Week 3: Sexual life Flashcards
What are stereotypes?
Stereotypes are beliefs that are held about individuals that belong to a certain group.
You can have explicit (conscious) or implicit (uncounscious) beliefs about groups of people.
E.g. “southern Europeans are lazy and like partying.”
What are prejudices?
Prejudices are emotional reactions (usually negative) focused on an individual in virtue of them belonging to a certain group.
E.g. being scared that there is someone with islamic clothing in your tram.
What is discrimination?
Discrimination is a type of behaviour which differentiates an individual in virtue of them belonging to another group.
E.g. ‘No fats, No Fems, No Asians’.
What are explicit stereotypes?
Explicit stereotypes are conscious and are often accompanied by prejudices and discriminatory behaviour.
E.g. someone who explicitly believes that non-heterosexuals are morally corrupt has a reason to feel disgust or shame; or
Someone with these explicit beliefs and feelings has a reason to, for example, refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
What are implicit stereotypes?
Implicit stereotypes are unconscious. Some believe that it is possible to have implicit bias / stereotypes but not have prejudices.
E.g. an employer who hires more women because of their implicit bias but has no ill feeling towards women.
And it is possible to never act discriminatorily despite holding implicit stereotypes.
E.g. you may have a stereotype of Southern Europeans, but never meet one or have to decide on anything that affects them.
Are all stereotypes morally wrong?
Whether stereotypes are wrong depends on whether they are inherently harmful, meaning harmful by nature, independently of their content. Any action that is harmful to others is potentially immoral.
What are the two responses to whether stereotypes are inherently harmful?
Anderson’s response (A) was: stereotypes are not inherently harmful, but just tools to understand the world.
Blum’s response (B) was: Stereotypes are inherently harmful because of what they are by nature.
What is the argumentation behind Anderson’s response (A)?
- Stereotypes are not inherently derogatory, nor typically generated by preexisting group prejudice.
- Rather “cold” cognitive processing than “hot” emotion;
- They’re crude, unconscious heuristics that enable people to economize on information processing and react quickly to situations involving the object.
What is the argumentation behind Blum’s response (B)?
- Respect to others entails not having false beliefs about them.
- Stereotypes provide with reasons to harm others.
- Stereotypes are evidence-resistant.
- Stereotypes portrays individuals through a “narrow lens”, i.e. solely in virtue of the group they belong to.
- Stereotyping fails to grasp the variety of the group targeted.
What is a common practice regarding sexual preference?
It is common practice to cite phenotypic traits (i.e. observable) as preferred for sexual/romantic partners.
What are Halwani’s three possible reasons for asserting that preferring/excluding a group from sexual preferences is racist?
- Because it excludes other groups: Racial features are physical, and physical features determine sexual desire.
- Because it displays moral defect: It assumes moral optimum as desiring everyone.
- Because desires are based on stereotypes: Stereotypes may be restricted to the sexual realm and people may believe sexual stereotypes but not accept them outside of the sexual realm.
What is Halwani’s conclusion with their arguments?
Some people with racial sexual desires are racist, but not in virtue of their racist desires.
What must we do, according to Zheng, to determine the wrong of sexual preference for a specific racialized group, and why?
To determine the wrong of sexual preference for a specific racialized group, we need to change focus:
Not so much on determining whether the person having preferences, but on the people belonging to the preferred racialized group.
Racialized sexual preferences harm racialized individuals.
What theme/topic did Zheng discuss?
Zheng discussed the so called ‘yellow fever’: a preference of white men for Asian women as sexual and romantic partners.
What is Zheng’s Mere Preferences Argument (MPA)?
- There’s nothing morally objectionable about sexual preferences for hair colour, eye colour, and other nonracialized phenotypic traits.
- Preferences for racialized physical traits are no different from preferences for nonracialized phenotypic traits.
Therefore, - ‘Mere’ preferences for racialized phenotypic traits are not morally objectionable.
