{"id":6963,"date":"2013-12-14T21:49:34","date_gmt":"2013-12-15T02:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/?p=6963"},"modified":"2021-01-16T22:04:18","modified_gmt":"2021-01-17T03:04:18","slug":"civilization-and-its-contents-platonic-reflections-on-sex-and-the-culture-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/?p=6963","title":{"rendered":"Civilization and its Contents: Platonic Reflections on Sex and the Culture Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

A pr\u00e9cis of the book I’m hoping to finish in 2021. I’m going to start linking from this page to posts of of draft chapters soon. Comments always welcome!<\/em><\/p>\n

Civilization and its Contents: Platonic Reflections on Sex and the Culture Wars<\/i> critiques the conception of human sexuality that underlie both left and right in the contemporary culture wars. It presents a radically new \u00a0account of sexuality and its place in human life, one that encourages various good ways of pursuing sex that bring pleasure and\u00a0a connection to other people and\u00a0in a way that\u00a0recognizes and supports the fundamental equality of\u00a0 men and women.<\/p>\n

The three philosophical essays of part one of Civilization and Its Contents<\/i> set out the traditional view of sexuality in some detail and contrasts it with a very different view,\u00a0inspired by Plato and Aristotle (although admittedly an unorthodox interpretation of them).\u00a0 I show that extremes of left and right share a picture of sexuality as a powerful, anarchic, uncontrollable force that come from the lower, animal-like part of our selves. The right holds that civilization is only possible if sexuality, especially female sexuality, is limited and controlled. The far left holds that sexuality must be utterly unconstrained if human beings are to be fulfilled. Following some suggestions of Plato, as well as contemporary evidence about the varieties of sexual expression, I show that while human sexual desire is expressed in our bodies it is given shape and power by our souls. It is neither anarchic nor uncontrollable. It is far stronger in human beings than in other creatures not because of\u00a0the intrinsic power of lower animal-like desires but because the desire for sex is not just bodily but rather is intrinsically relational, shaped by our self-understandings, and powered by deeper human desires including what Freud called our erotic and aggressive desires, which for Plato are two sides of a single human aspiration.\u00a0 Sexuality, on this view, is not a chaotic force that needs either restraint or unfettered freedom, but rather is a way in which we can both secure physical pleasure and express and\u00a0create a \u00a0variety of connections with other people. Sexuality only becomes a source of division between human beings when it becomes allied to extreme forms of the drive for mastery and control, as it has been for much of Western history since the ancient Greeks. It becomes a source of profound\u00a0connection between human beings when allied to the erotic desire to unite with others.<\/p>\n

The four essays of part two of the book trace the development of ideas of sexuality from ancient Athens and Jerusalem to today in a way that reveals how sexuality has been too often allied with what I call dominator sexuality. These essays show how Christian asceticism evolved from the confrontation of Greek Philosophy and Jewish thought with the dominator sexuality of the Greeks and Romans and how in the transition to modernity asceticism was transformed from a way to escape the burdens of everyday life to a way to succeed in everyday life. The modern transformation of asceticism also reversed the ancient notion that women\u00a0are far more sexual than men and instead led to the idea that the incentives created by the chastity of women is the critical means by\u00a0the dangerous and powerful sexual desires of men can be kept in check. (The same transformation\u00a0in thought leads to the first real condemnation of masturbation as a terrible sin rather than a somewhat humorous and harmless practice.)\u00a0Contemporary right wing views of sexuality as well as the\u00a0tendency of modern political communities\u00a0to oscillate between periods of sexual freedom and sexual restraint\u00a0are the result of this\u00a0the modern transformation of asceticism and some central features of liberal political regimes. The last essay in this section “The Trump Movement” uses the analysis of the last three chapters to explain how Trumpism is a version of fascism and why fascism is on the continuum with right wing sexual (and racial) politics and is a permanent possibility in liberal regimes that recurrently generate economic uncertainty \u00a0and stress, to which repression of self and others is the usual response.<\/p>\n

The essays of part three of the Civilization and Its Discontents<\/i> address a number of \u00a0contemporary issues in sexuality. \u201cHaving Sex and Making Love\u201d looks at how sexuality is expressed in different kinds of relationships and why those various relationships are valuable in different ways. \u201cWhy I Don\u2019t\u00a0Chase Women\u201d critiques the account of sexuality presented by contemporary evolutionary psychologists, explores the good of sexuality in marriage, and looks at some possible futures for marriage. \u201cThe Culture of Viagra\u201d looks at what the popularity of this drug\u2014and its frequent failure to solve sexual problems\u2014tells us about how we think (wrongly) about sexuality today. \u201cWhy We Don\u2019t It\u201d looks at contemporary concerns about low\u00a0libido in both men and women\u00a0and suggests\u00a0this problem primarily arises because we misunderstand sexual desire. \u201cRape and Dominator Sexuality\u201d shows how rape\u2014and the culture that encourages it\u2014is connected to the understanding of sexuality that has for too long dominated Western culture. Despite its ironic\u00a0title, \u201cThe Myth of Male Orgasm\u201d explores the nature of orgasm in order to argue that differences between the sexuality of men and women are far overstated and concludes that not only women but men and women have less powerful orgasms than possible \u00a0given contemporary sexual practices, there is no uniquely female orgasm problem that is not a product of those practices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A pr\u00e9cis of the book I’m hoping to finish in 2021. I’m going to start linking from this page to posts of of draft chapters soon. Comments always welcome! Civilization and its Contents: Platonic Reflections on Sex and the Culture Wars critiques the conception of human sexuality that underlie both left and right in the contemporary culture wars. It presents a radically new \u00a0account of sexuality and its place in human life, one that encourages various good ways of pursuing sex that bring pleasure and\u00a0a connection to other people and\u00a0in a way that\u00a0recognizes and supports the fundamental equality of\u00a0 men and women. The three philosophical essays of part one of Civilization and Its Contents set out the traditional view of sexuality in some detail and contrasts it with a very different view,\u00a0inspired by Plato and Aristotle (although admittedly an unorthodox interpretation of them).\u00a0 I show that extremes of left and\u2026 Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[10,14],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p35YuU-1Oj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6963"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6963"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8797,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6963\/revisions\/8797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}