Sexual Investigations
by Alan Soble
New York University Press 1996

Soble's ongoing mistake in this book is to argue against the views of specific authors and to end his discussion when he believes he's said enough to weaken or counter their position, rather than examining sexual issues and concepts independently of specific opponents and thereby going deep into the topic and doing real philosophy. The problem with his method is that the authors he argues against are often shallow thinkers (not all — I certainly exclude Aquinas and Kant from the charge). The consequence is that Soble himself stays in the shallow end of the philosophical pool. His usual approach is to quote some trite opinion that has little or no argumentative support, and then to splash around within the confines of the "problem" as presented, when almost always what he needs to do is think for himself and think through the topic rigorously on his own, pushing the inquiry to whatever depth and complexity it needs.

If you've not already discovered the intellectual pleasures and relevance of philosophy, this book will probably not change your outlook. It gives a poor display of the potentials of philosophical inquiry. There are so many issues and distinctions Soble could have raised during his discussion of consent, for example, that what he does say amounts to little more than a superficial sketch of the topic. He also seems to have no concept of the systematicity of thought. To counter a position, it is often not enough to argue merely against the position itself. One must also counter the class of beliefs that in one sense or another rely upon or endorse that position. The difficulty of this is the reason argument rarely convinces anyone to change their mind. But if you're going to set out to argue, then go all out and work to collapse the structural integrity, not just knock down a wall or two.

The book has six chapters: Ethics, Masturbation, Analysis, Health, Beauty, and Pornography. The ethics chapter discusses such topics as marriage as a sexual haven, marital duty to yield to sex, sex and procreation, consent as moral requisite to sex, the possibility and range of consent, the language of consent, sex and love (with brief mention of sadomasochism), sex as pleasure and the right to sexual pleasure. The chapter does not read as well as it sounds. None of them do.

When Soble discusses masturbation in chapter two, he soon mentions the stigma of speaking about masturbation and suggests with a straight face (I see the coming pun) that there can be an element of homosexuality in masturbation because your hand is touching and arousing someone of the same sex as you. If the pleasure is as much or more-so in the touching than the being touched, or if it is sexually significant that the hand doing the touching is the same sex as you, then in either case this is suggestive of homosexual pleasure, says Soble. In other words, masturbation can be interpreted (and apparently in Soble's mind, with some degree of reasonable justification) as a kind of homosexual act. A straight male, for example, would not want to suggest any hint of homosexual arousal, and so, in Soble's world, he would remain silent about his masturbation. I say 'interpreted' because at this place in his discussion Soble does not mention images that may be occurring in the mind of the masturbator. He is speaking only of the body. You can of course in some sense "experience" masturbation as a homosexual act if you are imagining yourself in a homosexual situation, regardless of what you think about the gender relations of the hands and body parts active in your physical arousal, just as you can "experience" masturbation as love, rape, incest, necrophilia (perhaps even with yourself as the corpse), or bestiality; or you can, if so inclined, experience masturbation in conjunction with imagined events that in themselves contain no overt sexual behavior at all, such as murder, or with perhaps not even any biological beings present — human, animal or otherwise (I once knew a woman with an assortment of fantasies about being raped by aliens in a UFO). The type of fantasy where there are no people or creatures involved, but only things or processes, takes us into the concept of the fetish (for example, a pair of moist pink panties lying crumpled on the laundry room floor, or a bright burning house in a dark southern city, or anything else where the fantasy at no point contains imagery of sexual acts, yet for the masturbator is sexually arousing).

That mention of the pink panties should raise in readers' minds a question on the relation of fantasy to imagery. If we delimit fantasy to imagery (mental images plus any accompaniments such as imagined sounds and so forth), we need another word to express what it is in the masturbator's psyche that is affiliating the imagined pink panties with his arousal when there is no sexual behavior whatsoever occurring within the imagery itself (or its accompaniments). In other words, if there is no sexual behavior within the imagery, what makes the fantasy sexual? What is linking the imagery with the arousal? It is the significance of the imagery for the masturbator. So the rest of the "fantasy" or whatever we are going to call it, is occurring beneath the imagery, giving it sexual meaning. This is even more obvious in the case of sexual arousal occurring with the imagery of a burning house.

This raises further questions: is imagery necessary for a sexual fantasy; is language necessary, if not imagery; and what is the relation between imagination and sexual arousal? Obviously, for example, when the mere sight, sound or scent of female is plenty enough to stimulate sexual desire (as for heterosexual men it often is), arousal can occur (it seems) without the (immediately) prior stimulus of sexually associated mental imagery or the explicit (immediately) prior use of sexually stimulating language; and so imagination seems to be playing its part in this case only after arousal is underway. However, isn't it clearly possible that "sexually associated mental imagery" could be of the fetish sort, and therefore, doesn't it seem that the mere sights, sounds and scents themselves could be interpreted as fetishistic when their physical presence stimulates sexual desire? ("I'm a leg and ass man.")

At least in some cases, it would seem that a fetish has its place in fantasy because it first became significant through its association with sexual desire in the physical world (for example, certain body parts, particular styles of clothing, or the modern craze for tattoos can be fetishes, at times, for this reason — but see my example below of a leather collar). However, it seems evidently true that not every fetish within a fantasy finds its origin in a prior physical experience of the fantasizer. In some cases a fetish symbolizes the person to which the object belongs (using 'object' to include such things as scents and handwriting); but in other cases a fetish symbolizes a relation between the person associated in one way or another with the object and the person for whom that object is a fetish (the association may be fantastic, unlike a fetish in the previous instance), for example, a song on the radio and the memory of a seductive dance (because of what she made the song mean for them as a couple, compared to a song that was "her favorite song", which would be a fetish of something that was only hers), or, for another example, any black leather collar (because the fetish is via an association between a type of object and a type of relation and it is the relation, symbolized by the object, between an individual and the fantasizer, that is sexually arousing, even if no actual individual has ever held that relation with the fantasizer). This analysis is only a start, and even at this level could be refined. (Consider how the Cultural Studies pigeonholes of metaphor and metonomy, for example, could be used as a small next step.) Soble doesn't discuss the topic at all. So let's move on.

After his suggestion that masturbation can be interpreted as a homosexual act (remember, he discussed this without regard to any fantasies occurring during the act), Soble spends several pages sounding like a highschool kid stoned on pot musing about masturbation and sex, and decides that quite a lot of sex could be interpreted as masturbation. It's mildly clever if you're a 15 year old virgin and you've just discovered your rational mind, but it's not even close to astute. I would have thought that Soble, as an adult, has had enough experience with masturbation and sex to know there's a significant (although not absolute) phenomenological difference between them, regardless of where your focus of satisfaction is placed. Philosophers should be adept at making distinctions and identifying differences, at analyzing concepts and unpacking their complex meaning and relationships. They should not be smearing everything together into a muddled jumble of imprecise thought.

Intent, of course, is deeply significant for a moralist (unless he's a behaviorist or wants to limit judgements to the observable — not necessarily the same thing), and thus those who would argue against the moral innocence of masturbation might argue against its intent (and conflate sex with masturbation when the intents appear analogous or equivalent — hence Soble's muddle). The discovery of intent is not as easy as it might seem, even within ourselves. Is there only one intent urging some particular behavior or is there a complex tangle of motivations? To separate out a single intent and nominate it the only intent might be an incomplete, and perhaps at times even reproachable, analysis of the behavior. Are intents rankable, some dependent upon others, so that these lesser, subordinate intents could be or should be dismissed during moral judgements? Is an intent ever, only sometimes, or must it always be, a conscious purpose urging or compelling behavior? And which is it: an urge or a compulsion? Do not look to Soble for help. He says nothing on this.

Rather than investigating the psychology of sexual arousal, fantasy, desire, and intent, and their role in sexual behavior — which he never explicitly does in this book — the direction Soble goes next after his (hypothetical?) near conflation of sex and masturbation is to argue against three authors whose positions on masturbation go in the opposite direction, separating masturbation from sex in order to depict masturbation negatively. The authors are Alan Goldman, Thomas Nagel, and Robert Solomon. For these men, masturbation is either perverted, "empty" or not a sexual activity at all. See the book to see who believes what if you can't bear not knowing. There is more after this to the chapter on masturbation but it is tedious reading. Soble has discovered more trite positions against which he feels he must argue (for the sake, I suppose, of academic approval), but which I feel no obligation to even mention.

Chapter three, Analysis, begins with a proposed definition (not Soble's) of adultery and proceeds from there to question its completeness. The definition, paraphrased with no loss of precision, is that adultery exists when sexual intercourse occurs between two people, at least one of which is married, and they are not married to each other at the time; both persons are said in this case to have committed adultery. Adultery is a moral category as well as a legal one. Soble is concerned with the moral rendering. (The definition by itself contains no moral or legal judgement and could simply be taken as demarcating a type of sexual behavior.) The moral rendering takes us into the domain of intent. Incidentally, Soble uses the legal term mens rea a few times in his discussion without explaining what it means.

{Imagine this paragraph as a footnote: Soble does the same thing, using a term without explaining what it means, with the Freudian term cathect in various places throughout the book. He uses it to mean "eroticise", as in eroticising a condom, or more specifically, even though he doesn't make this important distinction, the eroticisation of condomed cocks during sex (think: "safe sex is sexy sex" — a slogan Soble doesn't mention, I just made it up now, but which makes his point); yet he seems to not mean "fetishise", so presumably the condom is not itself an erotic object, though Soble seems unaware of the distinction when he speaks of cathecting a condom. The term cathexis was devised to translate the German term Besetzung when translating Freud's texts to English for the Standard Edition, so the Freudian meaning must be assumed unless a different meaning is given. To see how incomplete Soble's meaning is to the Freudian meaning, and also to see how my use of fetish in this review is not strictly Freudian (Krafft-Ebing in his 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis preceded Freud in using the term, so the term is not strictly Freudian anyway, and the term was used in anthropology even before Krafft-Ebing — and since I haven't read Psychopathia Sexualis my use of the term is not coming from Krafft-Ebing either), see the entries for cathexis and fetish and related entries in Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, edited by Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, published by The American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press, 1990. You may also find fascinating the entry on masturbation and how it relates masturbation to castration anxiety, which itself has connections to the Freudian concepts of the fetish and the infamous Oedipus Complex. This is an example of what I called the systematicity of thought. Truth, we imagine, would be coherent — the coherence theory of truth, an obvious and practical label, not a definition, explores and expands on this assumption — and so systematicity is a good thing, but it makes counterargumentation sometimes especially difficult when the system is well developed and some parts seem valid to us while others seem not. If there are root concepts, one could attack those in hopes of collapsing the structure, but the biological metaphor of roots and their nourished plant or the architectural metaphor of a foundation plus superstructure are not always reliable guides to how the structural integrity of thought is sustained and often survives resolute faultfinding.}

The legal terms mens rea and actus reus are useful to know. Here is how they are defined by David S. Clark in the Oxford Companion to American Law (Oxford University Press, 2002).

ACTUS REUS. Every crime has two parts: (1) actus reus, or an objective part, the criminal act; and (2) mens rea, or the subjective part, the criminal defendant's culpable state of mind. The criminal act (or omission if there is a duty to act) must be voluntary, overt conduct (not merely thoughts) that exactly fits the crime's definition and causes harmful results. (p. 4)

MENS REA, the subjective element of criminality, requires that a defendant have both a culpable state of mind (for instance, not be insane or coerced) and the particular mental state, such as intent, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence, required for the commission of the specific crime. (p. 559)

In his discussion of the moral rendering of adultery, Soble says (with some confusion): "Adultery requires more than the physical and legal components of two people, not married to each other, engaging in coitus. It also requires mens rea." (Soble: 113) He then tries to discover what varieties of intent are necessary to mark coitus adulterous. The definition is specific about sexual intercourse being the necessary and sufficient behavior for any behavior to count as adultery, saying nothing about intent or other types of behavior such as hugging, kissing, fondling, dry humping, fellatio, cunnilingus, anal sex, homosexual sex, sexual intercourse outside an open marriage, or consensual orgies; nor does the definition say anything about psychological states, such as fantasizing about someone other than one's spouse while masturbating or while engaged in sexual intercourse with one's spouse, or about fantasies entertained by a single person about someone married, or a married person entertaining the fantasy of having sex with the spouse while fucking someone else; nor does the definition have anything to say about virtual sex activities such as online sex chat, email fantasy exchanges, phone sex, or slipping a ten in a stripper's thong; but Soble worries about such things (he doesn't mention them all, but this is the direction his initial discussion tends). The definition clearly has not captured our feelings about what constitutes adultery, so what is the accurate moral definition of adultery? Is an orgasm necessary? Is sexual arousal? Is arousal sufficient, if not necessary? Must there be physical contact? Genital contact? What about love or some related emotion? You'd be surprised how long it takes Soble to reach these questions. But then, he's trying to fill out an entire book and I'm only trying to get to the point. Oddly, he never does remark on love in relation to adultery. Isn't the declaration "it didn't mean anything to me, it was just sex" a common defense when caught in adultery? (I'm ignoring, as Soble does with much less justification, the entire issue of unmarried couples in a "committed relationship".) The implication is that no emotions that should be directed only toward the spouse were active during the "technically adulterous" acts, and so it wasn't really being "unfaithful". Soble does not discuss the notion of being unfaithful. In fact, in the remainder of the chapter he gets hung up on trying to define sexual act. He does battle, for example, with social constructionists who believe that no act is sexual except by social endorsement, by which I mean society endorses the meaning of the act, not the act itself.

{Another footnote: Soble doesn't mention this, but it is interesting to note that if (1) rape is a sexual act only by social endorsement, and (2) any law that prohibits behavior via the meaning that behavior acquires through social endorsement is a disputable law, then (3) if laws against rape exist and derive their social force via their prohibition against rape qua sexual act, then (4) laws against rape are disputable laws. But notice that some sex crimes are called crimes of "sexual assault", the emphasis being on the assault, not the illegal sex. The social constructionists need their laws to be of this sort, and I suspect they have been working diligently for such advantageous redefinitions. No social constructionist considers assault, I presume, simply a matter of social endorsement. The consequences would be rather painful, with no logically justifiable legal relief. This is illogical of them, but they can always counter that logic (and a fortiori truth) is a social construction, too (and they have), and (illogically) demand (upon what right?) the protection of those laws, anyway. The argument against assault begins with the argument for the moral primacy of consent and the circumference of sovereignty it creates. I left out the word individual twice in that sentence. Social constructionists don't like talk of individuals except as members of a class — itself, one would think, under their own definitional parameters, a social construction. The other issue with that sentence about consent and sovereignty is that it assumes those concepts are stable, that they are not in any sense socially constructed, that they have meaning across cultures. I hold that both concepts, consent and sovereignty, share meaning across cultures. All societies have some kind of law, formal or informal, and certainly familial, and thus the concept of "the one in charge", i.e. sovereignty, exists across cultures; and any person in any culture understands and uses the core meanings of desire, coercion, and consent, derivable if nothing else from law but certainly from basic drives such as hunger and the possibility of theft of one's food by another; and rape as a coercive act, deemed sexual or otherwise, is certainly cross-culturally stable — and, contra the constructionists, I'm sure most rapists think it sexual, no matter their erection firmness or possible lack of orgasm. If one wishes, it's possible to take these thoughts and look again at fantasy and sexual arousal and the notion of murder, for some, as sexually arousing. Do sexual killers always commit overt sexual acts, or is it just that if they do not they are not labeled as sexual killers? Is it necessary for the killer's genitals to be involved at some point in the assault for the act to be a sexual killing? What about knives and other penetrating objects? Would they suffice? This seems so close to the surface of any hidden sexual meaning that it's nearly overt, explicitly sexual, especially when the knife is thrust into body cavities. How sexually aroused must the killer be for the killing to be sexual? It is not beyond possibility — I imagine Freud discusses this somewhere — that even same sex murder with penetrating objects, for example, when done in particular ways in particular contexts, by a heterosexual man, could be unconsciously sexual, even though, that is, it may not be sexually arousing in any consciously recognizable sense; or the killing may begin with no conscious sexual impulse and during or after the killing the killer experiences, to his surprise, overt arousal — in which case one could question whether it was the killing qua killing that brought on the arousal or was the gender indeed (and perhaps other characteristics — physical, psychological, or social) of the victim significant. This, of course, raises the question of latent sexual urges and dispositions of which an individual may be unaware. Soble, in all his concern for finding a definition of sexual act, does not discuss any of this. Chapter three, like the two before, grows tiresome long before it's done.}

I didn't go into any detail on chapter one, Ethics, and neither will I give much detail about chapter four, Health. Soble says "the moral and the medical are entangled in our discourse about sex." (p. 145) The medical profession involves itself in sexual values with labels such as sexual health, healthy sex, dysfunctional, pathological, and sick. "No transcendental criterion tells us which kind of judgment about sexuality (moral/immoral, healthy/unhealthy, criminal/legal), if any, and which discipline (religion, medicine, the courts) should prevail." (p. 168)

Chapter five, Beauty, can also be summarized briefly. The physically attractive get almost all the breaks. This doesn't seem fair. Evolution, beauty and desire: what is their relation? But beauty can be deceptive. The beautiful are not always the best, not even in sex. Next chapter. I exaggerate, but read it yourself. Soble offers it as a selection on his website. You'll not find all that much more once you wade through the verbiage and nonsense.

Chapter six, Pornography, gives us the expected (and annoying) antiporn assault by Dworkin and MacKinnon (the vulgar, female, antiporn tag team) and their ill-mannered, belligerent, feminist-lesbian rant against men. Sex with men disgusts these two women so much it seems at times they'd love to make it illegal. But because they're academics (and they're damn loud), other academic writers feel obliged to respond to their vehement hatred cloaked as objective argument, sanctioned outrage, and social concern. I, however, feel no such need. I have no time for such vicious inanity. Read the chapter if you want to know the bloodthirsty details. Soble, to his credit, is extraordinarily patient with these and others in the antiporn camp. It's almost enough to get to me to take back all the mean things I said about his book.

Alan Soble's website is here.