Peak Libido


Book Description

What is the carbon footprint of your libido? In this highly original book, Dominic Pettman examines the mutual influence and impact of human desire and ecological crisis. His account is premised on a simple but startling observation: the decline of libido among the world’s population, the loss of the human sex drive, closely tracks the destruction of environments worldwide. The advent of the Anthropocene leads to the decline of eros, the weakening of the link between sexual pleasure and human reproduction, and thus, potentially, to human extinction. Our capacity to care for one another in any meaningful way is being replaced by a restless, technologically-enhanced zombie drive. The environmental crisis of our time is also, and simultaneously, a crisis of human reproduction and of interpersonal intimacy. What Freud called ‘libidinal economy’ has morphed into libidinal ecology. Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers from Georges Bataille to Donna Haraway, Pettman explores the implications of peak libido, linking this development to the new cultural interest in eco-sexuality, polyamory, and other cases of the ‘greening of the libido’. Peak Libido is a forceful reminder that our hearts and loins are primarily ecological organs, beholden to their wider environments, and, as such, they share the same fate.




Twist of Fate


Book Description

From Ancient Greece to contemporary times, themes of fate and destiny have served as a central worldview for many. These compelling ideas have guided those in battle, and provided influence and inspirations for politicians, philosophers, and artists. Despite a pervasive concern with fate, we find that an explicit discussion of this construct is absent from psychological theory. Twist of Fate reconciles contemporary psychological research with the ancient and frequently held position of fatalism that was common in that era. The Greek mythological history of the "Moirae" (the triad of goddesses known as the "Fates") offers a unique perspective on human beings by illustrating how fate and destiny influence a variety of behaviors such as drug addiction, spirituality, sexual activity, aggression, and other applied psychological topics. An analysis of the "Moirae" integrates diverse ideas from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and Nietzsche's philosophy into a fatalistic view of the human personality. The analysis raises the issues of possibilities for personal change, the role of clinical interventions, and what role freedom actually plays in the human experience. Twist of Fate also accounts for recent developments in personality theory and research by shedding new light on findings from evolutionary psychology, narrative theory, and trait psychology. The result is an integrative personality theory that takes the reader from Nietzsche to neuroscience.




A Curious History of Sex


Book Description

This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. The act of sex has not changed since people first worked out what went where, but the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world. Attitudes will change and grow – hopefully for the better – but sex will never be free of stigma or shame unless we acknowledge where it has come from. Based on the popular research project Whores of Yore, and written with her distinctive humour and wit, A Curious History of Sex draws upon Dr Kate Lister’s extensive knowledge of sex history. From medieval impotence tests to twentieth-century testicle thefts, from the erotic frescoes of Pompeii, to modern-day sex doll brothels, Kate unashamedly roots around in the pants of history, debunking myths, challenging stereotypes and generally getting her hands dirty. This fascinating book is peppered with surprising and informative historical slang, and illustrated with eye-opening, toe-curling and meticulously sourced images from the past. You will laugh, you will wince and you will wonder just how much has actually changed.




CANTOS LIBIDOS


Book Description

The poet has endeavoured to place his pure emotions into words. Having found a compatible love mate encouraged him to extend an initial adventure into a search for the more engaged fusion of heart/mind/and soul. An inexplicable driving force of desire and lust became a mutual survival tool for the mature aged partnership that extended to the state of soulmates, who would seek the limits of intimate sensualities. Defining features of sex weren't alone penis in vagina (PIV), but more so a natural longing for engaging one's entire body with all the sensuality of one's skin transferring one's feelings to the partner, with the alternatives of manual and oral lovemaking, thereby learning to know one's partner and her desires intimately. "Perhaps at that stage of mature love, our libidos were still intact to a good extent and therefore furthering our desires and we could therefore satisfy our demands of pleasuring our partners successfully," the poet experienced indeed. Indeed, the so-called 'sacred triad' in lovemaking leads to experience a fusion of heart/mind/and body. "It was an experience;" the poet said, "I would wish for all couples, especially all mature ones". The poet's soulmate described this culmination in mature love as "winning a lottery ticket." Intimacies on- and offline lead to the desire of tasting each other in "flesh and blood", finally experiencing the real physical togetherness, the foreplay actions thru' cyber-love prepared beforehand in all delightful details. Basically, intense communication prepared the way to greater physical and mental fulfilment. Continual foreplay and a description of one's sexual fantasies one wished to share, less egotistical demands and the poet's a wish to satisfy his sexual partner first. Indeed, elderly people are capable of experiencing strong love. In that sense, the poet has written his first-hand experiences, when the lust had culminated in wonderful intense orgasms.




The Sexual Century


Book Description

Over the course of the past century, sexual liberation has transformed the way in which most of us regard our bodies and live our sexual lives. Now a preeminent psychoanalytic theoretician on sex and gender discusses what has gone into this unquiet revolution-the roles played by sexologists and psychoanalysts, antibiotics and birth control, the liberation movements, and Freud’s insight that sex has as much to do with the mind as with the genitals.In this collection of new and previously published papers, Ethel Person writes of the centrality of sexuality to our identity. She describes the role of fantasy in desire, its different expression in the sexes, and the way in which desire is inevitably intertwined with power. Her classic papers on transvestism, transsexualism, and cross-dressing homosexuals, written with Lionel Ovesey, help us to understand how gender and sex develop in all of us. The public acceptance of the transsexual, says Person, is emblematic of the profound scientific and intellectual shifts that have taken place in the past hundred years. The way that sex and gender develop and are experienced and expressed is the resultnot only of nature and nurture but also of the cultural zeitgeist, its unspoken values and biases.




The Space of Sex


Book Description

As film and television become ever more focused on the pornographic gaze of the camera, the human body undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming both landscape and building, part of an architectonic design in which the erotics of the body spread beyond the body itself to influence the design of the film or televisual shot. The body becomes the mise-en-scène of contemporary moving imagery. Opening The Space of Sex, Shelton Waldrep sets up some important tropes for the book: the movement between high and low art; the emphasis on the body, looking, and framing; the general intermedial and interdisciplinary methodology of the book as a whole. The Space of Sex's second half focuses on how sex, gender, and sexuality are represented in several recent films, including Paul Schrader's The Canyons (2013), Oliver Stone's Savages (2012), Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike (2012), Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon (2013). Each of these mainstream or independent movies, and several more, are examined for the ways they have attempted to absorb pornography, if not the pornography industry specifically, into their plot. According to Waldrep, the utopian elements of seventies porn get reprocessed in a complex way in the twenty-first century as both a utopian impulse-the desire to have sex on the screen, to re-eroticize sex as something positive and lacking in shame-with a mixed feeling about pornography itself, with an industry that can be seen in a dystopian light. In other words, sex, in our contemporary world, still does not come without compromise.




Gender as Love


Book Description

In recent years, the issue of gender has become a topic of great importance and has generated discussion from the kitchen table to the academy. It is an issue that churches and Christian educational institutions are grappling with as well, since gender is a crucial aspect of identity, affecting how we engage socially and understand our embodiment. Upstream from all these conversations lies a more basic question: What is gender? In Gender as Love, Fellipe do Vale takes a theological approach to understanding gender, employing both biblical exegesis and historical theology and emphasizing the role human love plays in shaping our identities. He engages with and explains current theories and debates, but his approach is unique in that it avoids the present impasse between social constructionist and biological essentialist paradigms. His emphasis is on love as identity forming. This fresh, holistic approach makes an important contribution to the literature and will benefit scholars and students alike. Foreword by Beth Felker Jones.




An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies


Book Description

An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly is the first introduction to queer theory written especially for students of literature. Tracking the emergence of queer theory out of gay and lesbian studies, this book pays unique attention to how queer scholars have read some of the most well-known works in the English language. Organized thematically, this book explores queer theoretical treatments of sexual identity, gender and sexual norms and normativity, negativity and utopianism, economics and neoliberalism, and AIDS activism and disability. Each chapter expounds upon foundational works in queer theory by scholars including Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Each chapter also offers readings of primary texts –ranging from the highly canonical, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, to more contemporary works of popular fiction, like Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot. Along the way, An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly demonstrates how queer reading methods work alongside other methods like feminism, historicism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. By modelling queer readings, this book invites literature students to develop queer readings of their own. It also suggests that reading queerly is not simply a matter of reading work written by queer people. Queer reading attunes us to the queerness of even the most straightforward text.




Erotic Attunement


Book Description

Heightened awareness of the problem of sexual abuse has led to deep anxiety over adults touching children in nearly any context. This book probes the disquieting issue of how we can draw a clear line between natural affection towards children and perverse exploitation of them.




American Medicine


Book Description