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This chapter examines the science of sexual attraction. It investigates how attraction works; why we are attracted to people, and how that attraction affects us biologically. It explores both sociological and biological theories of attraction: facial beauty, pheromonel influences, and even attraction to similarity. This is important, because heightened sexual attraction enables a couple to believe that they will be satisfied with sex with just this one other person, indefinitely. But our mechanisms for sexually desiring others do not turn off just because one is in love.

This chapter looks into the work of Desmond Morris, particularly his book, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's View of the Human Animal (1967). Morris took a more light-hearted approach to human nature than had either Ardrey or Lorenz, choosing to emphasize the pleasure-seeking aspect of human nature and the resulting sexual dilemmas of modern man. According to Morris, “the naked ape is the sexiest primate alive.” More than in any other species, he suggested, human social bonding resulted from sexual attraction and interactions. In The Naked Ape, Morris provocatively suggested that humans lost the fur covering the bodies of most other mammals because it facilitated sexual caresses and made possible the development of other, now accessible, sexual signals.

The term incest referred to marriage between related people, including in-laws, but cousins had been allowed to marry since Henry VIII's reign. Until the 1830s the Church regulated marriage prohibition. Peopled expressed feelings of intimacy and desire in romantic language. The particularly close emotional ties between siblings were represented in various genres including pornography. The case of William and Dorothy Wordsworth's relationship has fascinated commentators from the nineteenth century onwards. The controversy over the legal ban on a man's marriage to his dead wife's sister, lasting from 1838 to 1907, also generated debate. These studies neglect relationships between numerous siblings and their spouses in large families. The focus is on the brother's experience, giving little agency to the sister. After a long quiescent period there has been an upsurge of interest in sibling incest among policy makers and the public, although now defined in terms of sexual attraction.

This chapter examines how people’s attitudes about marriage shape their discourses about gay marriage. On one hand, supporters and opponents disagree fiercely about the legal definition of marriage and whether or not marriage requires an opposite-sex couple. On the other hand, people of all ages and ideologies share a commonsense understanding of what marriage means in practice. The surface-level disagreement about the legal denotation of marriage therefore rests on a deeper consensus about the social connotations of marriage, and the characteristics of that imaginary understanding of marriage ultimately legitimate the battle over gay marriage for both supporters and opponents alike. The legalization of gay marriage may therefore hasten the reinstitutionalization of marriage, not its deinstitutionalization.

Provides an exposition and criticism of the central ideas in the sociobiology and evolutionary psychology of sex and gender. Also reviews the kinds of evidence that are offered for claims in this area, including the alleged evolutionary basis for sexual attraction in each sex, and the alleged male disposition to rape. The poverty of this evidence points to the general weakness of the evolutionary psychological programme.

This chapter discusses the issue of professional boundaries as seen in the film Waitress (2007). The film tells the story of Jenna (Keri Russell), a small-town waitress trapped in an unhappy marriage, who begins an affair with a new physician Dr. Jim Pomatter (Nathan Fillion). The movie illustrates some clear recommendations for clinicians. Among these are that clinicians must readily acknowledge that they may occasionally develop feelings of sexual attraction toward a patient, recognize those feelings when they arise, and be prepared to discuss them with a trusted colleague. Physicians should never act on feelings of sexual attraction toward a patient, and should be prepared to transfer the care of a patient to another health care provider when those feelings persist. Likewise, if a patient shows signs of being interested in a relationship with the clinician, the clinician should be particularly cautious about being alone with the patient and consider transferring care.

Female enthusiasm for men in red coats was a recurrent topic of interest in late eighteenth-century letters, diaries, newspapers, plays and novels. Propaganda played on it and commentators and satirists often noted it with a mixture of bemusement and envy, characterising it as ‘scarlet fever’. The association of martial service with female admiration offered clear benefits as a recruitment tool for the military, but it also presented significant potential dangers to men and women alike. This chapter explores the allure of men in uniform in this period and considers the potential benefits and risks it posed to men, women and the British state. Rather viewing ‘scarlet fever’ as an ahistorical and ‘natural’ phenomenon, this chapter explores what it reveals about the relationship between war and gender and the position of the military within Georgian society.

Hellenistic Babylonian figurines with separately made and attached limbs are not a uniform corpus in terms of their iconography or subject matter, but all leave similar visual traces of fragmentation on an otherwise complete miniature body. Rather than interpreting these visual “breaks” as simply an unfortunate side effect of these figurines’ manufacture, the chapter argues that the appearance of broken places actually enriched these objects’ affect by fixating and intensifying user interest on otherwise overlooked body parts. Strikingly, the artificial poses and hyper-real actions of fragmented figurine limbs all operated in the liminal zones of cultural contestation between Greeks and Babylonians: banqueting, childhood, male and female nudity, and sexual attraction. By depicting some of these most difficult points of cross-cultural contention in the miniature scale (where they were less threatening) and in fragmented form (where they were visually interesting), such figurines offered avenues into cross-cultural dialogue and communication.