Category: Love and Sex

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The New Sexual World We Have Made and the Return of the Culture Wars

  By Culture War, Feminism, Love and Sex, Sexual and gender equality

In the last fifty years, we have seen a dramatic transformation in both relationships between the sexes and our relationship to sexuality. No one thinks that there is any likelihood that we will return to traditional practices and beliefs. But in the last few months Republican candidates have tried to reignite the culture war that has accompanied these transformations.

One reason that traditionalists continue to call the changes of the last fifty years into question is that of those of us who have turned away from traditionalist ideas don’t give as deep a defense of the new world we have made as we could. We defend sexual freedom, feminism, and the acceptance of homosexuality mostly by talking about the ideals of freedom, individuality and autonomy. The traditionalists answer that those modern ideals are empty and low, a mere excuse for doing whatever we want to do. And they claim that the changes in our lives are deeply in conflict with the ideals of love, marriage, and the care of children. Of course we, too, seek love, marriage and the care of children. But we haven’t asserted as strongly as we should or could that our ideals are not only fully compatible with but enhance our prospects for love, marriage and the care of our children.

This essay sketches a new theory of sexuality that underlies an account of the new sexuality we have been creating as we throw off traditional ideas and build a new way of integrating sexuality into our lives. It’s based on my forthcoming book, Civilization and Its Discontents: Reflections on Sex and the Culture Wars. focus in the essay on Continue reading

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Unrequited Love’s a Bore

  By Love and Sex, Philosophy

It’s not, of course. Not when you have it pretty bad, when it is the only thing about which you can think. And not when you don’t, either. If all the songs, and films that are at least partly about unrequited love were to disappear, half the jukebox slots in America would be empty and the video stores would carry much less stock. Unrequited love is only a bore when you have to hear about it from a suffering friend. And perhaps it is also a bore when you try, as I’m going to do in this essay, to think about how we deal with it. We express or listen to expressions of unrequited love all the time. But there is surprisingly little written about unrequited love that is reflective about the variety of ways in which we might respond to it. And that’s, in one way, surprising because, as… Continue reading

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Rape, domination and sexuality

  By Love and Sex, Sexual and gender equality

Matt Ruben wrote a good op-ed in the Daily News today that points out that rape is a crime of violence against women and that calls for making the hate crimes law apply to such violence.   I agree with this conclusion.   But in the course of making the argument, Matt repeats a staple of feminist thought when he says that “research has demolished the myth that rape is a crime of lust or passion. It’s a crime of power: Men rape women because they seek to dominate and brutalize them.” That I don’t think is quite right. Rape is a sexual act as well as an act of domination. And we won’t understand rape, or the other ways both vile and much more innocuous, in which men dominate women unless we grasp that. Continue reading

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Dreaming the city of our lives; finding the city of our dreams

  By Love and Sex, Philosophy

Here is a problem for the 21st century: how do you live a life that is changing and flexible and that requires constantly reinventing oneself when there are things in life—family, bodies of knowledge and work, the soul of a person you love—that require long term commitments. Maybe forging a soul of any depth, or getting to know one, is like getting to know a city with broad avenues, narrow alleys, and everything in between; one that holds surprises around almost every corner. You can get to know it only if you can travel back and forth in it from every direction. Not systematically, not with a plan in mind but serendipitously. Eventually, you learn how to make your way through it almost instinctively, knowing at each corner how to get to where else you want to go. That’s Wittgenstein’s understanding of learning your way around a city–and of doing… Continue reading

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The Crooked Thing

  By Language, Love and Sex, Philosophy

To the woman who has me looped. Brown Penny I whispered, ‘I am too young,’ And then, ‘I am old enough’; Wherefore I threw a penny To find out if I might love. ‘Go and love, go and love, young man, If the lady be young and fair.’ Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, I am looped in the loops of her hair. O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon. W. B. Yeats “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.” Immanuel Kant I’ve loved this poem for a long time. But it was only a few years ago that I think… Continue reading

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Your love is not like a faucet

  By Love and Sex, Philosophy, Politics

Love is just like a faucet it turns off and on Love is like a faucet It turns off and on Sometimes when you think it’s on baby It has turned off and gone Billie Holiday Fine and Mellow Your love is like a faucet You can turn it off and on Albert King Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. William Wordsworth Tintern Abbey We usually think that power, strength, and achievement in politics and the world of ideas—and… Continue reading

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Making Sex Last

  By Love and Sex

What part should sex have in our lives? I want to defend one answer to that question, suggested by Tantric sexuality, that says that sexuality of a certain kind can be something that enriches our lives as a whole. (One very important caveat to what follows: I’ve long had some interest in Tantric sex, but have not studied or practiced it in any systematic way. So I don’t want anything I say here to be taken as a serious interpretation of this set of theories and practices.) It has struck me that one way to take the goal of Tantric sex is this: it’s about making sex last. Sex is  a human practice, something that we can spend a little time doing every once in while and in a  way that brings us pleasure but has little carryover to the rest of our lives. The goal of Tantric practice is not just better… Continue reading

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Trust, Language, Love, God, and Bobcat

  By Language, Love and Sex, Philosophy

Teshuva—which is usually translated as repentance but literally means return or turning around—is central to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for Jews, which ended at sundown today. This essay is initally about how we turn ourselves around, specifically with how we learn to trust others when we lack some basic trust in the world around us and then it moves on to talk about the connection between trust in others and trust in a process or ideal that we might call God. Much of the beginning of the essay, however, is mostly about my cat Bobcat. How do we learn to trust? People who abuse others typically don’t trust others–they expect to be abused themselves and deep down believe that they have to do unto others before others do unto them. Morality and civic virtue are practices that survive only when we live in a community in which people have some… Continue reading

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The Culture of Viagra and Violence Against Women

  By Love and Sex

A column today by Bob Herbert, and a blog post by a friend, point to the continuing epidemic of violence against women. Thinking about it today led me to do a little work on an essay that will appear in a book I’m writing about politics and sex, called Civilization and Its Contents. The argument of the essay might help us understand some of the sources of violence against women. A warning. This essay is mainly not about violence against women. It’s about certain views of sexuality and certain sexual practices that, I believe, are part of a larger set of misogynistic practices and beliefs that encourage violence against women. I’ll say something at the end of the essay about violence against women. But I take a long and meandering path back to the subject. I initially began this essay because a friendly commentator on the central essay of my… Continue reading

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Eros and Eternity

  By Love and Sex

Hannah Miller’s blog post, which I discussed in my previous post, also points to another way in which the urge to document our lives might be problematic, one that I actually was writing about over the weekend. To get to my point quickly, let me reference a great New Yorker cartoon. A woman is addressing the guests at what is evidently a fairly fancy party. She says, “The video of the first half of the party is now playing in the family room.” The apprehension to which this cartoon points, and that I see in Hannah’s post is this: the urge to document our lives, indeed the urge to reflect on our lives, can be a way to escape from living our lives. (I certainly see, though, why Hannah is writing about it at a family event. The urge to reflect is likely to come forward when one is hanging… Continue reading