Submitted for discussion: Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies are superior to Christopher Nolan’s. Now let me warn you first of all this is all entirely tangential to the post I originally set out to write, and which I am still working on: whether we should care more about movie sex than movie violence. It’s also outside [...]
Categories: Aesthetics
Tagged: Batman, Cartoons, Comics, Freeze, Joker, Nolan, Robin, Superheroes
Of all history’s great philosophers, Epicurus is the one who you might expect to be keenest on sex. He was a hedonist. His basic premiss is that pleasure is the greatest human good, and that we should devote ourselves to pursuing it. Sex produces an awful lot of pleasure. Therefore we should have a lot [...]
Categories: History
Tagged: Epicureanism, Epicurus, Hedonism, Lucretius
This is a new blog, so I haven’t yet done many entries, and I don’t have tons of readers. (Note to readers: Tell you friends!) But within that limited sphere, the post of mine that has generated the most discussion is the one on whether it is immoral to have a type. For those of [...]
Categories: Dating
Tagged: Dating, May-December, Types
There was a movie released not that long ago called The Dilemma, about a weird-looking guy with an insanely hot girlfriend who, surprisingly enough, cheats on him. His best friend finds out, and – well it’s supposed to be a comedy, so I guess we can presume that hilarity ensues. I tried watching it on [...]
Tagged: Kant, Utilitarianism
If you are of a certain age, and that age is pretty old, you may have, as you prepared to go out into the world of work for the first time, received as a gift a copy of John Malloy’s 1975 classic Dress for Success. The book is still in print, and indeed is ranked [...]
Categories: Sex and Power
Walk into any convenience store and you are instantly met with a wall of magazines featuring celebrities and models, the glossy photos showing off their perfect faces and bodies. The ideal of physical perfection with which we are constantly bombarded is not just hard to achieve; it is in fact impossible. Nobody looks like the [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
I suspect most people have a type, some particular sort of person to whom they find themselves automatically drawn. Put them in a giant room full of eligible people, and they will gravitate towards members of this class over and over. We all know a guy with a thing for Asian women. (Oh yeah, that [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Attraction, Dating, Fetish
One of the issues I plan to discuss in more detail both in class and in my blog is the ethics of sex with robots. There are a number of questions that we could raise here. (How about: how realistic do sexbots have to get before sleeping with one counts as cheating? But we’ll get [...]
Categories: Robot Sex
Tagged: personality rights, public figures, robots, steve jobs, technology
In the coming days I want to examine what some important Greek philosophers had to say about sex. But first I want to provide a bit of context for their views. The Greeks had nothing against sex in and of itself. They accepted desire as a perfectly natural urge, one that deserved satisfaction like [...]
Categories: History
Tagged: Akrasia, Aphrodite, Aristotle, Enkrateia, Eros, Helen, Paris, Phaedra, Plato, Socrates, Xenophon