Sex edition by The School of Life Health Fitness Dieting eBooks
Download As PDF : Sex edition by The School of Life Health Fitness Dieting eBooks 
We live under a cheerful delusion that sex might nowadays be easy – because we have been ‘liberated’ from the hang-ups and taboos of the olden days. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Despite a veneer of openness, sex remains an extraordinarily complicated business, hard to discuss and surrounded by shame and unspoken desires. This book provides a relief from the loneliness and confusion, explaining how sex truly operates and what it aims at. The book demonstrates that far from thinking about sex too much, we haven’t begun to think about it as deeply as we should.
Sex edition by The School of Life Health Fitness Dieting eBooks
The texts here range from gentle and charming to brief and unexplorative. Certainly by the end, I was starving for enlightening material. This feels more like an individuals barside musings on the subject than a really enlightening (or reassuring) treatment of various issues. Not without its value, but quite certainly overpriced.Product details
|
Tags : Sex - Kindle edition by The School of Life. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Sex.,ebook,The School of Life,Sex,The School of Life Press,Family & Relationships Love & Romance,Psychology Human Sexuality
People also read other books :
- Cultural Psychology Steven J Heine 9780393911565 Books
- Gershwin Last Waltz and Other Stories edition by Frank Frost Literature Fiction eBooks
- State Fair Book 14 of A Benni Harper Myster Earlene Fowler Johanna Parker 9781428194427 Books
- The Diary Of A UBoat Commander Anonymous Books
- A Short Course in Canon PowerShot S90 Photography book/ebook Dennis P Curtin 9781928873945 Books
Sex edition by The School of Life Health Fitness Dieting eBooks Reviews
This review is based on the hardcover edition of the book purchased from .UK. It seems that US is only offering the kindle version at the time of this review.
As stated on the cover of this book, sex remains an extraordinarily complicated business, hard to discuss and surrounded by shame and unspoken desires. Why this is the case, that we are not as sexually liberated as we think, is touched upon in the book and I would like to explore some ideas a bit further in this review. The two chapters that stood out to me in flushing out of the more perplexing issues about human sexuality were Cross-Dressing and Bisexuality.
In terms of Cross-Dressing, this is really a proxy for gender role reversal. Cross-Dressing is presented as a form of empathy with the other gender in this chapter and I think there is much truth in this perspective. As the Roman playwright Terence once said (p. 67) “I am human, nothing of that which is human is alien to me.” How anchored must we be in the gender we are born? Without trying to repeat the material in the text, I must further ask, how bright are the lines between any of our dichotomies, human-animal, male-female, spiritual-material, good-evil, sound-unsound, valid-invalid? This is a deep-set problem of existence. There seems to be more fluidity in these ideas than we like to believe in our rigid bifurcated way of thinking. For example, is a hermaphrodite person both male and female, or neither male nor female, or beyond male and female? The paradox of bringing together of what would otherwise be two distinct natures aids us in getting past our purely binary way of thinking in general. Gender role reversal can loosen this seemingly unmovable anchor and satiate or natural human curiosity as to what it might be like to be fully human, to fully experience what it is to be human from more than one perspective, be it a gender perspective or other perspective. There is actually a fluidity of perspectives available. I think that interest in one of these alternative perspectives, viz., gender reversal is partly driven by a quest for completeness of experience - to surpass the incompleteness of our existence and life’s experiences; the incompleteness that is prima fascia a human fact of life by the very division of human beings into male and female. None of us can be complete in a purely and exclusively male or female role. Actually, I do not believe that any of us is purely male or female, this is a learned dichotomy. I have known heterosexual men with a strong feminine or more submissive side. I have also known heterosexual women with aggressive self-promotional personal qualities more associated with men. I am have also been acquainted with homosexual individuals of both sexes with various combinations of male and female behavioral, personality and psychological qualities. Even the new reality of four physically distinct genders identities through partially completed sex change operations is too rigid, there is yet more vagueness in these definitions and designators. But all of this is just my personal and very anecdotal experience. At its most positive, gender role reversal allows each of two dominant genders to empathize with the experience of the other gender and experience life from a different perspective. As mentioned in the text, and I agree, there is not anything abnormal or immoral about imagining what it would be like or fantasizing about being the opposite gender, or a combination of the two dominant genders – it seems to me brutish and degrading to think of this in terms of somehow being wrong or unnatural. I do not believe that male or female is a complete state. But by cross dressing, we can occupy both states simultaneously. Rigid gender roles rob of us fuller human potentiality. Sexuality is a bit more fluid then we are led to think from the experience of day to day life. I accept that people are far more diverse and multi-dimensional than can be captured in the simple dichotomy of male or female.
I would also like to further explore another aspect of erotic experience, the subject-object divide. Take the example nude modeling. I see this from a subject-object perspective of experience. Being the nude is often to be the object and this gives one the opportunity to explore the experience of the object. In most of our experience we are in the role of subject and relate to other people on a subject-to-subject basis. To be the sole nude in a given situation, for example as a nude art model, is to assume the role of object while other persons remain in the role of subject. They remain subject-to-subject to each other but subject-to-object with respect to the person who is the nude model, who is different from all the rest in some significant manner. As object, I become a part of the objective world, I am no longer just a subjective being perceiving the objective world, I am now a part of the objective world in the experience of perception for other subjects. This is my attempt to gain access to the world outside of my own subjectively. To be in the role of object is very liberating. Liberated, that is, from the obligations of subject-to-subject interaction, of the high expectations that come with subject-to-subject interaction to say nothing of the awkwardness that comes when said expectations are not met along with the clumsy attempts to be witty, humorous, deep, understanding etc. in order to live up to the what are very likely the overly high expectations that come with the responsibility and expected decorum of being a subject and relating in a subject-to-subject manner. Much of the confusion and problems inherent in subject-to-subject relations come from our tendency to project onto the other subject person what we want them to be rather than see them as they ‘truly’ are. We make of a strawman out of every person that we interact with on a subject-to-subject basis. The person in the status of object avoids having the projections of others, their assumptions, and their assaults, thrust upon them as there is no need for the other subject persons to create the strawman for an object person. To be the object is to be liberated from all this and to be liberated from the inevitable disappointment that comes when subject-to-subject relations move past the initial phase and it is found that the strawman is not the person with whom are or have been interacting. The subject is pedestrian, banal, slavish and uncouth. As the object we can court self-objectification as long as we never lose control over our own charade. After the benefits of objectification have been experienced, we may find that subjectivity may not be worth recovering, how much more liberation is wanted?
To court objectification is to court liberation. This is liberation from Being and Being-in-the-world. I was thrown into subjectivity and now I have found a way to throw myself out of subjectivity. Only the object has inner necessity, the subject is fully contingent. The object is its own necessity, the subject is contingently dependent. The object is easy to understand, the subject is complex, difficult to understand and perhaps not even understandable. If authenticity is found in recognizing Being, my subjectivity, than I found liberation in my rejection of Being, in my self-objectification; in my anti-Being. Non-Being and Something is the way to describe this mode of existence. All this remained invisible to me when I was only in subject-to-subject relationships. As an object, I was a disinterested observer in those who gazed upon me. My emptiness became fulfillment and the noise within became silence.
Great book
I loved this book! It was informative and witty! The realistic description of each act was intriguing!
The texts here range from gentle and charming to brief and unexplorative. Certainly by the end, I was starving for enlightening material. This feels more like an individuals barside musings on the subject than a really enlightening (or reassuring) treatment of various issues. Not without its value, but quite certainly overpriced.
0 Response to "⇒ Read Free Sex edition by The School of Life Health Fitness Dieting eBooks"
Post a Comment