Recent philosophical writing on sexual desire divides broadly into two camps. Reductionists take sexual desire to aim at an essentially physical bodily pleasure, whereas intentionalist accounts take a focus upon the reciprocal interaction of the mental states of the partners to be crucial for understanding the phenomenon. I argue that the apparent plausibility of reductionism rests upon the flawed assumption that sexual pleasure has the same uniform bodily character in all sexual encounters, which rests in turn upon flawed assumptions in (...) the philosophy of mind. Drawing on an Aristotelian understanding of persons as essentially embodied minds, I outline an alternative account of sexual desire, showing how the nature of the sexual pleasure we take in the body of another can be transformed by the significance the person or situation has for us. I proceed to show that my account of sexual desire is able to accommodate the entire range of sexual phenomena, including those that seem to undermine standard intentionalist accounts as well as those that reductionists have difficulty in fully explaining. Finally I make some brief remarks about the implications of my account of sexual desire for sexual morality, suggesting some reasons why it casts doubt on the view that universal participant consent is sufficient for a sexual act to be morally unproblematic. (shrink)

I am deeply worried about your guest editorial,1 please allow me a few bullet points: Trying to dispel some of the counterarguments to sex selection, your argument of prospective parents’ autonomy is void. If anyone has a right to determine his or her sex, it would be the person concerned, in this case the unborn child. ….

argues that when reproduction is sexual, natural selection can explain why individual organisms possess the traits they do. In stating his argument Matthen makes use of a conception of individual organisms as receptacles for collections of genes—a conception that cannot do the work Matthen requires of it. Either these receptacles are abstract objects, such as bare possibilities for organisms, or they are concrete. The first reading is too weak, since it allows selection to explain individual traits in both sexual and (...) asexual contexts. The only concrete entities we might think of as receptacles for collections of genes are male or female gametes. It is true that in the sexual context selection explains why an individual gamete combines with a second gamete of one type rather than another; however, this is not to say that selection explains why an individual organism has the traits it does. (shrink)

John Millar's Origin of the Distinction of Ranks contains one of the first extensive and systematic discussions of the status of women in different societies. In this paper I attempt to show first that a combi nation of circumstances associated with the teaching of moral philos ophy at Glasgow and with the reform of Scots law undertaken by Lord Kames made the status of women a critical problem for Millar. Second, I attempt to demonstrate that Millar drew heavily upon the (...) resources of associationist psychology to explain how female status changed from hunting to pastoral to agricultural to commercial societies and that in doing so he diverged substantially from the perspectives developed by his mentor, Adam Smith. Finally, in view of Millar's extraordinarily positive reputation throughout Europe prior to the French Revolution and in view of the potential relevance of his analysis to early feminism and to mid-19th-century anthropological discussions of early matri archy, I seek to account for why his work was virtually ignored from around 1802 to 1960. (shrink)

God, sex, and economics are all intertwined. The trafficking of people for sex intensifies each year. The sex trade crosses a spectrum from ‘high class’ escorts to sex slaves. The sex industry includes toys, pornography, and the exchange of sex between buyers, sellers, and managers. In this market exists sexual poverty caused by injustice, the imbalance of sexual power between individuals and within structures. Poverty pushes people into the market to sell, to be sold. Theologically there is a harmful, top-down, (...) and irrelevant theology that often ignores our sexuality. Liberation theology’s hermeneutical circle, a circle of action and reflection in community, can address sexual poverty. Its steps include: 1. assessing our situation; 2. analyzing our situation with academic tools; 3. analyzing our faith; and 4. praxis; right action. It can help us to draw the line between sexual exploitation and the celebration of sex as a way to know God. (shrink)

This chapter argues that sex and love are quite different from each other. Specifically, it argues that sexual desire is different kind of entity from romantic love, especially when the latter is understood as the settled abiding commitment between long-term partners. It also explores the normative connections (moral permissibility, obligation, and supererogation) between non-romantic forms of love—friendship, familial, and agapic love—and sexual desire, as this is an under-researched area. Furthermore, the essay argues that sexual desire’s goals clash with the goals (...) of many forms of love because the goal of sexual desire is self-interested whereas those of love are not. (shrink)

Our extant texts never give a fully comprehensive or representative impression of classical literature. Fragments are valuable because they tell—or hint at—a different story. They represent vestigial traces of a counterfactual alternative version of literary history, and they offer tantalizing glimpses of voices or varieties of human experience that were (accidentally or deliberately) excluded from the classical canon. To ‘think fragmentarily’ is to think beyond the canon and to question traditionally dominant modes of thought. This article uses a neglected fragment (...) of Damoxenus (fr. 3 PCG) as a case study for ‘fragmentary thinking’. This extraordinary fragment reveals that Damoxenus’ comedy dramatized a homosexual love story, in sharp contrast to the familiar heteronormative marriage plots of Menander and other Greek and Roman comic playwrights. Careful examination of a single fragment can prompt us to re-examine conventional scholarly narratives of sexuality in New Comedy. (shrink)

The feminist movement was from its start in the 19th century involved in the struggle for better health care for women. The first feminists aimed at better information on birth control and sexuality. The second feminist wave focused on the unequal division of power roles between men and women. A lot of the problems women experienced could be seen as a consequence of their subordinate role in society. At the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s, the discipline women (...) and health or women and medicine was developed. In this introduction to the theme, the developments in this discipline are described. The starting points of the new discipline followed the principles of ‘women’s health care’. These principles can be summarized as the emphasis on control and autonomy by the patient, demedicalization, the importance of the psychosocial context of complaints, empowerment of women and good information and communication. The central issue of the article is: what is the actual scientific state of the art and what important changes have been made on the subject gender and health? The article ends with ideas for future research. (shrink)

본 논문은 성에 대한 존재론적 주장들을 검토하여 성이 존재일반에 내 속한 일탈이자 모순의 핵심임을 밝히고, 그것의 정치적 함의를 도출하는 것을 목적으로 한다. 최근 등장하고 있는 존재론과 실재론들은 담론과 문화를 물질보다 우선시하는 지배적인 철학 담론에 대한 반응으로 생각된다. 특히 페미니즘 담론 내에서도 주디스 버틀러를 비롯한 포스트구조주의와 사회구성주의에 대한 대안으로 다양한 존재론들이 등장하고 있다. 그러나 페미니즘의 핵심 개념인 성과 성차, 섹슈얼리티에 대해서 동시대의 존재론들이 어떻게 다루고 있는가에 관해서는 거의 논의되지 않고 있다. 존재론이 존재들을 가능하게 하는 원리들을 규명하는 것이라면 성에 관한 존재론도 마땅히 (...) 다루어져야 한다. 이를 위해 본 논문에서는 우선 최근 물질과 과학을 존재론적으로 구성하는 신유물론의 몇몇 주장들을 검토하고 그것이 성의 존재론에 어떤 정치적 함의를 주는지 확인한다. 그리고 성과 주체의 동시발생을 그 시작부터 집중적으로 논의해 온 정신분석이 최근 부상하는 존재론과 어떻게 대결하고 어떠한 방식으로 성의 존재론을 논하는지 살펴본다. 그럼으로써 인간중심주의로 퇴행하거나 물질을 간과하지 않고도 성, 주체, 물질, 담론을 다룰 이론을 위한 단초를 마련한다. (shrink)

Asi aždý člověk již slyšel či četl o virtuální realitě : o divech multimediální techniky, které dovedou vykouzlit dokonalou iluzi něčeho, co ve skutečnosti neexistuje. Nasadíte si přilbu, která se postará o vás zrak a sluch, případně navléknete rukavice, které obhospodaří váš hmat, a můžete procházet domy, které nebyly nikdy postaveny, či někde neexistujícím vesmírném prostoru bojovat s neexistujícími vetřelci.

This is a slightly edited version of a talk given by Mrs Claire Rayner, a journalist and broadcaster, to a conference on human sexuality held under the auspices of the London Medical Group in the spring of this year. Mrs Rayner's lively presentation conveys the problems and anxieties which people face in this area, even in this so-called `permissive' age.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault's work has had a significant impact on feminist and lesbian/gay scholarship in the United States. These explorations of gender and/or sexuality in which feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars rely on Foucault's ideas carry significant implications for the organization of knowledge in our culture beyond the issues of gender and sexuality narrowly defined. Many feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars in the United States initially read Foucault primarily as a historian. Since roughly 1985, many such scholars have (...) increasingly considered and critiqued the philosophical implications of his work, elaborating an account of the assumptions about gender and sexuality that reside at the core of ostensibly universal descriptions of human subjectivity. ;Participants in debates about the "social construction" of sexuality during the 1980s observed that Foucault did not originate social constructionist work in the field, widespread assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, the social constructionist position differs importantly from Foucault's analysis of sexuality as the truth of subjectivity. Historians in the United States have modified many of the substantive claims in Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. More recently, scholars have attended less to Foucault's substantive claims in favor of his approach to questions of knowledge and subjectivity. ;Feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars have long suspected that gender and sexuality play a major role in authorizing subjects to produce knowledge. Many such scholars continue within existing modes of inquiry to substitute their own, sympathetic versions of their selves for prejudicial, hegemonic versions. Scholars working off of Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers increasingly suspect that prejudicial assumptions about gender and sexuality lie embedded in the very definition of current modes of inquiry, and thus require a fundamental reconceptualization of knowledge. (shrink)

This article examines changes and continuities in the epistemic and methodological presence of “race” in British imperial demography from 1920 to 1960. It does so in relation to population-level interventions aimed at improving reproduction in the New Hebrides. Through an examination of the sex ratio in relation to debates about demographic decline, the article describes aspects of how sexual selection was connected to race thinking. Taking a balanced sex ratio as a marker of well-adapted, healthy populations—biologically and culturally—the British authorities (...) in the New Hebrides attempted to regulate the bride price in an attempt to level the imbalanced sex ratio. They believed that this intervention would reduce the marriage age of men while also appeasing missionary agendas of changing marriage and kinship practices. I use the metaphor of a “watermark” to think through the conceptual and methodological absent/presence of race in colonial demography and colonial administrators’ attitudes toward and interventions in local reproductive practices. (shrink)

Oogenesis being performed in the ovary shows two different kinds of nuclei in the nursing cells. The above mentioned nuclei are transferred and incorporated into the nuclei of developing eggs, which become sexually differentiated and showWolanski's methyl-green reaction. The sex determination is, therefore, cytologically progamic and genotypical. The spawned eggs in the jelly strings appear first of identical shape and are all coated from the very beginning with grainy bonellian pigment, but afterwards, being reared in free water cultures in the (...) absence of females, they differentiate into distinctly different male and female larvae. The numerical ratio of the sexually differentiated larvae is discussed. The true chromosomes in gamogenesis as well as in somatic cells have not been found. L'oogénèse qui a lieu dans l'ovaire montre deux sortes de noyaux dans les cellules nourricières. Les noyaux mentionnés ci-dessus sont transportés dans les noyaux des ovules en voie de développement qui se différencient sexuellement et montrent la réaction deWolanski au vert de méthyle. Le déterminisme du sexe est, par conséquent progamique et génotypique, du point de vue cytologique. Les ovules déposés en gelée sont d'abord de forme identique et sont tous recouverts, dès le début, du pigment granulé de boneliéne, mais, élevés par la suite, dans des cultures en eau courante, en l'absence des femelles, ils se différencient distinctement en larves mâles et femelles. La proportion numérique des larves différenciées sexuellement est discutée. Dans la gamétogénèse, comme dans les cellules somatiques, les vrais chromosomes restent introuvables. Während der Oogenese, die sich im Eierstock abspielt, zeigen sich zwei differente Kerntypen in den Nährzellen. Diese Kerne werden allmählich in die Kerne des sich entwickelnden Eies übertragen und dort inkorporiert. Das Ei wird dadurch geschlechtlich differenziert und zeigt dann dieWolanski's Methyl-grün Reaktion. Die sexuelle Determination ist somit progam und genotypic. Die in schnurartigen Gallerten abgelegten Eier sind am Beginn von gleicher Form und Grösse, so wie von Anfang an mit Körnchen des Pigmentes Bonellein bekleidet. In freien Wasserkulturen,ohne Weibchen, entwickeln sie sich in deutlich differenzierte männliche und weibliche Larven. Das numerische Verhältniss der geschlechtlich differenten Larven wird diskutiert. Echte Chromosomen sind weder bei der Gamogenese noch in somatischen Zellen gefunden worden. (shrink)

‘Gender’, understood as the social construction of sex, is a key concept for feminists working at the interface of theory and policy. This article examines challenges to the concept which emerged from different groups at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, September 1995, an important arena for struggles over feminist public policies. The first half of the article explores contradictory uses of the concept in the field of gender and development. Viewpoints from some southern activist women at (...) the NGO Forum of the Beijing Conference are presented, Some of them argued that the way ‘gender’ has been deployed in development institutions has led to a depoliticization of the term, where feminist policy ambitions are sacrificed to the imperative of ease of institutionalization. ‘Gender’ becomes a synonym for ‘women’, rather than a form of shorthand for gender difference and conflict and the project of transformation in gender relations. ‘Gender sensitivity’ can be interpreted by non-feminists as encouragement to use gender-disaggregated statistics for development planning, but without consideration of relational aspects of gender, of power and ideology, and of how patterns of subordination are reproduced. A completely different attack on ‘gender’ came from right-wing groups and was battled out over the text of the Platform for Action agreed at the official conference. Six months prior to the conference, conservative groups had tried to bracket for possible removal the term ‘gender’ in this document, out of opposition to the notion of socially constructed, and hence mutable, gender identity. Conservative views on gender as the ‘deconstruction of woman’ are discussed here. The article points out certain contradictions and inconsistencies in feminist thinking on gender which are raised by the conservative backlash attack on feminism and the term ‘gender’. (shrink)

Brian Skyrms has studied the evolutionary dynamics of a simple bargaining game. Fair-dealing is the strategy 'demand 1/2', competing with the more modest strategy 'demand 1/3' and the greedier strategy 'demand 2/3'. Individuals leave offspring in proportion to their accumulated payoffs. The rules for payoffs from encounters penalize low- and high-demanders. The result is a significant basin of attraction for fair-dealing as an evolutionarily stable strategy. From these considerations Skyrms concludes that a disposition to fair-dealing could have evolved. A very (...) different picture emerges, however, when one considers genetic bases for the dispositions involved. A simple two-allele sexual model produces very different stable equilibria in the distribution of behavioral phenotypes. The equilibria for Skyrms's purely phenotypic selection process will not in general be attainable once one enters some simple genetic considerations. (shrink)