Reviews for Rethinking Sexuality

The average rating for Rethinking Sexuality based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-04-08 00:00:00 Lorraine Mathews Cannot recommend enough this exploration of feminism over the last century. Her discussions of the flip in focus from sexual acts to sexual identities and now back to sexual acts gave me a philosophical undergirding for what I was doing with howtomakeloveto.com, which focuses on acts and never asks what you consider yourself or forces you to encounter your identity in the way it's been talked about for so long. My note on that part: Final section on the role of he HIV crisis on sexual discourse. Main interesting part here was the transition back to a focus from sexual identity to sexual conduct or behavior, which was the focus of all the old laws outlawing certain behaviors. p137 "By the late 1980's, it was evident that there had been a shift in HIV/AIDS health education policy away from talking about risk groups to emphasizing risk behaviors." Academia and society hasn't really caught up to this public health necessity, but the nose of the boat will ultimately turn. Earlier on, there's a wonderful discussion of the queer critique of heterosexuality--or the idea that it is this monolithic practice, so normative and ordinary that it doesn't need to be studied. Another part that I loved documented the various fights among lesbians over sexual conduct: what was the right way to have sex, what was the wrong way. Finally, there was the discussion of justifying gayness. There's the push to say it's genetic, but then that's kind of an apology, on the order of, "I'd be straight if I could but I can't help myself." So then choice is ennobled. My favorite explanation for lesbianism (which the last time I read anything on the topic, had no identified genetic / biological basis) was that every one of us is born to a woman and shares his or her first physically loving relationship with a woman. Therefore everyone, men and women alike, are capable of physically loving a woman. Everyone is a lesbian. There's something I can get behind.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-10 00:00:00 Peter Stone Here's the alternate subtitle for D. Keith Mano's Fergus Dialogues :: "Sex and Cannibalism; or, How to Out=Freud Freud." In other words, this is how one engages Freud's ideas. You will be pleasantly surprised to learn that it is not sex which functions as a cover for traumas xyz, but rather much more disturbing, that sex itself is a sublimate of eating. Oedipus is already a late=period screen. It is a miserable thing to be a human being, knowing that we are not what we were and cannot know what we are not yet. Return to nature? No thanks! Which really begins to bring into question the distinction between liberal and conservative in today's mis-guiding political demarcations, when liberals would return to the 'natural' and the conservative insist upon 'culture and civilization.' It is not a question of whence stems any give issue xyz, whether from nature or nurture, but rather what do we do in the way of responding to and solving issue xyz? More nature or more culture? Is civilization the cause of our problems? Maybe. Is a return to the 'natural' the solution? No. The wound is healed by the spear which smote it. At any rate, one understands very well why The Fergus Dialogues is Mano's son's favorite Mano novel. You will read Take Five because you a novel reader ; and it is Mano's greatest novel in the opinion of this novel reader. But then too do not miss what Mano gets himself up to in Fergus ; all is stripped away straight to the bone ; dialogue of the Platonic type, being perhaps the greatest Platonic dialogue of the twentieth century? Why not. And this Fergus character is as thoroughly Manoan as anything this or that side of Simon Lynxx. That good, yes. Quail that Mano is BURIED.