... Perhaps no story better illustrates the painfully confined place Western patriarchal culture ... more ... Perhaps no story better illustrates the painfully confined place Western patriarchal culture has ... Patriarchy's primary strategy for controlling women has been female genital mutilation, real and ... Man's cultural discourses about woman's sexuality have mystified the clitoris, making ...
This study investigates how images of saints, suppressed in Protestant England since the sixteent... more This study investigates how images of saints, suppressed in Protestant England since the sixteenth-century Reformation, returned to popularity in the nineteenth century, entangling femininity in metaphors of sainthood and providing sites upon which Victorians waged wars over issues of gender. A first chapter investigates the appearance of saints in diverse Victorian cultural forms, including painting, architecture, gardens, stained glass, poetry, prose and prose fiction. It interrogates the history, rhetorical power, and literary contributions of hagiography, and claims that the way saints became linked with femininity was a peculiarity of the Victorian era. The next three chapters read how saints worked to construct femininity in three Victorian classics: Christina Rossetti\u27s Goblin Market , Charlotte Bronte\u27s Villette , and George Eliot\u27s Middlemarch. Looking at both lives and letters, these chapters demonstrate how the authors used saints to organize and unify their works in ways that protested and revised the hagiographic self-fashioning domestic ideology prescribed as scripts for Victorian women. These chapters enlist Melanie Klein\u27s theories of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions to explain splitting as a defense that at least partially resulted in the sexism Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot endured as women and to provide insight into what each author\u27s saint writing expressed about her experience. Julia Kristeva\u27s Kleinian elaborations are also used to translate Villette \u27s depiction of melancholia as at least partly a consequence of the segregation of Victorian women. An afterward traces the image of the woman as saint in late Victorian and Edwardian literature as it waned as domestic paragon and emerged as Saint Joan of Arc, the primary symbol of British female suffrage. It claims the works of literature Rossetti, Bronte, and Eliot wrote helped to forge women\u27s political solidarity, foster desire for mutuality with men, and stimulate demand for full citizenship that arrived as first wave feminism. The study concludes that although cultural interpellation and self fashioning are intertwined processes, in creating new fantasies of womanhood, Victorian writers changed womanhood itself
This essay responds to The Sex Bureaucracy, in which Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk condemn regulat... more This essay responds to The Sex Bureaucracy, in which Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk condemn regulations of sexual conduct they see metastasizing on college campuses, pursuant to Title IX’s mandate for equal educational opportunities in institutions receiving federal funds. We focus on the authors’ most trenchant critique, which slams efforts to teach sexual health principles and practices on the ground that, in doing so, universities are “regulating sex itself” and interfering with “ordinary sex.” By placing recent sexual health and violence prevention measures in historical and cultural context, we challenge the authors’ assumption that, absent such instruction, sex occurs naturally and unproblematically on college campuses. In addition, contrary to the authors’ negative assessment, we highlight the value and promise of some of the newer developments they contest. We understand such interventions as a form of sex education, which we call “higher sex education,” given both the campus loci and the advancements apparent when compared to many more familiar sex curricula. We show, in context, why such instruction belongs in higher educational institutions and how it has the potential to transform campus sexual cultures and enhance students’ sexual unfolding — preparing them for healthier and more pleasurable sexual futures. We conclude by noting ways in which higher sex education might improve as it continues to evolve.
Peggy Kleinplatz’s second edition of New directions in sex therapy: Innovations and alternatives ... more Peggy Kleinplatz’s second edition of New directions in sex therapy: Innovations and alternatives takes off from where her first edition left off. Issues raised as problematic in 2001 reappear in 2012 as having reached crisis proportion. A ‘‘then’’ and ‘‘now’’ format structures the book’s introduction. The chapter lists tendencies problematic in 2001 as now threatening sex therapy’s efficacy. Some of these include medicalizing sexuality, using performance standards to evaluate ‘‘adequate’’ sexual functioning, failing to integrate goals of sex therapy with those of transformative psychotherapy, excluding social change from sex therapy’s goals and ignoring intersectional perspectives. Adding to these troubling developments, Kleinplatz reports progressive fragmentation of the field of sex therapy and growing divergence in practitioners’ attitudes, which can only confuse potential therapists and clients. She is concerned that the field has little coherence, with some practitioners pursuing developmental and relationship goals, while others set performance goals, often dependent upon erection-enhancing drugs. She worries over the polarization of practitioners’ perspectives: some arrogantly presume ‘‘we have all the answers’’ while others lack confidence ‘‘we have anything distinctive or worthwhile to offer’’ (p. xix). According to Kleinplatz, these are signs of a profession in trouble. In 2001, Kleinplatz claimed sexual ‘‘dysfunction’’ was a product of social rather than individual pathology and called for sex therapists ‘‘to advocate social change’’. In her 2012 edition, she more emphatically warns:
ABSTRACTBackground:Sexuality in later life and its relationship to dementia is a neglected topic:... more ABSTRACTBackground:Sexuality in later life and its relationship to dementia is a neglected topic: greater understanding of the area has the potential to contribute to the quality of life of people with dementia, their family members, and formal carers. We review current knowledge about sexuality, aging, and dementia.Methods:We undertook a review of the recent literature to examine of the following areas: what is known about sexuality and aging, and about attitudes to sexuality and aging; what is known about the relevance of sexuality and aging to people living with dementia and their care; and the management of sexual behaviors causing concern to others.Results:Sexual activity decreases in frequency with increasing age but many older people remain sexually active; there is no age limit to sexual responsiveness; and sexuality is becoming more important to successive cohorts of older people, including people living with dementia and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered elderly pe...
This Essay presents the development of Viagra® as a pharmaceutical model for sex therapy. The aut... more This Essay presents the development of Viagra® as a pharmaceutical model for sex therapy. The authors say that the drug has started the movement for contraceptive equity, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not formally recognized its impact on men and women\u27s use following its 1998 approval. They authors offer that William Masters and Virginia Johnson\u27s theory of the human response cycle shows an innovative view of female sexuality and the identification of sexual dysfunction
The World Health Organization affirms sexuality/reproductive health information and clinical serv... more The World Health Organization affirms sexuality/reproductive health information and clinical services as human rights. This session will examine surveys of social workers’ confidence to assess, provide interventions, make referrals, and advocate for clients’ sexual issues; analyse contemporary models for teaching sexuality to social workers; and evaluate the current use of predecessor’s sexual health education legacy
This essay responds to The Sex Bureaucracy, in which Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk condemn regulat... more This essay responds to The Sex Bureaucracy, in which Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk condemn regulations of sexual conduct they see metastasizing on college campuses, pursuant to Title IX’s mandate for equal educational opportunities in institutions receiving federal funds. We focus on the authors’ most trenchant critique, which slams efforts to teach sexual health principles and practices on the ground that, in doing so, universities are “regulating sex itself” and interfering with “ordinary sex.” By placing recent sexual health and violence prevention measures in historical and cultural context, we challenge the authors’ assumption that, absent such instruction, sex occurs naturally and unproblematically on college campuses. In addition, contrary to the authors’ negative assessment, we highlight the value and promise of some of the newer developments they contest. We understand such interventions as a form of sex education, which we call “higher sex education,” given both the campus ...
Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, 2011
What can sex therapy tell us about sex — and about gender, power, fantasy, culture, and law? Part... more What can sex therapy tell us about sex — and about gender, power, fantasy, culture, and law? Part of a symposium on "For Love or Money? Defining Relationships in Law and Life," this article proceeds from the premise that sex therapy is a vital topic for scholarly investigation in general and feminist analysis in particular. Studying sex therapy illuminates a society’s fantasies of healthy and adequate sexuality and provides insight into the tensions between love and money, the purported divide between private and public, and the reproduction and persistence of gender hierarchy in America, notwithstanding several decades of equality-minded law reforms and feminist developments. In this article, we explore changes in sex therapy over the past sixty years, beginning with the pathbreaking research undertaken by William Masters and Virginia Johnson and the therapeutic interventions they developed, as recounted in Thomas Maier’s recent book, "Masters of Sex: The Life and Ti...
... Perhaps no story better illustrates the painfully confined place Western patriarchal culture ... more ... Perhaps no story better illustrates the painfully confined place Western patriarchal culture has ... Patriarchy's primary strategy for controlling women has been female genital mutilation, real and ... Man's cultural discourses about woman's sexuality have mystified the clitoris, making ...
This study investigates how images of saints, suppressed in Protestant England since the sixteent... more This study investigates how images of saints, suppressed in Protestant England since the sixteenth-century Reformation, returned to popularity in the nineteenth century, entangling femininity in metaphors of sainthood and providing sites upon which Victorians waged wars over issues of gender. A first chapter investigates the appearance of saints in diverse Victorian cultural forms, including painting, architecture, gardens, stained glass, poetry, prose and prose fiction. It interrogates the history, rhetorical power, and literary contributions of hagiography, and claims that the way saints became linked with femininity was a peculiarity of the Victorian era. The next three chapters read how saints worked to construct femininity in three Victorian classics: Christina Rossetti\u27s Goblin Market , Charlotte Bronte\u27s Villette , and George Eliot\u27s Middlemarch. Looking at both lives and letters, these chapters demonstrate how the authors used saints to organize and unify their works in ways that protested and revised the hagiographic self-fashioning domestic ideology prescribed as scripts for Victorian women. These chapters enlist Melanie Klein\u27s theories of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions to explain splitting as a defense that at least partially resulted in the sexism Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot endured as women and to provide insight into what each author\u27s saint writing expressed about her experience. Julia Kristeva\u27s Kleinian elaborations are also used to translate Villette \u27s depiction of melancholia as at least partly a consequence of the segregation of Victorian women. An afterward traces the image of the woman as saint in late Victorian and Edwardian literature as it waned as domestic paragon and emerged as Saint Joan of Arc, the primary symbol of British female suffrage. It claims the works of literature Rossetti, Bronte, and Eliot wrote helped to forge women\u27s political solidarity, foster desire for mutuality with men, and stimulate demand for full citizenship that arrived as first wave feminism. The study concludes that although cultural interpellation and self fashioning are intertwined processes, in creating new fantasies of womanhood, Victorian writers changed womanhood itself
This essay responds to The Sex Bureaucracy, in which Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk condemn regulat... more This essay responds to The Sex Bureaucracy, in which Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk condemn regulations of sexual conduct they see metastasizing on college campuses, pursuant to Title IX’s mandate for equal educational opportunities in institutions receiving federal funds. We focus on the authors’ most trenchant critique, which slams efforts to teach sexual health principles and practices on the ground that, in doing so, universities are “regulating sex itself” and interfering with “ordinary sex.” By placing recent sexual health and violence prevention measures in historical and cultural context, we challenge the authors’ assumption that, absent such instruction, sex occurs naturally and unproblematically on college campuses. In addition, contrary to the authors’ negative assessment, we highlight the value and promise of some of the newer developments they contest. We understand such interventions as a form of sex education, which we call “higher sex education,” given both the campus loci and the advancements apparent when compared to many more familiar sex curricula. We show, in context, why such instruction belongs in higher educational institutions and how it has the potential to transform campus sexual cultures and enhance students’ sexual unfolding — preparing them for healthier and more pleasurable sexual futures. We conclude by noting ways in which higher sex education might improve as it continues to evolve.
Peggy Kleinplatz’s second edition of New directions in sex therapy: Innovations and alternatives ... more Peggy Kleinplatz’s second edition of New directions in sex therapy: Innovations and alternatives takes off from where her first edition left off. Issues raised as problematic in 2001 reappear in 2012 as having reached crisis proportion. A ‘‘then’’ and ‘‘now’’ format structures the book’s introduction. The chapter lists tendencies problematic in 2001 as now threatening sex therapy’s efficacy. Some of these include medicalizing sexuality, using performance standards to evaluate ‘‘adequate’’ sexual functioning, failing to integrate goals of sex therapy with those of transformative psychotherapy, excluding social change from sex therapy’s goals and ignoring intersectional perspectives. Adding to these troubling developments, Kleinplatz reports progressive fragmentation of the field of sex therapy and growing divergence in practitioners’ attitudes, which can only confuse potential therapists and clients. She is concerned that the field has little coherence, with some practitioners pursuing developmental and relationship goals, while others set performance goals, often dependent upon erection-enhancing drugs. She worries over the polarization of practitioners’ perspectives: some arrogantly presume ‘‘we have all the answers’’ while others lack confidence ‘‘we have anything distinctive or worthwhile to offer’’ (p. xix). According to Kleinplatz, these are signs of a profession in trouble. In 2001, Kleinplatz claimed sexual ‘‘dysfunction’’ was a product of social rather than individual pathology and called for sex therapists ‘‘to advocate social change’’. In her 2012 edition, she more emphatically warns:
ABSTRACTBackground:Sexuality in later life and its relationship to dementia is a neglected topic:... more ABSTRACTBackground:Sexuality in later life and its relationship to dementia is a neglected topic: greater understanding of the area has the potential to contribute to the quality of life of people with dementia, their family members, and formal carers. We review current knowledge about sexuality, aging, and dementia.Methods:We undertook a review of the recent literature to examine of the following areas: what is known about sexuality and aging, and about attitudes to sexuality and aging; what is known about the relevance of sexuality and aging to people living with dementia and their care; and the management of sexual behaviors causing concern to others.Results:Sexual activity decreases in frequency with increasing age but many older people remain sexually active; there is no age limit to sexual responsiveness; and sexuality is becoming more important to successive cohorts of older people, including people living with dementia and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered elderly pe...
This Essay presents the development of Viagra® as a pharmaceutical model for sex therapy. The aut... more This Essay presents the development of Viagra® as a pharmaceutical model for sex therapy. The authors say that the drug has started the movement for contraceptive equity, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not formally recognized its impact on men and women\u27s use following its 1998 approval. They authors offer that William Masters and Virginia Johnson\u27s theory of the human response cycle shows an innovative view of female sexuality and the identification of sexual dysfunction
The World Health Organization affirms sexuality/reproductive health information and clinical serv... more The World Health Organization affirms sexuality/reproductive health information and clinical services as human rights. This session will examine surveys of social workers’ confidence to assess, provide interventions, make referrals, and advocate for clients’ sexual issues; analyse contemporary models for teaching sexuality to social workers; and evaluate the current use of predecessor’s sexual health education legacy
This essay responds to The Sex Bureaucracy, in which Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk condemn regulat... more This essay responds to The Sex Bureaucracy, in which Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk condemn regulations of sexual conduct they see metastasizing on college campuses, pursuant to Title IX’s mandate for equal educational opportunities in institutions receiving federal funds. We focus on the authors’ most trenchant critique, which slams efforts to teach sexual health principles and practices on the ground that, in doing so, universities are “regulating sex itself” and interfering with “ordinary sex.” By placing recent sexual health and violence prevention measures in historical and cultural context, we challenge the authors’ assumption that, absent such instruction, sex occurs naturally and unproblematically on college campuses. In addition, contrary to the authors’ negative assessment, we highlight the value and promise of some of the newer developments they contest. We understand such interventions as a form of sex education, which we call “higher sex education,” given both the campus ...
Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, 2011
What can sex therapy tell us about sex — and about gender, power, fantasy, culture, and law? Part... more What can sex therapy tell us about sex — and about gender, power, fantasy, culture, and law? Part of a symposium on "For Love or Money? Defining Relationships in Law and Life," this article proceeds from the premise that sex therapy is a vital topic for scholarly investigation in general and feminist analysis in particular. Studying sex therapy illuminates a society’s fantasies of healthy and adequate sexuality and provides insight into the tensions between love and money, the purported divide between private and public, and the reproduction and persistence of gender hierarchy in America, notwithstanding several decades of equality-minded law reforms and feminist developments. In this article, we explore changes in sex therapy over the past sixty years, beginning with the pathbreaking research undertaken by William Masters and Virginia Johnson and the therapeutic interventions they developed, as recounted in Thomas Maier’s recent book, "Masters of Sex: The Life and Ti...
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