The Curious Case of the Excellent Gossiper

My main aim in this paper is to examine whether gossip should be categorized as an epistemically valuable character trait. Gossip satisfies the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for an acquired character trait to be classified as an intellectual virtue under the responsibilist understanding of the concept of virtue. The excellent gossiper is (i) motivated to acquire epistemic goods through gossiping, (ii) reliably successful in acquiring epistemic goods through gossiping, (iii) competent at the activity of gossiping and (iv) good at judging when, with whom and what to gossip. Nonetheless, I show that the excellent gossiper inflicts (knower-initiated) epistemic wrong on others. The excellent gossiper comes to intentionally acquire another person’s private information (e.g., their sexual preferences) without their consent. This leaves virtue responsibilists with three options: (a) resist my argument that gossip qualifies as a responsibilist virtue and/or that excellent gossiping inflicts epistemic wrong, (b) bite the bullet and argue that the intellectually virtuous agent sometimes inflicts epistemic wrong on other agents intentionally, (c) develop a no-wrong principle that disqualifies gossip from being categorized as an intellectual virtue.

Becoming a Man

This paper seeks to analyze the affective-sexual trajectories of young gay men in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Based on qualitative research with 15 young, urban, low-income gay men aged between 19 and 24, carried out in 2019, this article shows the learning of masculinity and its consequences on the men’s sex lives. As a result, we argue that these young men have been brought up for the exaltation of heterosexuality and being a real man since boyhood; that the pedagogies of masculinity produce hierarchies among gay masculinities; and that the connection with other social markers, such as race, social class, religion, sexual preferences related to being active or passive, and gender expressions, upholds the notion of hegemonic masculinity. Regarding those who escape this pattern, these young men reveal several vulnerabilities and multiple violent acts during their trajectories.

The evolution of Darwinian sexualities

Charles Darwin's Descent of Man was suffused with questions of courtship, mating and sex. Following in his footsteps, biologists throughout the twentieth century interrogated the sexual behaviour of humans and animals. This paper charts the fate of evolutionary theories of sexuality to argue that – despite legal and social gains of the past century – when biologists used sexual selection as a tool for theorizing the evolution of homosexual behaviour (which happened only rarely), the effect of their theories was to continuously reinscribe normative heterosexuality. If, at the end of the nineteenth century, certain sex theorists viewed homosexuality as a marker of intermediate sex, by the late twentieth a new generation of evolutionary theorists idealized gay men as hyper-masculine biological males whose sexual behaviours were uncompromised by the necessity of accommodating women's sexual preferences. In both cases, normative assumptions about gender were interwoven with those about sexuality. By the twenty-first century, animal exemplars were again mobilized alongside data gathered about human sexual practices in defence of gay rights, but this time by creating the opportunity for naturalization without recourse to biological determinism.

Automaticity of Early Sexual Attention: An Event-Related Potential Study

A promising line of research on forensic assessment of paraphilic sexual interest focuses on behavioral measures of visual attention using sexual stimuli as distractors. The present study combined event-related potentials (ERPs) with behavioral measures to investigate whether detection of a hidden sexual preference can be improved with ERPs. Normal variants of sexual orientation were used for a proof-of-concept investigation. Accordingly, 40 heterosexual and 40 gay men participated in the study. Within each group, half of the participants were instructed to hide their sexual orientation. The results showed that a match between sexual orientation and stimulus delays responses and influences ERP before motor responses. Late ERP components showed higher potential in differentiating hidden sexual preferences than motor responses, thereby showing how ERPs can be used in combination with reaction time measures to potentially facilitate the detection of hidden sexual preferences.

Two sides of the coin: Comments on political correctness and hate speech/language

The author shows two uses of language manipulation: positive — in relation to the phenomenon of political correctness, the implementation of which he also considers a kind of manipulation, and negative — manifested in hate speech. Political correctness generally eliminates to some extent aggressive language — hate speech. Its influence can be seen in various spheres of social life (attitude towards other nationalities, sexual preferences, religion — non-denominationalism, etc.). The area where hate speech is spreading is widely understood politics. The conclusion is that while in many spheres of social life diplomacy is in force or is beginning to apply, politics is in a state of an ever worsening war.

MALE AND FEMALE CLIENTS OF MEN PROVIDING SEXUAL SERVICES: RESEARCH REPORT

The aim of the research was to gain knowledge of who the people using sexual services are, why they do it and what their relationship with men offering paid sex looked like. Results show that the people who used sexual services were both men and women of different ages and with different professional status. The main reasons for using paid sex services were: unsatisfactory sexual contact,; a sense of loneliness and being neglected by the life partner, partner’s infertility, heartbreak or betrayal of a partner, problems with finding the right partner, unusual sexual preferences, change of gender and treatment of sex-meetings as a form of entertainment.

Patterns of Genital Sexual Arousal in Transgender Men

Most men show genital sexual arousal to one preferred gender. Most women show genital arousal to both genders, regardless of their sexual preferences. There is limited knowledge of whether this difference is driven by biological sex or gender identity. Transgender individuals, whose birth sex and gender identity are incongruent, provide a unique opportunity to address this question. We tested whether the genital responses of 25 (female-to-male) transgender men followed their female birth sex or male gender identity. Depending on their surgical status, arousal was assessed with penile gauges or vaginal plethysmographs. Transgender men’s sexual arousal showed both male-typical and female-typical patterns. Across measures, they responded more strongly to their preferred gender than to the other gender, similar to (but not entirely like) 145 cisgender (nontransgender) men. However, they still responded to both genders, similar to 178 cisgender women. In birth-assigned women, both gender identity and biological sex may influence sexual-arousal patterns.

Ethical management of limited medical resources in COVID-19 times

The current COVID-19 pandemic has affected thousands of people around de world, regardless their race, religion, sexual preferences nor socioeconomic class, leaving all of us with the same vulnerability to suffer this disease. This emergency situation has shown to have the ability to collapse de health care systems in countries like: Italy, Spain, and the United States, because the medical personnel and the available material resources were exceeded. This conflict generates big ethical challenges for the practice of public health since difficult decisions have to be made about how, when and to whom the resources should be allocated. Due to the great responsibility that resource allocation implies, important points in the existing literature are exposed on how to give the best solution to this situation.