This chapter contains sections titled: Female Porngasm is More Interesting to Study than Male Porngasm Most Porn is Designed to Activate and Appeal to Men's Short‐Term Sexual Strategies Most Female Porngasms are Fake Our Study Results But Female Porn Stars Do Love the Sex! Correspondence Bias Error Management Theory Conclusions Notes.

How should we react to the development of sexbot technology? Taking their cue from anti-porn feminism, several academic critics lament the development of sexbot technology, arguing that it objectifies and subordinates women, is likely to promote misogynistic attitudes toward sex, and may need to be banned or restricted. In this chapter I argue for an alternative response. Taking my cue from the sex positive ‘feminist porn’ movement, I argue that the best response to the development of ‘bad’ sexbots (...) is to make better ones. This will require changes to the content, process and context of sexbot development. Doing so will acknowledge the valuable role that technology can play in human sexuality, and allow us to challenge gendered norms and assumptions about male and female sexual desire. This will not be a panacea to the social problems that could arise from sexbot development, but it offers a more realistic and hopeful vision for the future of this technology in a pluralistic and progressive society. (shrink)

How should we react to the development of sexbot technology? Taking their cue from anti-porn feminism, several academic critics lament the development of sexbot technology, arguing that it objectifies and subordinates women, which is likely to promote misogynistic attitudes towards sex, and may need to be banned or restricted. This chapter argues for an alternative response. Taking its cue from the sex-positive ‘feminist porn’ movement, it argues that the best response to the development of ‘bad’ sexbots is to (...) make better ones. This will require changes to the content, process and context of sexbot development. Doing so will acknowledge the valuable role that technology can play in human sexuality, and allow us to challenge gendered norms and assumptions about male and female sexual desire. This will not be a panacea to the social problems that could arise from sexbot development, but it offers a more realistic and hopeful vision for the future of this technology in a pluralistic and progressive society. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) may have featured both animated corpses and hardcore sex scenes, but only recently have Re-Penetrator (2004) and Porn of the Dead (2006) managed to fully eroticise the living dead, allowing these creatures to engage in intercourse. In doing so, the usually a-subjective zombie is allotted a key facet of identity - sexuality. This development within the sub-genre needs accounting for outside of the contexts of porn studies, where it has only been (...) briefly touched upon in relation to its "extremity". -/- Moreover, the gendering of the undead opens a discussion which expand the horizons of zombie studies away from the overt critiques of capitalism, race and psychoanalysis that have pervaded analyses of these narratives. The dichotomy of binary oppositions so often associated with psychoanalytic approaches dictates that "passive (non-phallic) = female", and "active (phallic) = male". In these terms, the zombies are feminine - soft-bodied and passive, despite their murderous intent (which has been accounted for, by Barabara Creed (1993) amongst others, by invoking the vagina-dentata motif). Humans (active) are deemed masculine, not least since they tend to dispatch zombies with "phallic guns". Taking this logic to an extreme, the zombie may be read as allegorising feminism: the "feminised" figures (zombies) become fearsome in their will to exert themselves despite their seeming disempowerment in the face of "masculine" hegemony. Ultimately, by grouping together as a force, they overthrow or at least significantly damage that "normality" (an ideological paradigm usually read in terms of race, class and economics). (shrink)

Resumo Este artigo analisa parte do discurso que a Igreja Católica teceu sobre as mulheres, enfatizando o tema da maternidade durante o século XIX. O enfoque parte da Bulla Sylabus (1864), expedida no pontificado de Pio IX, e da encíclica Rerum Novarum (1891), do Papa Leão XIII. Entre a segunda metade do século XIX e a Primeira Guerra Mundial, a Igreja passou pelo processo conhecido como "romanização", caracterizado pela preocupação moral e disciplinar do clero diante de críticas do laicado, além (...) da promoção de ordens e congregações religiosas. O objetivo deste artigo é, portanto, discutir como aquela instituição definiu um papel social feminino vinculado à ideia do amor materno, divulgado como natural e incondicional. A partir da contribuição dos estudos de gênero, aborda a atribuição de características masculinas e femininas para a distinção não apenas biológica entre homens e mulheres. Concluiu-se que, na longa duração, o discurso católico passou de uma postura misógina - de recusa do sexo feminino - à incorporação das mulheres como público essencial para a sustentação do catolicismo diante das propostas de laicização da sociedade ocidental contemporânea. Palavras-chave: Mulheres; Discurso católico; Maternidade; Gênero.This paper discusses part of the discourse that the Catholic Church built in order to define woman's role in the 19th century, emphasizing representations of motherhood. The focus starts with Pius IX's Bulla Sylabus (1864) and Pope Lion XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891). Between the second half of the 19th century and World War I, the Catholic Church underwent a process known as "Romanization", characterized by the clergy's moral and disciplinary concern in face of the laity's criticism, and by the promotion of new religious orders and congregations. The paper considers, therefore, how the Catholic Church defined a social female role linked to the idea of maternal love, diffused as natural and unconditional. With basis on the contribution of cultural history and gender studies, it demonstrates how that Church attributed male and female characteristics to the distinction not merely biological between men and women, associating the latter with the idea of motherhood and natural love for their children. It concludes that, through time, the Church has changed its misogyny discourse - refusing the female sex - into one that incorporates women as essential to support Catholicism in facing the laicization of contemporary western society. Key words: Women; Catholic discourse; Motherhood; Gender. (shrink)

This research explored the influencing factors of gender swapping among female players in online games and their impact on online gaming behavior. Based on an online survey of 3,658 female players in China, we found that perceived benefits and the Tanbi tendency, a psychological indulgence in enjoying novels, comics, or series on love and sex between attractive males, were the most important factors for female players to employ male avatars. Sexual orientation, perceived anonymity, and perceived tolerance (...) also had a significant influence on gender swapping. Different from the practical benefits perceived by men who use female avatars in online games, the perceived benefit for female players who use male avatars was to avoid gender discrimination. In order to obtain more freedom and fairer treatment, they chose male avatars for a better experience. Female players with a higher degree of gender swapping showed a stronger aggressiveness and dominant “hyper-masculinity” behavior tendency in the game. Though online virtual worlds may be a convenient place for females to experience gender equality through gender swapping, the findings of this study suggest that gender swapping in games may, to some extent, perpetuate or even reinforce gender stereotypes in the real world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:uippraisals from the 'Past THE CLEAREST INTELLECT OF OUR AGEl H UGH MACLENNAN 19°7-199° R cently I have been rereading Bertrand Russell, and in so doing I suddenly realized that lowe to this man a good deal of such happiness as I enjoy. Over the years I had forgotten how great my debt was, but when I reread one of his books which I first read as a student, (...) I understood the extent to which he had liberated me from the psychological sadism of Calvin and Knox, to whom I had been unduly exposed when young. It is probably impossible for anyone entirely to escape once these two have got their hands around his throat, but Russell enabled me to escape a litde. 1 [This essay was recently discovered during the cataloguing for BRACERS of an obscure class of correspondence. Mr. Joseph w. Devine had sent Russell a clipping of the essay's appearance in' the Philadelphia Sunday But/etin, of 15 July 1962. I had long thought, from reading Elspeth Cameron's Hugh MacLennan: a Writers Life (1981), that he showed signs not only of having been influenced by Russell but of being the sOrt of person who is attracted to Russell's way of thinking. A promising tide in the same scholar's bibliography ofMacLennan turned out to be a fuller version of the clipping. "The Clearest Intellect of Our Age" is reprinted from The Montreal Star, 14 July 1962, "Entertainments" sec., p. 5. Russell did influence MacLennan. Neither the Russell Archives nor the inventory of the Maclennan papers at the Universiry of Calgary reveals personal contact berween the rwo. I wish I had asked MacLennan about contacts and influence seventeen years ago, when I sent him an early issue of Russell He commented: ''1 found your journal fascinating and never before had read that beautiful thing Russell wrote in his early days with Whitehead:" He is referring to the essay on the status of women in No.6, now in Papers 12.-Ed.] russell: the Journal ofthe Benrand Russell Archives McMaster Unive..ity Libraty Press noS. 11 (summer 1991): 83-5 ISSN 00,6-01631 84 HUGH MACLENNAN I suppose he really is the greatest man alive, in the sense that his teaching grows and his teaching is good, but it is pointless to argue the point between him and Churchill. It is wonderful, however, that many think he is our greatest man and that he has become an international hero to millions of the thoughtful youth. He must be the first pure logician who ever was that. Until he took his stand against nuclear war, he never appealed to the passions. He lacked the aggressions which youth admires. He never said: "Come live with me and I will be your master"; or, "Follow me and I will purge you of your sins." He had no use for self-sacrifice as such. He simply said, in effect: "Happiness is good. If you desire it, you must be reasonable." As he was intelligent enough to know that anyone who teaches that happiness is good, and teaches how to achieve it, is sute to be considered subversive to a Christian-commercial society, he bore no personal resentment when society persecuted him. The young know, of course, that Russell is now assumed by the experts to be the most important philosopher since Hume, but that is not why they love him. They love him for the sublime civilization of his courage, for his refusal to let an intensely kind nature blunt his respect for truth. They love him because he loves life even in the twentieth century; and they love him most of all because he is engage. And of course they also love the wit which refuses to be made tongue-tied by those who insist that whenever one speaks of sex or religion one must be solemn. Russell's wit is worth the study of any writer. It is based on mathematics, and Russell would agree, I think, with the remark Camillien Houde once made to me when I asked the famous mayor of Montreal how he was always able to make people laugh. Houde replied... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Philosopher’s Seduction: Hume and the Fair SexVicki J. SappFollowing the failed reception of his Treatise David Hume turned to writing essays and published these in various editions throughout his career. Among the first offerings were essays addressing “the female reader,” “the ladies,” or “the fair sex” in that current habit which Jonathan Swift labelled “fair-sexing it.” Hume’s Victorian editors T. H. Green and T. H. Grose classified (...) and commented upon these woman-appeal essays “apparently designed to attract the attention of ladies, and marked by the mannerisms of what was then a fashionable literature,” concluding that these “can hardly have been much to their writer’s taste, and... mingle strangely with a series of discussions on the British Constitution.” 1 Green and Grose refer to the fact that Hume gradually eliminated his woman-appeal essays from the editions; today, we find these “literary” texts safely removed from the “moral and political” frame and anthologized as “Essays Withdrawn and Unpublished” in the two modern editions of Hume’s essays. 2Following Hume’s apparent cue, the critical tradition has paid little heed to the woman-appeal essays except in those cases where kind neglect has given over to insult or factionalism. From the former category we find contemporary readers such as M. A. Box who in his rhetorical analysis of Hume’s opus echoes earlier judgments of these essays as frivolous, mercenary, essentially devoid of substantive or stylistic worth—and most certainly unphilosophical. In the latter case, scattered commentators from the 1970s and 1980s reflecting those decades’ gynocritical trend built cases for Hume’s “sexism” (primarily) or “feminism” (most notably the philosopher Annette Baier). And Jerome Christensen has attended to Hume’s female reader in his [End Page 1] elaborate theoretical play with Hume’s gender as a metaphor for his literary ambitions. 3What is curious is that each of the above readers has passed over the woman-appeal essays in favor of Hume’s “serious” writing (for example, Treatise, Book III, Part II, sect. xii, “Of Chastity and Modesty”) or his letters, even though the rejected woman-appeal essays are obviously rich sources for a study of Hume’s gender perspectives. It is true that in “Of Chastity and Modesty” Hume offers what is perhaps his best evidence of society’s conventional as opposed to metaphysical foundations, in his argument that the laws of chastity governing female education and behavior are certainly “notions... founded on the public interest,” that is, patriarchal property interest. In the woman-appeal essays Hume actually works out, by illustration, the gender-biased foundational intricacies of his social contract philosophy, especially the importance of education to the regulation of society: “As publick praise and blame encrease our esteem for justice; so private education and instruction contribute to the same effect.... For these reasons [parents] are induc’d to inculcate on their children, from the earliest infancy, the principles of probity, and teach them to regard the observance of these rules, by which society is maintain’d, as worthy and honourable, and their violation as base and infamous.” 4The rejected woman-appeal essays include titles that bespeak a focus on gender, education, and social formation (“Of Love and Marriage,” “Of Moral Prejudice”), as well as titles that appear more public or scholarly: “Of Essay Writing,” “Of the Study of History.” In spite of their topical neutrality or marginally “political” tone, these latter two I identify as Hume’s core woman-appeal essays. In them Hume brings the female reader into the spotlight, inviting her into a dialogue with the male philosopher-essayist; she is to share in a sort of Humean Utopia of gender-mixed educated, genteel company servicing the ends of true philosophy in the marriage of intellection and experience. As overt appeals to “women of Sense and Education” featuring some gestures towards gender equality, these essays, one suspects, were doomed to eventual rejection by both Hume and a subsequent critical tradition prone to the kneejerk devaluation of woman-appeal.I offer here evidence that the rejected essays do have “philosophical” merit as they take up or dramatize core ideas of Treatise philosophy. These essays also feature some... (shrink)

On the God of the Christians tries to explain how Christians conceive of the God whom they worship. No proof for His existence is offered, but simply a description of the Christian image of God. The first step consists in doing away with some commonly held opinions that put them together with the other "monotheists," "religions of the book," and "religions of Abraham." Christians do believe in one God, but they do not conceive of its being one in the same (...) way as other "monotheists," like the first of them, the pharaoh Akhenaton (18th century before J.C.), like some philosophers, e.g., Aristotle, or like Islam. Christians admit the authority of a Holy Book, but don't consider it as being the peak of God's revelation. For them, revelation culminates in the person, life, and doings of Jesus - including his passion and resurrection. Christians acknowledge the exemplary figure of Abraham, but the stories they tell about him they share with Jews, but not with Muslims, who see in him the first Muslim. The Trinity is not a way to loosen the exclusivity of the only God. It is the very way in which God is one, i.e., in the inner richness and fecundity of love. The God of the Christians is Father, but not male. Human males become fathers through the mediation of a female. God is so radically the Father of everything and, in a very special sense, of the eternal Son, that He is not in need of a partner. His fatherhood can in no way legitimate the superiority of the male over the female sex. The God of the Christians doesn't want us to obey Him in order to enslave us; He expects us to act freely according to what is good for us. Now, the Good is not something that He has in store and bestows on His creatures. The Good is what He is and He is the Good of His creatures. The God of the Christians is merciful, but He takes seriously man's freedom, even when man doesn't accept Him. Hence, He doesn't content Himself with forgiving fromthe outside. He has to contrive a system (technically speaking: salvation history or "economy of salvation") that will enable Man freely to accept His love. (shrink)

People with disabilities face attitudinal barriers including prejudice, stereotypes, and low expectations. Many young people without disabilities may doubt that people with disabilities can be fulfilling partners in any loving adult relationship. The objective of the present research was to assess the willingness of non-disabled youth to engage in conjugal relationships with persons with disabilities in Wolaita Sodo town, Ethiopia. Both descriptive and explanatory study designs were used and quantitative data were collected. A self-administered questionnaire was designed and distributed to (...) randomly selected 403 (202 females & 201 males) unmarried youth. Data analysis was undertaken using SPSS software in which both descriptive and inferential statistical techniques were utilized for data presentation. The result showed that most (85.5%) of the young people without disabilities participated in the survey were not willing to have any type of personal relationships with persons with disabilities and the main reason for 44.2% of these respondents being the fear of reaction from family members. Furthermore, it was found that the level of willingness of youth without disabilities to engage in romantic love and marital relationships was not influenced by the socio-economic status of people with disabilities. Moreover, the result of binary logistic regression analysis showed that the willingness of respondents to have marital and romantic love relationship with persons with disabilities is significantly associated to the sex (OR = 2.376; P < 0.05; 95%CI = 1.210, 4.664), raised-up area (OR = 2.512; P < 0.01; 95%CI = 1.319, 4.783), age (OR = 2.886; P < 0.05; 95%CI = 1.012, 8.228) and the presence of person with disability in the family (OR = 3.945; P < 0.01; 95%CI = 1.648, 9.442) of respondents. The findings of the present research demonstrate that people with disabilities have continued to face stereotypes and discriminations. Such stereotypes extend to assuming them as asexual and unfit to carryout roles that arise from love or marital relationships which violates the rights of PWDs to form their own family and have children. It is therefore, important to raise the awareness of young people about the differences between disability and sexuality and that physical disability has nothing to do with sexuality and relationship formation. (shrink)

Modern attitudes to meat in both men and women reflect a strong meat-masculinity association. Sex differences in the relationship between meat and masculinity have not been previously explored. In the current study we used two IATs (implicit association tasks), a visual search task, and a questionnaire to measure implicit and explicit attitudes towards meat in men and women. Men exhibited stronger implicit associations between meat and healthiness than did women, but both sexes associated meat more strongly with 'healthy' than 'unhealthy' (...) concepts, suggesting that the meat-masculinity association readily observed across western cultures may be mediated by a meat-strength/power association. The sex difference was not related to explicit attitudes to meat, nor was it attributable to a variety of other factors, such as a generally more positive disposition toward meat in men than women. Men also exhibited an attention bias toward meats, compared to non-meat foods, while females exhibited more caution when searching for non-meat foods, compared to meat. These biases were not related to implicit attitudes, but did tend to increase with increasing hunger levels. Potential ultimate explanations for these differences, including sex differences in bio-physiological needs and receptivity to social signals are discussed. (shrink)

On the God of the Christians tries to explain how Christians conceive of the God whom they worship. No proof for His existence is offered, but simply a description of the Christian image of God. The first step consists in doing away with some commonly held opinions that put them together with the other "monotheists," "religions of the book," and "religions of Abraham." Christians do believe in one God, but they do not conceive of its being one in the same (...) way as other "monotheists," like the first of them, the pharaoh Akhenaton (18th century before J.C.), like some philosophers, e.g., Aristotle, or like Islam. Christians admit the authority of a Holy Book, but don't consider it as being the peak of God's revelation. For them, revelation culminates in the person, life, and doings of Jesus - including his passion and resurrection. Christians acknowledge the exemplary figure of Abraham, but the stories they tell about him they share with Jews, but not with Muslims, who see in him the first Muslim. The Trinity is not a way to loosen the exclusivity of the only God. It is the very way in which God is one, i.e., in the inner richness and fecundity of love. The God of the Christians is Father, but not male. Human males become fathers through the mediation of a female. God is so radically the Father of everything and, in a very special sense, of the eternal Son, that He is not in need of a partner. His fatherhood can in no way legitimate the superiority of the male over the female sex. The God of the Christians doesn't want us to obey Him in order to enslave us; He expects us to act freely according to what is good for us. Now, the Good is not something that He has in store and bestows on His creatures. The Good is what He is and He is the Good of His creatures. The God of the Christians is merciful, but He takes seriously man's freedom, even when man doesn't accept Him. Hence, He doesn't content Himself with forgiving fromthe outside. He has to contrive a system (technically speaking: salvation history or "economy of salvation") that will enable Man freely to accept His love. (shrink)

This article examines the phenomenon of same-sex unions, both joint suicides and weddings, mostly among young, low-income, non-English speaking women, that have been reported from many parts of India over the last three decades. Most of the women were Hindus and many of the weddings took place by Hindu rites. None of these women had contact with any LGBT or women's movement or activists before their weddings. Ancient as well as modern texts show that people can and do draw on (...) traditional Hindu ideas about love (as the product of attachments formed in former lives), rebirth (attachments persist from one birth to another) and marriage (which is supposed to outlast one lifetime) to legitimize socially disapproved unions, both cross-sex and same-sex. Right-wing Hindu forces today mistakenly argue that the idea of same-sex love and marriage, and indeed of marriage based on love itself, are Western imports. In fact, same-sex marriages were reported from rural areas and small towns long before the Indian LGBT movement took cognizance of the issue. When families accept them, female couples are generally able to stay together but when families violently oppose them, often with the collusion of local police, couples may be forced to separate or driven to suicide, even though law courts have uniformly upheld the right of consenting adults to live together. Modern Hindu teachers and priests are divided on the question of the validity and desirability of same-sex marriage; a doctrinal debate is now developing. (shrink)

In Solo: A Star Wars Story, the debonair Lando Calrissian is clearly in love with the artificially intelligent droid L3‐37. There are lots of friendships between droids and humans in Star Wars. This chapter looks at the relationship between Lando and L3‐37 in Solo and argues that they exhibit all the hallmarks not just of friendship, but of love. A friendship between people who both seek to gain from the relationship is one of utility, while a friendship between (...) people who simply enjoy each other's company is one of pleasure. Droids are the kinds of beings that can be good friends, as is clearly supported throughout the Star Wars canon. One potential concern is that droids smarter than humans might take advantage of an inferior organic life form by having a sexual relationship with them. (shrink)

The Love-Code is a continuation of The Couple to the family, whose image has changed dramatically. Sexual promiscuity, the social equality of male and female, the individual planning of biographies, all make traditional gender roles appear outdated. Whether these changes will make the living together of the sexes easier is doubtful. This book addresses the question, how can love even in the conditions of neo-liberalism keep its mysterious binding force: through the recognition of sexual identity as a (...) way to knowing the self and the other. (shrink)

This article provides a spatial analysis of the types of microspaces, or Cultural Time Zones (CTZs), that constitute the narrative universes of chick lit from South Africa, China and India. I argue that although these books take place in ‘developing’ countries, their ‘First World’ spatial politics, and thus their political impact and cultural commentary, are both enabled and constrained by the settings of their narrative thrust. In the CTZ of the five-star hotel, or the elite spa, the books’ protagonists exemplify (...) a popular notion of choice/neoliberal feminism. What, then, do they say about the possibility of feminism for confronting patriarchal traditions in CTZs like the ‘local’ neighbourhood? The three books analysed – Angela Makholwa’s Black Widow Society, Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby and Anita Jain’s Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India – are set in the globalising cities of Johannesburg, Shanghai and Delhi in putatively ‘developing’ countries; however, the books’ female protagonists tend to inhabit a series of ‘global’, ‘First World’ CTZs, like the high-end shopping mall, the Western music-playing nightclub or the cappuccino-serving cafe. These CTZs are geographically distant from those of their Western chick lit counterparts, yet nonetheless not very far away if measured in cultural kilometres. The neoliberal, so-called feminist ‘choices’ available to these protagonists would not be possible in geographically proximate but culturally distant, ‘traditional’ CTZs. The key question this article asks is whether these narratives’ spatial settings, confined as they are to upper middle-class, ‘global’, ‘modern’ CTZs, produce a form of spatial politics that fem-washes global capitalism while failing to confront patriarchal and traditional structures which dominate in more ‘local’, ‘traditional’ CTZs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 341 Petrus Liu Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus Originally formulated to dispute biologically deterministic explanations of women’s subordination, the analytical distinction between sex and gender has developed in unexpected ways in transitions from one language to another. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from John Money’s sexological writings to Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum, (...) “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” Anglophone feminists in the 1970s developed the distinction between sex (understood as anatomy) and gender (understood as social identity) to argue that a woman’s biological sex ought not dictate the kind of work she should do or the kind of life she should live.1 In her landmark 1975 essay, “The Traffic in Women,” Gayle Rubin coined the phrase “sex/gender system” to examine “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”2 In more recent years, however, the distinction 1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Paris: Gallimard, 1949; New York: Knopf, 1993), 281. Citations refer to the Knopf edition. For an account of feminist reformulations of John Money and Robert Stoller, see Jennifer Germon, Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34. It is worth mentioning that sex in Rubin’s sex/gender system refers to sexual practice rather than the distinction between male and female. This understanding forms the basis of her theoretical disagreements with Judith Butler, who preserves the semantic ambiguity of sex (as 342 Petrus Liu between sex and gender has taken on an entirely different meaning as it comes to inform transgender movements and politics seeking to decouple a person’s sex assignment at birth from their future gender identity. At the same time, theories of intersectionality, women-of-color feminisms, and transnational feminisms have all developed their own theses of gender variability to contest the myth of the universal woman. The life of gender—in academic theory, politics, and social movements— has confounded the original intentions of its American theorists. It is clear that there is no singular or stable account of gender; rather, gender is always in a state of flux, incessantly rethought and reforged by the demands of an increasingly complex and asymmetric world.3 Gender is always a translation—from one discipline, context, or language to another—ineluctably intertwined with the geopolitical problems created by the violences of imperialism, colonialism, and transnational capitalism. The translation of gender into non-European languages, such as Chinese, raises questions about whether spaces previously resistant or exterior to world capitalism are now being assimilated and enfolded into the structure of neoliberal globalization defined by the Washington Consensus. Against this view, some critics maintain that China’s precipitous ascent presents an alternative model of development for the Global South called the Beijing Consensus. Considering how gender has entered different languages, including Chinese, to create new coinages that may at times appear as instruments of an imperial takeover, Judith Butler argues that the translation of gender actually offers a path of linguistic humility for English, a reminder that we cohabit a multilingual world in which no one ever owned the term.4 But how exactly do we describe that complex, multilingual world and how does gender both gender and sexuality) as the point of departure for a different kind of feminist inquiry. See Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 67. 3. See Heather Love, ed. “Rethinking Sex.” Special issue, GLQ 17, no. 2 (2011): 1–221. This collection of essays conveys a sense of how Rubin’s methodological distinction between sex and gender has given rise to new ways of thinking across different disciplines about sex radicalism, crip sexuality, Black feminism, and sex trafficking. 4. Judith Butler, “Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism,” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (Winter 2019). Petrus Liu 343 transform it? How is the translation of gender inflected by the material conditions... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Eeew! Sucks to be a Porn Star! Get Out Of My Bed! Ways of Valuing Lives Climax: Happy Slaves, Oppression, and Quality of Life Afterglow Notes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:'I am cringe, but I am free':A Reparative Reading of Assuming the Ecosexual PositionVanesa Raditz (bio) and Jess Martinez (bio)Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Jennie Klein, and Linda Montano. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. ISBN 9781452965796.INTRODUCTIONEcosexual: Eco from the ancient Greek oikos; sexual from Latin, sexuales 1. a person who finds nature romantic, sensual, erotic, or sexy, which can include humans or (...) not. 2. A new sexual identity (self-identified). 3. A person who takes the Earth as their lover. 4. A term used in dating advertisements. 5. An environmental activist strategy. 6. A grassroots movement. 7. A person who has a more expanded concept of what sex and orgasm are beyond mainstream definitions. 8. A person who imagines sex as an ecology that extends beyond the physical body.Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth As Lover (Sprinkle and Stephens 2021, 2)What does it mean to take the Earth as a lover? How does it change our experiences of pleasure in our bodies to give attention to the eroticism of air in our lungs, mud on our skin, or water in our throats? How would it shape our ethical commitments to these elements that we depend upon for life if we were to reconnect with them as pleasurable extensions of our own bodies? These questions are at the heart of the decades-long research-creation performance-art collaboration between Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens that has built an international "ecosexual" identity and movement, a tale that they document in their new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. Part travelog, part relationship memoir, part how-to guide, Assuming the Ecosexual Position chronicles [End Page 105] the emergence and evolution of their ecosex concept and community through a playful recounting of over a decade of productions: performative weddings to the earth, moon, lakes, rocks and beyond; theatrical two-women sexecology performances that culminate in explicit sex in piles of earth; ecosex walking tours; workshops; public sex clinics; documentary films; and so much more.Woven throughout are philosophical reflections on the entanglements between bodies, land, sex, eroticism, and love, many of which emerge from ecofeminist thought, pollinated with the post-porn, sex-positive, queer feminism of the 80s and 90s. In introducing their philosophical inspirations, they name Greta Gaard's classic piece on queering ecofeminism (18) which stimulated a body of work describing the ways that patriarchal systems of power simultaneously oppress women, the erotic, and nature (1997). Drawing upon Sprinkle's background in porn and post-porn modernist theater, Stephens' background as a queer artist with a doctorate in Performance Studies, their mutual interest in sex education, and their love for the redwoods of Santa Cruz, the pair crafted ecosexuality as a particular lens for expanding queer ecofeminist inquiry into the power of sexual liberation for ecological liberation, which they do through the creative methodologies of performance. The performance art practice that they develop has significant inspiration from the Fluxus art movement, which resisted the authority of museums to define the meaning or value of art, and encouraged the active practice and production of art throughout life.Among the inspirations they list in the introduction to Assuming the Ecosexual Position, Donna Haraway and Kim TallBear stand out. Donna Haraway's presence is felt throughout the book—as a colleague of Stephens at UC Santa Cruz, as a friend at their Wedding to the Earth, as a collaborator in the documentary Water Makes Us Wet, and ultimately, as a posthuman philosopher (Haraway 2000) who has inspired Stephens and Sprinkle to "see ecosex as a conceptual art practice and a way of thinking beyond individual identity, and even beyond human beings, to envision a larger system—an ecology of relationships" (8). The authors also express the influence of their evolving relationship with Kim TallBear, with whom Beth studied while pursuing her PhD, and who has encouraged the pair to leverage this posthuman and new materialist consciousness towards decolonial politics (TallBear 2015). They cite one of TallBear's blog posts on ecosexuality, where she encourages ecosexuals to use a critical eye towards "New Age" appropriation of Native American ceremonies... (shrink)

It is usually taken for granted that romantic relationships will be sexual, but it seems that there is no necessary reason for this, as it is possible for romantic relationships to not include sex. Indeed, sometimes sex is a part of a romantic relationship for only a relatively short period of it. Furthermore, scientific explanations of the link between sex and love don’t seem fully satisfying because they tell us only about the mechanics of sex, rather than its meaning (...) or phenomenology. Therefore, the question of why it is that the archetypal romantic relationship includes sex, calls for philosophical analysis, yet it has been under-explored in philosophy. In this paper, I attempt to remedy this. I argue that sex is important to romantic love because it partly constitutes, builds, and expresses four of the central goods of a romantic relationship: 1) pleasure, 2) union, 3) intimacy, and 4) vulnerability and care. Thus, sex can be, and often is, an important vehicle for romantic love, though it is not essential for it. (shrink)

Resumo "O candomblé aceita o homossexualismo porque é uma religião que não tem pecado. Não interessa se você seja homem, mulher ou gay. Não importa a opção sexual. (...) Você pode ver. É uma religião de homossexuais". É assim que um filho-de-santo responde a uma pergunta sobre a notável presença de homossexuais iniciados na religião dos orixás. Se comparadas a outras denominações hostis e indiferentes às orientações não-heterossexuais, o candomblé e outras devoções afro-brasileiras são, de fato, mais tolerantes à participação (...) de homossexuais, permitindo-lhes ocupar todos os postos previstos na hierarquia ritual. Embora estejam entre as expressões religiosas que menos discriminam o indivíduo por razões de preferência sexual, percebemos por meio da literatura especializada e de uma pesquisa de campo, realizada na região metropolitana de São Paulo, que os candomblecistas também empregam em seus discursos argumentos ou narrativas míticas, certos princípios e valores seculares articulados à moralidade cristã e que dão sustentação à hierarquia de sexo/gênero - conforme alguns sacerdotes, as categorias homem/mulher e masculino/feminino devem corresponder às expectativas sociais esperadas para cada ser sexuado. Em virtude disso, tratar de homossexualidade nas comunidades-terreiro, ao contrário do que possa parecer, é um tema delicado, restrito e rodeado de tabus. Palavras-chave: Candomblé; Gênero; Sexualidade; Homossexualidade." Candomblé accepts homosexualism because it is a religion where sin does not exist. It does not matter whether you are a man, a woman or gay. Your sexual choice does not matter. [...] You can see it. It is a religion of homosexuals." This is how a filho-de-santo answers a question about the remarkable presence of homosexuals initiated into the orixás ' religion. If compared to other denominations, hostile or indifferent to nonheterosexual orientations, candomblé and other Afro-Brazilian religions are indeed more tolerant to the participation of homosexuals, allowing them to hold all positions in the ritual hierarchy. However, based on the literature and on a field research carried out in the São Paulo metropolitan region, we realized that those affiliated to candomblé , although following one of the religions with the lowest degree of prejudice against individuals due to their sexual preference, also employ in their discourse arguments or mythical narratives, secular principles and values articulated with Christian morality, which support the sex/gender hierarchy: according to some priests, man/woman and male/female categories must correspond to the social expectations of each sexual being. Thus, on the contrary, approaching homosexuality in Afro-Brazilian religious communities is a delicate and restricted matter, surrounded by taboos. Key words: Candomblé; Gender; Sexuality; Homosexuality. (shrink)

This collection joins together sixty essays on the philosophy of love and sex. Each was presented at a meeting of The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love held between 1977 and 1992 and later revised for this edition. Topics addressed include ethical and political issues (AIDS, abortion, homosexual rights, and pornography), conceptual matters (the nature, essence, or definition of love, friendship, sexual desire, and perversion); the study of classical and historical figures (Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, (...) and Kierkegaard); and issues in feminist theory (sexual objectification, the social construction of female sexuality, reproductive and marital arrangements). Authors include Jerome Shaffer, Sandra Harding, Michael Ruse, Richard Mohr, Russell Vannoy, Claudia Card, M.C. Dillon, Gene Fendt, Steven Emmanuel, T.F. Morris, Timo Airaksinen, and Sylvia Walsh. The editor, who is the author of Pornography (1986), The Structure of Love (1990), and Sexual Investigations (1996), has also contributed six pieces and an Introduction. (shrink)

BackgroundIntegrating a sex and gender lens is increasingly recognized as important in health research studies. Past failures to adequately consider sex in drug development, for example, led to medications that were metabolized differently, proved harmful, or ineffective, for females. Including both males and females in study populations is important but not sufficient; health, access to healthcare, and treatment provided are also influenced by gender, the socially mediated roles, responsibilities, and behaviors of boys, girls, women and men. Despite understanding the relevance (...) of sex and gender to health research, integrating this lens into study designs can still be challenging. Identified here, are nine opportunities to address sex and gender and thereby strengthen research proposals.MethodsOntario investigators were invited to submit a draft of their health research proposal to the Sex and Gender Research Support Service at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. The service works to build capacity on the integration of sex, gender, and other identity factors, in health research. Using the SAGER Guidelines and the METRICS for the Study of Sex and Gender in Human Participants as guides, proposals were reviewed to enhance their sex and gender considerations. Content analysis of the feedback provided these investigators was subsequently completed.ResultsNearly 100 hundred study proposals were reviewed and investigators provided with suggestions on how to enhance their proposal. Analyzing the feedback provided across the reviewed studies revealed commonly overlooked opportunities to elevate consideration of sex and gender. These were organized into nine suggestions to mirror the sections of a research proposal.ConclusionHealth researchers are often challenged on how to integrate a sex and gender lens into their work. Reviews completed across a range of health research studies show there are several commonly overlooked opportunities to do better in this regard. Nine ways to improve the integration of a sex and gender lens in health research proposals have been identified. (shrink)

All primates except human beings have thick coats of body hair. This suggests the primate ancestors of human beings likewise had such body hair and that, for some evolutionary reason, lost their body hair. Various theories have been put forward but none is fully adequate. This article presents the “naked love theory.” This theory locates the origin of human hairlessness in the ancestral mother—infant relationship. In this view, hairlessness is ultimately the adaptive consequence of bipedalism. Because of bipedalism, ancestral (...) infants lost their prehensile feet and thus lost the ability to grasp the mother's fur with their feet, as do other primate infants. Early bipedal mothers were thus under pressure to carry the infant. Therefore infants survived only if mothers had a strong desire to hold them. Because of the pleasure of skin-to-skin contact, the desire to hold the infant would have been stronger in mothers possessing a hairless mutation that enabled them to give birth to hairless infants. Survival of these infants would have then been greater than that of hair-covered infants. The hairlessness that began to appear in this context of maternal selection was then reinforced by sexual selection in the male—female sexual relationship. This is because a hairless sexual partner would have enabled the hairless individual to recreate the pleasure of skin-to-skin contact in the mother—infant relationship. This theory then helps to explain the evolutionary origins of romantic love. (shrink)

The lack of importance traditionally ascribed to human-nonhuman animal relationships in the social sciences has meant that while commercial sex in the human realm has been well documented, very few socio-cultural studies of commercial sex involving nonhuman animals have been undertaken to date. However, the growing recognition that nonhuman, as well as human, animals are “actors” means that their role in the sex trade, becomes problematic and eminently worthy of academic attention. This article considers a very particular instance of commercial (...) animal sex—that practiced on stud farms in West Wales, where the breeding of autochthonous Welsh cobs is of immense political, social, economic, and cultural significance. This study found that in this context Welsh cobs are expected to embody specific gender ideals in what is an inherently inter-subjective relationship. Through their animals' performances, human caregivers are able to negotiate their own ideas about gender roles, and these in turn determine those individual animals used for breeding and those not. (shrink)

The term ars erotica refers to the styles and techniques of lovemaking with the honorific title of art. But in what sense are these practices artistic and how do they contribute to the aesthetics and ethics of self-cultivation in the art of living? In this book, Richard Shusterman offers a critical, comparative analysis of the erotic theories proposed by the most influential premodern cultural traditions that shaped our contemporary world. Beginning with ancient Greece, whose god of desiring love gave (...) eroticism its name, Shusterman examines the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition and the classical erotic theories of Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Japanese cultures, before concluding with medieval and Renaissance Europe. His exploration of their errors and insights shows how we could improve the quality of life and love today. By using the engine of eros to cultivate qualities of sensitivity, grace, skill, and self-mastery, we can reimagine a richer, more positive vision of sex education. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

Some of my best friends are women, but I would not want my sister to marry one of them. Modern-minded persons criticize me for manifesting such out-dated prejudices, and would like to send me to Coventry for a compulsory course of reindoctrination. They may be right. It could conceivably be the case that in due course the Sex Discrimination Act will be tightened up, even to the extent of our recognizing that there are no ‘good reasons why the State should (...) not recognize contracts which are in all respects like marriage, except for the sex of the parties concerned’. We can envisage a society so enlightened that the relations between men and women will be purely platonic and it will be a matter of no concern whether two people are members of the opposite sex or not: or, alternatively, our feelings could be so completely homogenized, that it will make no difference to an emotional relationship whether Leslie and Julian have only one Y-chromosome between them, or two, or none at all. In that event I shall be shown to be wrong, and my critics entitled to erect a monument to female equality on my grave. But I have doubts, and suspect that long after I am dead men will go on falling in love with women and women will continue to find their hearts wooed and won by men. And this fact, if it is a fact, makes a profound difference to our social institutions. I want to follow out the logic of social differentiation, relying as little as I can on putative facts about the differences between the sexes. Scientifically attested knowledge is scarce in this field. Many academics take refuge in a safe suspension of judgment, but this is a craven dereliction of duty. We have yet to develop an adequate theory of knowledge in social matters, and only by thrashing out the apparently telling arguments on this and similar issues can we clear our minds about the nature of social knowledge. Moreover, if those who might argue rationally draw back from doing so, they leave the field clear for others who suffer from fewer inhibitions and fewer scruples. And finally, serious social consequences can follow from public confusion about the logic of a situation, and what things are possible and what desirable. There is a danger that in our attempts to remedy the real wrongs done to women we shall only succeed, as with much modern legislation, in making a bad case worse. (shrink)

How is love different from lust or infatuation? Do love and marriage really go together “like a horse and carriage”? Does sex have any necessary connection to either? And how important are love, sex, and marriage to a well-lived life? In this lively, lucid, and comprehensive textbook, Raja Halwani pursues the philosophical questions inherent in these three important aspects of human relationships, exploring the nature, uses, and ethics of romantic love, sexuality, and marriage. The book is (...) structured in three parts: _Love_ begins by examining how romantic love differs from other types of love, such as friendship and parental love. It asks which properties of love are essential, whether people have a choice in whom they love, and whether lovers have moral obligations to one another that differ from those they owe to others _Sex_ demonstrates the difficulty in defining sex and the sexual, and examines what constitutes good and bad sex in terms of pleasure, 'naturalness', and moral permissibility. It offers theoretical and applied ethical approaches to a wide range of sexual phenomena _Marriage_ traces the history of the institution, and describes the various forms in which marriage exists and the reasons why people marry. It also surveys accounts of why people should or should not marry, and introduces the main arguments for and against gay marriage. Features include: suggestions for further reading online eResource site with dowloadable discussion questions a clear, jargon-free writing style. (shrink)

In this paper I will consider whether there is something intelligible in finding value in having or aspiring to a certain kind of relationship which includes sex as a central feature. I argue that a scientific explanation can tell us only about the mechanics of sex, not what it feels like or means to us. Thus, we need to consider the meaning and significance of sex in relation to what we typically value about romantic love. I argue that sex (...) is partly constitutive of the central goods of romantic relationships, and can be an important vehicle for romantic love in two ways. It can express romantic love and it can ‘make love’, creating and intensifying it. This is because four of the central goods that we want from romantic love: 1) pleasure, (2) intimacy, (3) vulnerability and care and (4) union, can all be found in sex. Because of this, we seek romantic partners to whom we are sexually attracted and we are sexually attracted to people, in part, because they would make a good romantic partner to us. Nonetheless, this does not imply that a romantic relationship becomes less valuable the less sex it includes. (shrink)

This third brand-new 'Star Wars & Philosophy' title once again takes a fresh look at the franchise with all-new chapters. The focus of this volume is the more recent entries into the franchise, including hit TV shows such as THe Mandalorian. Modern applied philosophy is also used to analyse the Star Wars universe: In addition to thorny metaphysical questions about the nature of time and free will, this volume highlights the staggering cultural impact of George Lucas's universe. The newest Star (...) Wars narratives tackle ethnicity on alien worlds and how love and sex with a droid like L3-37 would work ("It works"). The connections between the Separatist Freedom Movement and the struggle for social justice in the USA in the 21st century are brought to light. And philosophical second looks at Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi prove there is much more to this controversial entry in the Skywalker saga. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 67 Leila J. Rupp Queer Dilemmas of Desire The dilemmas of desire confronting young women in contemporary US society are all too familiar. In the face of the persistent double standard that separates sluts from good girls, young women mobilize a variety of strategies: they lack desire, deny desire, restrain desire, police desire, and sometimes embrace desire. They (...) confront expectations to be sexy but not too sexual even as they insist on the right to be just as sexually active as men. Even in the hookup scene on college campuses, potentially liberating in its facilitation of noncommittal sexual encounters, young women worry about hooking up too much. It is a familiar story, but one that most often leaves behind young women with queer desires. Where they do appear, there are hints that they are not as likely to suppress their desires as straight women, no doubt because it is hard to ignore one’s desires when they fly in the face of heteronormative expectations. But it is also hard to come to grips with queer desires, and that is why the dilemmas I explore here are different. Unlike young straight women working to control their desires, the queer students whose stories I tell report awareness and acceptance of their attractions, sometimes from a very young age. Yet they encounter other kinds of dilemmas, especially uncertainty about the boundary between erotic love and intense friendship, a dilemma harking back to an earlier world of romantic friendship. And in the end, despite a contemporary social context in which nonnormative sexualities are more visible than ever before, 68 Leila J. Rupp experiencing queer desires continues to elicit confusion. Much has changed, but much has not. We know a great deal about straight dilemmas of desire. On the one hand, the double standard that separates sluts from good girls has persisted, despite the loosening of restrictions we associate with the sexual revolution of the long 1960s. In the face of slut shaming, young women continue to mobilize a variety of strategies, which Deborah Tolman has documented so eloquently in Dilemmas of Desire. Young women of color face additional obstacles to enjoying their desire, as the Latina girls we encounter in Lorena Garcia’s Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself make clear through their policing of their own and other girls’ sexuality in the face of racist stereotypes of unrestrained sexuality and teenage motherhood.1 On the other hand, a whole raft of commentators depict young women increasingly insisting on the right to be just as sexual as men. From Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs to Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex to Nancy Jo Sales’ American Girls, critics lament young women embracing sex as a form of empowerment.2 The tension arising from the contradictory responses of young women to the demands placed on their sexuality is nowhere clearer than in the ongoing debate about the impact of hookup culture on women. Is hooking up good for women because it allows them to be sexual while pursuing their studies and career goals unencumbered by intimate relationships, as Hannah Rosin has suggested? Or is it, as Kathleen Bogle first argued in Hooking Up, exploitative in fashioning sexual encounters around men’s preference for sex without commitment? Or is it somewhere in between, with some 1. See Leora Tanenbaum, Slut! Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation (New York: HarperCollins, 2000); Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (New York: Berkeley Books, 2002); Sarah A. Miller, “’How You Bully a Girl:’ Sexual Drama and the Negotiation of Gendered Sexuality in High School,” Gender & Society 30, no. 5 (2016): 721–44; Deborah L. Tolman, Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Lorena Garcia, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 2. Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005). See also Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape (New York: HarperCollins, 2016); Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women on the Global Market: Irigaray and the Democratic StateNicole Fermon (bio)Best known for her subtle interrogation of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray clearly also conducts a dialogue with the political, proposing that women’s erasure from culture and society invalidates all economies, sexual or political. Because woman has disappeared both figuratively and literally from society [see Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing”], Irigaray conceives the contemporary ethical (...) project as a recall to difference rather than equality, to difference between women and men—that is, sexual difference. She characterizes relations between men and women as market relations in which women are commodities, objects, but never subjects of exchange, objects to men but not to themselves: women do not belong to themselves but exist “to keep relationships among men running smoothly” [TS 192]. Women under these conditions require imaginative ways to reconfigure the self, to subvert the melancholy and regression of masculinist economies and envisage a future in which women would not be ashamed of the feminine, would experience it as a positivity worth emulating.Irigaray contends that after the gains of egalitarian politics are carefully examined, the inclusion of women in the political arena has failed to take into account women’s distinct and different position from men, and from each other, as well as perpetuating the fiction of the “neutral” citizen, the ahistorical individual citizen of the nation-state. It is that fiction Irigaray dispels in her critique of liberal democratic politics and its creation, “citizens who are neuter in regard to familial singularity, its laws, and necessary sexual difference” [SG 112] in order to benefit the State and its laws. The subject is male; the citizen is neuter. Who is the female citizen in contemporary society? What is the ethical elaboration of the contractual relations between women and men, and between sexed individuals and the community? How do women imagine a distinct set of rights and responsibilities based on self-definition and autonomy, given the particular strictures of contemporary politics—that is, the market-driven, antidemocratic nature of the current economic national and global forces? Irigaray suggests that “the return of women to collective work, to public places, to social relations, demands linguistic mutations” and profound transformations, an embodied imagination with force and agency in civil life [TD 65].Irigaray warns that if civil and political participation is construed in overly narrow terms, if focus is on economic or judicial “circuits” alone, we overlook the symbolic organization of power—women risk losing “everything without even being acknowledged” [TD 56]. Instead an interval of recognition can expand the political to include the concerns and activities of real women, lest silence imply consent to sexual neutrality, or more likely, to women’s obliteration under men’s interests and concerns. Women’s insistence on self-definition and wage labor, on love and justly remunerated work, [End Page 120] testifies to the obduracy of women’s difference, one that is not likely to disappear. The patriarchal family is still the legal norm, even when certain exceptions are made, while enduring questions regarding women’s health and children’s physical welfare as priorities beyond market considerations are consigned to legislative obfuscation, still a political afterthought. Instead, in the US the liberal state removes the slender welfare net specific to women and children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and fails to provide medical coverage to those who are among the most vulnerable of its citizens. Women without access to the legal protection of sex-neutral citizenship, poor working women without language (the money for an effective “mouthpiece” to represent their distress in a court of law), are further disempowered by liberal politics’ insistence on sexual neutrality—that is, on repression or amnesia regarding the lived experiences of women.Sexual difference is key to any project of self-definition by women. Irigaray insists on the sexual nature of this self-definition, not solely for its obvious procreative necessity, but because the natural world is a source of renewal and fecundity which requires attentive interrogation and respect [SG 15]. This rebirth seems alien to the structure of male politics, which instead seem to provoke disasters (Bhopal, Chernobyl, or the current runaway... (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 1 - 39 Through a novel set of texts drawn from Plato, Porphyry, Plotinus, Ps. Julian, Proclus, Hermeias, Synesius and Damascius, I explore how anagogic _erōs_ in master-disciple relationships in Neoplatonism contributed to the attainment of self-knowledge and to the transmission of knowledge, authority and inspired insights within and outside the _diadochia_. I view anagogic _erōs_ as one of the most important channels of non-discursive pedagogy and argue for the mediating power of anagogic (...) _erōs_ in the attainment of the main goal of the Platonist: reorienting desire from sensible to intelligible beauty and changing one’s ontological status to become like god and attain union with the divine. After considering the problematic nature of Socratic _erōs_, its skeptics and detractors, I discuss the dynamics of philosopher-disciple relationships and the experience of anagogic _erōs_ in the following: the attack on Porphyry and defense by Plotinus following Porphyry’s recital of an ecstatic poem on _Hieros Gamos_, the concealment of anagogic _erōs_ behind the authoritative façade of an oracle, the intensely devotional private letters of Ps. Julian to the aged Iamblichus and of Synesius to his female master Hypatia; the identification of anagogic _erōs_ with theurgic ascent in Syrianus’s school according to Proclus and Hermeias and the experiences of anagogic _erōs_ outside the _diadochia_ in Damascius’ _Philosophical History_. I conclude that the true and correct practice of philosophy had much, if not everything to do with the anagogic _erōs_ between the true philosopher, the bacchant and the philosopher in training, aspiring to become transformed from thyrsus-bearer into bacchant. The privileged and exalted status given to the divine lover ensured the transmission of the philosophical tradition in all its richness, preserving both its discursive and non-discursive aspects as a system of thought, as a way of life and as a way of being and loving. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dwelling in the GapsGalen SanderlinHave you ever wondered what it would be like to be a mythical being? As a hermaphrodite, I exist in a culture that sees only male or female. Those of us who don’t fit into the rigid sex binary are left out of many of the protections offered to our cousins who more neatly fit the two categories. This leaves an enormous gap in (...) cultural definitions and societal acceptance of my fundamental being.My journey has three main threads: 1) My personal and often rocky self–development, as I have come to understand and accept what it means to be a hermaphrodite, and finding others of my tribe; 2) recognizing the harm done by my medical treatment and actively seeking to change how the medical system treats hermaphrodites, starting from birth onwards; and 3) identifying what was done to me as a human rights violation.I was born in January of 1975. No genetic test was done at the time. My body looked male and my assigned sex/gender was male. As a child, I gravitated toward “male” toys. In 1989, a rural– MD noted that I was not experiencing puberty like my peers and she recommended that my parents take me to a teaching hospital in Seattle for tests. A pediatrician referred me to the adolescent medical division, and from there I was referred to an endocrinologist. After conducting many invasive tests, including drawing blood and comparing my testicles to a bead ring of ersatz testicles, the endocrinologist diagnosed me with Klinefelter’s Syndrome and a karyotype of 47,XXY. I was prescribed testosterone injections to affirm and strengthen the male identity I was assigned at birth and to prevent my body from developing secondary female sex characteristics (breasts and hips).Soon after the shots started I bulked up, adding muscle and hair everywhere. I also became dangerously aggressive and moody. I began to have serious self–esteem issues and a drastic increase in risk–taking behavior as my body was subjected to medical intervention that my parents innocently followed.The prescribed hormone treatment fractured my psyche—what I know now to be a common defense mechanism experienced in trauma survivors. The portion of my consciousness that existed prior to testosterone became deeply buried to prevent harm, and I experienced the emergence of a new “entity.” With each change in prescription, new fractures occurred: testosterone cypionate to enanthate shots, to patches, to gels.The physicians did not consider my feelings or preferences during recommendations or treatment. I feel I was forced into a “male” body based on a medical emergency they created to ease societal concerns.Last February I decided to stop hiding. Tearing the mask off has brought a flood of emotions hidden behind old traumas. I’d been living openly as an intersex person, but still deeply closeted, if not from the public—worse, from myself.Here is the writing that came pouring out of me as I’ve been accessing my repressed memories:I felt the first stirrings of my existence in August of 1989, like a fleeting visage of a long lost lover passing just out of view. The timing of the universe—Out of the infinite we are born, but in this case the body we are to occupy was already housing many other souls. Is this some mistake? Asked to be patient I waited... Late in the year of 1989 I was borne on testosterone wings into an imaginary masculine role/body.Molded in the image of Adonis, Hermes was forced to submit. No longer sexless or ageless—lost in a sea of supposed pressures and roles. My assumed gender [End Page E10] was male. Why!?! Screaming, thrashing, and damaging all around me, no way to express the horror of being so brutally manhandled.My guide Galen/Juniper were excised from our psyche—lost behind a barrier. The only solace was a shared beat: 1,2,3,4 over and over. Was this the pounding of our heart? Thank god for our love of music least we lose ourselves entirely.Why do they insist on calling me Galen? I no longer knew who this was. I... (shrink)

In 2003, the United Kingdom's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority published a report entitled Sex Selection: Options for Regulation. The report outlined the findings of a 2-year review of available sex selection techniques and recommended that the United Kingdom ought not to permit any regulated technique to be used other than for medical reasons. In so doing, it reflected the widespread opinion—repeatedly expressed in the public consultations that formed the cornerstone of the HFEA's review—that there is something ethically unacceptable, or (...) at least ethically suspect, about sex selection for nonmedical, or “social,” reasons. (shrink)

Our amorous and erotic experiences do not simply bring us pleasure; they shape our very identities, our ways of relating to ourselves, each other and our shared world. This volume reflects on some of our most prevalent assumptions relating to identity, the body, monogamy, libido, sexual identity, seduction, fidelity, orgasm, and more.The book covers common conflicts and confusions and includes work by established scholars and innovative new thinkers. Philosophically challenging but highly readable, the volume is ideal for a wide range (...) of courses on love and sex, including those taught in philosophy and gender studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 24.1 (2004) 3-22 [Access article in PDF] Love, Lust, and Sex: A Christian Perspective John Berthrong Boston University School of Theology Prologue When I was assigned the topic of love and sex (and I decided to add lust/desire as the link between the two), I immediately consulted with a number of my colleagues at the Boston University School of Theology.1 The response of my colleagues (...) was uniform. Representing different theological disciplines and denominational backgrounds, they noted that the answer as to the Christian perspective on sex was simple: don't; but if you do, be sure not to enjoy it. If this seems a vast and hasty overgeneralization, please consult Mark Jordan's new book (2002) on Christian sexual ethics to see that this confident and consistent rejection of sex and pleasure has been the dominant and main position for the entire history of the cumulative Christian tradition.2 As Clifford Bishop has noted, the West has held "a wounded body" in ambiguous embrace as chronicled by the history of its written discourse and artistic representation of sex.3 Once my colleagues had delivered this ironic teaching, they did go on to give me good advice as to how to grapple with the topic, as well as to wish me well in the attempt.I then decided to take solace in Daoism, often a good idea for a despondent Christian with strong Confucian tendencies, but came across this quote from Livia Kohn's new study of the tradition: "Anyone who commits debauchery and indulges in sex will suffer from insanity. Having passed through this, he will be born among the sows and boars."4 So much for differences between Daoism and Christianity—though I should point out that Kohn blames Buddhist influence for such a retrograde teaching. One wonders what will happen to women who act in a similar fashion. However, I was cheered in my search when I read the great Tiantai master Zhiyi's account of the matter: "It is like fighting bandits. Bandits are the root of glory; it is because a general is able to destroy bandits that he attains fame and reward. Infinite lust is a seed of the Tathagata in just the same way. It makes the bodhisattvas come up with an infinite number of Dharma-ages in response."5According to Mark Heim, Dante had a slightly more charitable view: "Lust is a type of shared sin; at its best, and so long as it remains a sin of incontinence only, there is mutuality in it and exchange."6 At least Dante thought we were in it together. [End Page 3] Moving on to a history of early modern Christian views of sex, which makes sense because this is probably the set of views that informs the modern period as well, I discovered why mainstream Christians were so concerned about the proper teaching of sexual ethics when I read the following: "... as the Ranters in seventeenth-century England proclaim, 'What act soever is done by thee in light and love, is light and lovely, thought it be called adultery....No matter what Scripture, saints, or churches say, if that within thee do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned.'"7If Daoists, Buddhists, and early modern Christians all agree and then disagree, then this is serious business indeed.Then I started to read about the contemporary history of sex, which I discovered was born, with a vengeance, about the same time as the new theology of dialogue, circa 1970. Even the scholarly, and hence most serious in tone, literature on sex is vast.8 I commend it to anyone who is not convinced that we have lived through and probably are still experiencing a new paradigm shift in the Christian worldview. My thesis is that the worldview transformation is the imaginative articulation of the shifting social grounds that have cried out for a new ethics of sex.9 But perhaps things are not so simple. Does the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s demand a new worldview or did... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sexual Difference as Model: An Ethics for the Global FutureGail SchwabIn Éthique de la différence sexuelle (1984), Luce Irigaray targeted language and love—for her, inseparable from each other—as the two areas of focus for the elaboration of an ethics of sexual difference. The heterosexual couple seemed to have taken on a new, and somehow inappropriately central, importance in Irigaray’s thought in the early eighties; however, the projected mutations (...) in language and love theorized in Éthique did not exclusively concern the heterosexual relationship, even though many readers of Irigaray expressed just such reservations about the book. Éthique foregrounded the couple in the love relationship in order to rethink the philosophical basis of ethics in general, to develop new paradigms, beyond or outside of Western totalizing phallo- and logocentrism, for human relations—not only relations between women and men, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, relations among women and relations among men. Irigaray carried on this project in subsequent works, in Sexes et parentés (1987), which as the title explicitly indicates, opens up the ethical debate to familial and genealogical issues and broadens her focus to include children and the ethical basis of their relationships to parents and more generally to adults of both sexes, and in Sexes et genres à travers les langues (1990), a cross-cultural report on her empirical studies of gender differences in language usage, which sheds new light on the linguistic and communicational issues she had presented in Éthique and even before, in several seldom read and even more rarely analyzed works of the late seventies and early eighties. J’aime à toi (I Love to You) (1992) returns specifically to the more traditionally philosophical approach to the problems of language and love and their intertwining, and carries on the work projected in Éthique, but it goes much further in both the theoretical and the practical development of the concept of sexual difference as the foundation for a new ethics, a new culture of universal validity. J’aime à toi can be read as a follow-up to Éthique and as a founding text for the construction of an ethics of difference modeled on sexual difference, an ethics for the future of humanity in all of its diversity.Western Feminism and the Global FutureIrigaray is very much aware of the limits of the various Western political and academic feminisms, of the need to broaden their scope, both horizontally across cultures and vertically within specific cultures, before they can serve as the basis for a new ethics. Irigaray expresses the concern that Western feminists, rather than represent the exploited women of the world, may exploit them ideologically for their own personal or political purposes, at the risk of preventing them from coming to a feminism of their own making, appropriate to their own cultures and historical moments. “Certain women do implement power strategies—including the power of the media—but not solely for the benefit of the exploited women they use as an alibi. They thus run the risk of clouding the issues and [End Page 76] preventing their consciousness from being raised” [Irigaray, J’aime à toi 15]. 1 Irigaray calls this “egological” feminism (Dare I invent a new term here? Now we have “egofeminists” as well as “ecofeminists”...) and demonstrates its totally undemocratic orientation, despite its representative claims.Certain militants..., practicing direct democracy or an egological feminism, based on their own real, or imagined, needs and desires, rather than on those of all women, leave women subject to existing legislation. Indifferent to the rights necessary for all women—including the little girls of the present and the future, and the women of other cultures—they make decisions that perpetuate, and even aggravate, through unnecessary misunderstandings, the injustices done the female gender.[J’aime à toi 13]As a feminist, in general, it always pains me to read criticisms of feminism, even cogent and theoretically valid criticisms, and I am even now painfully aware of the political dangers of criticizing feminism myself in a public forum such as this one. However, if I have managed to learn anything from the works of Western feminists of color and from Third World feminists, it is... (shrink)

The relationships between female sex workers and their noncommercial male partners are typically viewed as sites of HIV risk rather than meaningful unions. This ethnographic case study presents a nuanced portrayal of the relationship between Cindy and Beto, a female sex worker who injects drugs and her intimate, noncommercial partner who live in Tijuana, Mexico. On the basis of ethnographic research in Tijuana and our long-term involvement in a public health study, we suggest that emotions play a central (...) role in sex workers’ relationships and contribute in complex ways to each partner's health. We conceptualize Cindy and Beto's relationship as a “dangerous safe haven” in which HIV risk behaviors such as unprotected sex and syringe sharing convey notions of love and trust and help sustain emotional unity amid broader uncertainties but nevertheless carry very real health risks. Further attention to how emotions shape vulnerable couples’ health remains a task for anthropology. (shrink)

According to Xenophon, the hetaira "gratified" her patron as a philos, participating in an aristocratic network of gift exchange , while the pornê, as her name signified, trafficked in sex as a commodity. Recent writers on Greek prostitution have acknowledged that hetaira vs. pornê may be as much a discursive opposition as a real difference in status, but still, very little attention has been paid to the period of the "invention" of this binary. Hetaira meaning "courtesan" first occurs in Herodotus (...) and does not exist in Homer: hence, the conceptual category of the hetaira is an invention of the archaic period. What needs generated the constitution of this category? And what conceptual "work" was the opposition hetaira-pornê doing in Greek culture in the period of its inception? This paper addresses these questions through a reading of fragments of archaic lyric-predominantly those of Anakreon-as well as consideration of Attic vase painting. I suggest that the hetaira-pornê opposition participates in the overarching tension between the aristocratic symposium and the public sphere in archaic Greece. Oswyn Murray has suggested that the symposium constitutes itself as a kind of anti-city with its own rules and conventions. Part of the discursive exclusion of the public sphere is the complete suppression of the city's monetarized economy from the domain of the aristocratic symposium, and it is this impulse to mystify economic relations for sex that generates the category of the hetaira within a framework of gift exchange. But if the motives for this discursive invention are economic, they are also political: the hetaira affirms and embodies the circulation of charis within a privileged elite, while the pornê figures the debased and promiscuous exchanges of the agora. (shrink)

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine. Only the mediation of another can establish an individual as an Other. In so far as he exists for himself, the child would not be able to understand himself as sexually differentiated. In girls as (...) in boys the body is first of all the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that accomplishes the comprehension of the world: it is through the eyes, the hands, and not through the sexual parts that children apprehend the universe." -/- My aim is to develop an interpretation of this passage, which starts with one of the most iconic sentences in the history of feminist thought. Beauvoir asserts that only in virtue of the significance others attribute to their sexual parts do children come to understand themselves as sexually differentiated. This is the phenomenon Beauvoir refers to when she speaks of “the mediation of another.” Her claim here, I argue, is that becoming a woman is predicated on developing such a self-understanding. -/- Many readers have argued that this passage epitomizes Beauvoir’s conviction that there is an important difference between sex and gender. On such a reading, Beauvoir might be said to describe the transition between two states: the state of the newborn who has a sex but no gender identity yet (“who is not a woman”) and that of the grown person who has both a sex and a gender identity (“who has become a woman”). I argue that this reading is untenable, and for two reasons. First, there is no evidence in The Second Sex that Beauvoir means to establish a distinction between a person’s biological properties and her social identities. Second, this distinction does not make sense of Beauvoir’s understanding of the body as a situation. Being a woman, I will argue, is an aspect of the body-as-a-situation. The body-as-a-situation is the instrument through which freedom is exercised, and it is shaped by the social significance of bodily features. By contrast, biological properties cannot be predicated of the body-as-a-situation. As such, they are not properly speaking attributes of the self. In other words, Beauvoir does not theorize a nature/culture distinction, but aims to describe the social significance of bodies and constraints on women’s freedom. (shrink)

Sex determination in the germ line may either rely on cell‐autonomous genetic information, or it may be imposed during development by inductive somatic signals. In Drosophila, both mechanisms contribute to ensure that germ cells are oogenic when differentiating in females and spermatogenic when differentiating in males. Some of the genes that are involved in germ line sex determination have been identified. In other species, including vertebrates, inductive signals are commonly used to determine the sex of germ cells.

Feminism is the movement to end women’s oppression. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) (...) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. This entry (around 12 000 words in length) outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender. (shrink)

John Wesley insisted that love is the “sum of all” in real Methodism, Christianity, and True Religion. This “sum” includes “God is love,” the two love commandments, and all beliefs, affections, and good works that are derived from, express, and nurture love to God, neighbors, and every creature God has made. Wesley expressly rejected Biblical doctrines and practices that are unloving such as predestination, God hated Esau, and the many malicious and vengeful imprecatory Psalms. Wesley’s example (...) encourages us to reconsider LGBTQ issues in light of “What would be the most loving thing to do?,” and to reject such unloving and unethical Biblical commandments as putting to death all people who work on the Sabbath, all practicing male homosexuals, and both the male and female partners involved in adultery. What else? Taking Wesley very seriously might require changes in the curriculum of Wesleyan divinity schools, and in the contents of Wesleyan preaching. (shrink)

Asking whether the sexes are natural kinds amounts to asking whether the categories, female and male, identify real divisions in nature, like the distinctions between biological species, or whether they mark merely artificial or arbitrary distinctions. The distinction between females and males in the animal kingdom is based on the relative size of the gametes they produce, with females producing larger gametes (ova) and males producing smaller gametes (sperm). This chapter argues that the properties of producing relatively large and (...) small gametes are causally correlated with a range of other properties in a wide variety of organisms, and this is what makes females and males natural kinds in the animal kingdom. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between sex and gender: while the difference between the sexes is biologically grounded, the difference between genders is socially based. Since gender depends in part on the perception of sex, whether or not gender is real or not does not depend on whether sex is, since social reality is constituted in part by our perceptions. The claim that sexes are natural kinds in the animal kingdom does not imply that the biological differences among female and male humans do and should have social consequences. (shrink)

The issue of gender is one of the important indicators for understanding religious interpretations at the individual and social levels. One of the responsible institutions in shaping the gender approach in Turkey are the Faculty of Theologies. The majority of the students who are studying in theology faculties and who will take part in the religious services of the society after completing their education are women. It is clear that the religion and gender understanding of female students of theology (...) faculties will have various levels of influence on the religious and social life of women and men in society, now and in the future. This article, which is studied with a qualitative research method, focuses on the religious and gender understanding of female students of theology faculty. The most basic conclusion reached in this article; the female students of the faculty of theology do not have a homogeneous understanding of religion and gender, they have traditional and modern approaches together. The students are mentally inconsistent and indecisive about many issues related to gender.Summary: Gender perceptions are One of the areas that have changed rapidly with the modernization processes. The issues concerning gender and religion recently have become a matter which is the subject of intense debate in Turkey. Theology faculties also take part as a party to the debates and tensions about gender and religion. This study focuses on the gender and religious understanding of the female students of the Faculty of Theology and to examine the intellectual and material factors that nurture them. The scope of the study was limited to Dicle University Theology Faculty female students. The data of the study was obtained by the qualitative research method. In this article, which takes the religion and gender understanding of female students of Theology Faculty as the main problem; the ontological value of women, the authority of men over women, the paid work and management of women in the public, the change of the Shari'ah provisions on gender with social change, the beating of women and the themes formed in this context are examined.The religious and social status of women in Muslim societies was not shaped by the Qur'an or practices of the Prophet, but by the discourse created by hadith narrations and the influence of economic and political conditions. The development of this discourse was also influenced by the image of the ‘seductive’ Eve and the patriarchal culture of Mesopotamia, which were inherited from the Jewish and Christian tradition.Women's social position within the traditional society structure was legitimized by religious traditions, some of which date back to pre-Islamic times, and by the contribution of the rising jurisprudence and ascetic movements in the historical process and has resisted change for centuries.Nearly all of the female students of the Faculty of theology consider that there is no difference between men and women ontologically in the context of the value that Allah gives to both sexes.According to them, the physical and emotional naivety of women cannot be interpreted as the ontological worthlessness of women or as their lack of intellect and religion.About half of female students think the final decision in the family should not always be in the male.According to them The Prophet's practices on this subject are a very important example. In some cases, he consulted his wives and followed their suggestions. Therefore, narrations that trivialize the thoughts and demands of women in the family have cultural and not religious influences.All female students think that women can work outside the home on a paid basis. Moreover, according to the vast majority of female students, women can be managers in the public sector. The students who are in this view think that the narrations stating that the woman cannot be a manager in the public can be ignored for reasonable reasons. About one-third of female students think that the Shari'a provisions in Islamic law regarding women and family may be able to changed with new jurisprudence, while one-third think that some of them may be able to changed with the change of social conditions. Another view shared by nearly a third of students is that Sharia provisions on gender will not be changed over time. Nearly two-thirds of the female students in the research sample do not approve of beating women under any circumstances. A third of female students think that a woman can be beaten if she disobeys her husband. Some of them are confused about how to interpret the verse about the beating of women.It is unthinkable that the Faculties of Theology, which cannot be an actor of religious social change, stay away from the wind of change of a rapidly modernizing society. The rapid flow of time of change on the one hand, and the absence of a tradition or strategy of the Faculties of Theology on the other, resulted in the Faculties of Theology becoming the object of social change in many contexts. This situation made the Faculty of Theology's understanding of religion hybrid, fragmented and unstable between traditional and modern approaches and quite open to the effect of political conjuncture. In this context, although the understanding of gender in theological faculties is not at the same level in all, it can be said that traditional understandings are in the form of a softened form in favor of modernity.The students of the Faculty of Theology at Dicle University are mostly grown up in the Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia regions and are generally members of the lower-middle societies. In most of the female students who come from a social structure where the social status of women is quite low and girls are regarded as worthless compared to boys, an awareness be formed about the social position of women during the education of the Faculty of Theology. Through the study of the Faculty of theology, female students realize that religion is not responsible for the otherized position of women, but for religionized traditions. Two main factors determining the gender understanding of women students of the Faculty of theology can be mentioned. These can be roughly categorized as the main sources of religion and their interpretation by denominations, as well as the socio-cultural habitats of the students and their individual experiences. On the subject of gender, there is a tension between verse, Hadith and their interpretations made by sects and the values and norms of modernity internalized by female students. At Dicle University Faculty of Theology, it is not possible to talk about a learning system and intellectual accumulation that would allow to overcome this tension. This causes mental and emotional bifurcation in female students and leads them to become caught up in a vortex between religious and social reality on many issues. An important consequence of this is the lack of updated religious norms to guide them in many issues that have emerged as an alternative to religious beliefs and practices in the context of gender and have become established values and have common practices in modern life, and have led them to modern secular tendencies and this leads to an internal secularization. The lack of updated religious norms to guide female students in many subjects that are widely practiced in Modern life leads them to modern secular tendencies, which lead to an insider secularization. The fact that female students are mostly traditional in discourse but modern in action on gender and religion makes this situation testable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 623 Jaye Cee Whitehead, Kath Bassett, Leia Franchini, and Michael Iacolucci “The Proof Is in the Pudding”: How Mental Health Practitioners View the Power of “Sex Hormones” in the Process of Transition In the United States today, popular discourse touts the power of “sex hormones” and hormone receptors in the brain to chemically produce gender expressions (manifested in (...) physical sex traits, behaviors, and attitudes) and identities (a sense of self as feminine or masculine). These accounts range from common assumptions that Western ideals of femininity (such as empathy understanding, cooperative orientation, nurturing behavior) and masculinity (rational/spatial understanding, competitive orientation, violent behavior) are produced by corresponding sex hormones, to studies that reduce complex gender identities and macrosocial economic phenomena to presocial, binary, hormonal processes.1 For sociologists, accounts that reduce complex identities to internal hormonal reactions are problematic for two primary reasons: first, they are inaccurate because they fail to examine how hormonal reactions are embedded in a complex cultural process of meaning and interpretation; second, they operate as bioreductive ideologies that obscure the social power inherent to the process of gender identity construction. In what follows, we extend both of these insights by examining mental health 1. For an example of a hybrid popular-scientific account of the power of sex hormones to destabilize economic structures, see Jon Coates and Joe Herbert, “Endogenous Steroids and Financial Risk Taking on a London Trading Floor,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 16 (April 2008): 6167–72. 624 Whitehead, Bassett, Franchini, and Iacolucci practitioners’ divergent interpretations of the power of sex hormones in the process of gender transition.2 In doing so, we examine the cultural power of sex hormones in crafting gender identities without reproducing reductionist interpretations of trans embodiment. Perhaps what is most perplexing about the way we speak of sex hormones is that we know it is inaccurate to describe these hormones as sexed; scientists have acknowledged since the 1930s that they are neither sex specific in their function, nor in terms of their location in male or female bodies.3 In her extensive historicization of sex hormones, Anne Fausto-Sterling concludes that it is more accurate to call androgen- and estrogen-based hormones, “steroid hormones” as they have functions that are not confined to corresponding sexed bodies. In fact she urges scientists to “break out of the sex hormone straightjacket” and to look at steroids as just one of a number of components that are important to the creation of sex and gender, including environment and experience.4 Scholars also point to an inextricable link between the chemical operation of hormones and the social process of constructing meaning, both at the level of social interaction and macrocultural constructions of sex categories and gender ideologies.5 While brain organization/activation theory attributes sex and gender differences to hormonal interactions within the developing brain, Fausto-Sterling questions the distinction between activation and organization by pointing out how “the brain can respond to hormonal stimuli with anatomical changes…hormonal systems, after all, respond exquisitely to experience, be it in the form of nutrition, stress, or sexual activity (to name but a few possibilities ).”6 Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Fausto-Sterling argues that the power of hormones is best understood according to the model of the 2. “Gender transition” is a controversial phrase, as it implies that transgendered individuals who receive hormone therapy are changing identities. We are only using it for lack of clear alternative phrasing, not because we believe body modifications change gender identities. 3. See Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones (New York: Routledge, 1994). 4. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 193–94. 5. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body. 6. Ibid., 232. Whitehead, Bassett, Franchini, and Iacolucci 625 Möbius strip, wherein internal components of the self are always connected to and continuous with outer components such as culture and environment.7 In other... (shrink)

Although moral psychologists and feminist moral theorists emphasize males’ interest in justice or fairness and females’ interest in care or empathy, recent work in evolutionary psychology links females’ interests in care and empathy for others with interests in fairness and equality. In an important work on sex differences in cognitive abilities, David Geary (1998) argues that the evolutionary mechanism of sexual selection drives the evolution of particular cognitive abilities and selection for particular interests. I mount two main challenges to Geary’s (...) claims. First, I argue that female social and intrasexual competitive environments evolve, which challenges the assumption that such environments are largely nonkin-based and characterized by reciprocity. Second, I grant Geary’s entire characterization of female environments, but argue that the natures of reciprocal relationships themselves do not require and may not select for interests in fairness and equality. This analysis not only challenges claims regarding sex differences in moral interests, but also suggests the need for a diachronic model of male and female social and intrasexual competitive environments. In addition, I propose a return to Trivers’s (1971) focus on the suite of emotions underlying reciprocal altruism as properties and features of individuals as fodder for selection. (shrink)