Lafayette Morehouse, previously known as More University, is an experimental community, or commune, established in 1968, on Purson Lane, Lafayette, California. The community is known by residents in the area as “the purple people”, a nickname derived from the community’s characteristic use of the color purple on their buildings and on some of their vehicles. […]
What happened to one of our most famous feminists? by Julie Bindel. The majority of the women who participated in the research disclosed that they could easily make themselves orgasm by masturbating, and that sex with male partners was far less satisfactory. Of course, telling men that they are rubbish in the sack was — […]
Slow sex, long life. Tokyo’s imperial archives advise what science now confirms: the secret of longevity lies in the gentle arts of the bedroom. by Denis Noble | Aeon Essays Kenny was working with the scientists Katja Simon and Ghada Alsaleh from the University of Oxford on a compound called spermidine – named for its […]
by Heba Yosry | Psyche Ideas, published 5 January 2022. Ibn al-‘Arabi believed that sexuality is the metaphysical path, par excellence, towards the divine.
While we fuss over definitions and pontificate on freedoms, sex and lust and desire and passion and bodies coming together, remain largely undomesticated. by Marilyn Simon. There are a number of prominent tenets that characterize current values surrounding sex and sexuality. The overarching one is, of course, a belief that we are freer, wiser, and […]
by Alison M Downham Moore Long before Viagra, people around the world and throughout history used aphrodisiacs to boost health and improve fertility The era of heightened spice trade after 1400 saw the increased transport of food and medicinal products from East Asia, India and the Middle East into Europe. Following the thriving activities of […]
Popular stereotypes of Islam as a prudish religion ignore rich traditions of freewheeling, explicit erotica and advice. by Mark Hay, Aeon Essays. Numerous hadith suggest that new Muslims often asked the prophet what their conversions would mean for their sex lives. Muhammad responded with lectures on, among other things, consent, foreplay, and the value of […]
Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex? Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession. by Kate Julian
At its core, #MeToo represents a rejection of the sixties’ vision of erotic liberation. by Kay S. Hymowitz. In the quest for what Herbert Marcuse, one of the period’s guiding philosophers, called the “liberation of instinctual needs and satisfactions which have hitherto remained tabooed or repressed,” revolutionaries rejected all forms of “social control” as both […]
by Hugo Schwyzer. This disease, which Greek and Roman doctors believed was caused by a wandering, sex-starved womb, was said to threaten women’s sanity. (Which, of course, is why the term “hysteria” -– from the Greek word “hyster,” meaning uterus –- became a synonym for madness.) Orgasms, or “hysterical paroxysms,” were thought to temporarily relieve […]
by Christopher Turner. JD Salinger, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer were all devotees of the orgone energy accumulator, nicknamed by Woody Allen the ‘Orgasmatron’. Its inventor, Wilhelm Reich, claimed that better orgasms could cure society’s ills. Reich could be said to have invented this “sexual revolution”; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the […]
by Katherine Angel, Current Opinion in Psychiatry 23(6):p 536-541, November 2010. In work going beyond Freud’s own pronouncements, the failure of vaginal orgasm became the conceptual lynchpin of ‘frigidity’; Hitschmann and Bergler defined the condition as the inability of a woman to have a vaginal orgasm. Moreover, the woman desiring clitoral stimulation, as opposed to […]
by Marie Louise Berneri. “Freud’s original theory of sex was revolutionary and evoked the most violent reactions. The story of psychoanalysis is essentially the story of never ending attempts to allay these reactions on the part of a shocked world, and, to make psychoanalysis socially acceptable, sexuality had to be robbed of its real significance […]
by Jeffrey Escoffier. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Wilhelm Reich’s thinking about sexuality on intellectuals and more indirectly on the general culture. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was initiated by people who shared many of Reich’s beliefs (whether or not they got them from him directly) about the detrimental impact of […]
by Georges Didi-Huberman (Author), Alisa Hartz (Translator). (The MIT Press) Paperback – Illustrated, September 17, 2004 Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part.
by John Ince. 2003, Vancouver : Pivotal Press. Scriptural antisexual dogma legitimates erotophobia, makes it seem moral and valid. Further, such dogma insulates erotophobic attitudes from rational debate.
Revolutions are seldom the spontaneous mass upheaval of the downtrodden, provoked beyond endurance by their miserable condition, and the sexual revolution was certainly no exception in this respect. The revolution had its intellectual pro-genitors, as shallow, personally twisted, and dishonest a parade of people as one could ever wish to encounter. They were all utopians, […]
by Rachel Maines. At the same time, hysterical women represented a large and lucrative market for physicians. These patients neither recovered nor died of their condition but continued to require regular treatment.
by Timothy Taylor. Taylor suggests that sexual tastes, prejudices, knowledge and politics not only lie deep in our evolutionary heritage, but also in many instances have actually directed fundamental biological adaptations
The Cultural Construction of Sexuality Published 1987 edited by Pat Caplan (in our library) Page 66, chapter by Margaret Jackson. In many respects, however, Marie Stopes’s sexual ideology was was profoundly reactionary; in common with her contemporaries she exalted the ‘thrills of the chase’ and man’s innate hunting instincts, and contradicted her own commitment to […]
Sherfey’s position consists of three major theses: first, that the early embryo of all human beings is female; second, that by the nature of their physiological structure women are sexually insatiable; and third, that civilization arose as a means of suppressing the inordinate demands of female sexuality that result from its inherent insatiability.