‘Sexual Loneliness’: Affirmative Action for Controversial Views?

When a journal wants to foster critical engagement with “controversial” views, what editorial standards should apply? Should we look the other way if “controversial” papers contain inaccuracies and obvious blind spots, just to get the discussion going?

When a journal wants to foster critical engagement with “controversial” views, what editorial standards should apply? Should we look the other way if “controversial” papers contain inaccuracies and obvious blind spots, just to get the discussion going?

By Lynette Reid

In 2023, Bioethics published a guest editorial proposing that “sexual loneliness” is a neglected public health problem. The author, Joona Räsänen, cites evidence from sexual health researchers of changes in the frequency of sexual activity and number of partners, with some young men having more and others less. It’s a public health issue, he says, for two (sets of) reasons: not having partnered sex (in specific, sexual activity with other people, not masturbation) intrinsically and extrinsically affects health and well-being for the worse, and sexual loneliness causes sexually lonely men to be violent. He calls on ethicists to discuss the pros and cons of policy proposals to address sexual loneliness, offering one policy proposal (from Jordan Peterson, as reported in the NY Times) for ethics colleagues to consider.

The cover of Amia Srinivasan's book The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

Sudenkaarne, Browne and Kendal answer Räsänen’s call. They contextualize his (and Peterson’s) claims within incel culture and identify cultural stereotypes and ideological presuppositions in how he characterizes the problem. The threat of violence, they argue, is not a basis for ethical public policy. In a paper outside this debate, Tietjen & Tirkkonen argue that incel claims about the causes of their violence should not be taken at face value. Applied ethicists debating these questions usually reference Amia Srinivasan’s incisive discussions in The Right to Sex (original article here, 2018). Räsänen does not.

Räsänen responds to Sudenkaarne, Browe, and Kendal with a letter complaining that google scholar doesn’t count their paper as a citation to his. Udo Schuklenk, an editor of Bioethics, later complains that the guest editorial was the target of the “internet outrage machine” and commits himself to “protecting” controversial views in the face of that machine. Schuklenk doesn’t cite or quote the criticisms Räsänen received. He elides what critics actually say and dehumanizes them in referring to them as “the internet outrage machine.”

I am surprised that Räsänen’s paper was published, and I attest that I am not a machine. I think that if anyone, author or editor, wants reasoned debate rather than outrage, they should publish good arguments. This paper does not meet that standard. For transparency, I am co-Editor-in-Chief of Public Health Ethics. The views I present here are my own.  

One expects an editorial to take a stand, not to be “neutral.” However, an opinion piece is not a fact-free zone. An editorial should represent sources accurately and caveat speculative claims. In addition, a call for attention from your colleagues should exhibit basic literacy in your shared discipline, by appropriate nuance and acknowledgement of relevant views and sources.

Räsänen’s editorial is flawed in how it reports the empirical evidence base and normative arguments, and its own normative arguments fail to meet the standards of applied ethics. A substantial part of the editorial is highly derivative of a few paragraphs in the NY Times profile of Peterson that it cites for Peterson’s policy proposal.

Räsänen cites two epidemiological papers in support of his claim increasingly some young men are without sexual partners: Ueda et al., 2020, who do make this claim, and Bozick, 2021, who says that what his study finds “diverges from the findings of Ueda et al. (2020)” (p. 6). Bozick used a different (larger) dataset and a more appropriate statistical analysis. When age, cohort, and period effects are disentangled, he concludes that there is no evidence that more young men in the cohorts in Ueda et al.’s study are not engaging in sexual activity. (Both researchers are defining sexual activity as activity with a partner, as their data sources do.) Bozick explicitly set out to evaluate incel claims in the popular media, and his conclusion is that incel claims are mostly not substantiated. There is a later cohort, not in Ueda’s data, where more young men are not sexually active, though cohort and period effects cannot yet be distinguished, and may never be as that cohort was about to experience COVID-19.

Räsänen offers Danaher (2020) as an example of a philosopher who supports his view that fair distribution of partnered sex is a matter of justice. As he tries to support this claim, he moves from talking about sexual partners to sexual experiences, and then quotes Danaher, who does argue that there are justice issues about sexual experiences, defined broadly. Danaher goes on to state: “… ensuring that everyone has access to a sexual partner is certainly not required by a reasonable theory of sexual justice” (p. 471), explicitly denying the claim about partnered sex Räsänen is trying to establish. Danaher highlights this in his abstract: his argument “does not entail that anyone has a right to sex with another person.” 

What about Räsänen’s arguments about sex, well-being, and health? He cites Levin 2007 to support the idea more frequent partnered sex has health benefits. Levin deliberately reviews only studies of the benefits of sexual activity (Levin, 2007, p. 145; the paper is also largely speculative and mechanistic). In a more recent review article (one still biased by its sole focus on benefits), Gianotten et al. concede that, “for the time being, it cannot yet be proved that ‘good sex promotes good health’ since good health also favors good sex.”

By the way, this entire field invites normative analysis around what good sex is assumed to mean, whether and how they integrate concerns about sexual violence and coercion, how their research engages with occupational health and safety of sex workers, and whether researchers in this field are justified in publishing deliberately biased reviews (intended as a corrective to sex negativity.)

Why do public health researchers (like Leichliter et al., whom Räsänen cites) calculate Gini coefficients for numbers of sexual partners and frequency of activity? To inform prevention efforts for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). While it is possible that more sex promotes better health, more sex partners introduces health risks, including STIs and the cancers that can be their sequelae, and depressive symptoms.

There are larger questions here about how we should engage with empirical research as applied philosophers, as authors, editors, and peer reviewers in an interdisciplinary field. Obviously, we should aspire to accuracy. I believe we should also practice and expect contextual awareness.

What about the normative work Räsänen does with these well-being claims? A classic criticism of the WHO definition of health as a complete state of mental, physical, and social well-being is that it threatens to medicalize everything. Räsänen sets an implausibly low bar for what constitutes a public health problem. Virtually everything we do modifies chronic disease risk and affects well-being.

Turning to the argument from violence, it is extraordinary that Bioethics would publish the following set of claims and not hold the author accountable for supporting them empirically or for demonstrating critical awareness of the normative presuppositions they express:

Lack of sex and relationship is related to many societal problems, and loneliness and lack of intimacy predispose men to violent behavior. Misogyny is prevalent in places where competition for women is tough and men struggle to find a partner. (p. 101)

Räsänen might have acknowledged a source for these speculations (though this is still not evidence for them): Peterson, in the same NY Times profile Räsänen draws on for the sole policy option he presents for debate, states (also without citation to any evidence): “violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners.”

Meme "Know Your Trolls" by Tuulisti, 2022 showing "a troll that lives under a bridge" on the top left, a "propaganda troll" behind a computer on the top right, a troll doll that is "creepy, benevolent" on bottom left, and an internet troll that "infiltrates support groups for vulnerable people to cause maximum suffering" on the bottom right.

Räsänen goes on to offer a semblance of the empirical support that Peterson’s profile lacked: he cites a US Secret Service report that a mass shooter was motivated by women rejecting him. A motive in law is not a fact established by social or evolutionary science. If the shooter had said that God told him to shoot women, the Secret Service would have reported that as his motive. Citing such a claim as proof of God’s existence would not pass editorial muster at Bioethics.

An editorial where one asks for academic ethicists to debate the issue one raises should propose questions that demonstrate respect for (and literacy in) what we bring to bear on it. Provoking debate with “Jordan Peterson says…” isn’t even trying. It fits the definition of trolling. In which case, social media instead of scholarly literature may be the appropriate place to respond.

There are real “internet outrage machines” out there: for example, AI-fueled disinformation campaigns to polarize and destabilize democracies. It’s (long past) time to stop name-calling feminists with opinions, and pay attention to the real threats to free speech.

Lynette Reid is Associate Professor in the Bioethics Department at Dalhousie University, involved in public health ethics, the ethics of screening, and anti-oppressive medical curricula development.