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Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl Jun 26, 2006 |
Earlier, I asked the question whether the secret love between Radha and Krishna was like a Pinot Noir, sex in a glass, or whether it was more like a storm in a teacup, a thunderstorm in the making, about to break two lovers. Depending on your point of view, it could be either one or perhaps a little bit of both. Whatever your point of view is, I do think that Kinsey might find a different crowd if he were to repeat his study today. After all, modern technology and urban living conditions have minimized the risks, costs and consequences of the casual affair while maximizing the ease with which one can start one.
Despite the archaic attraction, and despite the fact that our ancestry is filled with casual sex (despite even the evolutionary significance of casual sex), much of the research of sexuality is focused on marriage. This is in part because extramarital sex is brief and fleeting, which makes it hard to study. The secrecy in which it is cloaked makes it even harder. In the famous Kinsey study on sexuality for example, the sheer fact that there were questions about extramarital sex caused many people to refuse to participate in the study. Many of those who did agree to participate and talk to Kinsey about sex, refused to answer the questions related to extramarital sex. After all, casual affairs can have hefty risks, costs and or consequences and Kinsey's participants were keenly aware of this.
For four weeks, we have explored various aspects of desire. We have looked at desire from a mythical standpoint, and last week, we looked at the evolutionary roots of casual sex. I think it's fair to say that causal sex is, and always has been, enormously, ceaselessly and primordially attractive, an attraction evidenced by countless plays, films, novels, biographies, autobiographies and life itself. Zsa Zsa Gabor aptly expresses what might, at least to some degree, lie at the root of the desire for casual sex: that pesky sense that passionate sexual desire can only be found in the transcendence of the mundane routines of domestic life: "I know nothing about sex, because I was always married." What does contemporary research on desire have to say about all of this? How does research on desire compare to research on other aspects of sexuality?
Read the last article in this series for a look at theories of desire.