Your question raises a number of really interesting issues.

One of these is how to distinguish ethical questions from non-ethics ones. Could it be the case that your question about toplessness does not raise any moral issues at all and so isn't the sort of question that can be answered by appeal to ethics? You are right, of course, that questions of nudity strike an emotionally-charged nerve in our culture. But does this necessarily mean that these responses are best understood or assessed as ethical responses? For example, people in our culture feel strongly about table manners but these seem to be culturally relative and more a matter of etiquette than morality. Are peoples' positions about toplessness akin to those non-moral questions of etiquette? If so, maybe it is wrong to seek a specifically ethical assessment of the norms and conventions you wish to understand.

Another important ethical issue arises no matter how you address the issue I just described: The ethical significance of the norms and conventions surrounding nudity, regardless of whether those norms have an ethical basis or are non-ethical along the lines of merely conventional judgments about etiquette. What are the significance of those norms and conventions on individuals' lives? How do they relate to significant issues of gender and equality? Do they reinforce or are they reinforced by an unethical cultural system of patriarchy or misogyny? I suspect that your question engages many significant issues related to feminist philosophy and so could be used to explore those issues.

So, those are two wider sets of issues that your question raises in my mind. With respect to narrow answers, different ethical traditions will try to answer your question in different ways. For example, today I was reading a wonderful book on ethics, Jesse Prinz's The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford, 2007). Prinz argues that, on the one hand, morality is subjective, not objective, but, on the other, moral facts are real. He writes, "Moral facts are like money. They are social facts that obtain in virtue of our current dispositions and practices. They are as real as monetary values and even more important, perhaps, in guiding our lives" (p. 167). So, Prinz would answer your question by saying that the moral fact of the matter about toplessness is to be interpreted and assessed by looking at "dispositions and practices" embedded in our culture and might say that widespread dispositions opposing public toplessness by women is a moral fact about our culture. Prinz wouldn't say that moral judgments are objective in the sense of universally valid, but he would say that they nonetheless really exist in our culture -- just like money. Other ethical traditions will provide different answers, and adjudicating between those competing answers raises another huge question: the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches to understanding morality and theorizing about ethics.

As a matter of fact, there are some psychologists and psycholinguists investigating the very question you ask. Lera Boroditsky, at Stanford University, has data that suggest that speakers of languages that use broad gender marking do associate more feminine characteristics with things whose names are marked as feminine, and more masculine traits with things whose names are marked as masculine. You can read a summary of that research here: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf She argues that these and other data show that language shapes thought. However, psycholinguists at U Penn (Lila Gleitman and John Trueswell), and at Delaware (Anna Papafragou) argue against the view that language shapes thought in this way. (Here's a link to a very readable paper by Gleitman and Papafragou on this topic: http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu/papers/Language%20and%20thought.pdf

I don't think that Frye's case depends on how this particular debate comes out. Her point is that there are multiple ways in which everyday life demands that individuals make clear what their gender is. She calls this "mandatory sex announcing." The fact that our language gives us no neutral personal pronoun and no neutral form of address (it's either "sir" or "madam" or "miss") is one thing that makes us have to find out someone's gender even if the person's gender is completely irrelevant to our purposes in referring to or addressing that person. Think of writing a letter to someone when you cannot tell from the individual's name whether that individual is a man or a woman. (Think of how hard I had to work to write those last two sentences without using a pronoun!) But language is just one factor, one way in which our social practices and conventions make it necessary for us to classify people as "men" or "women."

The four major views of happiness (aka subjective well-being) are that happiness is constituted by:

1) Pleasure (and the absence of pain)

2) Fulfilled Desires

3) Virtue

4) A number of different sources that form an objective list of some sort: usually including things like pleasure, fulfilled desire, virtue, but also friendship, knowledge, or beauty.

Of course, this list of theories is an oversimplification since each of the theories has a number of variations. I'm not aware of any correlation between gender and preferred theories. I think theories one and two are the most dominant theories among philosophers and psychologists. Theory four seems to be the 'common-sense' theory that most people intuit...(but academics are often drawn to theories one and two because they attempt to reduce all the sources of well-being posited in theory four to a single value). Theory three enjoys a lot of classical support and still has contemporary supporters as well.

I should also point out that there is an ambiguity in what you might mean by needing to 'act' in order to be happy. The older thinkers like Aristotle meant that we needed to '(act)ualize' our human potential in order to achieve happiness. I'm not sure that concept 'maps on' to what we currently think of as being 'active'. An interesting variation of Aristotle's theory was advance by Maslow several decades ago.

You might also be interested in my forthcoming book, The Prudence of Love, which argues that there is a connection between possessing the virtue of love and subjective well-being on all four of the above theories.

It seems to me that the legislator is misrepresenting the argument for charging young men more than young women. The argument is that insurance companies calculate risks based on statistics they gather about groups. Even though the brother and sister are exceptions to the generalizations, the generalizations about dangerous driving are statistically sound, and when calculating risks it is reasonable to rely on generalizations. You are unlucky if you are an outlier in your group, but the existence of an outlier doesn't make it wrong for the insurance companies to use the best statistics they can gather. Whether or not you agree with the conclusion about relying on generalizations, the point isn't about gender at all. It's about how to calculate risk and whether insurance companies should be entitled to charge individuals more if they are in a high-risk group. If we assume that insurance companies are permissible, then I can't see how they can not rely on generaliations, since they wouldn't be able to function otherwise. As far as I can see it, there is no double standard, stereotyping, or sexism here and the legislator is misguided.

On the latter set of questions you raise, it is a common complaint against feminism that it simply reverses the historical devaluation of women and instead values women at the expense of men. I see no evidence of this in the example or in the broader feminist movement. If you think it is true, then it would be interesting to discuss a different case.

The right to pursue certain goods (such as having children, or making money) does not justify using immoral means (such as exploiting women, or stealing) and does not entitle one to success (being a parent, or being rich). There are many ways to try to become a parent (or a wealthy person), some legal and some illegal, some moral and some immoral.

Perhaps you think that the right to have children is more of a right than the right to make money? (Like, for example, basic rights for food, shelter, education or health care.) Even if it was a universal human right to become a parent (which I doubt), it would not follow that there are universal human rights to be a parent by any particular means (such as IVF, surrogacy, adoption etc.)

There are many ways to become a parent, and as those in the adoption community often say, "second choice does not equal second best." I wish you the best.

You've several questions, though they're closely related. Let me start with the first one: "What does the presence of grammatical gender in a language say about the mentality of its speakers?" My answer is: "Darned if I know!" But I rather suspect that most of my co-panelists are in the same position. Whether the presence of grammatical gender in a language has an effect on the outlook of people who speak it is something we could only figure out by bringing to bear the reseources of disciplines like sociology, psychology, sociolinguistics and who knows what else. It would also call for refining the question itself to the point where we knew what counts as an answer. As you yourself observe, it's not exactly obvious that societies whose languages don't mark gender are less sexist than their grammatically gendered counterparts. If there is an effect here, one suspects that it's a subtle one, and not easy to tease out.

It may well be that if the people in a society believe that men and women are "importantly" different from one another, male dominance will be the typical consequence. But whether grammatical markers like "le" vs. "la" reinforce such beliefs is a lot harder to say. It would be hard to argue that sexist language doesn't matter (just as it would be hard to argue that racist language doesn't matter.) But the mere fact that a language sorts nouns into "masculine" and "feminine" may be quite another matter. In any case, the important thing to keep in mind is that the issues here really are empirical; speculation won't provide reliable answers.

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.