Abstract
Religion has controlled the conversation about sex and sexuality for centuries, often in harmful ways. But humanists don’t automatically lose our troubling ideas about sex when we leave religion. What are the foundations for humanist sexual ethics? Christina proposes seven places to begin: respect for bodily autonomy, respect for other people’s consensual choices, sexual ethics rooted in ethics, consent, understanding how sexism and other marginalization affects sexual consent and choice, evidence-based thinking, and respecting and valuing pleasure.
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Notes
- 1.
Darrel Ray, Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (IPC Press, 2012).
- 2.
Greta Christina, “Why Both of Sam Harris’s Recent Comments Were Sexist—Even If You Accept Some Degree of Innate Gendered Behavior,” Greta Christina’s Blog, September 29, 2014, https://the-orbit.net/greta/2014/09/29/why-both-of-sam-harriss-recent-comments-were-sexist-even-if-you-accept-some-degree-of-innate-gendered-behavior/. Greta Christina, “The Slymepit, Documented—UPDATED,” Greta Christina’s Blog, April 28, 2015, https://the-orbit.net/greta/2015/04/28/the-slymepit-documented/.
- 3.
Jefferson M. Fish, “Rethinking Drug Policy Assumptions,” The Humanist, February 15, 2013, https://thehumanist.com/magazine/march-april-2013/features/rethinking-drug-policy-assumptions. Humanists UK, “Assisted Dying,” https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/public-ethical-issues/assisted-dying/.
- 4.
Patricia S. Churchland, Touching a Nerve: The Brain as Self (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013). Other readings: Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, VS Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee (William Morrow, 1998); Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett (Little Brown and Company, 1991).
- 5.
James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment (University of California Press, 2000). See also “Nothing About Us Without Us: The Shared Goals of the Harm Reduction and Sex Worker Rights Movements,” St. James Infirmary, http://stjamesinfirmary.org/wordpress/?p=1108; “Nothing About Us Without Us,” Autistic Self Advocacy Network motto, http://autisticadvocacy.org; “Nothing About Us Without Us: A Manifesto By People Who Use Illegal Drugs,” Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, the Open Society Institute Public Health Program, and the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, http://www.aidsalliance.org/assets/000/000/377/310-2.-Nothing-about-us-without-us-Manifesto-(English)_original.pdf?1405520241.
- 6.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Random House, 2012). For a more detailed examination of this theory, see also “Morality and Evolutionary Biology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published December 19, 2008; substantive revision July 23, 2014.
- 7.
Ursula K, LeGuin, The Dispossessed, (Avon Books, 1974), p. 177.
- 8.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, “Mattering Matters,” Free Inquiry, Vol, 37 Issue 2, https://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php/articles/8609.
- 9.
“Moral Foundations Theory,” http://moralfoundations.org/.
- 10.
Brian O’Keefe, “Inside Big Chocolate’s Child Labor Problem,” Fortune, March 1, 2016, http://fortune.com/big-chocolate-child-labor.
- 11.
Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, editors, Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape (Seal Press, 2008).
- 12.
Rebecca Watson, “Twitter Users Sad To Hear They May Be Rapists,” Skepchick, December 18, 2012, http://skepchick.org/2012/12/twitter-users-sad-to-hear-they-may-be-rapists.
- 13.
Christophe Pettus, conversation on Facebook, quoted with permission.
- 14.
Saeed Kamali Dehghan, “Campaign for Iranian woman facing death by stoning,” The Independent, July 2, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/02/iranian-woman-stoning-death-penalty.
- 15.
Max Bearak and Darla Cameron, “Here are the 10 countries where homosexuality may be punished by death,” Washington Post, June 16, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/13/here-are-the-10-countries-where-homosexuality-may-be-punished-by-death-2/?utm_term=.14c48dc34e40.
- 16.
Anna Carey, “Depressing but not surprising: how the Magdalene Laundries got away with it.” New Stateman, July 17, 2013. http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2013/07/depressing-not-surprising-how-magdalene-laundries-got-away-it.
- 17.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos, “Episode 1: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean,” September 28, 1980.
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Christina, G. (2018). Humanist Sexual Ethics. In: Pinn, A. (eds) Humanism and the Challenge of Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94099-1_11
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