.
eh, they involve “work colleagues” in roughly the same attenuated sense in which philosophy professors are work colleagues with people who work in the same discipline at other universities
One reason of many that the discussion confuses me is that I don’t actually see philosophers at other universities as my colleagues.
I have a lot of uncertainty whether the word “colleague” more appropriately describes philosophers at other universities, or non-philosophers at the same university. (It mostly doesn’t describe non-philosophers at other universities.)
I’ve known some folks who inhabited Olympic Villages and the kids were like rabbits. But of course: young, energetic, buff, available. Bingo!
There is something to be said to view this as a pragmatic approach to lessen the impact of a problem that will always exist for as long as we’re human. But, I think it’s a bit too hopeful. As Alex points out, there are no clear guidelines for identifying who is a strong or a weak player and the consequences of things turning sour can be horrible both personally and professionally for all of those involved. Worse yet, many weak players undoubtedly don’t see themselves as such and could either mask this to fool other players or might not be recognized as such by other weak players even without masking. While I believe it’s impossible to keep casual sex out of academia (or about any profession really), I don’t think dividing the players into a good and a bad group does much of anything other than encouraging bad players. Striving for a sexless workplace might feel too strict for some, but remembering whom we’re trying to protect with doing so I feel it is in fact a desirable aim.
I have seen people on social media slagging this post. That reaction seems naive or disingenuous.
Consider:
Fact 1: some people take advantage of opportunities for sex or romance in professional contexts.
Fact 2: as the interest people have in sex and romance is quite strong, no amount of moralizing about the pursuit of sex or romance in professional contexts is going to make it go away.
Fact 3: the pursuit of sex or romance in professional contexts can go morally better or worse for the participants and have morally relevant effects on third parties or the profession.
Moral Opinion 1: It isn’t in itself morally wrong, in general, for philosophers to hook up with each other, nor does doing so necessarily have bad effects.
Given the above points, it’s reasonable to raise the topic of how to pursue these opportunities in a morally preferable way.
That seems much more helpful (and interesting) than simply demanding abstinence.
Sure but is it okay to slag on it for being cringe?
Yes. This is not how I would have written this post. (But then people would probably be slagging on my version for being boring.)
This version was boring. (There were other problems, too, but this was a big one.)
“In section 1, I will argue that there is in fact a “strong player/weak player” distinction. In section 2 I will analyze four proposed sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a strong player. In section 3 I will provide what I think is a better set of necessary and sufficient conditions. In section 5 I will consider several conceivable counterexamples and argue that they all fail. In section 6 I will begin by listing potential ethical issues and argue that only seven of them are worth considering further. In section 7…”
Comments like this make me think we need to add a “love” botton, as sometimes “like” isn’t enough.
The DN comments section is not an appropriate place to find love. Take it to the apps.
I think I must be finally getting into polyamory, because I love this comment, too.
I’m told that I’m a pretty charismatic public speaker and have some other things going for me too. I have had my interactions with “players”.
Please don’t proposition me at conferences. It doesn’t really matter how well you take rejection, how charming or subtle you think you are, or how gracefully you can retract an advance. It’s annoying and it stops being flattering very quickly.
I understand the heat of seeing someone hot saying something smart to a rapt audience. But you don’t have to act on it right there and right then.
If you want to hook up, you can check the apps to see whether your target is on there. If so, you can then play the game outside of our professional spaces. If they aren’t and there’s no other way to keep it outside, perhaps the game need not be played.
Or in the idiom of this post: Weak players try to play with people who are forced into a social situation for other reasons. Strong players have other options and can hold back. Playing in professional spaces makes you, ipso facto, a weak player.
Whatever the norms for relationships at work should be, I do find something a little dystopian about the idea that “the apps” should define the boundaries of romantic life.
Perhaps I’m just showing my age.
I’m of a younger generation, very familiar with “the apps,” and “a little dystopian” might be understating things.
No one said that, though… They said that if you really want to approach a particular person (“target”) at a conference, you should find a way to do it outside of our professional spaces — one, or maybe the the only option, being the apps — or just not approach them. The antecedent is extremely restricted.
Going on a gamified app and sifting through hundreds of artificially curated profiles in the hopes that someone right in front of you might notice, rather than just asking them out for coffee in person, is not any less dystopian.
That’s one (or a few) of the apps. There are plenty that are more searchable, for folks who want to be findable. Regardless, I don’t know why you think this is a response to my comment. I didn’t say you shouldn’t ask people out in person. I pointed out a bad and uncharitable interpretation in the comment one level up, which took the original comment to be way more extreme than it actually is.
First, although the apps differ, they do not differ in respect of their dystopian characteristics. So, it doesn’t matter to me that some apps are more searchable.
Second, your conditional ambiguously includes the disjunct “just not approach them.” I put it in the consequent, parsing the whole thing as: “if you want to find a particular person, then either use the apps (if outside the professional context and barring other alternatives) or do not approach them.” Even though the antecedent is “extremely restricted,” to a scenario in which you want to find a particular person, this is dystopian. That is because it rules out a scenario in which you want to find them and you do so exclusively by approaching them in person (given that exclusively approaching them in person is incompatible with not doing so and with using the apps).
Third, my comment was a response to yours because I do not believe that the latter actually did anything to address David Wallace’s concern (that there is a dystopian element, on which see my second point). My point is that his concern remains despite your clarification. On that note, he is clearly not bemoaning the fact that apps should define *all* boundaries of your romantic life, but rather that they should define them in cases where it’s easy to just ask a person out like a normal human being (among others). So, I don’t think he was being uncharitable here; you just read him very literally.
Tbh I find this very uncharitable, together with DW’s initial comment, which missed the point entirely: that when you want to approach someone, do it on the apps, in person, on Mars, whatever – but outside professional spaces. This also means don’t approach someone at an in-person conference – that’s still a professional space and just because it’s in-person doesn’t make it ‘normal’ regardless of age.
I don’t think the app suggestion was that immaterial to the original point—not least because it, unlike alternatives, was explicitly mentioned (and because it addresses the main concern of Queer Philosopher: you can really get a sense of what someone actually prefers through the apps). So, yes: I agree that the apps bit was not meant to be the only suggestion. But its salience in the comments made David Wallace’s reply (which was itself uncharitably interpreted) sensible; at minimum, it isn’t addressed he restricting an antecedent.
Good grief, sorry to mention “the apps”. There’s plenty of dating scenes around. I just mentioned the most salient one.
“If/Or” got my meaning perfectly right:
> Don’t proposition [people] in a professional setting — either find a way to do so outside the professional setting or just don’t proposition them
Fair enough, I think talk of apps in this context just prompted the negative judgment of them. I don’t think anyone, including DW, thought you were exclusively suggesting them.
Nothing more to add to why that’s immaterial to what’s said above, below and in-between.
(Do want to add though, that as I read the point, and agree with it: it’s inappropriate to proposition people at professional spaces NOT because you can’t “get a sense of what they prefer” – it’s inappropriate full stop.)
This continues to be extremely uncharitable, and anagrams has also explained why, so I’m going to leave it here: “Don’t proposition speakers in a professional setting — either find a way to do so outside the professional setting or just don’t proposition them,” isn’t dystopian. (I mean, come on.)
Here is a specific comparison: it’s better to proposition someone on the apps than in person at a conference. That’s implied by the original comment. Sorry, but that sounds dystopian to me. End of the world? Not at all.
But obviously other things are implied too. Queer Philosopher mentioned one: it’s better to ask someone out at a bar than at a conference. I agree with that. It doesn’t sound dystopian.
Anyway, I think the first point is all that DW meant. If it wasn’t meant to be implied, then QP is free to correct me (and I will stand corrected).
I did mention in my original comment “other way[s] to keep it outside”. So how DW got from this that I think that the apps should “define the boundaries” remains a bit of a mystery.
> it’s better to proposition someone on the apps than in person at a conference. That’s implied by the original comment.
This was implied, but I honestly fail to see the problem. There is a medium where you can contact people privately and that already pre-selects for people that desire such contact.
Maybe you think that this medium is itself dystopian and ought not exist. That’s fair, and I wouldn’t object. But then you can just insert in my post whatever replaces them as the primary meat market. Would that be something less dystopian? Who could know.
I suppose I read DW’s comment less strictly, but my reading is starting to feel strained, so I’ll drop that point (I do continue to think that the restricted antecedent bit suggested by another commenter wouldn’t address DW’s concern, on my weaker reading).
Anyway, yes: I (at least) think that the medium is dystopian, and (probably) that it is dystopian to recommend it as better than face-to-face interaction at a conference (something, I recognize, you were not exclusively doing). I don’t know that it is so dystopian that it ought not to exist. My reasons for these thoughts are inchoate and possibly non-existent; it’s just a gut feeling on my part. Otherwise, I continue to agree with the other points you’ve made (e.g., best to not proposition at a conference).
Two cents on how I read the point, which is not that complex.
Yes, not only is it better to proposition someone at w (app/in person/mars) rather than at a conference, but the latter proposition is inappropriate regardless of the medium of the alternative.
Not sure what exactly is so complex or dystopian about this. One might think they’re very skillful at gauging in person what the other prefers, that’s immaterial (and not always correct, for many reasons) if this is occuring in a professional setting. See if you get the same sense in a non-professional setting in a medium of your choice and go from there. If there’s no chance of being with the person in such a setting, then it’s simple: just refrain from hitting on them. There’s no right to hitting on people in an in-person (or other) professional setting.
I can think that it’s better to proposition someone on the apps than at a conference while still finding that dystopian. In fact, I do think that, and I will continue to do so. Not sure why that’s confusing (even if you disagree). Didn’t mention rights or anything like that; didn’t deny that it’s inappropriate to proposition people at conferences (though still unsure, honestly).
Fair enough, disentangling all the rest would probably go too far off field, so best to leave it at that.
In Ye Olden Days I might have written instead “try to find that person in a bar”. Or, you know, any other place where one might signal their availability.
It was a relatively throwaway point, but to the extent that there’s something serious here: most of my same-generation friends in serious relationships found them through work, grad school, being in the same college class/tutorial, or other non-sexual-coded space. (My wife and I volunteered for the same charity.) In-person meat markets led to lots of casual hook-ups but not many long-term relationships. (To be fair, I’m straight, and I think more gay relationships came out of the explicit dating scene, though again the long-term gay relationships among my own friendship group mostly did not. Also, this is the UK in the 1990s and 2000s; I don’t know how other countries differ or differed.)
I think there is lots of evidence that online dating apps have displaced not just in-person meat markets but much of those other ways of meeting people.
All this without prejudice to the specific issue of meeting people through philosophy, except to say that some of the strongest and longest-lasting relationships I know are between academics who met through work. (I have been in my current relationship for longer than I have been in academic philosophy, so have no relevant personal experience to draw on.)
For what it’s worth, Rails wrote specifically about “meat market” / “casual” kinda arrangements and that’s what I responded to.
I see your point about long-term relationships. I also know some cases where this all worked out well. I always wonder, however, how big the survivorship bias is. You see the good outcomes, but what else is going on?
Case in point, I used to have a more ambivalent view too. But I once had a brief brush with a department in which a number of people had recently partnered up (for all I could tell, happily and harmlessly). But this had sprung from (or possibly contributed to) a culture in which department events were regarded by many as _opportunities_ to partner up.
This was not a good situation for anyone. The brunt of this was borne by the graduate students, with each incoming cohort regarded as an injection of new opportunities. I did not stay at this place.
I hear you that you don’t want to make it impossible for people to partner up. But we still don’t want a workplace treated as a dating scene. So there should be norms discouraging courtship in the workspace. Humans gonna human, so some partnering will still happen. But if the norms ensure that the courting happens elsewhere, the worst is avoided.
And there definitely shouldn’t be an exception to these norms along the lines of “but it’s okay if you’re good at it”.
I see what you’re saying. I don’t know if I fully agree, but I’m not sure this is the right forum to resolve it.
I suppose as a minimal observation (that you might agree with): I think it’s rarely going to be a good idea to directly hook up with people at official events, but those events can legitimately be springboards for less official social activity that could lead to hookups.
I would specify that it is rarely a good idea to directly _pursue_ such hookups.
There is, I think, nothing wrong about springboarding per se. But I’m wary about creating a culture in which it is accepted that people use the main professional event to facilitate such springboarding.
Is the idea here that, because someone at a conference might have a preference like yours, it’s better not to risk asking them out? Or are you just expressing your preference, but not to convince anyone they shouldn’t “play the game” at conferences? The latter makes sense to me. The former does too, I guess, but it suggests that people should basically always avoid propositioning others (except perhaps when preferences are somehow made antecedently clear, like online or at a dating event). Maybe risks are supposed to be taken more seriously in professional contexts. That’s why I wouldn’t proposition others at a conference, anyway. But that’s also not solely about the risk of someone not liking it.
Anyway, to see whether it matters for this (potential?) argument, I’ll say that I’m happy to be asked for a drink at a conference. I prefer it between talks, and obviously I like it to be respectful. But I find it both flattering and a normal part of human interaction. I think it shows some degree of bravery and is often way less dehumanizing than “the apps.” I also understand that meeting a partner with similar interests can be very difficult for some people, and that a person can take a chance asking for perfectly innocent reasons.
My argument, if indeed I had one, was just to rebut the “strong/weak player” distinction: “It doesn’t really matter how well you take rejection, how charming or subtle you think you are, or how gracefully you can retract an advance.”
I get that the idea of being approached has charm. But you might find that it messes with your head if it starts happening too often and in situations that you cannot easily abandon due to your professional obligations or ambitions. (I don’t think I need to lay out how excessive sexual attention can be a problem, there’s plenty of feminism about this.)
OP put the blame on the “weak players” (eyeroll) who advertise their availability too widely. But on the flipside, there are people who receive attention from too widely (usually the young women at your average philosophy event). No amount of individual respectfulness or “skill at the game” ameliorates this flipside.
And of course there’s the problem that everybody fancies themselves a “strong player”, someone who “just pays a respectful compliment”, one who would “never act in retalitation” etc. Just like everybody is an excellent driver and it’s all the others who are maniacs.
Regardless of all the others points raised in your comment and the post: I will not live in a world where my phone dictates what sort of real-world interactions I can have with people.
Good thing then that I didn’t say anything remotely like this.
As originally stated, you did:
“Please don’t proposition me at conferences […] If you want to hook up, you can check the apps to see whether your target is on there. If so, you can then play the game outside of our professional spaces”
I, and clearly at least two other people, found the above hard to read in any way other than “you should not approach people in person: an app on your phone is the appropriate medium for finding a relationship/link up with a person with whom you are sharing a physical space”. No other appropriate angle was mentioned.
You’ve clarified in your later comments that it is not actually what you meant — and I probably agree with your point as restated.
> No other appropriate angle was mentioned.
Here’s me, with emphasis for your convenience:
“If they aren’t [on the apps] and there’s no other way to keep it outside […]”
I’m not sure arguing over whether that constitutes “mentioning” is going to get us anywhere, so I’ll leave it here.
Having read this thread, and freed myself of the many possible ways of misreading you, I wondered two things:
1. What counts as “propositioning” someone? Taken appropriately literally, I wonder why any socially competent person would find it appropriate do this. Taken less literally, it seems to me that the claim that propositioning someone at a conference is never appropriate, but that also hangs a bit on…
2. What counts as being at a conference? Is a bar after the events close “at a conference”? What about at a restaurant during lunch? Are “our professional spaces” merely the spaces explicitly dedicated to formal conference activities?
Off the main line of this thread (and somewhat glib): many philosophers, it seems to me, might’ve had promising careers in HR, though I suspect the average HR professional has a better sense of the value that can accrue to intimate relationships that stem from not just shared physical but also shared intellectual intimacy. 🤷🏻♂️
> Taken appropriately literally, I wonder why any socially competent person would find it appropriate do this.
I wonder that too.
> What counts as being at a conference?
I guess there’s vagueness here, but I understand that most events consider their code of conduct to apply to everything that is “on the program”. As a heuristic, this is as good as any.
A lot hangs on what “being propositioned” means. If it means to say “please have sex with me now”, that’s evidently inappropriate to do in just about all contexts, except those that are explicitly oriented around consenting adults approaching each other for sex. If it means “I would like to get a drink with you [by implication because I find you hot, smart, or interesting]”, I don’t see anything inappropriate about the latter at all, so long as it is done respectfully and rejection is accepted if/when given. Indeed, for much of human history, people with romantic interest in one another signaled their interest in just this way – sometimes with success, sometimes with failure.
While OP may want to be left alone at conferences, many people (myself included – someone who has also been described as having “charisma” and “other things going for me”) do not – in part because I share the view stated above that every philosopher or conference attendee is not my colleague, and so the code of conduct at my workplace suggesting appropriate norms of romantic involvement with coworkers simply does not apply. Further, I do think I am likely to have much more in common with most philosophers than any random person on a miserable dating app or random bar (NB: many people also go to bars without any desire to be spoken to by strangers), which is all the more reason why this is the kind of thing I would be open to.
This does not mean that I think there is no such thing as being professional at a conference, or using discretion in how to approach someone in a conference setting, should you attempt to do so (no, it shouldn’t look the same as at a bar), or that the purpose of these gatherings should be for everyone to let out their repressed sexual energy. But, as this post touched on, many – if not most – of my friends in philosophy who are partnered are partnered with other philosophers or other academics. This is not an accident.
Tl;dr: people’s individual receptiveness to being asked out by others in certain contexts doesn’t have broader implications for what “we” as a whole ought to be doing, given the good reasons people have for their own preferences. Seems to me that centering respect in these interactions is the core issue at hand, which is part of the blog author’s positive suggestion.
How many of the people trying to slice it on what “proprositioning” means and who would love it regardless are (cis) men? How many of those who say just don’t do it are women and/or queer folks?
I’ve been propositioned at bars, by men and women and once by a couple interested in a threesome. It is obvious when someone is just looking for sex. All of these times, it was gross and the person propositioning deserved a punch in the face. It’s not always (but it does happen) that people say “hey, come have sex with me”. Usually it’s just implied. The person propositioning will get offended when you say “no thank you” which then often eventually escalates to “please leave me the fuck alone” and then often I’m the one to leave the bar, perhaps asking to be escorted by someone because I have pissed off this asshole and who knows what he’ll do. Don’t do this, don’t do any part of this. I would have thought that this was obvious—And, it’s likely, that those who need to be told not to do this will not listen to this advice.
But if you find yourself attracted to a philosopher and would like to get to know them better, it is normal and obviously permissible to ask them if they would like to meet you for a drink. That is not propositioning. That’s a friendly request for a low-stakes get-to-know-you date. Obviously on that date, you should not pressure that person for sex. You should not ask them on a date in hopes of having a conference hook-up. All of that is bad behavior, extremely disrespectful and off-putting to every normal person.
I also think that philosophers should date philosophers, marry philosophers, and have kids with philosophers. It’s a beautiful thing to have a shared passion. Any norms that prohibit that are too restrictive. But being super sleazy at conferences is not that.
This comment prompts me to clarify that each time I mentioned “propositioning” in my comments above, I was referring to an ordinary request for a date, not an outright request for sex.
Anyway, I agree with everything said here. My only reservation is over the claim that you should not ask someone on a date in hopes of having a conference hook up. I don’t see why a person couldn’t *hope* for that, as long as they’re respectful, they’re not explicitly propositioning in an inappropriate way, they’d still be happy with a no-hook-up date, there are fairly obvious signs that the desire to hook up is reciprocal, etc etc. That seems perfectly fine for two adults to do. Just, you know, not during a Q&A or whatever.
Says you. I know I do not at all consent to being “propositioned”, respectfully or otherwise, for a hook-up or a no-hook-up date, when agreeing to the conference’s terms and conditions.
I do consent to go and do philosophy.
So why others expect me to be open to dates too is beyond me.
Yes, I am the one who says what my comments say. Anyway, I’m mostly just sharing a hunch, not proclaiming anything definitively. I repeat that I agreed with the previous commenter on every other point. That said, I wonder if you are relying on an overly strong notion of consent. I can easily imagine, and have seen, two people meet at a conference, chat the day and night away, exhibit obvious chemistry, and then (well, I don’t see this part) take things back to a hotel. I can see the potential problems here, definitely. But another part of me thinks that only an academic (or religious puritan) could find something problematic with this extremely human interaction—and if a notion of consent suggests against it, then (perhaps!) the notion should be reexamined.
Perhaps, perhaps, so many hunches, and so much imagination. A “puritan” certainly couldn’t fathom them. Bless your heart.
Idk what this means, but glad we agree
Just narrowly: how can you consent to being asked out? Isn’t a request for consent for being asked out just equivalent to being asked out?
Now we’re getting to some philosophy! To consent, do you have to consent to consenting? Don’t we run into an infinite regress problem? SO INTERESTING.
Wow. You can say no. THEN complain if someone doesn’t take no for an answer, but you can’t go through life pissed off every time someone invites you to do something you don’t want to do. It’s an invitation. Consent is not required for issuing an invitation. Simply decline.
Wow. You’ve done it, some lady. Just gulp it up and say no when propositioned at a *professional space*. So you can complain afterwards. Great progress, everyone.
yes, I’ve said no in a professional space. If you can’t say no in a professional space, that’s on you. Live large, exert your agency, and if someone asks you to do something you don’t want to do, gather all your courage, take a big breath, and say no.
Yes, some lady, I’ve done that. Just because I have doesn’t mean I should have had to (or you, or anyone else). That’s the issue here. Just because professional spaces *are* sexualised doesn’t mean they should be.
Yes, Some lady, I have done that too. It’s a pretty basic naturalistic fallacy. Just because I have, doesn’t mean I should have had to. And just because professional spaces are sexualised, doesn’t mean they should be.
i don’t know – i am a woman, and obviously think what “propositioning” means in this context matters a whole lot. i’m also not sure i’ve seen anyone endorse the “would love it regardless” view – it seems to me that everyone who has waded into this discourse has acknowledged that there is a form of propositioning that would be bad.
One of the biggest wakeup calls I had in the profession was when I was sitting in a faculty meeting and another faculty member said, “Having sex with undergraduate students is a perk of the job.” Another faculty member laughed and agreed with him. This type of behavior is clearly predatory and we should do everything we can to get it out of our profession.
With that said, I’m also sympathetic to non-predatory versions of this. This is not about being a player or a predator, but being a human. Most academics are consumed by the work they’re doing in their field. For them, it’s not a job, it’s how they live their life. There is no off switch. One important aspect of meaningful and fulfilling relationships with other people is that you share certain things in common. It doesn’t surprise me that faculty members and graduate students are attracted to each other, or that graduate students are attracted to each other, or that colleagues are attracted to each other, or other types of relationships along these lines. The challenge, of course, is how you can participate in that relationship without it being predatory in a problematic way.
I say “predatory in a problematic way” because sometimes self-described soft predatory behavior may not be problematic. For example, it wasn’t too long ago that a non-zero number of women went to college with the aim of finding a husband. And a non-zero percentage of that non-zero were specifically looking at their younger faculty members as possible future husbands. I’m not of this generation, but I know a handful of people who are, and all of their relationships seem to be very stable. In all of them, the women have made comments about how they were the ones who made the first move, initiated the relationship, or otherwise were the ones who were (as one said openly) “on the hunt.”
I don’t know how we strike the balance between these things. We clearly do not want faculty members talking in meetings about how having sex with undergraduates is a perk of the job. But if we really consider everyone involved to be an adult, part of being an adult (and treating people as adults) is that they’re free to enter into whatever kind of relationships that they want. As long as no one is being coerced, maybe there’s nothing wrong with these relationships? But I’m not sure how we can avoid the possible coercion or separating out the bad from the acceptable when it comes to these relationships.
“ We philosopher players are hedonists—in life, if not on paper.”
Are “we” though? It certainly doesn’t follow without additional explanation, since there are many reasons that people have sex – including in professional spaces – where pleasure is not the primary concern. Indeed, my own observations suggest that reasons related to ego, reflexive entitlement or, frankly, habit are as likely to motivate philosophy “players” as the pursuit of pleasure. it also seems to me that the sorts of ethical concerns that people raise about interprofessional relationships (and I’d include the concerns raised in this post) would be less pressing in relationships were “we” all hedonists.
This also gets at my other big concern about the way this post is pitched. The author doesn’t seem to just (or even principally) be addressing people who happen to love philosophy passionately – they seem to be primarily addressing professional philosophers – sure, there’s no doubt a lot of overlap between these two sets (though I’m not convinced that the overlap of the circles here is nearly as extensive as many of my colleagues assume). The author of course acknowledges this when they note that they personally have had two file two sexually related misconduct reports, but I think that they might have more room to conceptualize what these failures amounted to if they took the gap here between loving philosophy and being a professional philosopher more seriously.
All of which is to say that while I could give two shits about whether or not people choose to fuck around, this particular account strikes me as not taking nearly seriously enough the extent to which “we” might also be fucking around with one another’s working conditions.
And that is both unprofessional and unsexy.
“Some compassionate strong players, having slept with a weak player, take on the difficult and often draining task of educating weak players. ‘Hey, I notice that you were harsher than usual in your comments on our shared paper/ your review of my book/ etc. It made me wonder: is something bothering you?’ ‘It would make me more comfortable if we could compartmentalize our shared work and our sexual history. Would this be possible for you?’”
This is why non-academics hate us.
The language of “strong” and “weak” gives the game away here: the author is patently someone who preys on those around her and finds ways to eliminate them from the profession when they don’t act in the way she wants them to. The language of social justice and the bureaucracies friendly to it, like “reporting misconduct,” has been a convenient smokescreen for sociopaths like this for years. Besides those elements, this piece appears to have no philosophical content, though it is a fascinating exercise in self-aggrandizement.
I wanted to add that, despite this, I find parts of the reaction to this piece rather frustrating as well. To me, the sentiment that if one finds oneself attracted to a fellow philosopher one should scope out a sex party or use an app to get some sort of release valve or outlet for that attraction is pretty depressing. There is not much to be said for accruing “player”-style sexual conquests in the way this author seems to want, but it’s worth confronting some awkwardness and conflict in pursuing genuine attraction, romance, and love, rather than merely blowing off steam somewhere that everyone deems appropriate.
It’s a shame that you follow a decent observation (that OP seems to think that sexual conduct norms only protect but do not bind them) with this overblown social conservatism.
We could be allies in creating a professional space for everyone, but you just can’t keep your judgement away from people’s private lives.
No idea what this was even responding to in my comment but there are few things more overall tiresome and pointless I can imagine than “be[ing] allies in creating a professional space for everyone”, so I guess this turned out fine for me.
Believing in romance and love is “overblown social conservatism”, didn’t you know? So judgmental, thinking that romance and love are worthy of pursuit.
Did it? You had to smuggle in “the language of social justice” in there somehow to make a non-argument that was already cliche a decade ago.
“My experiences have led me to believe that one of the best things that men in a professional field can do for feminism is to learn to take sexual and romantic rejection well.”
Yeah what a wacko
“For this reason, it is important that the strong players are able to stop weak players in their tracks, for instance by breaking off the relationship, warning others or reporting them for misconduct. A strong player must be capable of doing this too, and not succumb to pity.”
Strong players flout silly, repressive professional norms. But it is also a sign of strength run to HR to have those norms enforced.
I think there are two very different “norms” here. There’s room to debate whether workplace relationships should be allowed; there’s no room to debate whether sexual harassment should be allowed. I took the OP to mean the second when they spoke of “misconduct”.
That might be right. I took the OP to mean something falling far short of harassment.
As the thread amply demonstrates, different people are reading the OP in radically different ways. I don’t claim any special virtue for my own reading!
Fair enough. One problem here is that it’s just not a very clearly-written essay. (But perhaps I’m biased since I’ve never slept with this person.)
I aspire to philosophical greatness – I want to get it right, make progress on big questions, and share that knowledge – understanding.
I — and no one I know that similarly aspires — has ever thought of this as a “quasi-sexual desire” and as intertwining “our mind and our body”.
Genuinely don’t understand what that even means.
Hard to see how you can seriously aspire to philosophical greatness if you haven’t read Plato or Nietzsche.
I’ve read them. Is the thought – since they thought of philosophy as a kind of physical eros, I / we should too?
If so, that’s obviously implausible. Do you accept the philosophy of mind behind the Platonic / Nietzschean diagnosis of philosophers? Why should I? Because I read them?
No, the thought is that you should “understand what that even means.”
You are only adding to confusion: Plato and Nietzsche have different mutually incompatible views of philosophy as body-bound. One way of being confused is not even understanding which the OP is on about.
Fair enough—I reflexively read you uncharitably; apologies.
Any philosopher thinking this in 2025 is delusional.
Why?
We are no longer in an age of a few great thinkers who are the intellectual colossi of their era (perhaps because all the low hanging fruit is gone, or philosophy is too professionalized, or the number of philosophers working now is several digits larger than previous eras). Instead, our error involves several thousand tinkerers–some more notable some less so–making incremental progress on the important philosophical problems of our times. So probably no one in our era will achieve “greatness”, and anyway, even if a few do, the odds are so stacked against you as one of tens of thousands of professional philosophers that it would be delusional for you to aspire to be a “great”.
This seems like an overly strict reading of “greatness.” Faylasuf even qualified their point immediately afterward, in ways which suggest strongly against the “intellectual colossi” reading (“get it right, make progress, share knowledge”).
Incidentally, couldn’t one aspire toward colossus-hood as a kind of unattainable ideal, for the sake of (e.g.) motivation or inspiration or whatever? I feel like people have a knee-jerk reaction to any talk of philosophical greatness, as if everyone who mentions it styles themselves as the next Plato rather than merely as someone who tries (and maybe fails) to excel at their passion.
Meme read me correctly.
There is obviously a distinction between “being a great” and “doing great philosophy”.
I hoped it was clear that I was talking about *trying* to do great philosophy.
I don’t see what is delusional about that. Reactionaries like to hear the desire for great work as a desire to be on the Mount Rushmore of philosophers since Plato, and that is obviously an imaginary target for them to pick on.
Physics is not fundamentally different, yet I can easily name a dozen physicists of the last half-century who i’d call “great”. (I think I could for philosophy too, but perhaps it would be a more divisive claim here.)
I’d love to hear what physicists you would name. I’m not trolling–I really value your opinion on that.
Wilczek, Gell-Mann, Wilson, Feynman, Anderson, Zeilinger, Witten, Polchinski, Susskind, Unruh, Wald.
(Okay, that’s eleven, not a dozen, but it’s just off the top of my head, without very much serious thought. Very skewed towards particle physics and towards theory; mostly that’s just my own background, though most of the really great experimental achievements – LIGO, LHC, EHT, etc have been by large teams.)
There is some important conflation going on here. The justification for having a “non-zero” amount of sex with people in the profession is that
1. many philosophers want to DATE other philosophers,
2. SEX is pleasurable, and
3. FLINGS, especially with certain like-minded people, can be meaningful.
Point 2 provides us no reason to think that conferences should have a non-zero amount of hookups. Just because something is pleasurable or we like something very much, doesn’t mean we are entitled to do it wherever. If professional conferences give you a sexual charge, you can go scope out a sex party in town afterwards. Or go to a local bar to meet others out on the town. Or masturbate.
Reasons 1 and 3 are more relevant because it focuses attention on colleagues. Ok. The issue is that the author seems to take it as a feature of a strong player that they are able to continue interacting with their hookup partner as if nothing had transpired between them. But this is impossible for most cases of DATING and some cases of FLINGS because it’s not just about sex (and of course even sex is often not just about sex). Of course, people can get over break ups and be fine toward each other, but there’s nothing “weak” about having difficulty casually interacting with someone who, say, interpersonally hurt them.
I’m not discouraging no-strings-attached sexual encounters here: have at it! But you can’t use people’s desire for meaningful ROMANTIC (and sexual) connection with people like the ones at these conferences as a general reason in favor of no-strings-attached sex in these venues.
You might say, FLINGS aren’t like DATING. FLINGS can be NSA and so, 3 is a reason for people to have a non-zero amount of sex at conferences. I’ll grant that ist is A reason. But is it a good reason? I’m not so sure. The author keeps talking about taking on risks but what is at risk? People’s reputations, professional and personal but also their personal and economic wellbeing. As an adult, you are free to gamble with your own wellbeing but the author seems very ready to gamble with the wellbeing of others.
The author describes one case of a weak player thus:
“If you are a strong player who has encountered a weak player, you might know how exhausting that can be. Some compassionate strong players, having slept with a weak player, take on the difficult and often draining task of educating weak players. “Hey, I notice that you were harsher than usual in your comments on our shared paper/ your review of my book/ etc. It made me wonder: is something bothering you?” “It would make me more comfortable if we could compartmentalize our shared work and our sexual history. Would this be possible for you?” If the weak player fails to develop, then they indeed become a risk to the whole discipline.”
People do not comment more harshly on a paper by someone with whom they had a fully consensual pleasurable NSA encounter with. They do so if they feel they have been wronged. To say that THIS is the person who needs to be taught about distinguishing between personal and professional interactions is laughable. The “strong” player is the one who mixed personal with professional by scoping out hook ups at a professional event. Now, they’re hypocritically going to tell the person they hurt that they need to get over it and act professionally? Give me a break.
This is all to say, I do not think that the author provides any good (or even decent) reasons for fooling around with people at conferences.
I found about much of this quite unobjectionable, if perhaps on the obvious side: sex happens in professional philosophical spaces, and this can have value, but it is morally complicated and something to be careful about. For sure. But I don’t find the categorization of people into “strong players” and “weak players” to be obviously apt. For one thing, I’m not nearly so sure as the author is that we should expect these to be reasonably stable traits in individuals. (I’d be nervous about someone self-identifying as “strong” in this way, even if they have a track record of good communication and moral sensitivity in past relationships.) For another, for a variety of reasons, I don’t think it’s helpful to think of sexual engagement as a “game”.
On a more substantive note, I note a bit of a performative contradiction in a post that complains about “weak players” making social moves that problematically sexualize the discipline on the whole, instead of creating targeted local sexualized zones. It’s hard to see why someone who thought of things this way wouldn’t think that publishing this post contributes to the sexualization of the discipline on the whole.
Thank you, Jonathan, for articulating the tension underlying the discomfort I was feeling… between on the one hand agreeing with the general points made, and on the other, let’s just say not relating to the person making them.
Haven’t started the piece itself yet, but thank God a third party has confirmed that “Alex Rails” is at a good university. You can’t trust the unwashed at state schools (or worse) to ethically fuck. I trust the rest will be good, having been reasonably assured of their employer.
As we all know, moral character osmoses from Gothic architecture.
I also had the reaction of “why are we being told this, it seems totally irrelevant”? However, to be fair to Justin, we should acknowledge that many of the readers here are American philosophers and they are particularly obsessed with institutional hierarchy and would immediately want this information.
“I go for women and men, though men are generally easier to pull for me.” Even at a philosophy conference? Hard to believe.
It’s becoming clear that with all the conference hookup theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding.
alex rails = serial lax? I’m suspecting this will turn out to be a hoax of sorts.
“a sex liar L” was right there
Thought I’d let others take a shot too
This and the lay of wife comment were my first and only times laughing out loud reading Daily Nous comments. Thank you
Among the various undefended assertions here, I focus (who knows why…) for the moment on the notion that philosophy is a ‘vocation.’ Really? My ‘vocation’ is to philosophy? Yours is? Is this how folks conceive of what we do generally? I don’t (but that may be a minority position).
While aware of the semantic shift in its original usage (Christian, of various kinds and sorts) to a much wider sense (including, for example, ‘vocational school’), there still seems to be – at heart – some sort of intertwining of personal and professional life that is implied – even today and in this piece in particular – toward an unarticulated ‘meaning’ that is sought in various avenues of life, always, everywhere, and all at once but unified by whatever it is philosophizing is. I tend to think of it not as a vocation but as an ‘otium’: a well and virtuously used leisure, to think, read, write, debate, advance. As a ‘vocation’ philosophy just seems so very involved, and tiring, and not terribly productive of achieving the aim or object of the activity (though I’m not sure what that aim/object is). So, to restate: do philosophers really see their being a philosopher as a ‘vocation’?
Yes, but I also find it so very involved, and tiring, and (to put it mildly) not terribly productive of achieving the aim or object of the activity.
To take a slight tangent, the whole piece screams academic seducer a la Kierkegaard, hence the suspicion it’s an (elaborate?) hoax
You don’t say this outright but you’re writing in a way that seems to assume the idea of philosophy as vocation is something you’re surprised to hear, like it’s such a rare idea that you’ve never or almost never encountered it before. Is that your intention?
Not my intention, but thanks for the question. Nor am I surprised to hear it used; I’ve heard it a lot. Something about the way it was asserted annoyed me, which was then picked up in some of the comments. Then I thought: is this a “vocation”? If so, of what sort? How does vocation differ from philosophy as a way of life, if they are different? Would Plato or Aristotle have called this a ‘vocation’ (no)? What about Boethius or Spinoza (no)? Clearly comes up in Nietzsche and Husserl, with similar terms in Heidegger and Vogelin, but then all those folks are in various ways impacted directly by the Christian concept of ‘vocation’ and use it in a similar way. Just puzzling on its widespread but possibly unreflected use. I think ‘otium’ is a better word for how I approach it.
To your mind is it impossible, difficult, or quite possible, for something to be both vocation and otium? I don’t know what various historical figures would say is or isn’t a vocation but what are you thinking of when you use the term?
I think that my notion of ‘vocation’ is idiosyncratic. I can’t but hear the term and refer back to my Christian (Catholic) upbringing, where one is meant to discern one’s “vocation” and here the term is explicitly harkening back to the Latin sense of “vocare”, to call. A vocation, then, is a calling from a person (God) to a person (me) – pulling me to where I’m supposed to be, and that to which I am ‘called’ is a big ticket item – not a profession but a state of life (e.g., marriage, priesthood/religious life, single life), and then one’s profession and other decisions fit into that larger item.
Now, I know that’s not what is meant by philosophers looking at doing philosophy as their ‘vocation’ (maybe Lady Philosophy beckons, we hear the ‘call’ and find out place in the world? – seems unlikely). But it also isn’t the sense of vocation as in ‘vocational school.’ When someone today says that their profession is a ‘vocation’ it usually connotes that they find meaning and purpose in their work beyond their pay check. Often this is in professions like teaching, medicine, etc., but there’s no in principle reason why it wouldn’t be also in, say, sheet metal work. It’s the meaning found in and through the work that makes it a vocation. I think this sense is closer to the Christian sense of vocation than that of vocational school, and I think it entered into the philosophical vocabulary through Christian sources but hidden. It has to do with one’s whole self in people like Nietzsche and Husserl (I think – I’m not an expert on their thought), but without an addressor (only an addressee?) doing the calling.
I wonder if this transposition from an explicitly Christian context, where there is an addressor and an addressee, to a different context, where the addressor is dropped off simply makes philosophy too much to handle, enveloping one’s whole life somehow, precisely because it is not a personal relationship with another person, but an amorphous sense of meaning I’m chasing.
So, I don’t think that a concept of the vocation of philosophy is necessarily at odds with a concept of an otium of philosophy, depending – perhaps (I haven’t thought through this part much yet) – on whether one thinks the vocation is an actual call from something (Lady Philosophy? God?) for me to do this. If so, then it seems to fit quite neatly with an otium (cf. Augustine on the otium philosophiae). Also, otium is the Latin word used to translate ‘schola’ from Aristotle’s Greek, which means ‘leisure’ and from which we get words like ‘school’ and ‘scholar’ (see Metaphysics I, 1 – where he talks about Egyptian priests having enough leisure to contemplate mathematical matters). On this (otium) account, philosophy can still be a way of life, a basic disposition in the world, but there’s no implied ‘call’ – it’s something I do with serious bearing and with desired outcomes, but it has its place within other things I do (family, hobbies, exercise, etc.).
I have written much and, perhaps, said little – but those are my thoughts in this direction.
In the manner I pursue philosophy, my vocation is otium. There are undoubtedly some philosophers (e.g., practical ethicists, ameliorative feminists or trans-theorists) who conceive of their philosophical activity as actively engaged negotium. They might still consider what they do as a vocation.
Yes
This is amusingly shocking, but “Having sex can be doing philosophy”? Just…no. No more than having sex at a dentistry convention is doing dentistry.
I mean, when you think about it, the dentistry thing seems a lot more plausible than the philosophy thing.
Sex can involve a lot of conversation. Some of that conversation can be directly practical for the moment, but some of it can be more theoretical and general, depending on who’s involved and what they’re interested in thinking about together. If it reaches the point of being philosophy, it’s very likely to be philosophy of sex, or maybe some sort of more general aesthetics or philosophy of practical reason. Not very likely to be logic or medieval philosophy.
What are you talking about dude?
I took “having sex can be doing philosophy” to mean something more daring, like “the physical act itself is somehow a form of philosophizing.” I don’t think anyone would disagree that during or after sex you can talk about things, including philosophy.
It’s a send up: Stop trying to sleep with you colleagues and students.
“Don’t shit where you eat,” Tony Soprano said, and in this he was right. GE Moore would have seen this.
No one wants to condemn the casual hookup here, but I do think that this weirdly arrogant confession of sorts (sex manifesto?) shows exactly what might be the problem with purely recreational sex. Obviously there shouldn’t be a law against doing this, but treating people and yourself with such disrespect is depraved and vicious. This woman is indifferent to the feelings and careers of her sexual partners. She admits freely that she uses these people for sex/pleasure, and thinks any other way of approaching sex (as indicating ongoing interest, say, or as expressing at least some kind of defeasible commitment) is “weak”: These are the rules of the “game”, and that anyone who thinks differently must be “educated”, which is tiresome and annoying to her. … Apparently, her “pleasure” is worth the trail of destruction it leaves behind, and besides, SHE’S the victim here, of people who aren’t “strong” enough to act in precisely the way she demands.
It is entirely possible to have lots of casual sex without being a self-aggrandizing sociopath or leaving a trail of wreckage in your wake. I’ve spent plenty of time in strange bedrooms and I find appalling many of the same things about this essay as you do.
I’m with yikes. I don’t know that I know this particular woman, but I’ve certainly and unfortunately come across her type in my time, as well as the men (and occasionally women) successfully manipulated by women like this. And I’ve seen the horrific effects on both some of those men, and certainly third parties, especially third party women who are just trying to do their jobs and be judged on merit rather than flirting with and fucking (men) as ways of getting by professionally. I’ve seen awards, tenure, time off, hiring, promotions, teaching and money all get distorted by this sort of thing, both in cases where some guy is being so successfully manipulated that he is blind to his own behavior and in cases where a guy is just afraid that what is going on will be revealed. The author thinks she can separate out the sex from that sort of thing. I’m willing to bet all of my pseudonymous money she’s not successful at that. And other women, women who are just trying to do the job, are primarily paying the price. That’s not feminist behavior.
I mean, consider even just this: her remarks about someone (a presumed male co-author and sex-buddy/former sex-buddy) whose remarks on their shared work/her work become more critically after they stop having sex. The author interprets this– without any sense of irony, or self-awareness– as her male co-author/reviewer demonstrating his unwillingness to take sexual rejection. So great is her vanity about both her sexual prowess and her philosophical abilities that it never even occurs to her that it’s the other way around: he went easy on the criticisms (either deliberately or just because he was blinded by lust) so long as they were having sex, and now that they’re not having sex, the blinders are off and/or he hasn’t got sex-motivated reasons to restrain himself from the critical remarks he would otherwise make.
This was particularly concerning to me, as well. The author apparently has a penchant for screwing UP the hierarchy (because it’s safer … FOR HER, explicitly not for her sexual partner, which means she KNOWS she holds the power there), and then this comment she makes about a person giving harsher comments. Like, how would a man “up the hierarchy” interpret this reaction to comments, except as a veiled threat to make use of the power differential unless she gets the (easy) treatment she wants? This is a power she has apparently exercised successfully, in the form of HR complaints, against those “weak” ex-partners who grew too attached or maybe didn’t behave professionally in the way that she wanted … Also the author’s admission that “some [of us players/hedonists] use sex to get ahead in their careers”. This is all kinds of yuck.
Yes, “yuck”. But it’s also infuriating. This is one of the reasons women who are just trying to do the work have to work twice as hard as the men who are busily doling out professional favors to women who flirt with and fuck them “to get ahead in their careers” and 4x as hard as the women who engaging in that behavior and getting the professional favors. I don’t think that word “feminist” means what she thinks it means…
I do not want to sound condescending ( I really like America and Americans ) but this is possibly the most American piece of writing in the history of writing.
Every single part of it is so American, it is almost as if intented as a caricature. All the rules about sex and dating at work and the implication this is morally wrong. The stated “naughtiness” of the author who thinks having sex with people in their field is an act of transgression and sexual courage. The cringe worthy vocabulary as if this is an R rated discussion between people in an 80s movie that the world is not supposed to be listening to. The casual way the destruction of lives is being mentioned as if it is a sport ( excessive moralising environments never serve real morality as we all well know).. The trivial intellectualising ( but really moralising) about sex. All in all, something I can’t imagine anyone reading to someone who is not an American and not being laughed at. And none of these points have anything to do with actual ethics even if we take the HR – like context of the discussion seriously.
Anyway, to each their own. If this passes for dangerous living to someone out there and this means something to them, then who are we to say otherwise?
It took all the way until the end, but I finally found something sensible in this thread. I’m glad I stuck it out.
Daily Nous has been misnamed for a while now. A better name for this blog would be:
Yeah, but that name is too long. Looks like another win for the USA.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a US-based blog on the philosophy profession to often concentrate on how the profession is in the US. If someone wants to set up (e.g.) a UK- or Germany-focused blog on the profession, there’s plenty of space on the Internet.
Also, as someone who teaches Australian employment law, I can say that it’s not the case that the rules about sex among co-workers or sexual harrassment in the US are especially unusual. The Australian ones are actually pretty similar.
Correct, but such locally-affiliated blogs should be honest about what they are and should not be treated by the profession as its de facto profession-wide news and discussion platform. And, if German philosophers on a German-focused philosophy blog constantly discussed issues that reflect the current narrow cultural preoccupations of Germans as if those issues where of fundamental importance to philosophers everywhere, then “obnoxious” would be an appropriate descriptor.
Yes. The lack of philosophical sophistication in this piece is amusing, and it is amusing to think how many people in the profession (perhaps especially in small circles in good universities) think this open and affirmative discussion/confession of professional sex to be amazing. So many weirdly arrogant people.
THIS. Bureaucratic Merteuil takes 5000 words to let us know, in the crudest and most pretentious VC jargon (weak vs strong…), that, yeah, sometimes if you sleep around a lot, you get some crazy exes, and man, that sucks, especially if you then have to deal with them at work. Thanks Einstein.
However I strongly suspect the post to be pure rage bait
“Bureaucratic Merteuil…”
What a gem! This says so much in just two words… the Prevan episode especially comes to mind, but it fits with so much else in the book as well.
Leave it to philosophers at good universities to gamify sex while the rest of us enjoy our boring lives.
“I am great at fucking and can compartmentalize things because I am so awesome. But sometime I fuck someone who develops a deeper attraction and would like to continue our relationship. How weak! And then they get mad when I don’t reciprocate, because I just want to fuck. Did I mislead any of these people in any way? How did my actions contribute to this outcome? Is any of this my fault? Nah, only to the extent that I am so strong that I can’t properly judge the weakness of weak players. But c’mon, it’s the weak players’ faults for wanting something different out of a sexual relationship than me.”
Alternative reading: if I sleep with someone a few times, and then want to stop sleeping with them, and they proceed to sexually harass me and not take “no” for an answer: then yes, it’s their fault.
I intentionally did not reference the misconduct claims from her post. And most of her post was not about those. So your summary is uncharitable when it comes to my post and inaccurate when it comes to hers.
Hmmm this all just makes me hate the players AND the game.
As the comments here and on twitter already show, this post risks serious reputational damage to women in the field.
This is a crazy read as someone who just got hired as a lecturer and beginning their professional academic career. Not sure if you should sleep with your coworkers, but I’m 100% on board with calling out academics who cannot handle rejection. The “nice guy” behavior has no place in any context.
Do people actually think this is a serious sentence: “It is not fair to ask the question ‘how does playerhood affect philosophy’ without asking ‘how does philosophy affect playerhood?’” hahahahahahahahaha
From the Victorian era through Jean Genet (“The only sexual act that truly interests me is the one that society condemns”), the genre of confessional erotic writing, often anonymous, permitted writers in effect to say: “I am bad,” “I defy your petty morality.” One senses that Alex would really like to join them, with this celebration of her bargain-bin will-to-power and her description of her mode of operation as a “game”. But a professional reflex holds her back and compels her to hedge her boldness with a great deal of performative caring about harm-reduction. Plenty of nerds in the comments have plainly never read Genet, or much of anything beyond analytic ethics, and have managed to convince themselves that if we think hard enough about it and set up mechanisms to regulate the hell out of it, sex might become something other than what it has always been — a big nasty mess that we cannot stop pursuing because we are, as a default setting, bestial horndogs, but that tears people apart inside and out unless a huge amount of ritual work is done at the community level to inscribe the union into the cosmic order, i.e., to sacramentalize it.
Anyhow, great editorial decision to run this, Justin!
Think there’s sex addiction groups out there you can attend if you can’t stop pursuing it mate. It doesn’t need to be a mess.
I already have a mate, cool illiterate guy.
Why start at Victorian literature? You’ll find many earlier examples if you read widely enough.
It’s risky to stretch the presentist mentality of the commenters here too far all at once, but yes, you’re right!
Meh, you might be the old-fashioned one here, thinking that there’s something really exciting and interesting about transgressive sexual practices. “Confessional erotic writing” tries to make something fascinating out of something that is mundane. Those who approach sex like it’s no more meaningful than eating a steak will have nothing insightful to say about it, and so the genre of transgressive sex-writing is about as interesting as the genre of food journalism.
The 60s have come and gone, and we’ve learned a lot since then … one thing we’ve learned is that sex is boring, and casual sex is the most boring.
Where did I say I’m not old-fashioned?
Some people may find food journalism boring, because food is no more exciting than casual sex, while others find food journalism exciting, because food is no more boring than casual sex.
There’s scarcely a single sentence in this farrago of lunacy that makes any discernible sense. This is Sokal-worthy nonsense.
Consider this bit of insanity: “Most of us can think of a few philosophers who would probably have produced better work (at least in some areas) had they been better players (I won’t mention the names that come to my mind, out of respect for devotees of these frustrated men.).”
What? Most of us can think of philosophers whose work would have been better if they had been better pick-up artists? Just think about that for a moment.
But perhaps the real giveaway is this: “It is not fair to ask the question ‘how does playerhood affect philosophy’ without asking ‘how does philosophy affect playerhood?’”
I guess we must be even-handed about these things.
Kant?
I assumed Wittgenstein, who is often hinted as being confined by the closet.
I’m not seeing a lot in the discussion here on changes in preferences and regret. So, a few words on this especially for junior scholars.
For a young philosopher, if you don’t hate social interactions, going to a conference might be the most exciting thing on the planet. In that context, and with alcohol, the social psychology is clear that you are primed to feel more sexual attraction. I imagine pursuing that successfully can be satisfying, and you can pat yourself on the back if nobody got hurt.
But ask yourself how you might feel about it ten years later. Do you want a shitty Marriott littered with people you have complicated relationships with? What if your eventual life partner isn’t a philosopher and has a Complex (partially justified by posts like this) that maybe you’d rather be with a philosopher? Meanwhile, you just want to go to a conference to see old friends, but several people you used to sleep with will be there. (What is the advice? ‘Never stop playing’? Just tell them, “It’s okay baby; I was a strong player.” ‘Don’t marry weak players’?)
If you are lonely and looking for a life partner, maybe a philosopher is the way to go. (And shout out to the great philosophy partners out there.) But if this is about hooking up at conferences, and speaking to the young men in particular, let just say: Bro, don’t do it.
The post was an enjoyable read, and boy have I enjoyed the comments. But we really don’t want to plant an expectation in the minds of young philosophers that, hey, sex might be on the table. This isn’t why we demanded to go back to in-person conferences.
“on the table”??? Well, that’s one place to have it, I guess. Consider “The Postman Always Rings Twice”…
If you’ve had negative reviews of your work by people who nevertheless find some of your work interesting, then that Marriott is already full of people you have complicated relationships with. The life of the mind is complicated, no less than the life of the body.
But it’s important to try to do what you can to make sure everyone can live well with the complications that there are.
I brought condoms to the Central APA this year but was very disappointed.
I’ve been dissapointed at the Central APA several times, but it was usually do to poor attendence or a really shabby book display. Never anything condom related, I’ll admit.
I just wish someone had told me it was entirely online. Getting back on the plane at O’Hare with a suitcase full of condoms was not a proud moment,
LOL – I’d forgotten about that part. Very nice. (probably the book displace still sucked, too.)
This manifesto suggests that using sex to get ahead in their career is a natural thing for a “philosopher player” to do (see quote below) and endorses being a philosophy player. So, this manifesto seems to be condoning using sex to get ahead in one’s career. That seems extremely problematic.
Saying that this (using sex to get ahead) is something that some people do is not the same thing as endorsing it, or even saying it is natural. Surely a community of professional philosophers can see this (unless they are deliberately trying to be extremely uncharitable).
I would just like to point out that many great philosophers suffered from blue balls, and that, for all we know, this may have been important to their ability to do great philosophical work: Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzche, Wittgenstein, to name just a few. In the Symposium, Socrates basically argues that the path to enlightenment goes through blue balls.
I found the distinction between “strong players” and “weak players” interesting, and I found myself both chuckling at (and feeling called out by) “everyone is a feminist ally until they get friendzoned”.
But I find myself stymied by this problem: how does one recognize the strong players? (This is like the problem of how the phronimos is recognized.) Obviously self-deception looms large here: it’s tempting to think of oneself as a strong player, since it’s all too tempting to imagine oneself to be skilled at navigating these sorts of tensions. But unlike in professional sports, there aren’t any objective reliable criteria for assessing one’s conduct.
What about intersubjective criteria? Can one rely on other strong players to identify oneself as a strong player? That just pushes the bump in the carpet around: it’s easy to imagine a group of people who all imagine themselves and each other as a strong players, but to everyone else in the professional, they’re just sex pests.
So I’m not sure how Alex Rails can avoid the following objection:
1. No one should think of themselves as a strong player.
2. Hence, if one is a player, then one ought to regard themselves as a weak player.
3. But weak players are bad for the profession.
4. Hence one should not be a player at all.
Have I missed something here?
To the extent that there’s a distinction, it seems quite clear to me that it has to be a continuum. But several of the comments suggest several very different dimensions along which a player can be “weak”, that cause different kinds of problems for the profession. Some of them are surely more important to prevent than others.
The doctrine advanced by “Alex Rails” is a modern day Doctrine of the Swine. Let us not forget Lady Philosophy’s proper magisterium is the intellect, it is not the flesh.
We can and should philosophize with the hammer, as Nietzsche did. We can and should philosophize with the hammer and sickle. And we damn well can and should philosophize with the dildo.
Damn, matching cringe for cringe here.
Traditionalist’s comment gives new meaning to what a posh wank is. So I had to match it, and invoke the image of its more commonly used traditional meaning.
In that case, it seems that *I* am the dildo here.
I agree we should talk about how to approach sex virtuously in the profession. But the author seems to get one aspect of being a strong player backwards.
At the very least, a strong player should acknowledge the risks involved in the game and be willing to deal with the consequences. When feelings get hurt, a strong player does not walk away or arrogantly “educate” their partner. Strong players care about the well-being of their partners even after the relationship has ended. They understand that problems will emerge and deal with them respectfully. They do not assume that the source of every problem is the weakness of the other player, but ask themselves what they could have done better first. If a strong player estimates that she is unable to deal with the aftermath, she doesn’t play.
No one is as purely hedonistic as the author seems to suggest she is. There might come a time that she falls in love with a colleague, is ultimately rejected and hurt, and finds it hard to be in the same room ever again. This has little to do with being weak or inexperienced, but more with being a human being.
An an example, what should a strong player do if she feels that a former bed partner makes “harsher” comments than before? Most importantly, do not approach them with the mere intention of educating them. This does not work, and it is likely disingenuous to yourself. If you feel the need to contact them, the first thing to do is introspection. Why do you feel hurt by their comments? Then approach the conversation from that starting point. Try to determine the other person’s motivation and feelings from the conversation, rather than jumping to an unsympathetic interpretation. Chances are they will apologise before you make any accusations. (And call or meet up, rather than text.)
In at least this aspect the author does not present herself as such a strong player. I suspect that if you are a actually a strong player, you might discover that sleeping with so-called weak players does not cause that many problems.
First, thanks everyone for reading and commenting. I want to respond to a few of the objections to this piece.
Many of the responses (not all!) cluster into two types, either “professional spaces should be kept clean of sex at all times, anything else is wrong” or “everyone knows hooking up with colleagues after flirting at conference socials is unproblematic, so stop talking about it!”
This divergence in opinion is already a sign that flirting and sex with other philosophers is not always good or always bad, but that there are good and bad ways. I would argue that if we are interested in treating people well, we should talk about the good and bad ways to sleep with colleagues. I think that would be more productive than responding with “this is all bad” or “don’t talk about it.” I am glad to see that many of the comments here try to make sense of this in-between space.
Some responses say we should not talk about this stuff on a philosophy site because it might encourage bad behavior. I think people will keep having sex regardless. What is important is that we can distinguish problematic sex from non-problematic sex. Looking at skills is a good starting point, especially skills in coping well with rejection. In my experience, sex pests who are in a position of power often act out because don’t cope well with rejection. I have experienced people who refuse to acknowledge my “no” and keep pursuing, even after they’ve been asked to stop pursuing me, multiple times. Like I said in the post, I have also experienced career-related threats as a response to rejection. The ability to cope with rejection makes a big difference. That’s why skill matters, skill determines whether you become a sex pest or not and skills can be learned.
Other responses to this piece take issue with the fact that I admit to being a player and enjoying sex with philosophers in particular. I get where this intuition is coming from. Making your profession into a kink goes against professional integrity in many cases. However, I don’t think this has to necessarily hold for “being a philosopher.”
A philosopher is someone who takes an interest in particular types of questions and spends time on them. I don’t think its problematic to be attracted to someone because of the way they think. The fact is that many of us come across attractive thinkers in a professional setting. Again, many philosophers date other philosophers, and this doesn’t always lead to marriage. Sometimes it leads to nothing at all, a relationship and then a break-up or a mutual decision to be regular platonic colleagues again. These situations are handled well by strong players and handled badly by weak players. When handled badly, they can slip into awful, coercive relationships that seriously damage people. This does not mean that the people handling them well are doing anything wrong. Whether you are a strong or weak player matters and our judgements should respond to that.
Come here often?
It is you who are damaging, and all the more so because you cannot see it. First: there are perfectly straightforward rules about this sort of thing, put in place by actual feminists of my generation and the generation before me. Rules like: if you stand in any evaluative capacity over or under someone, either don’t have sex with them, or if you do, immediately report it to HR *and* remove yourselves from that evaluative relationship permanently (irrespective of whether the sexual activity is ongoing, the problem becomes ongoing the minute the sex happens, which I suspect you know given your exploitative remarks about using sex to advance your career). If the philosopher you’re having sex with is outside your institution, there are fewer such rules, but there are some. E.g. no one you had sex with should have been permitted to evaluate your tenure case (supposing, as Justin reports, that you actually are tenured somewhere) Those rules protect everyone (whether they’re ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ players, or else women just trying to do our freaking job). Well, I suppose they protect, but don’t benefit, women like you have announced yourself to be who openly proclaim the intention to use sex for career advancement, since the rules are meant (among other things) to prevent that from happening.
Second, I suppose in one way I am grateful to you. I am on a university level committee concerned with (among other things) matters related to Title VII and IX, and I intend to print out the OP and large portions of the discussion that followed, including your own contribution, take it in to my fellow committee members as an example of why– for the sake of the women who are actually trying to do their jobs and be promoted on that basis– we have to be even more vigilant about enforcing these rules both regard to internal dynamics and with regard to external ones (such as who is allowed to serve as external referee on tenure cases). I am reminded of an old sitcom in which one character says to another “will you come to therapy with me? My therapist thinks I made you up” [Nod here to those who have indicated that we might here be up against a Sokal-hoax– I will be sure to acknowledge that to my fellow uni level committee members]
Third– take it from someone who hasn’t slept with you: the level of your philosophical analysis, even on consideration that this is a blog post, is so poor that I feel confident that whomever was your ex-sex-buddy that you thought got overly critical when you stopped having sex with him was clearly not critical enough.
I just want to second all of “actual feminist’s” contributions to this thread.
I was sexually harassed during my career. We did not have sex (consensual or otherwise), I did not return his interest, and I did not accept favors from him.
Nonetheless, I spent years worried that people would think that I had “slept my way” into some of my successes.
By the way, the guy who sexually harassed me justified his behavior, in part, by referencing all of the young women who “throw themselves” at famous male professors.
I don’t actually know how common such consensual quid pro quo “throwing” is, although I know first hand that the rate is not non zero.
This whole post feeds into exactly the kinds of beliefs that fuel both obviously predatory sexual harassers and people who look askance at any young women in the field.
I echo all that’s been said here. I’ve been sexually harassed multiple times by men in philosophy, whose advances I did not reciprocate. Most instances happened in graduate school (and thus when I was quite vulnerable). Presumably, these men would not self-identify as “weak players”, given that their “lack of skill” is partially indicated & constituted by a lack of both introspective & interpersonal epistemic accuracy. Alex Rails’ post threatens to undermine the work that many of us have done to safeguard women & queer philosophers by placing guardrails on the profession through emphasizing & mutually enforcing professional ethics.
There’s also a sharp distinction between mindfully & responsibly engaging in reciprocal sexual relations with like-minded peers whom one exercises no professional power over (on the one hand) and gamifying “the sexual pursuit of philosophical colleagues” (on the other). The latter fundamentally promotes the instrumentalization of one’s colleagues, which will disproportionately & inevitably harm (largely junior) women.
And for what it’s worth, sleeping with a person who’s e.g., reviewing one’s book is a violation of professional ethics, which undermines the accuracy & neutrality of the review. What an absurd & immature scenario to promote as par for the interpersonal course…
i have also been sexually harassed during my philosophy career many times, as well as in every work place where i’ve ever been employed. i have been asked point blank if i’ve slept with “x famous philosopher”, and worried that people assumed this about me (i hadn’t), and thought this was why i had achieved various things (evidently, it wasn’t). the existence of sexual harassment and bad behavior does not entail that people – including women – cannot reasonably be open to sexual relationships with others in the field (including being pursued by them in places like, e.g. conferences), and that this can be done in an ethical manner. to claim that someone who feels this way isn’t “actually a feminist” or “bringing real feminists down” is frankly offensive.
yes, there are lots of institutional rules about what you should do about romance when someone is at your university (though notice, being draconian and hyper vigilant about these rules has not only not stopped this behavior, but has in some cases made it even more insidious). most of what the author is describing here is actually not even that scenario, but rather things like sexual encounters at conferences, etc, which are not governed by the “perfectly straightforward rules” mentioned here (nor, to my mind, should they be).
there’s a lot of cringe in this piece – in particular i’m not fond of this strong/weak language – but the responses that claim to speak for the One True Feminism while casting aspersions at her and deliberately ignoring the quite reasonable points she has made (hard to disagree that men taking rejection well is good for feminism) is also quite cringy, imo.
Fucking your way to career success in philosophy, and openly advocating that, is anti-feminist. That’s not “one true feminism” language; that’s setting *some* kind of boundary that protects women in professional settings who are trying to succeed by *actually doing our jobs*, self-avowed ‘charismatic’. You also are deliberately glossing over where I and others have indicated that romantic/sexual interactions are fine, so long as they abide by the rules that prevent exploitation and unfairness on the job to those of us who aren’t trying to fuck our way to the top.
Second everything ActualFeminist Woman in Philosophy said. I’ve been sexually harassed multiple times (in and out of philosophy). Someone on my dissertation committee drunkenly declared in a restaurant with lots of other philosophers that he wanted to f*ck me. I rejected all his advances/propositions/whatever. He retaliated against me by voting against my dissertation (after emailing me frequently to tell me how wonderful he thought it was). That wrecked me for years–had profound effects. He was a vindictive and petty man and I feared he would continue to try to undermine me. I changed my subfield to avoid him, etc. etc.
Is it possible to have a healthy relationship with another member of your profession? Of course. I’m still very happily married to a fellow grad student I met in that same department. But, please, stop gamifying nonsense and sleeping-your-way-to-advancement bullshit. It’s frankly disgusting. Not cute, not attractive, just gross
The OP specifically discusses gaining professional benefits in virtue of having (what sounds a lot like) casual sex with others in the field.
She also mentions seducing “up the hierarchy,” in a way that certainly sounds like it dovetails with potential pursuit of professional gain in the field.
No one is saying that women can’t ethically hook up with other philosophers.
People in this thread are objecting to what is, at best, a risky way of communicating about this issue, given the non-ideal situation in the field and, at worst, an endorsement of the claim that it’s morally permissible to have casual sex in exchange for professional favors of any kind.
That’s right.Moreover, as “a woman in philosophy points out above”, the OP has already– admits to– violating important professional norms that are there precisely to protect the fairness of the field, e.g. having someone she had sex with review her book.
You don’t get to choose who reviews your book. Reviewing the book of someone you’ve slept with is absolutely an inadmissible conflict of interest, but that’s on the reviewer, not the author.
David– certainly not choose (though I’ve seen exceptions). But there are some journals that send authors drafts of the reviews in advance to correct for “factual errors”, and it’s very often the case that one knows who is writing a review of one’s book long before it appears in print or is even due to the journal. Both OP (if she knew) and the ex-sex-buddy who reviewed her ought to have alerted the journal immediately, before the review was so much as drafted, which journal ought to have sought a different reviewer.
That’s a fair point. (Though I can see that one is put in a very difficult position if someone who obviously should have recused on CoI grounds has not done so.)
Fair. Notice, though, that OP complains about the review being “harsh” not the failure to recuse, which…
Well, yeah, if someone breaks a professional norm out of generosity, we go along with it. If they break it out of vindictiveness, we complain. We have these conversations about publishing all the time.
Or some of us just, you know, play by the rules that are there to ensure fairness. I’ve recused myself from both invitations to referee (from papers on up to prestigious grants) and declined requests to serve as an external referee on tenure cases because of COI of the positive as well as the negative sort. And no, not even people I’ve slept with– though I’d certainly recuse myself in such a case
I would just like to say that I find this comment perceptive and helpful. It is very odd to me that some people think the appropriate feminist response to this piece is, “we need to make sure junior women aren’t sleeping their way to the top.”
Alternate, non-sexist reading of the response: the appropriate feminist response to this piece is to make it as loudly clear as possible- for the sake of fairness to all women in the profession, but especially junior women- that some of us have and will continue to work very hard to make sure women are judged on their merits– research, teaching and service– rather than how well or frequently or with alacrity they flirt, seduce and fuck men.
“though notice, being draconian and hyper vigilant about these rules has not only not stopped this behavior, but has in some cases made it even more insidious”
What exactly are you referring to, oh she who self describes as someone who “has also been described as having “charisma” and “other things going for me”?
I just want to add a perspective which is not my own: My partner was an academic in a different field and a big reason why she left academia is that she felt very uncomfortable being flirted with or propositioned in professional settings.
The issue for her was not weak or strong players; it was the very existence of “the game”.
I didn’t interpret there to be any suggestion in this piece that one would not be expected to recuse oneself from a tenure letter for someone with whom one once had a sexual relationship with!
The discussion of comments on one’s written work by someone that they had formerly had a sexual relationship with does suggest some sort of grey area that I don’t know how to think about, either prudentially or morally, but I think that was the closest they came to suggesting something like the clearly problematic evaluation cases you’re discussing.
She suggests the problem with the ex-sex-buddy guy who reviewed her work is that he was too “harsh” (as I point out, never even so much as contemplating the possibility that if his critical tone changed, it’s the post-sex-buddy tone that is apt)– not that he ought to have recused himself. Clearly, that was a conflict of interest on his part (and on hers). The issue is that ex-sex-buddies shouldn’t be reviewing one another’s work. But she doesn’t see it. Why should we think her response wouldn’t have been the same with a former lover writing a tenure letter, objecting only if he’s more critical than she’d like? Especially since she classifies herself as willing to use sex for career advancement. I’ve been around the profession long enough to imagine just how this is likely to go– a name appears on the potential list of referees, OP is asked whether there are any on the list that should be conflicted out, and she says no. The letter comes in, and she gets wind of it being less than she’d hoped, at which point she complains to (official) that it’s a spurned person with whom she once had sex. “Why didn’t you object before?” asks official. “Well, you asked me if there was anyone on that list with whom I had a romantic relationship”, she responds, dissembling and batting her eyes, “and that was just one night and I didn’t think they’d be so mean…” And now the whole university has a mess, because she was trying to use sex for career advancement (as she says she does) and no one thought to very carefully word the COI question so that this kind of dissembling would be precluded.
Many of these responses (particularly from “ActualFeminist”) seem to me to be SERIOUSLY reading into what the author actually wrote in a way that – not for nothing – sounds really insidious and sexist to me. She (again, we’re assuming it’s a she) does not say or even imply that she is “fucking her way to career success”; rather, she notes instances in the history of philosophy where she thinks romantic relationships have had a positive impact on philosophical output. This is neither false nor, to my mind, morally controversial (again, I think all of my philosophy friends in romantic relationships with other philosophers would likely agree with a version of this). That she noted she focused on approaching people above her hierarchically is, as she notes, precisely because she does not want to be taken to be exploiting any power dynamic that would favor her – this too seems like a morally justifiable perspective (I guess we could say she’s lying – but why think that?).
There has also been the assumption that, when she asks so-and-so about why they are being so newly critical when reviewing her book, she must be doing so because they are an official book reviewer (typically an anonymous role) who she has managed to identify as a former lover and then scold for being rude. My reading of this, supported by her referring to these people in the context of their “shared work”, is that this is someone she works/had worked with who has changed their tune following her rejection. It would be truly strange to blame her for not forcing an anonymous reviewer to recuse themselves from reviewing her own book when that is THEIR responsibility (which, I think she would say, is part of her point).
Finally, there is this incredible bit here of mental gymnastics where there is an imaginary referee that she has selected on the basis of imagining it to help her in an imaginary tenure matter only to find out it imaginarily didn’t… Now we are blaming her not only for things she didn’t say, but things she hasn’t done, nor do we have any reason to think she WOULD do, except for our desire to engage in wild speculation. And, all the while, using sexist language (surely we’re all familiar with the specific trope of “fucking her way to the top” using that very terminology) to now accuse her of bringing down all women in the field who are “honestly” trying to get ahead (I am not sure what is dishonest about her very honest description of herself, again, none of which really has anything to do with professional advancement) and I guess really just need people like AlmostFeminist to protect us from her and people like her. Because, as we all know, the biggest problem in academic philosophy is these skanky women with bad morals sleeping around just to get ahead (and succeeding in doing so). Jeez!
Reading through these comments, I have come to be confused by the notion that “everyone” seems to agree that sex and romance are “fine”, so long as we follow the “rules”, when the whole point of this piece and the ensuing commentary is exactly to see what people think those “rules” are. Some people seem to think these relationships are fine, so long as they occur seemingly magically without ever being initiated (as it’s hard to imagine how they could ever even BE initiated without violating some of the rules suggested). Others seem to think initiation is fine, if done with respect (like myself, and, I would suggest, the author).
I guess maybe what I’m left with in some way at the end is that, as important as it is to have systems in place to protect vulnerable people from exploitation and harassment (and it’s very important), I also feel frustrated by what I see as the infantilisation involved with the over-insistance on and over-formulation of “rules” and “boundaries” to govern normal people who have jobs and meet up sometimes outside of work to discuss them. At the end of the day, we are adults, and the existence of bad behavior shouldn’t mean that we allow the joys of normal human interaction – which yes, include romance, flirting, and sex to a great many of us – to go away. Given that we all have different boundaries, it seems to me that this cannot be attended to in a truly broad or universal way, which is why her point about being good at accepting rejection (and, I would suggest, also not imputing ill intent on the other party in the context of delivering a rejection) strikes me as so crucial.
To be fair, she does not admit to this, she just names it as a possible example of having to “educate” someone. It is good to point out that such a situation should never arise if everyone ethically recuses themselves from evaluating work of previous or current sexual partners, and refrains from sleeping with people whose work they are currently evaluating. The other example is comments on a coauthored paper. That seems less problematic (according to professional norms) since the role of the coauthor is not strictly evaluative. Still, it does seem to be the case that senior people often coauthor with junior people as a favor to those junior people … So if that favor is implicitly brought about/entangled in some sexual relationship, that could be ethically problematic, even if it’s not violating professional norms.
But again that also applies to other social relations. Every co-author of mine is a friend; I can’t imagine taking the time to co-author with somebody I didn’t get on with socially. And the reasons I get on with someone socially are not coextensive with the reasons someone is a good philosopher.
I definitely misread that passage on my first time through – I had thought it was harsher comments than usual from someone who often gives informal feedback on their work, and didn’t realize it was about a published book review.
I posted these remarks to my Facebook page:
“Wondering why so many (feminist) philosophers think it is necessary to preface their criticisms of the Daily Nous article by telling everyone on Facebook that they themselves have multiple partners and wild sex.
As someone who had her career seriously hindered by sexual harassment on the job, I can assure you that your criticisms should be recontextualized and redirected.”
I passed this along to a philosopher friend (early career, tenure-track, R1 university) who loved it. He said I could share his reply.
“I think the writer gets it exactly right. I couldn’t help thinking of the parallel in my own life, which is not so much about sex, but about chemical experiences. Many philosophers don’t know, or won’t admit, that our field is home to a good many fiends–those who bring spoons and needles to conferences looking for an opportunity to hook up with some especially good crystal meth or coke. For years it has been a pain in my ass selling to weak players, who can’t handle keeping their addiction separate from their professional lives. Please, if you are going to buy my stuff, DO NOT LOOK AT ME WEIRD DURING YOUR TALK. I have already had to report two colleagues for substance abuse (luckily I have blackmailed them, so they can’t point the finger at me.) If you are going to participate in the philosopher’s drug space (and for centuries, philosophers have drawn insights from the extraordinary states of mind these substances afford) do not be weak. Do not make me see the pain that comes from the drugs I sold you. Be strong and pay me good money. It is way too much to ask for philosophers simply not to buy and sell illicit drugs. So since we have to do it, let’s do it STRONG.”
(a) Your job is (in part) to evaluate your colleagues’ work as impartially, rationally, and carefully as you can. These mutual evaluations matter, not only for our collective progress as a discipline, but also for each of us individually. We are all gatekeepers to each other and our evaluations have material consequences in terms of salary/promotion/getting and keeping a permanent job/etc. But
(b) it’s hard for anyone who isn’t you to tell whether you are actually doing this job. You can just coast along, and give the thumbs up to some stuff at random, and most people won’t have any way to find out that you’re doing that. And so
(c) it’s often easiest to just not bother with doing the job. And
(d) if somebody seems confident, or cool, or is a friend of yours, or has helped you out in the past, etc., it’s really tempting to just give their work a big thumbs up without bothering to really take the time and effort to evaluate it properly. Likewise, if somebody doesn’t present themselves confidently, or doesn’t seem to have any friends, or isn’t very attractive, etc., it’s tempting just ignore their work, or criticize it, etc.
Being a “player” seems like a great way to exacerbate the problem of irrelevant influences described (d), and distract you from doing the job described in (a).
Wouldn’t that also be an argument of discouraging even (platonic) friendships between philosophers?
Well, I do think that there is a non-trivial problem of people forming little professional alliances with their friends, where they mutually prop up each other’s work, regardless of actual quality or interestingness. I think we all know of cases like that. That said, four suggestions:
(1) Friendship is pretty much inevitable when you’ve got people interacting with each other repeatedly and regularly. But we can pretty easily avoid being “players”
(2) Sex and the prospect of sex are just a lot more rationally distorting and distracting than mere friendship
(3) Friendship is, at least in principle, more widely distributable. And if, say, everybody in a given subfield is friends with each other, then the friendships might sort of cancel each other out. By contrast, you can only have sex with so many people
(4) The alternatives to friendship among colleagues might be even worse. (We don’t want colleagues being unfriendly to each other; that’s probably going to be even more distortive.) But the alternative to colleagues being players is just them not having sex with each other, which would be fine
I suppose I feel romance is also inevitable when you’ve got people interacting with each other repeatedly and regularly. I think it is more plausible to encourage (and model) appropriate transparency norms about conflicts of interest, including platonic as well as romantic closenesses.
People forming romantic connections with each other in these kinds of contexts might be inevitable, but I don’t think people being “players” in these kinds of professional settings is inevitable (although I’m not sure what we mean by ‘inevitable’ here, and I somewhat regret using this word in the first place).
That’s fair enough. I confess to some nervousness about *casual* sexual activity in professional contexts: the stakes are fairly high, and there is at least a case that it shouldn’t be risked except for longer-term happiness. (I’m not sure about this; just thinking aloud.)
I really don’t think that friendship is as rationally un-distorting and un-distracting as many people think!
But I do think that it’s less problematic for people to try to minimize sexual interactions than it is to try to minimize friendship.
I just want to give a nod to the Big Pun reference in your alias, since that song has been running through my head all day since reading this post.
Just take a real vacation, go on a cruise. Sheesh.
Add me to the list of folks who think this is somewhere between Sokal and satire. I would consider reading a revised version published on Medium.
I agree with OP that there is value in discussing sexual ethics in non-ideal contexts (including within the discipline). I also agree that it’s helpful to think about an ethically ideal sexual agent — a strong player. It’s also right that people shouldn’t get in each other’s way professionally whether attempts at sex are successful or unsuccessful.
But OP’s treatment of the issue falls short in many ways. Here’s three:
(1) A crucial skill for being a strong player is notably missing: the ability to effectively and respectfully communicate about sensitive, personal, and intimate topics.
People are entitled to their desires for different kinds of sex. One shouldn’t assume it is an implicit rule of “the game” that sex is singular and doesn’t signal other romantic interest, just as one shouldn’t assume that sex will be recurring and lead to romance.
I don’t know OP’s seduction method. But if you are going to hook up with someone, you should make it explicit that you want this to be a one and done thing. You should ask your potential partner what kind of sex they want, and whether a casual hook up is something they’ve successfully done before and enjoyed. If they haven’t, and you aren’t willing to take responsibility for the potential emotional fall out, then don’t have sex with them.
Some might say that this kind of conversation is unsexy. But if you can’t take precautions for the sake of your partner, then you shouldn’t be engaging in this kind of sex. The same is true for establishing consent and discussing protection — if you can’t do that, then you shouldn’t be having sex.
(2) A discussion of sexual ethics, especially in the discipline, shouldn’t be restricted to just hook ups. As others mentioned, it’s common for people to find long-term partners and spouses in the discipline. A strong player knows that others may be looking for different kinds of sex than them and will avoid having sex with these people.
A strong player should be able to navigate whatever kind of sexual or romantic relationship they are looking for — be that hook ups, friends with benefits, or romantic relationships — without leaving a trail of destruction in their path. Many of the strongest players in the disciple might those who’ve found love in it, despite the ethical challenges.
(3) OP themselves comes across as a Don Juan type. When I think of a “player” in the colloquial slang sense, I think of a man who uses women’s desires for deeper relationships to satisfy their shallow desire for sex. OP fails to avoid seeming like a player in this sense (whatever their gender and their partners’ genders). This makes this post seem like a way to justify their own sketchy behavior.
Very sensible points.
In the slut and slut adjacent communities that I’m a part of (kink, parts of polyamorous and queer spaces) it’s folklore to be wary of people who advertise themselves as experts. Best case scenario, they have unexamined blind spots. Worse case, they weaponize their “experience” against others.
In any case, I’ll be taking this view with some skepticism.
I think sometimes that posts like this — and their comment threads– give the impression that most people in the profession just agree that casual sex (including with colleagues and students), promiscuity, polyamory, etc are totally normal and consistent with flourishing as a person and supporting flourishing departments, classrooms, and communities. I just want to register that there are people in the profession who think sexual relationships are best within committed, long-term monogamous relationships. Gosh, maybe even best within marriage. And this is a respectable ethical position to hold. If, like me, you read this and thought… yeesh, I don’t think becoming a “skilled player” is something we ought to be celebrating, there’s room for you in the profession too. There’s even room for you in the comment thread of Daily Nous.
I get almost the exact opposite impression from this comment thread lol.
“…who think sexual relationships are best within committed, long-term monogamous relationships. Gosh, maybe even best within marriage.
“And this is a respectable ethical position to hold.”
I suppose it really depends what you mean by ‘best’, but i actually do doubt that this is a respectable ethical position to hold
Hm. If right conduct for me depends on my strength of play, it becomes morally important that I know how strong a player I am. How do I figure that out? Is there an Elo system? Will I be assigned a league after five placement matches?
There is also the question as to how one becomes a strong player. Does one go from being a weak player to a strong player through experience? How can one get that experience prior to joining a department? Should one mention it on one’s C.V., e.g., under the heading, “Successful seductions,” so that the hiring committee can know one is a strong player and, thus, a “safe” hire.
“Most of us can think of a few philosophers who would probably have produced better work (at least in some areas) had they been better players (I won’t mention the names that come to my mind, out of respect for devotees of these frustrated men.) ”
And those of us on the Ace spectrum (sexually and/or romantically) or familiar with the concept of compulsory sexuality can think of how this comment, amid the entire line of reasoning (in the comments section too), is incredibly presumptuous and harmful. Being Ace hasn’t limited my philosophical ability or enlightenment, but being sexually harassed and surrounded by people who are more fixated on satiating their libido than being professional or philosophical has affected my career and the lives of numerous female students and grad students that I know. These “players” are imposing their game and the consequences thereof on their colleagues and fellow conference attendees without consent. Y’all go find a playground that was intended and advertised as a playground and where everyone there chose to join the game.
And in the spirit of Captain’s comment, there’s an awful lot that could be learned from the kink community about how to conduct ethical sexual encounters amid potentially unbalanced power dynamics within a fairly tight knit community with limited options for people of similar preferences and backgrounds. That’s an essay I’d appreciate reading instead.
As someone on the ace spectrum too, thanks for saying this.
I’d also add that so much of the interactions at conferences (but also things like seminars, etc.), especially during and after the first drink(s), is so sexually charged. You’re expected to play along and flirt, in ‘an academic way’, or whatever you’re supposed to be doing. It’s exhausting.
The hand-wringing in some responses to this post is impressive—like watching moral outrage cosplay as philosophy. Let’s not pretend that philosophers hover above the messy plane of human nature, sustained only by the nectar of abstract virtue. They’re humans. Gloriously flawed, idiosyncratic, sometimes brilliant, sometimes unbearable, frequently horny. We are talking about a species that will flirt at funerals. So yes, it’s not shocking that sexual desire occasionally pops up in professional gatherings.
What is shocking is the wide-eyed sanctimony with which people pretend it’s a new discovery—“Oh no, some attendees at the philosophy conference might be hoping for meaningful intellectual discourse AND the potential for romantic or sexual connection? Burn the heretics!” Please. You can’t throw a copy of Nicomachean Ethics into a room full of grown adults and expect it to act as a pheromone suppressant.
Are there genuine ethical concerns around power dynamics, consent, and professional boundaries? Of course! We live in a society! But acting like desire itself is the moral contaminant is just lazy. Sexuality doesn’t negate intellectual rigor; if anything, the real danger is pretending philosophers are above it all. That kind of denial creates more harm than honesty ever could.
So maybe instead of clutching our pearls and drafting performative condemnations, we could try something radical—like treating people like people. Messy, mortal, and yes, occasionally flirtatious. Otherwise, we’re not doing philosophy; we’re doing fan fiction about imaginary flawless logicians who dwell in ivory towers and reproduce solely by dialectical osmosis.
It’s pearl clutching for a woman who has worked incredibly hard for what professional success she has, and worked for decades to protect other women who wish to earn their success to have the ability to do that –on the basis of their work and without paying admission price of flirting or fucking men, to object to a woman advocating fucking as a means of career advancement?
It’s quite the telling bit of misogyny to accuse a woman of pearl clutching when what she objects to is a woman making professional life even more difficult for she and other women who (like herself) are advocating for, and have fought long and hard for, fair standards of professional merit– career success based, as much as is possible, on research, teaching and service–where what the first woman is advocating instead is, explicitly, career advancement based on flirting and fucking. Am I not performing ‘down girl’ for you? So sad.
What stands out, for me, quite repulsively, isn’t the casual permissiveness about sex with colleagues — it isn’t that Alex is a player, which is fine and familiar. Rather, it’s the chilling callousness about their “victims”; ending or ruining their careers or lives because, as Alex readily admits, they were too “weak” (Alex’s own word) to stay within the subtle, delicate confines of proper playerhood, which, Alex simultaneously admits, takes a degree of skill, strength and wisdom.
Maybe a few of them deserved their fate — harassment is always impermissible — but there is something flat out ugly about Alex’s glibness over playing a part in their downfall, engaging them in a game they had no business playing (which is not say it’s Alex’s fault, but still). It’s noteworthy that Alex doesn’t talk about getting her “victimizers” in trouble, but her “victims.”
And if philosophy and life are as intertwined as Alex claims, I am genuinely worried about those lured into learning virtue ethics from her.
“Hooking up at conferences? That’s disgusting! Where, though? Which conferences, though?”