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Rejecting the Illusion of Purity

Karen C. Lang

in Four Illusions: Candrakirti's Advice to Travelers on the Bodhisattva Path

The third chapter discusses the mistaken apprehension of impure things as pure, and once again takes the human body as its example. Candrakiriti's condemnation of sexual desire encompasses both the ... More

The third chapter discusses the mistaken apprehension of impure things as pure, and once again takes the human body as its example. Candrakiriti's condemnation of sexual desire encompasses both the physical impurity of female bodies and the mental impurity of lustful men's minds. He reaches an egalitarian conclusion: all human bodies are impure, impermanent, painful, and insubstantial in nature.Less

Human male sexuality: appetite and arousal, desire and drive

R. J. Levin

in Appetite: Neural and Behavioural Bases

This chapter examines the processes involved in sexual desire, sex drive, sexual appetite, and arousal in the human male. It provides a flow chart showing the possible interrelationships between ... More

This chapter examines the processes involved in sexual desire, sex drive, sexual appetite, and arousal in the human male. It provides a flow chart showing the possible interrelationships between sexual interest, desire, arousal, and fantasy. It explores the concepts of sexual arousal, sexual arousability, and sex motivation and investigates the factors affecting sexuality. It also outlines experimental approaches for studying sexual brain function and evaluates the relation between brain neurotransmitters and male sexuality activity.Less

Desire’s Hunger and Plato the Regulator

Kathy L. Gaca

in The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity

This chapter addresses the features of human sexuality that Plato aims to regulate more closely. It focuses on Plato's sexual regulations, the conception of genital and reproductive urges that ... More

This chapter addresses the features of human sexuality that Plato aims to regulate more closely. It focuses on Plato's sexual regulations, the conception of genital and reproductive urges that informs them, and the broader nexus of customs he would establish to control those urges. The chapter is also concerned with Plato's middle and later works, such as the Republic and Laws. Plato claims that the appetites for the pleasures of sexual activity, food, and drink are irrational. In the Republic and Laws, he insists that procreative relations elicit the benevolent involvement of the gods through the use of religious ceremonies. Plato also leaves the sexual behaviour of the citizens and guardians unmonitored after they complete their reproductive service to the city. Additionally, he does not present one fixed plan to rein in sexual desire, but suggests that it be controlled by managing the reproductive urge in a variety of ways.Less

Imagination, Fantasy, and Sexual Desire 1

Cain Todd

in Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays

The starting point for this chapter is the idea that the appreciation of pornographic representations is heterogeneous. In particular, it makes a distinction between two different appreciative ... More

The starting point for this chapter is the idea that the appreciation of pornographic representations is heterogeneous. In particular, it makes a distinction between two different appreciative attitudes or states: regarding pornography as fiction, and regarding it as non-fiction. The latter, it holds, does not involve the imagination, but involves instead the voyeuristic-like ‘transparency’ that precludes aesthetic interest, and in virtue of doing so, involves real sexual desire. In contrast, the appreciation of pornography as fictional, the chapter argues, essentially involves the imagination and aesthetic attention to and appreciation of the ‘formal features’ of the work. The awareness of fictionality ensures that one's imaginative engagement implies merely imagined ‘desire-like’ states involving some aspects of the self as a character in the fictional world. Significantly, this imaginative engagement is enough to cause certain physiological and emotional sexual responses, but ones that people are sufficiently detached from, allowing them to serve as objects of reflection and permitting meta-responses of approval and disapproval.Less

‘Thought Control’: Conjugal Rights and Vaginal Orgasms 1940s—1960s

Hera Cook

in The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975

From the 1940s, the sex manuals reflected a slow acceptance by society of varied physical sexual practices. There was a contradictory and contested re-emergence of male domination, justified by ... More

From the 1940s, the sex manuals reflected a slow acceptance by society of varied physical sexual practices. There was a contradictory and contested re-emergence of male domination, justified by popular interpretations of psychoanalysis, within the genre as the influence of first wave feminism and the need for sexual continence to control fertility receded into the past.Less

Philo’s Reproductive City of God

Kathy L. Gaca

in The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity

This chapter argues that Philo's religious sexual ethic is an innovative synthesis which combines the Pentateuchal laws and sexual poetics of spiritual fornication with the sexual-reform plans of the ... More

This chapter argues that Philo's religious sexual ethic is an innovative synthesis which combines the Pentateuchal laws and sexual poetics of spiritual fornication with the sexual-reform plans of the Pythagoreans and Plato. Despite the differences in the specific laws of Plato and Moses, Philo and the Christian Platonists such as Clement found it irresistible to regard Moses' Law and Plato's Laws as part one and part two of the same dispensation. Philo appropriates the Stoic terminology of the passions to recast the biblical danger of spiritual fornication in psychological terms. The chapter indicates that Philo develops a forceful new program against sexual desire through his synthesis of Hellenistic Jewish and Platonic ideas about wrongful desire. Philo's limited synthesis of his criteria of impermissible sexual activity is covered. Philo also lays the ground for a paradigm shift in biblical sexual norms, but he remains relatively conservative himself.Less

Prophylactic Grace in Clement’s Emergent Church Sexual Ethic

Kathy L. Gaca

in The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity

This chapter argues that Clement of Alexandria completes Philo's paradigm shift, for in response to Philo he identifies any deviation from God's procreationist law as sexually hedonistic rebellion ... More

This chapter argues that Clement of Alexandria completes Philo's paradigm shift, for in response to Philo he identifies any deviation from God's procreationist law as sexually hedonistic rebellion against God. Clement upholds a Christian norm of biblical endogamy for the perceived safety and salvation of all Christians. Clement supports the procreationist rule in its later Pythagorean form. Clement uses Philo's trope of soul fornication to identify sexual desire with the whorish worship of the Greek gods of eros. He situates Paul's problem of spiritual adultery in a procreationist framework and links procreationism with Paul's marital poetics. Clement's argument for doing away entirely with sexual desire forms an unforgettable aspect of his sexual ethic, combining as it does the strictures of Plato and biblical scripture. Clement allows Christians to grow and multiply within marriage, but they must populate a land that is devoid of eros.Less

Psychology and Freudian Sexual Theory in Early 20th Century China

in From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China

Modern psychology first came into China through a context of educational reform. The work of Kubota Sadanori, Hattori Unokichi, Joseph Haven, Ruric Nevel Roark, and Harald Höffding provided the ... More

Modern psychology first came into China through a context of educational reform. The work of Kubota Sadanori, Hattori Unokichi, Joseph Haven, Ruric Nevel Roark, and Harald Höffding provided the framework for studying and understanding the mind. This chapter examines the introduction of modern psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis in China, focusing on the notions of the unconscious, sexual desire, theory of the mind, and subjectivity. It looks at the arguments of Gao Juefu (1896–1993), China's most famous psychological researcher, against the primacy of both sexual desire and the unconscious in Freud's theories. It also comments on the debate between Zhang Jingsheng (1889–1970), dubbed “Dr. Sex,” and Zhou Jianren (1888–1984) regarding sexual desire. Finally, the chapter discusses Freudian theory in relation to Chinese literature in the 1920s and 1930s and in post-Mao China.Less

The Virtue of (Erotic) Love

Robert C. Solomon

in In Defense of Sentimentality

I suggest that erotic love is (or can be) a virtue. I contest both the cynicism and the vacuousness in much of the love literature. I argue that love is a historical emotion, involving a great deal ... More

I suggest that erotic love is (or can be) a virtue. I contest both the cynicism and the vacuousness in much of the love literature. I argue that love is a historical emotion, involving a great deal of historical and cultural variation. And I give an analysis of what love is as shared identity. On the way, I also talk about sex and Plato's Symposium.Less

“A Most Lascivious Picture of Impatient Desire”

Daniel Hurewitz

in Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics

As Julian Eltinge settled into Edendale and the new phase of his career in the 1910s, he quickly found himself at the center of flurry of activity. Movie-making was a busy business. It was estimated ... More

As Julian Eltinge settled into Edendale and the new phase of his career in the 1910s, he quickly found himself at the center of flurry of activity. Movie-making was a busy business. It was estimated that during this period, film industries in and around Los Angeles were already spending more than thirty million dollars a year. It was Eltinge’s specialty to play challenging roles. This chapter discusses the quest for identity, and focuses on the relationship between sexual desire and identity, particularly gender identity. It seeks to answer whether gendered behavior is an expression of sexual desire—that is, whether men who dress as women in fact desire other men. These concerns are reflections of the questions that began to circulate in Eltinge’s Los Angeles. However, dthe 1910s, ’20s, and early ’30s lacked a single governing paradigm for explaining sexual desire and sexual behavior. Instead, multiple paradigms prevailed; Eltinge’s offered no answers. For a time, that did not matter. Hollywood was still happy to put Eltinge on screen as a female impersonator. However, the demand for authenticity and interest in desire intensified. In part, the fairy paradigm gained wider popularity. While audiences laughed at male effeminacy, they began to believe that the hidden truth of male effeminacy was homosexuality.Less

Beyond Belief: Pragmatics in Hate Speech and Pornography1

Langton Rae

in Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech

Pragmatics can shed light on racial hate speech and pornography, but only if we bring it down to earth. Five models for hate speech and pornography are distinguished: a conditioning model, an ... More

Pragmatics can shed light on racial hate speech and pornography, but only if we bring it down to earth. Five models for hate speech and pornography are distinguished: a conditioning model, an imitation model, an argument model, a speech act model, and its descendant, the pragmatic model. A speech act model distinguishes illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions of speech: e.g. hate speech can incite, and cause, hatred and violence. The pragmatic model tries to capture these dimensions via an account of accommodation. It can indeed illuminate racial hate speech and pornography, but only with amendments that go ‘beyond belief’. Lewis and Stalnaker showed how ‘score’ or ‘common ground’ of conversation accommodates to moves speakers make, and the hearer’s belief adjusts accordingly. This picture needs extending to make sense of hate speech and pornography: we need to allow for the accommodation of other attitudes, such as desire and hate.Less

‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’

Lawrence Danson

in Wilde's Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism

This chapter analyses Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W.H., a fiction about the putatively real biographical basis of William Shakespeare's sonnets. It suggests that this essay is elusive in its ... More

This chapter analyses Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W.H., a fiction about the putatively real biographical basis of William Shakespeare's sonnets. It suggests that this essay is elusive in its simultaneous expression and erasure of Wilde's own sexual desire. The chapter explains that this work is Wilde's most extensive exploration into the art of forgery, and argues that the material facts of its composition, as well as its form and rhetoric, contribute to the sense that mysteries begin with their solution.Less

Socialism, Masculinity, and the ‘Faddist’ Sage: Edward Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw

Ruth Livesey

in Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914

Schreiner's good friend Edward Carpenter was her chief source of news about the socialist movement during her self-imposed exiles on the continent throughout the later 1880s. Carpenter sought to ... More

Schreiner's good friend Edward Carpenter was her chief source of news about the socialist movement during her self-imposed exiles on the continent throughout the later 1880s. Carpenter sought to reshape masculinity and civilization through sexual desire itself. This chapter examines how the fads of vegetarianism, Jaegerism, and sandal wearing came to be associated with socialism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that for Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw, these ascetic regimes provided a means of investigating and reforming conventional ideals of masculinity. Both writers represent such fads as bodily labour and discipline, thus overcoming the opposition between the man of letters and the manly labourer. While Carpenter's theory of Lamarckian biological idealism concluded that such practices would result in species change and a socialist utopia of liberated sexual bodies, Shaw's regime aimed to supplement the necessary redistribution of capital.Less

Destructive Desire: Sexual Themes and Same‐Sex Relations in Genesis A

David Clark

in Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature

The sixth chapter investigates how homosocial bonds are constructed in the Old English poetic version of the biblical book of Genesis, starting with the treatment of the Sodomites in Genesis A and ... More

The sixth chapter investigates how homosocial bonds are constructed in the Old English poetic version of the biblical book of Genesis, starting with the treatment of the Sodomites in Genesis A and the contrast between their relations and the ‘correct’ and praiseworthy homosocial bonds between Abraham and his kinsmen and friends. It argues that, unlike other prose treatments, in Genesis A same‐sex acts are not considered to be the primary sin of Sodom, but that they form part of a network of various forms of unsanctioned sexual desire, presented by the poet as destructive in order to promote by contrast the procreative coupling of Abraham and Sarah, the progenitors of the chosen people.Less

Disinterestedness and Objectivity

Christopher Janaway

in Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy

Part of Nietzsche's discussion of the ascetic ideal in Genealogy III concerns aesthetic experience. This chapter first examines Nietzsche's criticisms of Kant for conceiving of beauty from the ... More

Part of Nietzsche's discussion of the ascetic ideal in Genealogy III concerns aesthetic experience. This chapter first examines Nietzsche's criticisms of Kant for conceiving of beauty from the passive spectator's point of view and in terms of disinterestedness. Nietzsche diagnoses all philosophers as having a propensity towards the ascetic, and uses Schopenhauer as an illustration: Schopenhauer's conception of aesthetic experience as a pure will-lessness was motivated by his own wish to escape from tormenting sexual desire. Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory provides the model for Nietzsche's discussion of pure, disinterested objectivity in Genealogy III, 12. Nietzsche argues that such pure objectivity is an impossibility, and that its motivation is very much ‘interested’. Nietzsche can also be seen here as turning Schopenhauer's doctrine of the primacy of the will over the intellect against Schopenhauer.Less

Extracting Revolutionary Spirit: Jiang Wen's In the Heat of the Sun and Anchee Min's Red Azalea

in From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China

This chapter examines the work of filmmaker Jiang Wen, In the Heat of the Sun (1994), and expatriate writer Anchee Min, Red Azalea (1994). Both Jiang Wen and Anchee Min link sexual desire with the ... More

This chapter examines the work of filmmaker Jiang Wen, In the Heat of the Sun (1994), and expatriate writer Anchee Min, Red Azalea (1994). Both Jiang Wen and Anchee Min link sexual desire with the spirit of the revolution and apply a mystical approach that signals an underlying concept of transcendence. In the Heat of the Sun offers a novel interpretation of China's Cultural Revolution and rewrites the dominant narrative of trauma, violence, and dislocation. Red Azalea tackles an overarching mysticism that unites and expresses both revolutionary spirit and sexual desire while creating an imaginary spiritual Maoism out of and as resistance to political Maoism. It also describes the Cultural Revolution experience as profoundly, if secretly, sensual and erotic. Anchee Min associates sexual liberation with political progressiveness and argues that the defunct Chinese revolutionary state has lost its spirit, thus becoming hypocritical and essentially false.Less

Diasporic Desires: Narrating Sexuality in the Memoirs of Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Li-Young Lee

Kenneth Chan

in China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces

This chapter deploys Benigno Sánchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton's critical focus to attend to the representation and rhetoric of sexuality and sexual desire within the narratives of two Chinese American ... More

This chapter deploys Benigno Sánchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton's critical focus to attend to the representation and rhetoric of sexuality and sexual desire within the narratives of two Chinese American diasporic autobiographies: Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moonfaces: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist and Li-Young Lee's The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. Both Lim's and Lee's texts seem deeply conscious of how sexual desire mobilizes diaspora, and how diaspora, in turn, informs sexual desire. However, these texts also reveal anxieties of how to narrate sexuality in diaspora, particularly in the crossing of national and cultural boundaries, in both cases dealing with ethnic Chinese diasporic subjects moving out of anti-Chinese originating homelands to the United States. Lim uses her Malaysian Peranakan cultural background and her academic intellectual emplacement to analyze her sexual choices, while Lee turns to his Indonesian-Chinese identity and his familial connections to Protestant Christianity to frame his sexual relationship with his Anglo-American wife.Less

Conclusion: Character and Medicine

Charles Upchurch

in Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform

This chapter suggests that most scholars still credit Michel Foucault with profoundly important insights that have shaped the study of the history of sexuality, but there is also a desire to move ... More

This chapter suggests that most scholars still credit Michel Foucault with profoundly important insights that have shaped the study of the history of sexuality, but there is also a desire to move beyond his impressionistic and generalized narrative to understand better how ideas and discourses influenced individuals' understandings of their own sexuality. One scholar who has successfully taken up this challenge is Harry Oosterhuis in Stepchildren of Nature. Oosterhuis was the first scholar to gain access to the personal papers of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Viennese psychiatrist who wrote the most influential nineteenth-century study of the nature of sexual desire between men. The work of Oosterhuis has provided a significant advance in the area of “who knew what when” in relation to sexology and shows the value of approaches that link well-known cultural texts to individual experience.Less

Sex on the Road: Migratory Men and Youths in the Pacific Northwest’s Hinterlands

Peter Boag

in Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest

This chapter explores various types of same-sex affairs that the region's transient workforce participated in, concentrating on the adult-juvenile relationship that seemed to dominate this group's ... More

This chapter explores various types of same-sex affairs that the region's transient workforce participated in, concentrating on the adult-juvenile relationship that seemed to dominate this group's homosexual system. It then examines the distinctive culture that migrant laborers forged, concentrating on the same-sex sexual system they developed and that so dominated the rural work camps and byways. A brief consideration of the physical geography of the transients' same-sex sexual desires and activities in the rural Northwest is presented. Historical evidence and past studies of sexual practices demonstrate that the jocker-punk relationship was not necessarily one-sided. The transient youth and the migratory adult male influenced male same-sex sexuality in the city.Less

Introduction

William M. Reddy

in The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE

This introductory chapter discusses the main themes covered in this book, which explores the historical origins of the Western conception of romantic love. It shows that this very specific, Western ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the main themes covered in this book, which explores the historical origins of the Western conception of romantic love. It shows that this very specific, Western conception of romantic love was first formulated in the twelfth century. The making of “courtly love,” the medieval version of romantic love, in twelfth-century Europe is compared to the very different practices of sexual partnerships in two other places: in regional kingdoms of Bengal and Orissa in the ninth through twelfth centuries; and among the imperial aristocracy of Heian Japan in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The chapter also discusses the “longing for association” as a type of emotion; the current science of sexual desire; the anthropology of romantic love; how romantic love appears to lock men and women into very rigid roles; and romantic love and the history of sexuality.Less