1 resultado para Poverty Religious aspects
em Bucknell University Digital Commons - Pensilvania - USA
Resumo:
This paper explores the religious implications of eroticism in Western culture since the Sexual Revolution, a period at once applauded for its open and immanent view of sexuality and denounced for its shamelessness and promiscuity. After discussing the work and effects of Alfred C. Kinsey, the father of the Sexual Revolution, I focus on a critical appraisal of Kinsey written by French theorist Georges Bataille (Kinsey, the Underworld and Work, in LErotisme, 1957). Bataille situates contemporary Western sexuality within a larger historical movement towards the desacralization of all aspects of human life: sex, under the scientific gaze of the Kinsey team, became simply another object to be analyzed and classified, and good sex defined solely in terms of frequency and explosiveness of orgasm. For many, including Hugh Hefner, this approach to sex occasioned a refreshing awakening from the long dark night of Victorian sexual repression. However, as Batailles protg Foucault has shown, the scientific approach to sexuality often masks a desire to control and delimit sexual behaviour, not liberate it. Moreover, Bataille makes the point that the desacralization of sexuality denudes sex of a vital componenteroticismwhich is necessary for real pleasure and ecstasy. Beyond the moral critiques one often hears leveled against Kinsey and his work, Bataille provides a religious critique, one that stands, perhaps surprisingly, on the near side of sexuality.
