> Fromwww.alexanderpruss.blogspot.com:(I thought this was interesting,
> and highly relevant to this group.)
>
> Thesis: It is wrong to intentionally attempt to sexually excite
> another person without the other's consent.
>
> I will argue for the Thesis in a moment. But at the moment, I want to
> clarify a few things and give some consequences. I take it to be a
> consequence of the Thesis that the following three actions are wrong:
>
> Including sexually suggestive imagery in advertising in non-
> pornographic media in order that the viewer might be sexually excited
> and thus inclined to favor the product.
> Dressing in a provocative way in public in order to sexually excite
> others.
> Seducing another by trying to cause another to become sexually
> excited, when the other does not consent to being caused to become
> sexually excited, whether the means be a romantic dinner, ethanol,
> unfermented grape juice, a movie, a touch, a word, etc.
> Both to clarify the Thesis and to explain why these follow from it,
> note first that consent is not the same as enjoyment or wishing. Thus,
> that a reader of a magazine might enjoy being sexually excited at a
> model in an ad does not entail that the reader consents to that
> excitement. One way to see this is to consider the following case.
> Yakov is a Jewish man who smells some delicious sweet and sour pork
> while walking by a Chinese restaurant. He wishes God had permitted him
> to eat sweet and sour pork. He then remembers that in Talmudic law, it
> is permissible to violate kashrut to save your life (except in times
> of religious persecution). The food smells so good that he desires
> that the cook should come out, point a gun at his head, and tell him
> to eat some sweet and sour pork. He would enjoy this, moreover. (Let's
> suppose he's a very brave man much given to pleasures of the palate,
> so the sight of a gun pointed at his head would not spoil the
> delicious taste.) However, the fact that he wishes the cook to do
> this, and that he would enjoy it, does not contradict the fact that he
> has not consented to having a gun placed to his head. One can desire
> something and know that one would enjoy it when it would come, but
> nonetheless not consent to it.[note 1]
>
> Thus, even if it were true that the readers of a magazine would enjoy
> the sexual excitement, it would not follow that they consent to it. I
> do restrict claim (1) to the case of non-pornographic magazines,
> because the reader of a pornographic magazine can be presumed to give
> consent to being sexually excited by the contents. (This might be
> partly definitional of a pornographic magazine. I am not saying that
> there is nothing wrong with pornography, just that its wrongness does
> not follow from the Thesis.) Likewise, that someone comes to enjoy
> being seduced, and even comes to consent to its continuation, does not
> entail that the initial attempt to sexually excite was consented to.
> At the same time, consent can be implicit in a context, so this is not
> going to cover all cases of seduction (e.g., it will not cover
> seduction in the context of a relationship where such seduction is
> implicitly consented to and where the implicit consent is not withdrawn
> --again, I do not want to say that all consensual seduction is
> acceptable, but only that it does not violate the Thesis).
>
> Observe, also, that expectation is not the same as consent. A person
> might expect that a popular non-pornographic magazine contains some
> provocative imagery, or that a date will try to seduce one, but
> expectation is not the same as consent. It should be no defense in a
> theft case that a man knew that a neighborhood was rife with muggers
> when he went out for a walk and hence he consensually handed over his
> wallet, so it wasn't theft.[note 2]
>
> In any case, even if most readers of some non-pornographic magazine or
> most bystanders consented to being sexually excited, there would
> surely be some who did not, and if the intention was to excite all
> readers or all bystanders of the appropriate sex and sexual
> orientation, then some would be excited non-consensually, and a
> violation of the Thesis would occur.
>
> What is kind of interesting about this argument is that many arguments
> against the sexual objectification of women have involved the harm to
> women from such objectification (see, e.g., Dworkin). While I think
> such arguments are basically sound, they miss out on a dimension of
> the question, which is that in many not overtly pornographic contexts
> the male viewers are not consenting to sexual excitation, and hence
> are being wronged.
>
> I am assuming here that sexual excitement is a state of the person
> that includes some emotional and some physiological components, and
> that these physiological components involve, at least in part, the
> physiological state of the person's sexual systems.
>
> Why should we believe the Thesis? I think it follows from the same
> considerations as make sexual assault be wrong. Sexual assault can
> range from full-scale violent rape to a sexual pat on the behind. What
> is common in all of these cases is that the contact is sexual in
> nature and not consented to. (Whether the contact is desired, wished
> for or enjoyed ought to be irrelevant to the question whether a sexual
> assault occurred, though obviously the more undesired the contact, the
> worse the crime.) It seems plausible to suppose that any sexual
> manipulation of parts of the physiological sexual systems of a person
> is wrong.[note 3] Nor should it matter much whether the manipulation
> is done directly by means of the assailant's body, or by the
> intermediate use of some tool. Even if the manipulation is done by
> means of the victim's own self without the victim's consent, this is
> surely sexual assault (think of the case of hypnotizing an
> unconsenting subject[note 4]).
>
> Cases of intentionally sexually exciting someone are cases of
> intentionally manipulating the physiological sexual systems of the
> other. Hence if they are non-consensual, they are wrong for the same
> reasons that sexual assaults not involving physical contact are wrong.
> Hence the Thesis is true.
>
> Interestingly, then, sexual assaults against men are not as rare as
> people think--I suspect a lot of ordinary magazines contain them.