While many liberation theorists focus on the role of the oppressor or oppressing institutions in

maintaining oppression, I aim to analyze the role of the oppressed individual—those who receive
and accept, rather than distribute, the rewards and punishments attached to oppressive norms—
in its perpetuation. Liberation theorists argue that members of dominant groups uphold systems
of oppression when they exercise privilege in social contexts. But often in response to privilege,
oppressed persons exercise complicity. Thus one should expect that both privilege and
complicity perpetuate oppression at the individual level. The goal of this book is to ask—in
good faith—whether individual women are morally responsible for their own and the social
group’s oppression by examining and analyzing women’s rational choices to accept rewards for
complicit behaviour rather than punishments for resistance.

In Existential Eroticism: A Feminist Ethics Approach to Understanding Women’s Oppression-

Perpetuating Choices, I aim to fill a gap that exists in the space between lived oppression and
theoretical analysis. I focus specifically on feminist analyses of women’s oppression-
perpetuating choices to draw out how such biases in theorizing can undermine liberation. In this
book, I traverse the interstices of the dupe/victim dichotomy. To do so I provide a thorough
analysis of how feminists invested in liberation ought to regard women and their choice’s that
perpetuate oppression—focusing specifically on Western women in sex work and abusive
relationships to guide my analysis. I restrict my analysis to women’s oppression qua beauty and
sexuality, which I term existential eroticism. I argue that this is the one form of oppression that
all women experience and must navigate differently according to their race and class
designations. I parse out the differing forms and degrees of restriction that result from existential
eroticism, explicitly distinguishing between individual and systemic modes, to better understand
the rationality that women must use to endure and navigate this experience. In doing so, I
articulate a notion of desperate rationality that emerges from the experience of coercion vis-à-vis
trauma. I analyze this experience from the perspective of the existentially erotic woman because
most feminist philosophers bear race and class privilege that has protected them from such
experiences, which in turn limits their ability to accurately account for how and why women
make perpetuating choices, and which results in biased analyses of attribution or withholding of
moral responsibility for those choices. By taking on and accounting for the perspective of
marginalized women in contradistinction to the proper lady or feminist ideal, and demonstrating
the hyper-rationality they exercise to strategically navigate oppression and abuse, I provide two
distinct accounts of moral responsibility that apply discretely to the individuated act and the
complicit act that inheres within a single choice. Such an analysis will affect mainstream
feminist analyses of moral responsibility for complicit women because none have separated the
phenomenon of the individual’s act from the inadvertent phenomenon of complicity. Pace most
feminists, I argue that women can be responsible for complicity in collective action problems—
even when they are not morally responsible for the individuated aspect of the choice—and
demonstrate how moral responsibility works differently when separating out complicity for the
purpose of moral evaluation.

I also attend to questions of blame and forgiveness. This proves imperative to the discussion
because blame and the need for forgiveness often underlies the biased analyses and, moreover,
preclude the possibility of solidarity that oppressed persons need and desire to overcome
oppression. I advocate for a relationship-centered account of blame for complicit women and
argue that feminists also have much to be forgiven for given that their analyses are written more
from a perspective of exoticization than understanding. Consequently, I develop an analysis of
intra-group forgiveness that can begin to restore the bonds between women and overcome
resentment that precludes the kind of understanding needed to address the harms of complicity
and its ability to perpetuate oppression. Overall, this project broadly utilizes feminist ethics to
look deeply at how women regard and judge one another and to offer a more representative
account of restriction, rationality, and responsibility to begin the healing process.

Primarily, I take up and expound upon Ann Cudd’s arguments about self-perpetuated oppression
that she articulates in Analyzing Oppression (2006).1 I position my philosophical expansion and
analyses largely between Anita Superson’s article “Right-Wing Women: Causes, Choices, and
Blaming the Victim” (1995) and Uma Narayan’s article “Minds of Their Own: Choices,
Autonomy, Cultural Practices, and Other Women” (2002). Although feminists acknowledge
degrees of choice and responsibility, when they analyze women and responsibility they seem to
dichotomize them into a binary that then extends over into their responsibility for perpetuating
oppression: victims or wrongdoers.2 Martha Mahoney concisely captures this theoretical
dichotomy when she states:
In our society, agency and victimization are each known by the absence of the
other: you are an agent if you are not a victim, and you are a victim if you are in
no way an agent. In this concept, agency does not mean acting for oneself under
conditions of oppression; it mean being without oppression, either having ended
oppression or never having experienced it at all. This all-agent or all-victim
conceptual dichotomy [is not] easy to escape or transform (Mahoney 1994, 64).
But this distinction is too simplistic to account for the range of women who engage in the array
of practices that ultimately perpetuate women’s oppression.

Existential Eroticism is distinctive from similar feminist philosophy books in both its offered
perspective and its original conceptual analyses. Broadly speaking, this book is written from a
non-normative feminist perspective. The perspective from which I write and the perspective of
women’s narratives included are under-privileged perspectives with respect to the majority of
academic feminist philosophy viewpoints available and the social ideal of woman. This project
seeks to speak from and make available points of view from women, including myself, who are
lower class and/or women of color and who are or have been largely socially marginalized by
their association with socially devalued contexts and relations, e.g. sex work and domestic
violence. One motivating factor for developing this particular analysis is the scarcity of first-
person accounts of socially devalued lived experiences in or grounding philosophical theorizing.
As such, feminist philosophy analyzes and evaluates major women’s issues and related choices
without having familiarity with those contexts and subsequently leaves gaps in normative
assessments and prescriptions for women. Thus the perspective that I offer in this book is
distinctive in that I aim to consistently account for considerations for evaluating choice that are
often not addressed and to demonstrate the credibility of many women’s reasons for action that
typical are not given sufficient uptake by academic theorists. Relatedly and consequent of my
personal perspective, I consider my theoretical perspective to be a non-normative feminist

1
See also: Cudd. “Oppression by Choice.” Journal of Social Philosophy 25 (1994): 22-44.
2
One notable exception to this binary categorization is proposed by Sharon Lamb. The Trouble with Blame:
Victims, Perpetrators, and Responsibility. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
perspective insofar as I assign value and respect to many women’s choices that are rejected by a
broadly construed ideological understanding of academic feminist philosophy. As such, my
analysis is an analytic philosophical account that is oriented more towards some of the Gorilla or
Riot Grrrrrl feminist approaches found in Sociology and Women’s Studies—approaches often
quickly criticized and rejected in feminist philosophy as products of irrationality, false
consciousness, or doomed fates. However, I am strongly critical of my own perspective in light
of feminist philosophical arguments and work diligently to offer a tempered and nuanced
understanding of sex and beauty positive feminism.

The intellectual distinctiveness of this project inheres in the original conceptualizations that I
develop: existential eroticism, desperate rationality and a non-ideal version of game theory, and
an intra-group conception of forgiveness. I develop existential eroticism as a sub-genre of
patriarchy that attends to women’s specific and shared experience as socially valuable in relation
to their sexual desirability or lack thereof. Often times, general conceptions of systemic
patriarchy are too vague or too abstract to give substantive content to the analyses that aim to
evaluate particularized domains of choice. Because sexuality is one of the core constructs
through which feminist philosophers apply theoretical frameworks or use as an example to
contextualize oppression arguments, the need for a framework that attends specifically to the
norms, practices, and corresponding moral motivations behind sexuality-driven choices (direct
and indirect) evidences as crucial. The notion of desperate rationality is intended to depict a
sophisticated manifestation of rationality under trauma-based coercion and oppression. Feminist
philosophers have long struggled to make sense of women’s agency in coercive and abusive
contexts but the traditional frameworks of rational choice and game theory have prevented them
from reconciling the tensions between agency and abuse given that choice theory 1) precludes
the bulk of choices made under such conditions from the realm of rationality and 2) attributes
more moral responsibility than feminists believe abused women are due. In order to make this
reconciliation, I 1) flesh out a non-ideal version of game theory and demonstrate how choosers
under desperation can use one form of irrationality to combat another, more insidious form,
which is one method by which rational choice theorists believe rationality can be maintained and
2) I demonstrate that the rationality exercised is within the proper coercion that removes moral
responsibility under desperation—that is, rationality in such contexts is exercised as strategic
means of submission when submission is impossible to avoid. And finally, because I offer my
account as a liberatory framework and set of praxes that aims to heal wounds between women
that arise as a result of oppression perpetuating choices, I develop a unique intra-group construal
of forgiveness that can only obtain between members of shared social groups. This
conceptualization is a merging of various analyses of forgiveness theorized by feminist
philosophers, drawing parts of different kinds of forgiveness to create one used within the group.
This is significant because feminist philosophers who address oppression and forgiveness often
explore the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. The conditions for
forgiveness between these two groups are not suited to intra-group forgiveness because they
assume that one has done wrong and one has been wronged, one has benefited and one has been
harmed. But within a social group, such clear cut instances of wrongdoer and benefiter cannot
be ascertained because all individuals bear various burdens of complicity in their shared
oppression of existential eroticism.
The key benefit of the content of this project, broadly speaking, is that it aims to offer insight
into marginalized perspectives and offers, in many places, first-person narratives of marginalized
women to illustrate theoretical claims I present. Narrowly speaking, the key benefit of my
project is the introduction of the new concepts into feminist philosophy debates. Existential
eroticism, desperate rationality, the fighter phenomenon, the phenomenology of the hustle, non-
ideal game theory, and intra-group forgiveness are all original conceptualizations that are lacking
from the discourse. The benefits of the scope of the project are similarly broad and narrow.
From one vantage point, the scope is rather broad insofar as the monograph goes through each
ethical aspect related to understanding and evaluating perpetuating choices under oppression.
From autonomy to rationality and from responsibility to forgiveness, the project traverses the
line of ethical considerations necessary to generating a full approach to oppression perpetuation
from a feminist perspective. Yet the scope is also narrow insofar as the framework picks out one
particular version of patriarchy, existential eroticism, in and through which to analyze the
conditions and consequences of oppression perpetuating choices; and it is narrowed further by
honing in on the particularized contexts of sex work and domestic violence in order to give
meaning and realism to the abstract theorization I offer, which shores up my attempt to
substantiate particular marginalized lived experiences and perspectives. The combination of the
content and the scope are organized in an interdependent fashion, highlighting the reliance of one
component of the web of conceptual connections on the others, linearly but also symbiotically
and dialectically, articulated through both technical abstraction and personal narrative to breathe
life into a discourse that is often sterilized by the nature of the discipline. Overall, the project
satisfies a need within liberation theory for philosophical analyses that motivate new praxes for
generating understanding and communication between privileged academic feminists and less
fortunate women.