Tobi Tusing

If part of a more equitable sexuality is a more egalitarian view of sexual selection, how do we choose who to have sex with? To get the needed level of reward and fulfillment from sex, how do we de-couple our desire from culturally informed ideas of desirability and value?

The experience of appreciating beauty is valuable and a core view of aestheticism - that beauty and art are precisely things that stir emotional response and sensuality. Can we cultivate a personal sense of beauty that gives us these wanted feelings that is also honest, broad, inclusive, and experiential as opposed to value and power-based? Is egalitarian hedonism itself beautiful and worthy of internalizing as such?

As part of the framing of this discussion, I will highlight motifs and examples from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Nabokov’s Lolita as two examples of the ethical and practical consequences of egalitarian hedonism.