Gender Roles, Sexist Ideology, and Troubling Consent:  

 
REFLECT: PERSONAL ANECDOTE AS EXHIBIT SOURCE 
 
Reflect on your personal experiences: ​Can you recall any experience in which you felt that you were being pushed 
towards a particular social expectation on the basis of your perceived gender or sexuality? 
 
 
TEAM EXERCISE: USING EXHIBIT SOURCES TO MOTIVATE ARGUMENTS 
Some feminist philosophers (e.g. Hanel; Egbert) will argue that choices about sexual activities can be embedded in a 
social environment that ​invalidates c​ onsent, insofar as actions that might otherwise be harmful or violating are presented 
to us in a way that makes them appear desirable. In these cases, these feminists will argue that consent - indeed, even 
“enthusiastically given consent” - is not sufficient to make a sexual act morally legitimate. Consider the following exhibit 
sources. How can they be used to motivate the arguments from Hanel and Egbert? 
 
EXHIBIT 1. THE RESIGNATION OF KATIE HILL 
“​Rep. Katie Hill​ resigned earlier this week after admitting to an inappropriate relationship with a campaign staffer. 
Meanwhile, Rep. Duncan Hunter, ​a Republican lawmaker who prosecutors​ say engaged in five affairs, including one with 
his own staffer, is still in office...The uproar that Hill has encountered over these allegations serves to highlight the 
double standard that men and women have long faced when it comes to the treatment of their sexuality: Not only were 
naked photos used to shame Hill — a tactic that’s leveraged ​overwhelmingly against women​ — the penalty she faced 
was far more severe than that experienced by many of her male counterparts ...Another example that’s been raised as a 
point of comparison is President Donald Trump, who’s still in office after more than ​20 allegations of sexual misconduct 
have been brought against him.’” 
 
EXHIBIT 2. DISNEY MOVIES, MALE DOMINANCE, AND FEMALE PASSIVITY 
 
A recent study by the linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer analysed dialogue in Disney movies. According to 
The Washington Post, they discovered that, “all of the princess movies from 1989-1999 — Disney’s ‘Renaissance’ era — 
are startlingly male-dominated. Men speak 71% of the time in Beauty and the Beast (1991); 90% of the time in Aladdin 
(1992) 76% of the time in Pocahontas (1995).” 
 
EXHIBIT 3. GENDER ROLES AND CHILDREN’S TOYS 
 
What makes a good toy for a young child? NAEYC asked researchers about what their work tells us about toys, children, 
and play. Judith Elaine Blakemore is professor of psychology and associate dean of Arts and Sciences for Faculty 
Development at Indiana University−Purdue University in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her primary research interest is the 
development of gender roles: “We identified more than 100 toys and classified them to indicate how much each toy was 
associated with boys, girls, or neither. In general the toys most associated with boys were related to fighting or 
aggression (wrestlers, soldiers, guns, etc.), and the toys most associated with girls were related to appearance (Barbie dolls 
and accessories, ballerina costumes, makeup, jewelry, etc.). We then divided the toys into six categories, based on these 
ratings: (1) strongly feminine, (2) moderately feminine, (3) neutral, (5) moderately masculine, and (6) strongly masculine. 
Toys were then rated according to their characteristics, such as able to be manipulated, exciting, educational, aggressive, 
musical, etc. We found that girls’ toys were associated with physical attractiveness, nurturing, and domestic skill, whereas 
boys’ toys were rated as violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
EXHIBIT 4. SEXUAL VIOLENCE, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE MALE GAZE 
  
According to ​a 2010 study​ that analyzed 304 scenes from best-selling pornography videos, almost 90% of scenes 
contained physical aggression, while nearly 50% contained verbal aggression, primarily in the form of name-calling. 
Targets of these displays of aggression were overwhelmingly women and either showed pleasure or neutrality in 
response to the aggression. Some ​studies​ that have shown nearly 90% of pornography depicts violence while other 
studies have placed the prevalence at only 2%. One of the most disturbing facts about the prevalence of violence in 
porn is that nobody can agree on what they consider to be violent content. 
 
ARGUMENT SOURCES: Is consent sufficient to make sexual conduct morally legitimate? 
 
F​rom C.K. Egbert: “Suppose we have a world in which we define consent as active, explicit, and ongoing. In addition, we will assume 
that we have a legal system that reliably and adequately deals with cases of sexual assault. However, we will keep the other 
social-sexual norms intact (normalization of pain, eroticization of violence, and instrumentalization of women). In this world, Alice is 
a heterosexual female who wants the physical and emotional intimacy of a romantic relationship. She does not want to engage in any 
sexual activity that is painful or degrading for her; instead, she wants sex to be mutually pleasurable. What are her options? 

 
 
 
I am not saying that Alice is owed a relationship. But is Alice coerced? The answer is yes, because she is denied an equal opportunity 
to pursue a relationship to satisfy her need for emotional and physical intimacy. If we required, for example, that all black people must 
first be physically abused before they are able to earn their college degree, this would clearly be unjust. Similarly, a romantic or sexual 
relationship for Alice — something which people often think is a genuine human need, or at least an important personal good — 
comes at a cost that men do not have to pay, and the cost is her own suffering and bodily integrity. Would Alice no longer be coerced 
if she habituates herself to engaging in painful or degrading sexual behaviors in order to attain the intimacy she desires? 
 
 
 
1) Find a man who does not have a preference for eroticizing violence.  
 
2) Never have a sexual or romantic relationship with a man. 
 
3) Habituate herself to the social-sexual norms. 
 
 
Alice finds Brad, who possesses problematic sexual preferences. 
 
Alice expresses ​enthusiastic c​ onsent for Brad’s problematic behavior X. 
 
 
 
 
Who is doing coercing? 
 
It seems this is an even greater form of coercion; a coercion that becomes so ingrained that she can no longer see herself as deserving 
anything other than pain or abuse.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
What Is a Sexist Ideology? Or: Why Grace Didn’t Leave  
1. What is Hanel’s principle claim? What is a sexist ideology? How does Hanel use this concept to make her argument? And 
might Hanel appeal to the exhibit sources given to motivate her case? 
  
According to my proposal, a sexist ideology is a social structure, constituted by ritualized social practices, and 
rationalized by a coherent cultural framework that organizes social agents into binary gender relations of domination and 
subordination.​ What I attempt to show is that the problematic and common experience of men who fail to correctly understand 
their own behavior as acts of sexual violence (e.g., Ansari) as well as the difficult phenomenon of women who are incapable of 
resisting an uncomfortable situation (e.g., ‘Grace’) can be better illuminated with a specific theory of ideology. Such a theory makes 
intelligible the ways in which those involved in certain social practices can fail to understand their own acts and experiences for what 
they are or fail to act according to their own best interests…​Social practices that constitute sexist ideology are sexual violence, 
domestic abuse, forced marriage, forced surgery of intersex persons, hate crime against transgender persons, and so on. ​To 
be coherent, the cultural framework functions with a range of schemas (including rape myths) that make intelligible the sexist social 
practices grounded in binary gender relations. Thus, when I speak of sexist ideology, I have in mind a whole range of interconnected 
social practices.​ ​Sexual violence as a social practice within sexist ideology is supported by other social practices and by the 
underlying cultural framework—the set of interdependent public schemas—that makes certain acts unintelligible or masks 
interpretations by providing alternative and false understandings.  
We can now understand how Ansari fails to understand his behavior as an act of violence and how Grace believes 
that she “owed” him. The sexist ideology they are embedded within masks a more adequate interpretation of their own 
experiences and instead provides a dominant but false alternative explanation. ​Take, for example, Lois Pineau’s insightful 
discussion of when it is reasonable to assume that consent is indeed given...[​Pineau’s consent-based standard] assumes that we 
know what we want and we do not make choices against our best interest. However, such an assumption is questionable. 
After all, Grace did make a choice—she did not leave but engaged in pressured oral sex—that was against her best interest. ​Ideology 
can bring it about that women consent due to specific schemas, such as the one that makes it seem as though women owe 
sex to men; indeed, they might believe in the same schemas as men. Furthermore, growing up in a system that socializes 
women into being submissive (and enjoy it!) can render them incapable of distinguishing their real desires from their false 
desires. A woman might be so deeply influenced by the ideology that she actually believes that submission is her real 
desire. ​This is problematic for...how we understand consent, because it assumes that none of the participants in the sexual encounter 
are constrained by the “choice architecture” of sexist ideology and, hence, that they know what they want. ​Thus, in sexist ideology, 
consent—even enthusiastic consent—becomes questionable.