Gender and Sex

Lingerie Football Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Does this sport condone rape? Or tickle fights?

I think professional lingerie football is a strange sport, to be sure. Attractive women dressed in bras, panties, helmets and shoulder pads play football before paying customers, almost all of them men. The players seem to play hard and many of them are excellent athletes. Is it sport? Is it sex? Is it spectacle?

Sondra Miller, a feminist and rape crisis counselor, believes that lingerie football increases the incidence of rape and violence against women, and writes that the proper ethical conduct is to end it:

“Don’t support the women’s lingerie football league. Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t watch it on TV. Don’t talk about it at the water cooler. Ignore it — or better yet — speak out against it.” Continue reading →

Coercive Indoctrination in the Schools: Unethical, Regardless of the Content

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

A German language teacher at Western Hills High School in Fort Worth, Texas sent 14-year-old honors student Dakota Ary to the principal’s office for telling a classmate that he believes “homosexuality is wrong.”

Ary was then suspended as punishment. Homosexuality isn’t wrong,, but the school was.

Ary, who was raised in a church that believes homosexuality violates God’s laws, has a right to believe whatever he chooses to, and also has a right to express those beliefs as long as he doesn’t denigrate fellow students or incite violence or a disruption. There are words for schools punishing students for their beliefs, and among those words are “indoctrination,” “coercion,” brain-washing,” and “unethical.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Which Musical Comedy Censor is More Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

How could anyone predict that this show would be risque?

Rick Jones brought these sorry tales to my attention, and they are perfectly suited to an Ethics Quiz.

Your challenge: Explain which of the censors in these two incidents was more unethical.

Censor A: The mayor of Carrollton, Georgia, Wayne Garner, who ruled last week that a city-funded professional production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was not suited for a community production. The city council had contracted with a theater group of actors, singers, dancers, musicians and crew, and had committed $2,500 of taxpayer funds in up-front production costs to prepare for four performances in October. The mayor’s spokesperson said that the production was going to contain racy choreography,despite the fact that it was supposed to be a “PG show.”

How a counter-culture musical specifically about gender bending, kinky sex and transvestites was supposed to be “PG” is anybody’s guess.

Censor B: Thomas Fleming, Superintendent of Schools in the Richland School District in western Pennsylvania.   He prompted District officials to veto the high school’s choice of the classic 1950s Broadway musical Kismet as a 2012 production, because it suddenly occurred to him that the characters in the play, which takes place in old Baghdad, are Muslims. Continue reading →

Shameless Oglers, Ethics Chess, and the Duty to Confront

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Men who openly ogle the body parts of women in public make me want to turn in my Man Card and start dating Chaz Bono. I don’t know how people get like that, but no male should survive into his twenties with the idea that it is socially acceptable to stare at a woman’s breasts, legs, derriere or comely visage without an express invitation—and yes, some clothing choices can constitute such invitations. Absent that, however, a woman has the right not to be made to feel like a pole dancer, meat on the hoof, or a Sports illustrated swimsuit model simply because she is in public and in the presence of Y chromosomes.

The great relationship advice columnist Carolyn Hax addresses herself today to the lament of a woman who found herself unable to muster a response to a man in a restaurant who continued to stare at her chest, ruining her dinner. Hax initially disappointed me by suggesting that the woman should have simply switched seats, removing the attractive nuisance from his view. But she redeemed herself as she went on to urge the woman to prepare for her future encounters with ogling pigs, since given her natural endowments these were likely to occur:

“Learn to perform under duress through preparation.Ask yourself, now, what you can realistically hope to do in these situations, then prepare the words, gestures and/or actions. Say your plans out loud in the shower (seriously); repeat them to your friends by telling them the restaurant story and spelling out what you wish you had done. Even when practicing feels stupid, use repetition to teach your brain where the path is. In time, you’ll be able to find it no matter how rattled you get.”

This is what I like to call “ethics chess;” preparing yourself to handle ethical problems and dilemmas when they arise…thinking ahead regarding your tactics when a predictable event occurs, so you do the responsible and ethical thing. Continue reading →

The Dominatrix Lawyer Principle?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

"Your witness, Counsellor."

Alisha Smith, 36, by day a lawyer in the state Attorney General’s Office specializing in prosecuting securities fraud, prowls the night as “Alisha Spark,” a dominatrix who performs at S&M events for pay. So reports an expose in the New York Post. At a recent S&M event, Alisha posed for photos with fellow fetishists, wearing a skin-tight, see-through latex dress with heart-shaped pasties.“They pay her to go to the events. She dominates people, restrains them and whips them,” the Post’s source said.

Yesterday, the Attorney General removed Smith from her duties. “The employee has been suspended without pay, effective immediately, pending an internal investigation,” said a spokesman for state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The lawyer-dominatrix’s punishment, which will may eventually involve dismissal, will undoubtedly be based on a standing executive order in the Attorney General’s Office that requires employees to “obtain prior approval from the [Employment Conduct Committee] before engaging in any outside pursuit … from which more than $1,000 will be received or is anticipated to be received.”

Whipping enthusiastic S&M lovers pays a lot better than that.

She should be dismissed anyway. Her activities breach no legal ethics rules, but as a representative of the state, the Attorney General and the justice system, “Alisha Spark” was obligated conduct herself in a manner that did not undermine the system’s dignity or call the competence of the Attorney General’s Office into question. Even if she had been whipping leather-clad, squealing men free of charge, she was still duty-bound to keep her kinky escapades secret and private, because once they became public, if they did, they would harm her ability to do her legal job. Would a jury be as likely to accept an argument from a prosecutor who had pictures circulating the internet showing her whipping up fun in her alternate profession while dressed like Cat Woman? Maybe, but no sane Attorney General would want to take that chance.

Kinky though she may be, Smith is apparently good at her day job. If the Attorney General  believes that his office won’t be tangibly impeded by her continued employment in a legal role that doesn’t require a high profile or courtroom duty, then it would make sense to keep her on. Otherwise, it is the Naked Teacher Principle again, under the rare sub-category labeled “Dominatrix Lawyers.”

The Washington Post’s Hypocrite Who Doesn’t Understand Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Washington Post columnist Erik Wemple says he really, really believes that it is bad journalism to write about the pre-marital sex of public figures, particularly before they were public figures. After all, 1) it’s nobody’s business and 2) it’s an invasion of privacy. But Wemple wrote this week that he makes an exception to that rule when hypocrisy is involved. Thus it is OK for Sarah Palin’s slimy biographical hit-man Joe McGinnis to dish about rumors of her dalliances before she was wed, because, Wemple says, in a 2006 Eagle Forum questionnaire, Palin indicated that she supported funding abstinence-until-marriage education programs and opposed teaching sex-education programs. This makes her a hypocrite, he claims, so journalists quoting McGinnis’s invasion of privacy and violations decency is fine and dandy with him.

Wemple is wrong once, twice, three ways:

1. What Palin says years after her pre-marital sexual exploits, assuming there were any, can’t possibly make her a hypocrite. It is not hypocritical for a mature and experienced adult to decide that her conduct in the past was mistaken, unwise and risky, and to advocate policies that discourage it in others. Condemning someone for learning from mistakes and trying to craft public policy based on acquired wisdom is the mark of a fool. Continue reading →

“I Am One of Those Untouchables” : The Unethical Persecution of Former Sex Offenders

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

No ethical person can read this and conclude that such treatment by society is fair, responsible, compassionate or American. It is the ethical duty of every citizen who believes in our society’s commitment to the freedoms guaranteed by the Declaration and the Constitution to oppose efforts to persecute former sex offenders, because our elected officials will not oppose them. It is, in the end, a matter of choosing national integrity over bigotry and fear.

“I am one of those untouchables. And I’m not one of those ones that everyone agrees shouldn’t be on the registry. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “America’s Untouchables”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Among the many provocative, informative and heart-breaking comments to the Ethics Alarms post about the continued persecution of convicted sex offenders after they have completed their sentences is the following Comment of the Day by Peekachu (not to be confused with the Pokemon of the same name—different spelling). This is obviously an emotional topic for many, and I am somewhat surprised that there have not been any comments in defense of the increasingly restrictive limits placed on the Constitutional rights of sex offenders to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness….perhaps because there is no defense.  I hope to explore this issue more thoroughly in the future, but in the meantime, I urge readers to visit the other comments to the original post, and also to read Ethics Bob Stone’s take on the topic.

Here is the Comment of the Day, by Peekachu, on “America’s Untouchables”: Continue reading →

A Cautionary Ethics Tale From Texas

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

A Good Samaritan Teddy could relate to

In Texas, a 62-year-old man pulled over on the highway to help a couple whose truck had run out of gas. While he was assisting, the Good Samaritan apparently objected to the demeaning way the 31-year-old husband was addressing his wife, and said so. The husband then attacked the older man…who drew his concealed gun and shot him in the shoulder.

<sigh> Continue reading →

America’s Untouchables

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Americans allow prisoners in its penitentiaries to get raped, despite the fact that it is a blatant violation of the prisoners’ civil rights. They even tolerate TV shows making light of the situation, which is a human rights scandal: how many times have you heard the FBI agent or police in shows like “Law and Order” or “The Mentalist” taunt an arrested criminal with the prospect that he will soon be a prison sex-toy? Never mind: American don’t really care about the abuse of prisoners. Similarly, the nation is systematically making it impossible for convicted sex offenders who have served their time to live a normal life anywhere. They might as well be in prison. Well, except then they might get raped. Continue reading →