One might try to argue that men are typically the proponents and organizers of war and, in this sense, not really victims (because, like boxers, they bring the harm to themselves). I don't think this is empirically accurate: many men are pacifists and many women have strongly supported wars. Moreover, support for war is often manufactured with false information and cruel manipulation of people's patriotic sentiments -- producing victims even among the war's supporters. So I agree with you that this is a silly statement. Most of us say silly things sometimes; with top politicians the silly things they say are often broadcast to millions. I doubt Hillary Clinton would care to defend what she said if pressed to do so.

For the reasons you give, an accidental sexist utterance or other act does not reflect as badly on the agent as a like premeditated sexist utterance or other act. So let's be charitable and interpret the initial sentence as meaning that such an act -- whether intentional or not -- is just as harmful. The point of saying this is to get us all to try harder to avoid "accidents".

Plato calls in his Republic for women to participate as equals in the activities of citizenship, saying that surely many women are more excellent than some men and that less excellent women should be disqualified from various roles (along with less excellent males) on account of their lesser excellence rather than on account of their gender.

A society where this is the norm is not one in which the two sexes are equal. So, as a social norm, this division of gender roles is not compatible with the feminist belief in the equality of the sexes. But at the individual level the two are compatible. In a society in which the sexes are equal, there would be lots of women working while their male partners mind the kids. This is compatible with feminism, surely. Therefore, a feminism that believes in the equality of the sexes must then also find acceptable the mirror image: men working while their female partners look after the kids. If these two role divisions were roughly equally frequent, I think feminists should find no fault.

Your experience may be more reflective of philosophy in Germany than of philosophy more generally. There are at least three relevant factors. German students specialize early while students in the US, say, take a broad range of courses in diverse fields during their undergraduate studies. In particular, they take broad (often mandatory) Western civilization courses that focus on philosophical materials that (i) integrate well with non-philosophical materials produced at or around the same time and (ii) are attractive and helpful to students through their relevance to present society. This relates to the second point, that universities in the US tend to reward (often quite directly) teachers and departments for attracting students; and it's rather easier to attract undergraduates to feminist themes than to, say, the philosophy of language. All this in turn reinforces the third point that German academic philosophy tends to be a bit narrow and conservative. While feminism certainly has a presence in...

Reading your "should" as alluding to what you owe the rest of us, I think there is no obligation either way. Perhaps some utilitarians would hold that you have a duty to maximize the general happiness, even by turning heads and upgrading others' visual fields. But such an assertion is more plausibly taken as a reductio ad absurdum of these brands of utilitarianism than as informative about your obligations. Reading your "should" as alluding to what it makes most sense for you to do, the answer depends in part on your ends and ambitions. Dressing up, you'll have a lot of silly boys and guys chasing you, which can become tedious rather quickly. Still, some of these will have money, power, connections -- and you may feel in need for one or more of these. Continuing your current practice will make you less discouraging to people who are interesting, and interested in you, in other ways; and it will also give you more time to interact with them. This is likely to make your life better, richer, than...

Much that people and corporations do contributes to a sexist culture, undermining equality of men and women. Such conduct is wrong in most cases. But there's a big step from this insight to the conclusion that such conduct should be outlawed. Outlawing wrong conduct can easily be counterproductive in much the same way as Clare Short's proposal was by getting her ridiculed for being unattractive and whining. And it can have other bad effects as well -- just imagine what a law against lying with a $100 fine attached, or a law against sexist jokes and remarks, would do to interpersonal relations and the court system. I don't have enough information to judge whether it makes sense to outlaw that Page 3 in the UK. If it does make sense, there are probably better ways for most citizens to spend time and effort toward reducing sexism than organizing a Ban-Page-3 campaign. More importantly, if it does not make sense -- and even if it would be wrong -- to outlaw Page 3, this does not undermine your...