Dear Michael
I was glad to see the reference to Merleau-Ponty
because it suggested another line of thought, one that
hardly dare speak its name in contemporary discussions.
One of the consequences of vesting existential agency in
the body is that its actions are not ‘natural’, they serve
the purposes of the subject. There are several accounts
(the most famous by Sartre) which view sex as a dynamic
power relationship. In Sartre’s account, sexual attraction
is a function of insecurity: individuals are insecure in
their subject-hood. Security is achieved by being
recognised as a subject by someone else, someone the
individuals recognise as a subject-agent. The sexual
encounter is then imagined as a form of mutual
acknowledgement that those involved are subjects. The
situation is unstable because as the initial individuals
feel reassured about their own subject status, they come to
view the other increasingly as an object, i.e., someone
whose opinion or actions are of little or no account.
(The attraction of this model for me is that it relates
the more obviously exploitative sexual relationships of
prostitution or cynical seduction of random individuals to
more socially acceptable romantic conventions.)
In terms of the immediate debate, it may be worth thinking
about the degree to which sexual attractiveness correlates
with perceptions of subject-hood; the observation that
society tends to objectify and depersonalise people with
disabilities is hardly original. An exploration of this
idea could well produce a coherent explanation of why
aesthetic valuations of sexual attractiveness are relative
rather than essential.
Hope folks find these points suggestive,
Bernard
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Bernard Doherty
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