The political power of sexual preference

Draft only: please do not cite without written permission. Comments and criticisms are welcome.

How should one choose one’s sexual partners? I contend that one's choice of sexual partner may be more a political power than a personal privilege. For other people's actions, when those actions are informed by their benign sexual attraction to us, constitute a social basis of our self-respect. This fact grounds, in the first instance, a duty to introspect and, in the second, a duty to divest oneself of any sexual aversion to members of a stigmatised, subordinate social group one might find oneself to have. These duties fall disproportionately on members of a privileged, dominant social group.

Neither the nature nor the origin of sexual preferences renders them inscrutable to introspection. For, regardless of what their nature is, it is their capacity to influence action that makes sexual preferences morally salient. Moreover, with regards to their origin, to claim that sexual preferences are unchosen would be to undermine the ability of those preferences to ground the self-respect of the person who is sexually preferred.

For its part, the duty to divest oneself of a sexual aversion to members of a stigmatised, subordinate group, first, does not require the adoption of any corollary sexual attraction to them; second, is not impugned by the possibility that members of the dominant group might divest themselves of a sexual aversion only to replace it with a sexual indifference; and, third, does not require the impossible, since an individual has a right that the rest of his society, which socialised him to have such deleterious desires, now provide him with real means of divesting himself of a sexual aversion that threatens to maintain, aggravate, or rekindle stigmatisation in his society. Fortunately, there are many ways in which the rest of society can fulfil this duty to him.