I'm not sure that "most people would have a hard time imagining" how a woman's forcing herself sexually on a man could cause lasting and profound trauma for the man: some people might well have difficulty imagining how this could be the case. Perhaps such 'imaginative resistance' would be due to certain ingrained and long-standing assumptions about sexuality, including the canard that males always want sex, and therefore could not be forced to have sex. Even if some do share such assumptions, I myself do not find it difficult to think that a woman forcing herself sexually on a man would be no less a violation than a man forcing himself sexually on a woman: what's crucial in these cases, to my mind, is that the sexual relationship is in some way coerced and, hence, is not freely entered into by both parties. (To be sure, the nature of the coercion might differ in the two cases: whereas one might think that a man forces himself by force on a woman, in most cases, given the disparities...

Many philosophers committed to feminism are concerned with 'objectification', i.e., roughly, treating a person--often, as in this case and henceforth, a woman--as a thing in some way. While the concept of objectification is slippery, as noted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the topic, from which I profited and which one can access by clicking here , the case you present is clear-cut. While there are senses of objectification that are akin to taking the female form as an object of aesthetic appreciation--such as the reduction of a person to her body or her appearance--the mere appreciation of the beauty of the female form in particular or of the human body in general does not seem to me, in and of itself, to constitute a form of objectification, and I would be surprised if it were indeed the case that the majority of feminists would consider the aesthetic appreciation of the human body to be a form of objectification. To be sure, if one rigorously and uniquely adopts an ...

Provided that there is some cue to the fact that the work in question is a satire of sexism--even if the cue is only a matter of conversational implicature (a notion introduced by the philosopher Paul Grice to capture aspects of meaning that may be communicated without being made explicit in the communication)--as the question seems to assume, then it would clearly seem not to be the case that the work is itself sexist. (Similarly, it seems to me that Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is clearly not an invitation to cannibalism or infanticide.) But how, exactly, can one tell that a piece of writing is satirical: that's a nice and subtle question. (A parallel question: how can one tell one a speaker is being sarcastic? Some people have difficulty in doing so, at least with some speakers.) I don't know that any necessary or sufficient conditions could be enumerated that would allow one to determine when something counts as satire and when it doesn't; to my mind, in order to be able to...

The idea that there is a distinctively 'feminine' approach to ethics was articulated forcefully in the pioneering work of Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice : Gilligan argued that there are certain distinctive virtues and traits--such as care, empathy, forgiveness, etc.--that are coded 'feminine' that had gone underemphasized in more traditional, 'masculine', approaches to ethics and character development, which stressed the primacy of the development of an impartial, more 'rational' standpoint in ethics. The basic idea, that there are differences in the way that men and women make moral judgments, that reflect the way that they are socialized, makes good sense to me, and has been championed by a number of philosophers and developed in various ways, particularly by those interested in the 'ethics of care'. However, it seems to me to be incorrect to think that these differences are somehow 'fixed', or that men cannot come to look at the world from a more 'feminine' perspective (and vice versa ,...