Solarpunk Selves and Sexual Ethics

Defining the Solarpunk Self, Part 1

Found here.

In creating a solarpunk future we must begin with the self. This is simply because the self is always the origin of anything we could ever do. You are who you are, but also where you came from, what you know and believe, etc., etc. It’s so obvious that it’s a wonder when we begin with anything other than an understanding of ourselves when faced with an obstacle we find too difficult. Even if you say that you need to know this or that theory, you are ultimately doing so through and with your “self”.

As we’ll see more in future essays, the self must be thought of as relational, meaning that it is created through its relationships with others. If we want to create a solarpunk self that can create a solarpunk society, then we need to focus on the ethical relations that are capable of creating such selves. According to Dr. Anderson, Beauvoir and Levinas understood, “the [sexual] relation to be exemplary of ethical relations in general.”¹

This will make more and more sense as we continue, but to create this model of the solarpunk self, I’m going to be using heterosexual relationships as a case study for the kinds of ethical relations that can produce solarpunk selves. This is not meant to ignore LGBT+ identities or relationships. In fact, I think we can make heterosexual relationships more ethical precisely by learning from outside the hegemonic order of cis gender heterosexual relationships. As always, I will end the essay with a “principles of application” so that you can apply what I say here to a domain of your choosing.

We’re given a taste of the current state of heterosexual relationships from Dr.’s Hirsch and Khan (H/K) in their an analysis of sexual assault on a college campus:²

“They have grown to physical maturity surrounded by a cacophony of messages about sex: fear-based messages about the dangers of sex; incitements in popular culture to act and do and achieve; an internet filled with pornography; but often very little in the way of actual conversations. They’d been told time and again what not to do—don’t get pregnant, don’t get a girl pregnant, don’t get HIV, and now, don’t assault anyone, and be careful about getting assaulted. They are […] pressed to consume; stressed, lonely, and insecure.”

As adults, we’re expected to already know what to do and when we don’t, we’re responsibilized for any troubles we face. It’s our fault, our responsibility, and if we want to be better then we have to get better ourselves or pay someone to teach us. As a socially anxious 18 year old with a history of trauma, I found myself in precisely that situation. For better or worse, I then found myself in the deeply misogynistic world of pickup artistry.

I’ve already written much about my experiences in this community in a previous project. I go into why I decided to end that project here, but these essays on the self were originally intended for it. If you want a little more context on dating, I have several more essays at the first link, but it’s unnecessary to understand this project.

Either way, my point in bringing up pickup is that it emerges out of a fundamental problem that many men run into, “I suck at talking to women, and I want to learn how so that they are excited about the possibility of sex or romance with me.”

In other words, pickup promises to do what I intend to do here, help people engage in relationships in order to create a certain kind of self that is able to create a certain kind of future. Where we differ is very obviously on the ethical quality of those relationships, self, and future. That difference is in part what led to the rise of Red Pill. The neoliberal capitalist order that is threatening to tear our world apart is also the kind of order that the androcentric pickup artist valorizes as the natural way of things.

In contrast, H/K provide the concept of the sexual citizen, or a person who is capable of sexual self-determination and of respecting the same in others.² Part of the inadequacy of pickup is that it only focuses on the first half of that, teaching men to enact sexual agency or the pursuit of their own self-interested goals, without honouring sexual communion, or the pursuit of other-interested care.³

In an ethnography of the pickup community, Dr. Rachel O’Neill writes the following:⁴

“seduction relies on and reinforces a worldview where ‘women are indeed valued – for their capacities to satisfy impulses; [and] they are also seen as deserving understanding – because they can present all sorts of annoying technical problems. What they are not seen as is subjects whose thoughts and feelings are of equal value to men’s’”

What she’s trying to get at here is something seen throughout almost all pickup content. Women are constantly framed as not only lacking agency, but desiring a man who can enact her agency for her. This can be seen in the way pickup artists radicalize David Deida’s claim that men focus on their purpose and women focus on the relationship, turning it into Rollo Tomassi’s claim that the relationship must be dictated by a man’s frame or control at all times or she’ll never respect you.^5,6 Women are seen as passive recipients of a man’s actions rather than active participants in the games of romance.

As such, in any ethical sexual relation, people must be taught sexual agency and communion.

This speaks to H/K’s concept of the sexual project. This includes the reasons a person has for pursuing or even not pursuing sex. A devout Christian’s sexual project would be to wait until marriage. In fact, H/K found that religious students were most likely to have conscious sexual projects in relation to community values. Unfortunately, these were often sexual projects that entailed high degrees of guilt and shame that prevented them from being sexual citizens.²

This is such an important point. The nature of our sexual projects can make or break our capacity to be sexual citizens. H/K write as much here:²

“Sadly, sexual partners often fit in as objects, rather than fully imagined, self-determining humans. We found that students whose sexual goal is connecting with another person are much more attentive to whether or not their partner wants to have sex than those whose goal is pleasure or status accrual.”

Pickup is often framed specifically in terms of the pursuit of pleasure, conquest, and status. Certainly pleasure itself is not a problem if both partners are invested in mutual pleasure, but mutual pleasure through connecting with another human as a human is very different from mutual pleasure as a necessary transaction to get what I want from her body as merely a hole.

In pickup, a man takes as much responsibility for the sexual interaction as he can. This can be fantastic, but it often comes hand in hand with a denial of women’s agency to the point that her right to consent can be completely erased. She’s reduced not just to a passive object, but to a complex lock that must be poked and prodded into unlocking. Agency lies solely in the hands of the man holding the lock pick.

That said then, how do we actually educate people into being sexual citizens?

Classical definitions of what it means to be a citizen rely much on Kant, putting forth the liberal individual as an autonomous, rational actor.^7,8 The issue with this is, firstly, that being rational is a developmental capacity, meaning it is something that takes aging, education, and practice.^9,10,11 We aren’t born sexual citizens, and that’s partly because we are not born rational. This can be seen in H/K’s story of Karen.²

Karen told them that her ex had pushed her to the ground and assaulted her despite her saying no and physically resisting him. A disturbing and tragic part of this was how much she defended him. She couldn’t admit to herself that she’d been assaulted. This is very relevant to the concept of psycho-ideological horizontal lines, which I introduced in my essay How To Change Minds.

The idea comes from research that found that if you raise cats in environments where horizontal lines don’t exist, then as adults they’re literally unable to see objects with horizontal lines. They may as well not exist. Psycho-ideological horizontal lines are those aspects of reality that we are blinded to given the psychology or ideology we have, consciously or unconsciously.

For Karen, her psychology prevented her from seeing her ex as being capable of assault and of herself as being someone who was assaulted. It was as if those realities didn’t exist. They couldn’t possibly exist. Her psychology, beliefs, and the capacities they gave her were not enough to recognize her own right to self-determination and to demand that her ex recognize that right. She lacked the ability to be a sexual citizen. What’s more, her defense of her ex is also a standard behaviour of the Conformist, of people who sacrifice themselves due to a high need for social cohesion around an in-group.^9,10

I obviously have no idea if Karen was a Conformist, but I do believe that Conformists lack the ability to be sexual citizens, at least within our culture. They’re too often going to put the group above their own or another’s agency. If our sexual project is purely defined by our conformity to our culture, then we are incapable of questioning how it benefits or damages us.

This can be a tricky problem to solve because our very self-image as an autonomous, rational actor, our desire to be this liberal individual, can prevent us from being one. H/K write this here:²

“students of all genders [refused] to label an encounter an assault because they felt that doing so might invalidate their self-perception and identity as an assertive, together, sexually modern person.”

In other words, when we demand that we be liberal individuals, we blind ourselves to all the ways in which we are not. Furthermore, we may begin to deny others the support they need to become autonomous and rational because a “true individual” should be able to do it themselves. How many times have you heard someone ask, “why didn’t she just say no,” when you hear about an assault?

We must accept the fact that people don’t just magically become sexual citizens. Human beings go through development in which they go from a Conformist wholly incapable of questioning their group to an Individualist capable of questioning the unspoken and hidden assumptions of their culture, to stages even further beyond. Human beings must develop the capacity to think rationally and to feel their emotions in ways that honour those emotions while supporting their rationality.

The developmental psychologist Dr. Robert Kegan offers a beautiful concept that can help us profoundly, which is the developmental demands of a cultural curriculum. ¹⁰ A culture has certain expectations on its citizens, tasks they must perform and problems they must solve. This is the cultural curriculum. If we are capable of meeting some minimum of those expectations then we are capable of living as a full citizen within that culture.

However, such a minimum also implies that we have to develop to the point that we can surpass that minimum. These are the developmental demands of that curriculum. If we have someone who cannot meet the minimum expectations of their culture’s curriculum, then that person has failed to meet the developmental demands of their culture.

In other words, psychologically, that person is not enough of a fully grown adult to be a citizen in their culture. It’s not that they aren’t “an adult” necessarily, it’s that their culture has become so complex and challenging to navigate that they may as well be a second class citizen. Think about that.

With the breakdown of democratic institutions, the complex systems of climate change, educational decay, the deconstruction of gender roles, the fracturing of the media landscape, etc., etc., and you’re just a high school grad trying to get your kids to and from school, work a full-time job, and find some intimate time with your wife. When are you going to have the time to be educated enough, or cognitively and emotionally developed enough to be able to navigate the current complex culture we find ourselves in? The developmental demands of our culture have become so severe that arguably most people are incapable of navigating it effectively.

Think about how truly radical the implications of this idea are. We assume that a person is an adult, and thus a citizen, around the ages of 18 – 21. If that person hasn’t met that minimum of expectations, then that person is not a psychological adult given the demands placed upon them.¹² What happens if that person is not 18, but 35? Are they yet an adult?

This brings us to a very important point. I am in no way saying any of what I’m writing here should inform law. Whether or not an 18, 35, or 15 year old is a legal adult given how they meet the cultural curriculum’s demands is outside the scope of this essay and far beyond my area of expertise. You can obviously see how this idea could be co-opted by fascists looking to take away the rights of adults or by predators looking to justify the abuse of minors who are oh so mature for their age…

However! What I do want to accomplish is a justification for having empathy for legal adults who have not been given the opportunities necessary to become psychological adults, and thus, sexual citizens. We can most obviously see this when it comes to the survivors of abuse who are questioned about their lack of agency in leaving a relationship. They were literally incapable of what Dr. Kegan calls self-authorship, or a capability to author and enact self-determination despite environmental conditions.¹⁰

That may be controversial to say as it sounds like victim-blaming. However, it is more a call to empathize with the fact that our system fails to educate people to navigate a world with bad actors, and thus that we must educate them and potential abusers. We must also better understand how abuse can rob even the educated of agency. This is all the more important when we consider that the most important agency a survivor can have is the agency to enact their own personal definition of justice. That is something only they have a right to define for themselves, but having greater agency and communion in that decision is profoundly important.

Perhaps just as controversially, it also acts a justification for having empathy for those individuals who might become predators. I hope you see how careful I’m being here. Remember, where a lack of psychological adulthood prevents survivors from having the agency they needed, it also prevented the predator from having the communion they needed.

Legally speaking, a person who has already committed assault must be held fully accountable for their crimes. Saying that survivors, of any gender, need more agency is not to blame them for not having had enough agency. Bad actors must be educated to have the communion necessary to not abuse or assault, and that’s the entire purpose of my project and of H/K’s.

They make the very important point that preventing assault is not best served by focusing on preventing each individual case, but must include going upstream to create the kind of culture that produces sexual citizens.² This again would require us to have the other-interested care necessary to see how they have come to lack the capability for sexual agency or sexual communion, whichever the case may be.

A key point here is the difference between self-authored capability and scaffolded capability. A self-authored capability is one you are able to generate from within, on your own terms and values. A scaffolded capability is one that is given to you by your environment.^13,14

For example, a core assumption in this essay has been that we need sexual citizens who are Individualists, who have the ability to self-author sexual agency and communion. However, this is only true in our culture given that it doesn’t already educate these skills. In other words, it takes Individualists who are capable of questioning our toxic culture in order to develop agency and communion. And yet, if we had an adequate education system, it could teach Conformists the skills they need to do this.

Given that such an education system doesn’t exist, we require Individualists to rise up against the limitations of their cultural education to meet the developmental demands of their culture’s curriculum in terms of sexual citizenship. For those of you reading, the demand on you is to be able to challenge yourself and grow beyond your culture so that you can be a sexual citizen capable of sexual self-determination and capable of respecting the same in your partners.

I hope you see how deeply relevant all of this is for creating solarpunk selves out of relationships of a sufficiently ethical quality. Pickup advocates for neoliberal selves that justify exploitive and extractive relationships and modes of being. We are bound by psycho-ideological horizontal lines that blind us to how for-granted we take this worldview as the standard, natural way of things. Being able to challenge the hidden assumptions of this standard is a necessity for transforming it as radically as is required for a solarpunk society.

In the next essay, we’ll begin to question the hidden cultural assumption of the liberal individual itself.

Principles of Application:

1. Each essay I write has this section. Sometimes multiple essays’ will build on each other, other times they’ll be self-contained. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk.

2. While I discussed sexual citizenship in this essay, you can apply this to any domain of citizenship you choose. With some facet of your identity, politics, ideology, etc., do you have self-determination and do you respect the right to the same in others? Why or why not?

3. What is your “project”, or the reasons for doing what you do in this domain? Where do these reasons come from? Are they helpful or hurtful to your growth and goal, and those of others?

4. To have a more prosocial project, do you believe you need more agency or communion? Are you unable to pursue your own self-interested goals or to enact enough other-interested care? What are the consequences of these biases or lack in ability on your project and citizenship?

Until that next essay, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

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References:

1 – Anderson, E. (2019). From Existential Alterity to Ethical Reciprocity: Beauvoir?s Alternative to Levinas. Continental Philosophy Review, 52(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9459-3

2 – Hirsch, J. S., & Khan, S. (2020). Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. WW Norton.

3 – Abele, A., & Wojciszke, B. (Eds.). (2019). Agency and Communion in Social Psychology. Routledge.

4 – O’Neill, R. (2018). Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy. Polity.

5 – Deida, D. (2017). The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire. St. Martin’s Essentials / Sounds True

6 – Tomassi, R. (2013). The Rational Male. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

7 – Halwani, R., Soble, A., Hoffman, S., & Held, J. (Eds.). (2017). The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

8 – Nussbaum, M. C. (1995). Objectification. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24(4), 249–291.

9 – Cook-Greuter, S. (2021). Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making.

10 – Kegan, R. (1997). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.

11 – Dempsey, B. G. (2025). Psyche and Symbolic Learning. Sky Meadow Press.

12 – Lewis, P. M. (with Lewis, B. P.). (n.d.). The Discerning Heart: The Developmental Psychology of Robert Kegan (L. Katainen & J. Rohschild, Eds.).

13 – Freinacht, H. (2017). The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One. Metamoderna ApS.

14 – Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press.