Leave him. He's a creep.

Let me explain. From your description of him, your husband seems to regard and treat you as a mere object for his own satisfaction, and his satisfaction consists largely in giving you pain. If this is accurate, then it seems to me that you are under no obligation to continue to tolerate his company.

Your experience may be more reflective of philosophy in Germany than of philosophy more generally. There are at least three relevant factors. German students specialize early while students in the US, say, take a broad range of courses in diverse fields during their undergraduate studies. In particular, they take broad (often mandatory) Western civilization courses that focus on philosophical materials that (i) integrate well with non-philosophical materials produced at or around the same time and (ii) are attractive and helpful to students through their relevance to present society. This relates to the second point, that universities in the US tend to reward (often quite directly) teachers and departments for attracting students; and it's rather easier to attract undergraduates to feminist themes than to, say, the philosophy of language. All this in turn reinforces the third point that German academic philosophy tends to be a bit narrow and conservative.

While feminism certainly has a presence in US universities, it tends to be segregated. We have women's studies departments, for instance, and the occasional philosophy course on feminism. Yet gender issues are still not well integrated into courses on moral and political philosophy, professional ethics, and the like. And likewise for philosophical publications. There are some very good feminist writings, but virtually all the major books on moral and political philosophy, professional ethics, and the like ignore the very interesting issues raised by the systematically differential life chances women and men have in virtually all existing societies.

For an accessible discussion of who else has written on this topic, I would recommend Susan Okin's books Women in Western Political Thought and Justice, Gender, and the Family. The former deals with some older, the latter with some more recent treatments of the subject (both feminist and anti-feminist). You can probably also find out a great deal through the internet. One easy way to start is with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-topics/ with various subentries). But I also found a lot of interesting stuff through a google search for (jointly) feminism and philosophy.

I have a slightly different reaction to your question that Prof. Fosl does. The version of feminism that I subscribe to says that sexism consists in the existence of gender roles -- that is, in the social construction of categories of persons founded on differences in reproductive physiology or morphology. I envision a world in which (as Richard Wasserstrom puts it) there is no social significance assigned to biological sex. Gender categories, because they cover so many facets of life -- intellectual interests, modes of dress, choice of career, aesthetic preferences -- serve to regiment human difference. So if you know that someone likes big trucks and is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you can predict that that person's favorite movie is not Steel Magnolias. In a world without gender, human differences would be much less systematic -- people would thus be more different from each other than they currently are. Thus I think that the question you pose involves a false dilemma. One can admit -- indeed, insist -- that we are not inherently the same and still work to eliminate gender differences. The question is not "shall we have one or two different kinds of people?" but rather "shall we let people be fully themselves or not?"

You ask a powerful and intriguing question. From where I sit, feminism ought to work towards a delicate balance of celebrating diversity and downplaying difference. Diversity should continue to be celebrated in the name of liberty so that our society is able to support maximal forms of human self-expression. Diversity should also be celbrated as a sort of vaccination against the oppressive potential of sameness. It's often the case that sameness--or the downplaying of difference--is achieved by repressing some people towards the end of re-making them in the image of other people.

On the other hand, the very ideas of woman and man (feminine/masculine) need to be undermined or at least loosened up a bit. Celebrating women (as a category opposed or differentiated in its contrast to men) can also constrain people by establishing confining norms about what it means to be a 'real' woman. Part of loosening the idea of woman will mean expanding it to include a diversity of woman, but part of it also will mean emphasizing the common ground between men and women that define us just as much as our differences.

Have feminists overshot, and do things like Women's Studies programs and Ministers for Women marginalize women. That is a bit of an empirical question, but so far as I know the facts of the matter there remains a lot of specific work to be done regarding issues that are peculiar to women that justifies their existence. One does see, and I think this a good thing, Women's Studies programs in the United States shifting their nomenclature to 'Gender Studies'. In this, I agree with Gloria Steinem that feminism must become humanism. But not yet.

This is the effect of a successful political movement, one that sought to replace the use of "he" and "his", as "gender-neutral" pronouns, with the use of something else. The reason was that people thought that the use of "he" and "his", at least in certain contexts, made readers liable to assume that the pronoun referred to a person of the male persuasion, when it need not. One option is to use something that is truly gender-neutral, such as "he or she", but that is rather verbose. Some people therefore use "s/he", but that is ugly. I've taken to using "s'he", but I'm lonely. And there is a case to be made for "she" and "her", unaltered, as well, namely that it makes one conscious of something of which one might not otherwise have been conscious.

It is as you say difficult to know how one would unwind social and biological factors in determining gender roles, or indeed a whole variety of other roles also. If people were brought up in a rather different manner from the norm, and then exhibited rather different gender expectations and behavior, that would be suggestive of the significance of the social. These experiments are easier to carry out on animals, of course, and there does seem to be some evidence there that gender roles are to a large degree social and not natural. Many philosophers would want to query the radical distinction that sometimes is held to obtain between the social and the natural in any case. Even if a particular gender distinction is natural, that does not mean that we should make it, or act in accordance with it. Civilization is often taken to be the curbing of the natural by the social, and so even if it is natural for me to act as a brutish male, I hope I resist the temptation as far as I can.

I don't disagree with the first respondent, but I'll give you a somewhat different response, and taking my cue from the 'Bonjour' with which you open, will give it en français. (If the cue was misleading, I'll be happy to translate subsequently!) Premièrement, la beauté est une chose rare et précieuse, et ceux ou celles qui s'en réjouissent ne devrait jamais se sentir coupable à son égard. Deuxièmement, même si la beauté n'était qu'une affaire d'esthétique, qui dit que l'esthétique est moins importante que l'éthique, ou que l'esthétique ne comprend pas, d'une certaine optique, un aspect éthique? (Certainement pas Kant!) Troisièmement, personne n'arrive vraiment à négliger ou à nier complètement les valeurs de la societé entourante; de plus, ces valeurs ne sont jamais avec du moins une certaine justification. Quatrièmement, c'est vrai que la beauté ouvre beaucoup de portes qui autrement resteraient fermées, mais ce n'est pas la sagesse de refuser d'y entrer pour cette raison seule; on n'a que d'y entrer avec circonspection, et sans aveuglement. Cinquièmement, pour en finir, je dirais que la vie de mannequin n'est pas, tout bien consideré, une vie souhaitable, mais qu'on peut quand même tirer de la satisfaction du fait qu'on vous l'avait proposée...

Put otherwise: First, beauty is a rare and precious thing, and those who possess it should never be made to feel guilty about it. Secondly, even if beauty is only an aesthetic matter, who says that aesthetics is less important than ethics, or at any rate, that aesthetics does not include, viewed from a certain angle, an ethical aspect? (Certainly not Kant!) Thirdly, no one can entirely succeed in ignoring or denying the values of the society around them, and those values are also never without at least some justification. Fourthly, it's true that beauty opens many a door that would otherwise remain closed, but it's not wise to refuse to enter them just for that reason, provided one enters circumspectly and without self-deception. Fifthly, to conclude, I would say that the life of a model is not, all things considered, something to wish for, but even so, one can derive some satisfaction from the fact of having been asked...

Reading your "should" as alluding to what you owe the rest of us, I think there is no obligation either way. Perhaps some utilitarians would hold that you have a duty to maximize the general happiness, even by turning heads and upgrading others' visual fields. But such an assertion is more plausibly taken as a reductio ad absurdum of these brands of utilitarianism than as informative about your obligations.

Reading your "should" as alluding to what it makes most sense for you to do, the answer depends in part on your ends and ambitions. Dressing up, you'll have a lot of silly boys and guys chasing you, which can become tedious rather quickly. Still, some of these will have money, power, connections -- and you may feel in need for one or more of these. Continuing your current practice will make you less discouraging to people who are interesting, and interested in you, in other ways; and it will also give you more time to interact with them. This is likely to make your life better, richer, than it would be if you catered to "our culture's obsession."

Still, you needn't do one or the other exclusively. You can play with your looks here and there, to stun friends perhaps or to get some guy to walk into a parking meter. Living well surely doesn't mean that you should have no fun.

As is so often the case in philosophy, so much depends upon how one defines the relevant terms. "Sexism," like racism, is a rather vague concept, or at least a concept with a fairly large number of meanings. So, with any interlocutor you're dealing with, it would be important to acknowledge the definitions in play. I take it that those with whom you've been discussing the issue have claimed something like, "Some patriarchy is not objectionable" or "Some patriarchy is benign."

Certainly. as a term of social science, "patriarchy" should remain as free of moral judgment as possible. In that scientific sense, a society might be described as "patriarchal" without implying a moral judgment about that society. In such a case, however, "patriarchy" is not sexism at all. (Here I'm using "sexism" as a term that carries moral judgment and is not a scientific term.) Rather, patriarchy in a scientific sense is just a certain kind of social structure, one where, let's say, men rule women.

Or perhaps there is a relativistic moral claim at work in what you've been told that turns on the variety of societies, tribal formations, etc. Such a position might use the term, "patriarchy," in a non-scientific way to make the moral judgment that patriarchy is not always bad. In this sense, one might argue that while "patriarchy" might be considered pernicious in some societies, it is not considered so in others. In fact, even in the moral terms of our own society, there are other societies where patriarchy seems to function in a morally good or neutral way. I do think there are many societies (even most) where patriarchy is widely approved. But I must confess that I'm not familiar with a society where's I find this to be a good thing. Perhaps someone with more anthropological knowledge might introduce me to one.

For the sake of an answer to your question here, I wish to use "patriarchy" as a term of moral judgment. Using it in this way, I'd rather advance the converse of what you've been told about patriarchy, what you've been told being the claim that "Not all patriarchy is sexism" or "Some patriarchy is not sexism." Instead, I'd argue that, at least in contemporary Western societies, not all sexism is patriarchy, but all patriarchy is sexism. All patriarchy is sexism because the subordination of women to men is morally indefensible. But some sexism involves issues beyond rule or domination. Sexism does involve domination and subordiination, in particular the subordination of women to men. But it also, I think, involves the limitation of women and men to distinct or separate social roles (what anthropologists, I believe, call more neutrally, "sexual dimorphism"). So, while subordinating women is sexist, assigning women (and men) to certain roles (for example, child care or elementary school teaching) while excluding them from others (say, philosophy professorships) is also sexism, even where those roles may command comparable power.

These sorts of things seem measurable. We can measure, for example, the extent to which women hold positions of power in society (such as CEOs of corporations, government posts, university boards of trustees, holdings of property and wealth). We can also measure the extent to which women and men occupy different roles or perform different functions (caregiver, nurse, physician, lawyer, judge). So, patriarchy can be measured through the methods these sorts of matters can be measured.

Finally, I'd point out that some have defined patriarchy not only as (a) the subordination of women to men but also as (b) the subordination of younger men to older men. One might argue, then, that while the subordination of women to men is sexism, the subordination of the young to the old is not. The subordination of younger men to older men, then, would be patriarchal but not sexist. In any case, the moral standing of this second dimension of patriarchy is, I think, morally complex. For the most part (but not always) I think it morally indefensible, as well.

Yes, in short, I think you're right about restricting the display of pornography while preserving the liberty of those who wish access to it. And isn't that just the kind of balance that is often sought. Pornographic materials are sold from separate rooms of shops, encased in opaque wrappings, excluded from billboards--but access to them for those who wish to acquire them is often in many parts of the U.S., anyway, nevertheless not unreasonably difficult to obtain.

It's a tricky thing to figure, however, this balance. On the one hand, there is the liberty interest of those who choose to acquire pornography; and clearly many people find it enjoyable. Arguably, there is also a general political value to pornographic materials insofar as they are part of the conversation about what proper sexual morality and proper sexual expression should be. On the other hand those who find pornography obnoxious have an interest in not being harmed in the sense of embarrassed or annoyed or grossed out by it. Parents, indeed the whole community, have an interest in preventing children from being exposed to it, at least because children like to imitate what they see. Some have even argued that because pornography is more than offensive (i.e. it is degrading, exploitative, causes violence, causes psychological harm) there is a public interest in shielding people from it--just as there is a public interest in shielding people from chemical pollution.

Besides issues of harm, however, there is also the commonly overlooked interest in not being distracted unnecessarily. Sexual representations have a way of arresting people's attention and even arousing them against their wills. For the same reason it's rude to eat in front of others without offering them food (sometimes even if one offers food), it's rude to present them with sexual representations when they wish not to be distracted or aroused. It's interesting to think, in this regard, why people eat in public (at restaurants, etc.) but don't have sex in public. Of course, in the past sex had been a more public affair than it is now, but never so far as I know in the way eating is public. There are many reasons for this, I think, but one is that sex is so powerful in its ability to disrupt other human activities. Consider, how different it is to sit next to someone in a movie theater eating popcorn from the way it would be to sit next to someone in an ordinary movie theater having sex.