Archive for the 'Academia' category

How to Use a Harlequin Presents to Teach Sexual Ethics

Oct 19 2011 Published by under Academia, Ethics, Genre musings

In Contemporary Moral Problems we’re in the middle of a unit on ethical issues relating to sexuality. Our reading for today was Thomas Mappes, “Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person.” Mappes’s basic claim is that sex is immoral when it involves using someone as a mere means, or without their informed consent. His actual formulation is:

A immorally uses B if and only if A intentionally acts in a way that violates the requirement that B’s involvement with A’s ends be based on B’s voluntary informed consent.

Mappes says there are two major types of using: deception and coercion. Deception can include lies, like “I’m on birth control”, “I’m single.”, “I’m clean”, “Yes, I love you.”, omissions, equivocations, etc. Coercion can be “occurrent” or “dispositional.” Occurent coercion is basically the use of force (physically forcing someone, as in tying them down and shoving something somewhere), and dispositional involves the use of threats of harm (for example, raping someone at knifepoint).

But, Mappes adds, there is a third type, a kind of coercion that seems problematic yet does not involves the use of force or the threat of harm. It is the coercive offer. To get at this concept, Mappes distinguishes a threat from an offer:

Gesturing to a rough and ready distinction between “wants” and “needs”, Mappes then gives an example of a coercive offer, which I will paraphrase as follows:

Mr. Troubled is a widower with three young children. He wants to stay in his home, in his town, where his extended family lives, but he has lost his job and cannot make his mortgage payment. No one can help him. Ms. Opportunistic is sexually attracted to Mr. Troubled. She offers to make his mortgage payments if he agrees to an affair. Mr. Troubled is not attracted to Ms. Opportunistic.

Mappes claims that Ms. Opportunistic is attempting to use Mr. Troubled in the immoral manner defined above. Mr. Troubled has a genuine need, and Ms. Opportunistic is attempting to exploit it for her sexual gain. She is making a “coercive offer.” To be precise, it is not so much that she coerces him (and nothing hangs on our use of the word “coercion” here), but that she takes advantage of the fact that he is already “under coercion.” If Mr. Troubled accepts, he is likely to say something like, “I had no choice.” and that response would, Mappes asserts, make some sense to most people. Ms. Opportunistic is taking advantage of Mr. Troubled’s desperate situation, a situation in which his consent is so constrained by his desperate need, that it would not be fully voluntary.

Contrast this with another case (from Mappes), one in which a movie mogul offers a starlet a big movie part for a sexual favor. There may be other immoral aspects of the offer (perhaps the mogul is married), but the offer itself is not coercive. It is the starlet’s want, but not her need to have the big part. Her acceptance, if it happens, is voluntary.

My students had a good discussion of the question of whether it is fair to say Mr. Troubled has a “need” while The Starlet only has a “want.” Many of them seemed to want to say either they both have wants, or they both have needs.

At any rate, being a romance reader, I was sure I had seen a plot like the Mr. Troubled/Ms. Opportunistic one, only way sexier, and it took about .0008 seconds to find several Harlequin Presents that fit the bill. I chose The Italian’s Mistress, a 2005 Harlequin Presents by Melanie Milburn.

 

Here’s the blurb:

 

Back in his bed…with a vengeance!

When it comes to Anna Stockton, Lucio Ventressi knows he has an offer she can’t refuse….

Anna needs money — Lucio has it! His deal? Become his mistress for three months and he’ll pay for her son’s operation. Anna has no choice but to agree to being bedded by Lucio. But she finds that his passion is sweet — even if it is born of revenge….

 

Now, knowing that sometimes the blurb is misleading, I actually purchased and read this book. And … it is not misleading.

Here’s how it all goes down: Anna is in her native Melbourne, working a day shift as a hotel housekeeper (and a night shift as a dishwasher), and Lucio, who normally lives in Rome, is occupying the penthouse. Anna had been engaged to Lucio years ago, but ended up in bed with his brother, who took pictures to prove it. Anna was kicked to the curb, pregnant. She now lives in poverty with her gravely ill son and her deaf sister. Anna, in housekeeper mode, happens to walk in on Lucio, and they have this exchange.

‘Sammy needs…an operation,’ she said. ‘I don’t have private insurance but if I wait until it’s his turn on the public waiting list…it might be too late.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He has a heart condition.’

‘Serious?’

She took a painful breath. ‘He needs the surgery to survive into adulthood.’

He swore again. ‘How much is this…operation?’ he asked after a short pause.

She told him and he didn’t even flinch, which somehow annoyed her. It was such a pittance to someone like him, pin money really, and yet it could save a child’s life. Her child’s life. She watched him out of the corner of her eye. He was thinking…no—calculating…planning.

‘I might be able to help you,’ he said after another one of his strategically timed pauses.

‘Why would you want to do that?’ Suspicion crept into her tone as she lifted her eyes back to his.

‘I have my reasons.’ His expression gave nothing away.

‘A loan, you mean?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘What, then?’ Her stomach tightened.

‘I will pay for Sammy’s health care, but I have some conditions on the deal.’

‘Conditions?’ She swallowed the restriction in her throat. ‘What sort of conditions?’

His eyes held hers determinedly. ‘You can save your son’s life but you must agree to do something for me in return.’

‘I will do anything to save my son’s life,’ she said. ‘Anything.’

The corner of his hard mouth lifted in a slight smile. ‘I’m very glad to hear that as I was expecting much more resistance on your part.’

The fingertips of fear tickled along her spine. ‘What do you want me to do?’

He gave her another contemplative look. ‘I thought you would have guessed by now, cara.’

His eyes burned as they came back to hers, the line of his normally firm mouth now so tight it hinted at cruelty.

***

‘I will pay for my nephew’s surgery but in exchange I want you back in my bed.’

Her eyes widened in alarm. ‘No!’ ‘

No?’ The eyebrow rose once more. ‘I didn’t think that was a word you were accustomed to using a great deal.’

She closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see his derision. ‘I can’t do it.’

‘All right.’ He dismissed her with a step away.

‘Finish the room and get out.’

He was halfway out of the door when she came to her senses. This was about Sammy, not her.

‘Lucio…’

‘Yes?’ He turned to face her, his expression one of extreme boredom. She found it hard to hold his gaze and lowered her eyes to the floor at his feet, the collapse of her pride making her shoulders slump in defeat.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said hollowly. ‘I’ll do what you ask.’

‘Good.’

Giving Lucio the benefit of the doubt — because he so clearly deserves it — I read on, to see if he indeed would exact his sexy revenge. Maybe it’s an idle threat, and he’s really a big ‘ol softie? But no, he does. Over and over and over. Lucio is obviously a complete fucking asshole making a coercive offer here. But what makes this situation different from Ms. Opportunistic and Mr. Troubled is that Anna is sexually attracted to Lucio, and still kind of in love with him. Well, ok, Anna’s mind hates him, but her body — oh treacherous flesh! — can’t resist him.

So, it makes a good case to discuss on the topic of immoral sexual coercion.

Now, for romance readers curious about this book, I do understand the allure of the over the top Presents line, but even so, I can’t recommend this one. To take just one example, Anna and Lucio are both convinced the child is his brother’s (because Lucio always wore a glove). Despite this, a nanosecond after the above chat, with absolutely no discussion of how they are going to present this little arrangement to the child, here is what happens (click to enlarge):

There is no development whatsoever in the relationship, Anna is a doormat, Lucio is a complete jerk, and the whole thing is based on a Big Misunderstanding which gets resolved in the last paragraph. See, Anna did not actually have sex with Lucio’s brother. The brother just gave her a roofie, stripped her naked, and took pictures, to make it look like they had sex. Why? Don’t ask stupid questions. They are Italian magnates! This is what they do.

38 responses so far

Are We Having Sex Yet?

Oct 16 2011 Published by under Academia, Ethics

Tomorrow in my contemporary moral problem class, we begin a new unit, on sexual ethics. Before getting into the ethical questions, we’re spending some time, first, trying to define sex. It’s not as easy as one might think.

We start with a conservative religious definition:

sex … refers “either to the biological aspects of being male or female (i.e., a synonym for one’s gender) or to the expressions of sexuality, which have physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, particularly genital actions resulting in sexual intercourse and/or orgasm” (“Human Sexuality: A Catholic Perspective for Education and Lifelong Learning”, US Conference of Catholic Bishops, (1990,9)).

Lovemaking is an expression of vulnerability and intimacy, a two-in-one-flesh encounter, demanding a deep level of commitment and love for its natural fulfillment.

“Prior to or separated from the marital commitment, sexual intercourse ceases to be an expression of total self-giving” (Human Sexuality, 33). The bishops conclude that “outside of this ‘definitive community of life’ called marriage, however personally gratifying or well intended, genital sexual intimacy is objectively morally wrong” (Human Sexuality, 33).

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16 responses so far

A Bioethics “Case” is Always A Person’s Story

Oct 06 2011 Published by under Academia, Bioethics, Ethics

I’ve been teaching and working in bioethics for over a decade now, and like any bioethicist, I can rattle off a list of canonical cases: Quinlan, Cruzan, Conroy, Elizabeth Bouvia, Tarasoff, Baby M, Baby Jane Doe, Adam and Molly Nash, Tuskegee, Willowbrook, etc. etc. They each are slotted in to a different ethical lesson, be it about patient rights, informed consent, respect for patient autonomy, or the ethics of research on human subjects.

In bioethics class this week, we discussed the “case” of Don Cowart, a Texas man who was badly burned in a propane explosion in 1973. Cowart begged to be killed or allowed to die, from the moment he was discovered lying in the dirt, third degree burns over 65% of his body, and for months and even years afterwards, during the painful intensive care and rehabilitation process. The Cowart case is usually understood in the context of patient rights. In our textbook, it appears in the section on “Decision Making for Once Competent Patients”, and indeed, it is presented as a textbook case of failure to respect patient autonomy. Cowart may not have had decision making capacity in the initial minutes or days, but surely, his right to determine the course of his own medical care should have been restored shortly thereafter.

The author of the case in the textbook is Dr. Robert White, the first psychiatrist to declare Cowart competent, and more importantly, the one person who was willing to find outside legal help to end Cowart’s nightmare of being treated as a nonperson.

White is one of the few good guys in the story, and his account is interesting and well-written. It’s followed by two bioethcists’ analyses. But like every clinical ethics case, the narrative reflects the viewpoint of the writer, including what he takes to be important, and omitting what he doesn’t.

For this reason, I had my students view a video of Cowart discussing his experience filmed at the University of Virginia in 2002. It’s not just that Cowart has access to a perspective on experiences others lack — which of course, he does — but the details he chooses to include add a dimension of meaning lacking in White’s account. For example,

They did not want an attorney involved so they would not allow me to use the telephone. I ask them to take me to a pay phone on the floor and they said we don’t have any on the burn ward floor. I said, okay, let’s go to the lobby. Every hospital has pay phones in the lobby. They said no. Burn patients can’t leave the burn ward. I said okay, I will use the one at the nurse’s station. I know you got a phone there because I can hear it ringing all the time. And they said, no that is just for hospital staff. Patients aren’t allowed to use it. I said fine. At my own expense I will pay for the local telephone company to put a telephone in my room. And I will call from my room. And they said no, you can’t do that.

To many of my students, who can’t imagine being out of touch for a nanosecond, this is an especially chilling part of the story (although it can’t match Cowart’s descriptions of the gruesome, excruciatingly painful, and often ineffective burn “treatments” which he was forced to undergo). It’s a small detail, the telephone, but it seems to symbolize the powerlessness and dearth of human connection he experienced for so long.

The UVa video (transcript here) is a wonderful resource, because it offers up this “case”, not as a case only, but as, first and foremost, a compelling human story. I don’t think the form of presentation dictates our ethical responses. The moderator at UVa suggested that hearing Cowart tell his own story (one of triumph over adversity, a life well lived despite great odds) might make a listener more apt to think the medical staff was right to keep him alive. It had the opposite effect on me and many of my students. But every case study is a kind of “fiction”, as Tod Chambers has written, and exposure to more perspectives can help deepen our understanding.

Wryly observing that he never thought he would take up poetry as a hobby, Cowart concludes with a poem he wrote himself:

Embrace the day -
hold it close to you -
like the fire and passion of a vibrant, beautiful woman,
feel its warmth and energy flow through you.

Listen with the spirit, and you will hear the emotions of your brother’s heart.
Speak with the spirit, and your brother will hear the emotions of your heart.
And when you and your brother speak and listen to each other with the spirit,
your spirits will touch.

Be real;
step into yourself.
Cling to all that is you;
release all that is not.
For it is here, in the deep blue heaven of these high places,
that we soar on wings that are our own
and ride the currents of our soul.

I’m teaching future physicians in this class. What good is a bioethics course if our case studies eschew personal meaning, push human emotion to the margins, and ignore the importance of human connection?

9 responses so far

Popular Romance in the New Millennium Conference: Abstracts and Bios

Oct 05 2011 Published by under Academia

Registration is now open for the international conference Popular Romance in the New Millennium, hosted by McDaniel College in Westminster Maryland. The conference is hosted by Pam Regis, professor of English at McDaniel, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, and Vice President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

The conference is supported in part by a grant to McDaniel College from the Nora Roberts Foundation.

The conference will begin on Thursday November 10 with a keynote address by NYT best selling romance author Eloisa James, who is also Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, at 5:30 pm. followed by a dinner.

On Friday, there is a full day of panels and presentations, beginning at 9:00am, and ending with Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches Trashy Books (6:30-7:30pm).

Yours truly will be co-presenting with a colleague in the English department. Some other Romanceland names you may know are Sarah Frantz and Angela Toscano (reviewers at Dear Author; Sarah is also the President of the IASPR), Eric Selinger, An Goris, Jayashree Kamble, Jonathan A. Allan, and Amy Burge (contributors to Teach Me Tonight; Eric is also Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies).

Click here to see who else is on the program, and read the abstracts.

Hope to see you there!

4 responses so far

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy

Sep 21 2011 Published by under Academia

We’re reading Tolstoy’s 1886 novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in class this week. We’ve been reading several arguments in favor of ethical criticism, from Martha Nussbaum, Wayne Booth, John Gardner, etc., and we’ve read excerpts from Tolstoy’s own theory of art which requires ethical criticism. The idea is that we’ll read Ilyich the way ethical critics want us to read fiction, and we’ll also look for Tolstoy’s own aesthetic in the text.

I never tire of teaching this novella, in part because students seem to embrace it. The plot — what there is of it — is quite simple: the book opens with the funeral of Ivan Ilyich, a high court judge in Tsarist St. Petersburg, Russia. The immediate concerns of his colleagues and family are self-serving and superficial: promotions, pensions, and what the most minimal duties of propriety require. In Chapter 2, we are told that “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been the most simple and most ordinary and therefore the most terrible.” He had lived “pleasantly and properly”, goofing off a bit as a youth, attending law school, getting married, having kids, rising up the ranks, socializing appropriately, and basically doing what the respectable people of his class are expected to do. After a nice promotion, he relocates and purchases a new home, only to fall off a stepladder while trying to show the upholsterer how he wants curtains hung. He bruises his side, and never really recovers. The rest of the novella follows Ilyich’s deterioration and death from his own point of view.

There are many avenues into teaching and working with this novella. Bioethicists often use it to educate clinicians about the patient’s experience of serious illness. Ilyich’s doctors seem to give up on him (once cure is impossible, what is their role?), and his family behaves as if he has brought his illness upon himself. In the face of what is clearly his imminent death, his household continues to behave as if nothing much has changed.

What tormented Ivan Ilyich the most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he need only keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.

The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing-room diffusing an unpleasant odour)… He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position.

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2 responses so far

A Different Kind of Narrative: Abortion and the Violinist

Sep 12 2011 Published by under Academia

It’s not too often that the central argument of a contemporary philosopher gets its own Wikipedia page, but that’s how famous is the pro-choice argument of MIT philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, in her 1971 essay A Defense of Abortion.

I teach a unit on abortion in my contemporary moral problems course, for which I have steady (actually, kind of overwhelming) enrollments, thanks in large part to the requirement that every student at my university take a course in ethics.

Thomson, writing a couple of years before the passage of Roe v. Wade, decides to challenge the assumption that IF the fetus is a person from conception, then it follows automatically that abortions are (in most, if not all, cases) morally wrong. Instead of just making her case directly, she uses a thought experiment, and argues by analogy:

It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”

Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.” I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.

It’s interesting that students often embrace the message (or invitation to think) presented by Omelas, and understand quite well that Le Guin is talking, not about some other peoples, but about us, the readers. Yet, many students, perhaps the majority (in my experience), whether pro- or anti-choice, have serious reservations about Thomson’s argument.

In contrast to the skilled worldbuilding and writing of Le Guin, Thomson’s “story” is presented briefly and schematically. It’s unrealistic in more ways that one could count. The title of the article (“A Defense of Abortion”) and introductory material place the reader immediately in mind of what to expect, and so s/he is often resistant to suddenly thinking about violinists. And arguments by analogy are, by their very nature, irritating. This is because (a) they feel like they are taking you off track (why are we talking about violinists?), and (b) when well done, they often reveal an inconsistency in our own thinking.

There are questions we don’t ask in this class, about why it’s a violinist, why it’s the society of music lovers, why it’s a “he”, why it’s a medical setting, how the metaphor-within-a-metaphor of “unplugging” functions, etc. I don’t encourage those questions in this class, because I am doing moral philosophy, and I read the analogy in a very specific way. But I might well ask them in Ethics and Fiction. So the context is affecting me, as well.

Thomson’s article has inspired loads of commentary, maybe more than any other philosophical article published in the second half of the twentieth century. What she proves — even what she is trying to prove — is still a subject of major debate. But Thomson definitely pushes on the tension between a set of claims that folks who are opposed to abortion often accept: (1) that abortion is impermissible b/c the fetus has a right to life which the pregnant woman must protect, and (2) we don’t have significant obligations to strangers. In general, the article forces us to ask how much work the “right to life” is really doing in pro-life arguments. It also forces us to consider how impoverished our moral vocabulary would be if it were restricted to rights talk. And in doing so, it paves the way for our next readings, from the perspective of virtue theory and feminist ethics.

It’s worth asking about philosophers’ frequent use of thought experiments, most of which are violent or bloody. Should these be read, not as logical arguments, but as constructed narrative? And what would that tell us?

26 responses so far

Ethics and Fiction Syllabus Fall 2011

Aug 30 2011 Published by under Academia, Ethics

In case anyone is interested, here’s what I am teaching this term. I made a number of changes from last year’s syllabus. I can’t seem to help doing that, even though I know there are good reasons not to make frequent changes to a course. If you are interested in assignments, or have any questions about what I am trying to accomplish, just ask.

Ethics and Fiction (PHI 351/ENG 419)

Books:

Stephen K. George, Editor, Ethics, Literature, & Theory: An Introductory Reader

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Jennifer Crusie, Bet Me

 

8/30            Introduction to Course

9/1            John Gardner, “Premises on Art and Morality” (George); Abraham B. Yehoshua, “The Moral Connections of Literary Texts” (George)

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16 responses so far

Seeking Historical Romances with Novelist Heroines

Aug 05 2011 Published by under Academia, Genre musings

I’m working on a project with a colleague, which involves looking at concepts of authorship as they relate to the women who wrote Minerva Press novels (late 18th century to early 19th) and those who write romances in the modern era (1970-today). We plan to present on this at the upcoming Popular Romance in the New Millennium conference at McDaniel College in November.

My colleague suggested that I look at historical romance novels (I am focusing on that subgenre) that feature a fiction-writer heroine. I can only think of one: Black Silk by Judith Ivory. (In the back of my head, I recall reading a recent historical romance in which the hero reads the heroine’s books without realizing it. But the title? Gah.)

I’m honestly not sure this is the way I want to go with this project. I’m really more interested in what the writers themselves think of authorship, and I doubt I can extrapolate that from their author heroines. But author heroines are worth taking a look at … if I can find any.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

32 responses so far

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