CHAPTER 11

Humanist Sexual Ethics

Greta Christina

Religion has controlled the conversation about sex and sexuality for
centuries—often in very harmful ways. But humanists don’t automatically
lose our troubling ideas about sex when we leave religion. Religious ideas
about sex are deeply ingrained in our cultures and subcultures: when we
leave religion, or even if we never had religion, we’re still soaking in all
these ideas, and we still absorb them.1 And not all bad ideas about sex
come from religion. Sex is a powerful drive, a strong evolutionary force,
and we’re not always rational about those. While many humanists don’t
like to admit this, there are plenty of bad ideas about sex and sexuality in
the humanist, atheist, skeptical, and secular communities and movements.
Using pseudoscience to rationalize sexism, shaming consensual sexuality
because it’s supposedly too extreme or excessive, grotesque and overt
misogyny expressed with non-consensually violent or degrading sexual
imagery—all of this and more has been seen far too many times, in our
most visible leaders, local communities, national organizations, confer-
ences, online spaces, and more.2
If we want to help build a sexual world based on humanist values, we
need to do more than just reject religion. We need to do positive, active
work to recognize the bad ideas about sex we’ve absorbed, and to root
them out as best we can. That’s a lifelong project. And we need to do

G. Christina (*)
Independent Scholar, San Francisco, CA, USA

© The Author(s) 2018 239

A. B. Pinn (ed.), Humanism and the Challenge of Difference,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94099-1_11
240   G. CHRISTINA

more than just reject bad ideas about sex. We need to create something to
replace them with. I propose that there are seven basic places to begin to
build a human sexual ethic: respect for bodily autonomy, respect for other
people’s consensual choices, sexual ethics rooted in ethical concerns rather
than taboos, consent, understanding how sexism and other marginaliza-
tion affects sexual consent and choice, evidence-based thinking, and
respecting and valuing pleasure.

Respect for Bodily Autonomy

Let’s start with respect for bodily autonomy. This is a core humanist value:
it shapes our views on drug policy, doctor-patient relationships, the right to
die, and more.3 When we reject the common religious ethic that our bod-
ies belong to God, and that God (and God’s self-appointed representa-
tives) can tell us what to do with them, what do we replace that with? The
obvious answer: our bodies belong to us. We own our bodies. More accu-
rately, and more in keeping with a humanist and materialist outlook: we are
our bodies. Our consciousness, our very sense of identity and self, comes
from our brains, the rest of our bodies, and our interactions with others
and with the physical world.4 We own our bodies, we are our bodies—so
our right to make our own decisions about them should be very close to
absolute. There are some limits, of course: children can’t have as much
bodily autonomy as adults, although in my opinion they should have a lot
more than they currently do. And of course, we lose some rights to bodily
autonomy when we hurt or endanger other people. As the saying goes, my
right to extend my fist ends where your nose begins. But even that limita-
tion is rooted in respect for bodily autonomy. You have autonomy over
your own nose, and (with some exceptions, such as self-defense) you have
the right to not be punched. And we have to be careful even with the more
obvious limitations on this right. Much of the US justice system is rooted
in the idea that a society can restrict people’s bodily autonomy when they
hurt or endanger others, and while I don’t disagree with that in theory,
anyone who reads the news knows that in practice, this system is routinely
misused in racist and abusive ways that violate the principles it’s supposedly
protecting. So while there are some limits to the principle of bodily auton-
omy, we need to be very cautious about when and how we limit it.
What does this have to do with sex? Simple: respect for bodily auton-
omy applies to sex. We have the right to make our own sexual decisions.
When we’re having sex with other people, everyone involved gets to
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decide what happens and what doesn’t happen. When we’re having sex
with ourselves, our right to do what we want is pretty close to absolute.
And when it comes to setting law and policy, the principle of bodily
autonomy translates into somewhat different wording: nothing about us
without us. This idea was articulated in its current form by the disability
rights movement, and it’s been adopted by many other movements advo-
cating for marginalized people.5 If a society is setting law and policy
regarding transgender people, trans people need to be involved. If we’re
setting law and policy about sex work, sex workers need to be involved.

Respect for Other People’s Consensual Choices

This leads to my second foundation of a humanist sexual ethic: respecting
other people’s consensual choices. Religious sexual ethics tend to be based
on laundry lists of which specific sex acts are okay and which one’s aren’t.
Different religions have different lists, of course: anal sex, oral sex, mastur-
bation, sex with menstruating women, sex with a person of the same gen-
der, erotica, sex outside marriage, interfaith marriage, marriage with more
than one partner, divorce, even sex in any form whatsoever are all banned,
discouraged, limited, permitted, or encouraged by different religions and
different subsects of the same religion. But in the traditional forms of the
most common religions, sexual ethics are rooted in the idea that even
when consensual, some sexual variations are dirty and evil, while others are
clean and acceptable.
All too often, humanists echo this pattern. We have different lists than
many believers do: we’re more likely to accept gay sex and sex without
being married, for instance. But our increased acceptance of marginalized
sexualities often simply involves moving certain categories from the “No”
list to the “Yes” list—rather than rebuilding the ethical basis of how we
create those categories in the first place.
Humanists can still be very judgmental toward people who are exercis-
ing consensual bodily autonomy in their sex lives, if the sex those people
are having falls into the wrong category, or simply seems excessive to us.
I’ve seen humanists be judgmental and contemptuous of people who’ve
had large numbers of sexual partners, people who have more than one sex
partner at a time, people who have consensual sadomasochistic sex, people
who do sex work or hire sex workers. I’ve seen humanists do this this hun-
dreds of times, probably thousands: in casual conversations, formal writ-
ings, letters to editors, online debates, conference panels and talks, insults
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meant to discredit opponents. They’ve tried to defend their judgments as

rational, but their explanations are flimsy, contorted, and not based on
evidence. Their explanations aren’t rational: they’re rationalizations, for
beliefs and prejudices they already held.
This does real harm. When we express contempt and disgust for peo-
ple’s consensual sexual choices, it supports and emboldens people who
actually want to enforce those judgments with laws or violence. It fosters
a culture of sexual silence and shame, in which people are unable to be
open about their sexuality, find and share information about it, or even
accept it. And it reinforces a sexual ethic based on sorting sex acts into
pure and impure categories, regardless of the actual ethics.
We need to do better than that. We need to accept—not just grudg-
ingly tolerate, but accept, and embrace—people’s right to bodily auton-
omy. If we support this principle when it comes to drugs or medical care
or the right to die, we need to support it when it comes to sex.

Sexual Ethics Rooted in Ethical Concerns

Rather than Taboos
This brings me to the third pillar of a humanist sexual ethic: basing our
sexual ethics on actual ethical concerns rather than taboos. This is compli-
cated in practice, as ethics often are, and a thorough examination of the
nature of ethics is far beyond the scope of this chapter. But the basic prin-
ciple is fairly straightforward.
Human beings seem to have some core ethical values. From a biologi-
cal and neuro-psychological perspective, these ethics are rooted in the fact
that we evolved as a social species, and our brains seem to have evolved
with some ethical wiring that helps us live together and cooperate, and
thus survive and flourish as a social species.6 From this perspective, altru-
ism, empathy, even self-sacrifice aren’t baffling or paradoxical elements of
natural selection and survival of the fittest: they’re natural outcomes of the
evolution of social species. One of the best expressions of this principle
comes from Ursula K. LeGuin in her novel The Dispossessed: “‘The law of
evolution is that the strongest survives!’ ‘Yes, and the strongest, in the
existence of any social species, are those who are the most social. In human
terms, most ethical.’”7
From a philosophical perspective, these basic values are rooted in the
understanding that other people matter to themselves as much as we mat-
ter to ourselves, and that from an objective perspective, none of us matters
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more than anyone else.8 Obviously, both the evolutionary and the philo-
sophical summaries here are vast oversimplifications of a complex subject
that’s engaged philosophers for millennia. But they’ll do for now.
There are debates about what exactly these core values are, of course.
So I’m going to stick with the ones that are fairly widely agreed on by
people who agree with this theory: care versus harm, fairness versus injus-
tice, loyalty versus betrayal, and respect for legitimate authority versus
subversion of legitimate authority.9
When we’re considering the ethics of a particular sexual act or arrange-
ment, we need to consider how it fits into these ethical frameworks. Is
anyone being harmed? Is the act or arrangement unfair in some way? Is it
disloyal, betraying trust? The question of authority is a more difficult one
when it comes to sex, since the history of criminalizing consensual sex is
long and ugly. But I think it can be framed this way: does this sex act or
arrangement violate reasonable rules, or rules that people freely agreed to?
If the answer is No—it’s not harmful, it’s not disloyal, it’s not unfair, and
it’s not breaking reasonable or agreed-upon rules—and we still have some
sort of gut feeling that it’s not right, we need to consider whether our
feeling is actually an ethical response, or is just a prejudice, a learned
response to a social taboo.
When considering sexual ethics, it’s often useful to make a non-sexual
analogy, since our feelings about sex often run deep and are often not
rational. For instance, some sex work is exploitative and amounts to mon-
etized rape. Does this mean all sex work should be illegal? My analogy:
much of the chocolate industry depends on exploitative and grossly abu-
sive child labor.10 Does this mean all chocolate should be illegal? Does it
mean that people who consume chocolate should be shamed and margin-
alized? And does it mean that people who pick cocoa beans should also be
shamed and marginalized, or at best should be “protected” with laws and
policies they have no part in creating? Or does it mean that we should
work to empower workers in the cocoa farming industry? Should we cre-
ate social pressure supporting fair trade chocolate over child-labor choco-
late? Should we make sure that laws and policies about cocoa farming and
chocolate importing are created with the participation of the people work-
ing in the industry? Should we listen to what these workers say they need
to reduce or eliminate abuses?
Analogies, of course, are by their nature imperfect, but they can still be
extremely useful, and looking at the places where they fall down or don’t
correspond can still be instructive.
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Consent
When we look at sex acts that are genuinely unethical, often it’s because
they violate consent. I’ve touched on consent, and I want to get into it in
more detail. It’s an essential part of a humanist sexual ethic: a case could
be made that it’s the foundation of a humanist sexual ethic, and that all
other sexual ethics are ultimately based on it. It’s also a topic that’s widely
misunderstood. So I’m going to spend a fair amount of time on it. Sexual
consent is a large topic: huge amounts have been written about it, entire
books have been written about it.11 But if I had to sum up consent in one
short sentence, it would be this: consent is saying yes when we have the
power to say no.
If someone holds a gun to my head and says they’ll shoot me or beat
me up unless I have sex with them, and I say yes, that’s not consent. If my
landlord says they’ll evict me or my boss says they’ll fire me unless I have
sex with them, and I say yes, that’s not consent. If an adult asks a child to
have sex, and the child says yes, that’s not consent. If a person is drunk or
high to the point of being incapacitated, and they say yes to sex, that’s not
consent. If a person is passed out, and they don’t say no because they can’t
speak or don’t know what’s happening, that’s not consent.
Consent means saying yes when we have the power to say no, when
nothing terrible will happen if we say no. There may be consequences we
don’t like—someone might not want to date us, or might break up with
us—but nothing terrible will happen. We won’t get shot, beaten up,
evicted, fired. And the power to say no means the psychological capacity
to say no. Adults have a huge amount of power over children—and that
power includes the fact that children’s minds are wired by evolution to
listen to them, to trust them, and to do as they’re told. They don’t have
the capacity to say no to adults. And if someone is incapacitated by booze
or drugs, they don’t have the capacity to consent. That’s literally what
“incapacitated” means.
This issue of alcohol and sexual consent is difficult for a lot of people.
In my talks on atheist sexual ethics, and in the debates about harassment
policies, the subject of alcohol almost always comes up—and someone
usually asks, “How drunk is too drunk?” My short answer is to quote
Rebecca Watson: if you’re wondering if someone is too drunk to consent,
err on the side of not being a rapist.12 But there’s more to it than that. We
need to seriously question the role of alcohol in our sexual culture.
US culture tends to treat alcohol as the oil of the social-sexual machinery.
Alcohol loosens inhibitions, and we treat that as necessary to keep the
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machine of flirtation and cruising and hookups going. We see bars and
drunken parties as natural places to find sex partners; our jokes and con-
versations and popular culture are loaded with connections between booze
and sex. We tend to treat sex and alcohol as two great tastes that taste
great together. We need to knock it off. I’ll quote my colleague Christophe
Pettus: if a large amount of your sex life consists of gray-area sex, where
you’re not sure if your partners are sober enough to consent, you need to
re-evaluate your life.13 And the unfortunate reality is that alcohol is a com-
mon component of sexual assault. I don’t mean that in any victim-blaming
way: I’m not saying people who get drunk and are sexually assaulted
should have known better and deserve what they get. I’m saying people
who sexually assault others use alcohol and drunkenness as a weapon—
and a defense after the fact. They know our culture sees drunkenness as a
green light, and they rely on that as a way to get off the hook.
I’m not saying every flirtation or hookup or sexual encounter needs to
be stone cold sober. I’m saying we need to untangle this connection
between booze and sex. We need to start seeing tipsiness and drunken-
ness, not as a sexual green light, but as a red flag, a sign that we should
proceed with caution. Again, if you’re wondering if someone is too drunk
to consent, err on the side of not being a rapist.
So if consent is saying yes when we can say no, what counts as saying
yes? In conversations about consent, a common idea is “clear, verbal con-
sent.” Especially when we’re having sex with someone for the first time or
the first few times, or when we’re trying a new sexual act, it’s important to
not just rely on body language. And it’s hugely important to not assume
that a silent, passive partner is consenting simply because they’re not say-
ing no. No means No; maybe means No; silence means No. The only
thing that means Yes is Yes. Getting clear, verbal consent for sex in general
and for particular sex acts is an important part of erring on the side of not
being a rapist. If it seems awkward, clinical, or unromantic to talk openly
about sex, and to explicitly discuss sexual plans, boundaries, likes, and
dislikes—ask yourself why that is, and why our culture treats explicit con-
sent as unsexy. Now, if you’ve been married for eighteen years, standing
agreements are common, and clear communication doesn’t always have to
be verbal. That’s true about lots of things other than sex. But even then,
clear verbal consent is a good idea—and people always have the right to
withdraw it. The fact that you’ve had sex with someone once before, ten
times before, a thousand times before, doesn’t mean you’re consenting to
have sex with them again.
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Then there’s the idea of “enthusiastic consent.” The idea is that we

don’t just want our sexual partners to say, “Yeah, sure, okay.” We want
them to say, “Yes yes yes yes yes, yes please, hell yes, that would be awe-
some.” Enthusiasm is a really good sign that your partner is genuinely
consenting. Now, this isn’t an absolute hard-and-fast rule in all sexual
encounters. Many sex workers have pointed out that they aren’t always
enthusiastic about sex with their customers, and they’re still consenting.
And many asexual people in relationships with sexual people say they freely
consent to have sex they’re not enthusiastic about, because it’s important
to their partner and is an important bond. But as a general guideline for
most people in most sexual encounters, enthusiastic consent is what we
should be looking for. If someone’s not enthusiastic, that’s often a good
sign that they’re saying yes, not because they want to, but because they
don’t feel like they can say no.
So consent means saying yes when we have the power to say no. Power
means literal power—not having a gun to your head or your job on the
line. Power means the mental and emotional capacity to make decisions.
But I would argue that consent doesn’t just mean the power to say no. It
means the power to say yes.
In Islamist theocracies, women can be punished by imprisonment or
beating or death for having sex outside marriage.14 There are countries
where having gay sex is a crime punishable by death.15 For decades in
Ireland, the Catholic Church literally imprisoned women they thought
were too sexual.16 That’s not consent culture, either. Punishing people for
saying yes to sex chips away at consent—and that includes in the slut-­
shaming US. When we discourage people from saying yes and stigmatize
them when they do, it perpetuates the idea that the way to consent to sex
is with ambivalence or silence. When we shame people for having casual
sex, for having unconventional sex, for having sex with too many partners
(“too many” being defined as “more than we personally approve of”),
we’re chipping away at consent. Sexual empowerment means the power to
say no—and it means the power to say yes.
If we want to create a culture where sexual consent is valued and taken
seriously, we need to take a hard look at all the ways our culture doesn’t
do that. We need to look at how our culture thinks sex should be sponta-
neous and natural and beyond language; how making plans for sex, and
openly discussing our likes and dislikes, is seen as awkward or cold. We
need to look at how saying no or showing reluctance is seen as coy and
flirtatious. We need to look at the all-too-common assumption that once
   HUMANIST SEXUAL ETHICS    247

someone has consented to sex, they’ve consented to that person forever.

We need to look at how a drug that causes disinhibition at best and inca-
pacitation at worst is seen as a natural part of rollicking sexual fun. We
need to look at all the ways sexual assault is trivialized. We need to look at
all the ways victims of sexual assault are mistrusted, ignored, dismissed, or
blamed. We need to look at all the ways perpetrators of sexual assault are
defended, and how common it is for them to get away with it. We need to
look at how news media commonly refers to rape or sexual assault as “sex,”
“sex crimes,” a “sex scandal,” “inappropriate sexual behavior,” and other
minimizing language. We need to look at all the ways we treat sexual
assault as a special case; how even police and prosecutors are less likely to
believe rape victims than victims of other violent crimes, and more likely
to blame them for having been raped. We need to look at how the very
idea of rape culture is seen as absurd, and any instance of rape being taken
seriously is given as proof that it doesn’t exist.
And we need to look at all the ways that boundaries in general are not
taken seriously. We need to look at all the ways our culture sees not asking
for consent—not just for sex, but for kissing or touching or dancing—as
passionate and impulsive. We need to look at all the ways we think persis-
tence and not taking no for an answer—not just for sex, but asking some-
one for a date a hundred times—is cute and romantic and a sign of true
love. We need to look at how children are required to hug people they
don’t want to hug.
I’m going to assume that everyone reading this wants a culture where
sexual consent is valued and taken seriously. If that’s true, we need to
accept that we don’t live in that culture. We need to look at our own ideas
and feelings about sex, and look at whether they contribute to that cul-
ture. We need to speak out when we see consent violated or trivialized,
and we need to make it clear that we won’t accept it. We need to talk with
each other about our lousy cultural ideas about consent, and about our
visions for an alternative.

Understanding How Sexism and Other

Marginalization Affects Sexual Consent and Choice
If we’re going to understand how sexual consent is routinely violated, and
how our culture trivializes consent and enables consent violations, we
need to understand power, privilege, and marginalization. This is another
pillar of a humanist sexual ethic: understanding how sexism, racism, and
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other marginalizations affect sexual consent and choice. This is a very large
topic; it could be the topic of an entire paper in itself: for now, I’m just
going to touch on a couple of the most important points.
I said earlier that consent is saying Yes when you have the power to say
No. But the way society is structured, women have less power than men.
African American people, Latinx people, and other people of color have
less power than white people. Immigrants have less power than born citi-
zens. Poor people have less power than rich or middle-class people. All of
this affects sexual power dynamics. Understanding this is another essential
pillar to a humanist sexual ethic.
This power difference doesn’t mean that women can never consent to
sex with men, or that people of color can never consent to sex with white
people. It means we have to be conscious, and careful. These power dif-
ferences can make people feel pressured—and they can make it difficult
for people to openly and bluntly say No. Women, for instance, are trained
from childhood to be nice to men, to protect men’s feelings, and to pri-
oritize men’s desires over our own. We’re taught to make ourselves sexu-
ally attractive and available, while somehow at the same time being the
gatekeepers of sex and the policers of sexual morality. This isn’t just
about gender, either. Marginalized people of all varieties have learned
from long experience to be cautious about making powerful people
angry at us. Our jobs, our homes, our safety, sometimes our lives, all too
often depend on protecting the feelings of people more powerful than
us. All of this can make it very difficult for people to just bluntly say No.
And people on the more powerful ends of these axes of privilege are
taught, often in ways that we’re not aware of, that our desires take prior-
ity, and that access to other people’s bodies is something we’re entitled
to. So if we’re on the more powerful, more privileged end of a power
difference, and we want to approach someone sexually, we need to be
conscious of this. We need to tread more lightly, be more conscious of
body language signaling interest or discomfort, and give people more
room to say No. This is especially true when there’s more than one
power dynamic in play.
When it comes to power differences and sex, we need to be particularly
conscious and careful about false equivalency. For instance, men some-
times say they’d love it if women showered them with sexual attention, so
they don’t understand why women object to it. They’re ignoring the con-
text in which women are routinely sexualized, approached with attitudes
   HUMANIST SEXUAL ETHICS    249

of sexual entitlement, and treated as if our sexuality and ornamentality is

the only important thing about us—from our childhood until the day we
die. White people sometimes say they wouldn’t object to aspects of their
culture being exoticized in a sexual way. They’re ignoring the context in
which African American people, Latinx people, and other people of color
routinely have their cultures appropriated and turned into sexual enter-
tainment to be consumed by white people—not to mention the history,
continuing to this day, of black and brown people being treated as white
people’s sexual property. If we’re going to live up to the humanist princi-
ples of rationality and compassion, we need to see these contexts, and
these bigger pictures.

Evidence-Based Thinking
The acceptance of the reality of marginalization leads me to another pillar
of a humanist sexual ethic—the acceptance of reality, otherwise known as
evidence-based thinking. This is pretty straightforward, and I’m not going
to spend a lot of time on it, but it is important. Our thinking about sex
needs to be based on evidence, just as much as our thinking about any
other topic.
We need to pay attention to good research about sex. We also need to
understand that right now, good research about sex is hard to come by: we
need to be conscious of the filters and biases that shape the research that
is done, and we need to be conscious of our own filters and biases when
we’re looking at research and deciding what to believe and how to inter-
pret it.
Very importantly, we need to listen to what people say about their own
sex lives. We don’t like it when people make judgments about humanists
without bothering to spend five minutes Googling “humanism” and find-
ing out what we ourselves say about it. So before we make judgments
about gay people, lesbians, bisexuals, polyamorists, porn performers, porn
consumers, transgender people, asexual people, sadomasochists, sex work-
ers, sex work customers, and more, we need to do a little Googling our-
selves, and find out what these people themselves say about their own sex
lives. We need to educate ourselves—without always putting the burden
on people to do the emotional labor of educating us.
And when the evidence suggests that our opinions about sex are wrong,
we need to be willing to accept that we’re wrong, and change our minds.
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Respecting and Valuing Pleasure

I want to end on a more pleasant note. I want to end on the most pleasant
note of all—the topic of pleasure. One of the most important aspects of a
humanist sexual ethic is respecting and valuing pleasure—not just for the
other goals that pleasure can help achieve, but for its own sake.
Religious sexual morality often treats pleasure as suspect, even as dan-
gerous. This isn’t universally true—for instance, most varieties of the
Jewish religion see pleasure as a positive thing, including sexual pleasure,
as long as it’s religiously sanctioned. But this mistrust of pleasure is very
common in many religions. Even when pleasure is accepted and cele-
brated, it’s often because it leads to some other goal: sexual pleasure
strengthens a marriage, for instance. This isn’t just in traditional religions,
either: in New Age religions that pride themselves on being sex-positive,
sexual pleasure is still often celebrated because it brings about some sort of
spiritual connection, transcendence, or transformation. The idea of pure,
physical, animal pleasure for its own sake is still looked down on.
Humanists often buy into this—especially in the United States, where
our sexual culture is strongly rooted in religion, and particularly in a
centuries-­old tradition of Puritanical Christianity. When humanists con-
demn things like sex work or large numbers of sexual partners, it’s often
because they think sex is supposed to be an expression of romantic love,
and these variations violate what they think sex is supposed to be for. But
sex doesn’t have to be “for” anything. Pleasure doesn’t have to be “for”
anything. We ourselves aren’t “for” anything: we weren’t created for a
purpose, we weren’t created at all. We exist because this planet supports
life, and our ancestors survived and reproduced. We can certainly create
our own meaning and purpose, and we do. But part of that meaning and
purpose can simply be celebrating the mere fact of our existence, fully
experiencing this short, fragile, wildly improbable life. We certainly can
create our own goals, and we do. But when we’re free from the idea that
our lives only matter because they were created by a god to serve that
god’s purpose and be a cog in that god’s machinery, we can be free from
the idea that our lives only matter if we serve some larger goal, that we
only matter if we’re moving forward. Pleasure is its own reward. Literally.
Pleasure certainly can serve other purposes, but it doesn’t have to.
Pleasure—sexual pleasure, and other kinds of pleasure—can serve as a
bond between partners or friends, a reward for achievement, a consolation
or comfort during times of suffering or struggle. But it doesn’t have to. It
can just be.
   HUMANIST SEXUAL ETHICS    251

Carl Sagan once said that we are a way for the universe to know itself.17
That is true, and that is wonderful. But we are also a way for the universe
to give itself pleasure. Consciousness is extraordinary. That includes the
aspect of consciousness that is knowledge, and it includes the aspect of
consciousness that is joy. It doesn’t have to serve some other purpose. It is
valuable in itself.

Notes
1. Darrel Ray, Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (IPC Press,
2012).
2. Greta Christina, “Why Both of Sam Harris’s Recent Comments Were
Sexist—Even If You Accept Some Degree of Innate Gendered Behavior,”
Greta Christina’s Blog, September 29, 2014, https://the-orbit.net/
greta/2014/09/29/why-both-of-sam-harriss-recent-comments-were-
sexist-even-if-you-accept-some-degree-of-innate-gendered-behavior/.
Greta Christina, “The Slymepit, Documented—UPDATED,” Greta
Christina’s Blog, April 28, 2015, https://the-orbit.net/greta/2015/
04/28/the-slymepit-documented/.
3. Jefferson M.  Fish, “Rethinking Drug Policy Assumptions,” The Humanist,
February 15, 2013, https://thehumanist.com/magazine/march-april-2013/
features/rethinking-drug-policy-assumptions. Humanists UK, “Assisted
Dying,” https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/public-ethical-issues/
assisted-dying/.
4. Patricia S. Churchland, Touching a Nerve: The Brain as Self (W.W. Norton
& Company, 2013). Other readings: Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the
Mysteries of the Human Mind, VS Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
(William Morrow, 1998); Consciousness Explained, Daniel C.  Dennett
(Little Brown and Company, 1991).
5. James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and
Empowerment (University of California Press, 2000). See also “Nothing
About Us Without Us: The Shared Goals of the Harm Reduction and Sex
Worker Rights Movements,” St. James Infirmary, http://stjamesinfirmary.
org/wordpress/?p=1108; “Nothing About Us Without Us,” Autistic Self
Advocacy Network motto, http://autisticadvocacy.org; “Nothing About
Us Without Us: A Manifesto By People Who Use Illegal Drugs,” Canadian
HIV/AIDS Legal Network, the Open Society Institute Public Health
Program, and the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, http://www.aidsal-
liance.org/assets/000/000/377/310-2.-Nothing-about-us-without-us-
Manifesto-(English)_original.pdf?1405520241.
252   G. CHRISTINA

6. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by
Politics and Religion (Random House, 2012). For a more detailed exami-
nation of this theory, see also “Morality and Evolutionary Biology,”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published December 19, 2008;
substantive revision July 23, 2014.
7. Ursula K, LeGuin, The Dispossessed, (Avon Books, 1974), p. 177.
8. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, “Mattering Matters,” Free Inquiry, Vol, 37
Issue 2, https://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php/articles/8609.
9. “Moral Foundations Theory,” http://moralfoundations.org/.
10. Brian O’Keefe, “Inside Big Chocolate’s Child Labor Problem,” Fortune,
March 1, 2016, http://fortune.com/big-chocolate-child-labor.
11. Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, editors, Yes Means Yes!: Visions of
Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape (Seal Press, 2008).
12. Rebecca Watson, “Twitter Users Sad To Hear They May Be Rapists,”
Skepchick, December 18, 2012, http://skepchick.org/2012/12/twitter-
users-sad-to-hear-they-may-be-rapists.
13. Christophe Pettus, conversation on Facebook, quoted with permission.
14. Saeed Kamali Dehghan, “Campaign for Iranian woman facing death by
stoning,” The Independent, July 2, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/
world/2010/jul/02/iranian-woman-stoning-death-penalty.
15. Max Bearak and Darla Cameron, “Here are the 10 countries where homo-
sexuality may be punished by death,” Washington Post, June 16, 2016,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/
06/13/here-are-the-10-countries-where-homosexuality-may-be-pun-
ished-by-death-2/?utm_term=.14c48dc34e40.
16. Anna Carey, “Depressing but not surprising: how the Magdalene Laundries
got away with it.” New Stateman, July 17, 2013. http://www.newstates-
man.com/religion/2013/07/depressing-not-surprising-how-magda-
lene-laundries-got-away-it.
17. Carl Sagan, Cosmos, “Episode 1: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean,”
September 28, 1980.