Freud and Sexual Ethics

Philosophy ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 62 (241) ◽  
pp. 361-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Carr
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Sexual Motives ◽  
Sexual Guilt ◽  
The Common ◽  
Sexual Conduct

The common or lay view of the contribution of Freudian and psychoanalytic theory to our understanding of human sexual conduct seems to be that it is essentially subversive of traditional or conventional sexual morality. For does not the psychoanalytic discovery of psychological causes over which we have no direct control reveal that whatever we may be inclined to do from sexual motives is not a matterfor guilt or shame? Does it not show that much of the sexual guilt and shame that we do experience is merely the product of inhibitions and repressions which are the result of dubiously rational social taboos and parental prohibitions? The main impact of Freudian or psychoanalytic views on modern popular thought about sexual morality andconduct would appear to amount to little more than a collection of such vague beliefs.

Is the Prisoner's Character Indivisible?

1953 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. N. Gooderson
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One ◽  
A Charge

“There is no such thing known to our procedure as putting half a prisoner's character in issue and leaving out the other half.” This observation fell from Humphreys J. in delivering the judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in R. v. Winfield (1939). The purpose of this article is to suggest that at common law this statement is not borne out by principle or by authority. The effect on the common law where the prisoner elects to go into the witness-box in exercise of the statutory opportunity created by the Criminal Evidence Act, 1898, will also be considered. The type of situation that arises is illustrated by Winfield's Case, where the facts, in brief, were that on a charge of indecent assault, W. put in issue his good character for sexual morality, and the prosecution in cross-examination proved his previous convictions for offences involving dishonesty. The court held that such cross-examination was proper. The question is whether the evidence of the good or bad character of the prisoner must be confined to the trait or traits relevant to the type of crime charged. It will be submitted that the evidence must be so confined. On an indictment for murder, evidence of the good or bad character of the prisoner for honesty will be inadmissible. Not only the crime charged but also the circumstances in which it is alleged to have been committed must be considered. If the murder is committed with a hammer, character for peace and quiet on the one hand and for violence on the other will be admissible, but not if it is a case of slow poisoning.

Sexual Ethics: A Comparative Study of MSWs and BSWs

2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Duran Aguilar ◽  
Carol J. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Sexual Contact ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Training And Education ◽  
Course Content ◽  
Sexual Conduct

MSW and BSW members of NASW in one state were surveyed to assess their attitudes about sexual contact with clients and their perceptions about their training and education in this area. Both groups were found to be critical of sexual conduct between social workers and clients and would take action if they became aware of sexual contact between a colleague and a client. The study found over 90 percent of BSWs reporting a moderate or significant level of course content in ethics in one or more courses, compared with 71 percent of MSWs. The authors suggest that more research is needed in order to adequately determine training and attitudes among BSWs and MSWs in the area of sexual ethics.

Early Church

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wheeler-Reed
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Third Generation ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
John Cassian ◽  
Sexual Renunciation

This chapter shows how second- and third-generation Christians wrestled with the familial ideologies codified by the New Testament writers until sexual renunciation became the norm by 300 CE. It begins with an analysis of Tatian’s “encratite” argument, Clement’s emerging ecclesiastical sexual ethics, and Epiphanes’s so-called libertine Christianity. It concludes by demonstrating how all of these ideas coalesce in the writings of John Cassian, whom Foucault deems the quintessence of late antique sexual morality.

"With a Shade of Disgust": Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag

Slavic Review ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 308-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adi Kuntsman
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
Universal Category ◽  
The Common ◽  
Varlam Shalamov ◽  
The Individual

This article addresses a topic seldom discussed in gulag studies: same-sex relations in the camps. In particular, it deals with affective politics of sexuality and class in gulag memoirs and the role of disgust in the formation of sexual and class boundaries. It approaches disgust as existing between the individual and the social, the subjective and the historical, the internal and the external, and traces the ways the gulag memoirs constitute the disgusting, the disgusted, and the boundary between them. At the center of the article are descriptions of same-sex relations in the Kolyma camps of the 1930s-1950s by Evgenia Ginzburg and Varlam Shalamov. Based on a critical reading of these and other memoirs, Adi Kuntsman reveals how same-sex relations among the common criminals are constructed by the memoirists as disgusting because they go against gender norms and against class perceptions of sexual morality. Kuntsman shows how these perceptions of the appropriate, embedded within the habitus of the intelligentsia, are transformed in the memoirs into the universal category of humanness, locating the common criminals, and, by association, anyone who engages in same-sex relations, beyond the bounds of humanity.

Unjust Sex vs. Rape

Hypatia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 746-761 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann J. Cahill
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Theoretical Account ◽  
Gray Area ◽  
Philosophical Account ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Difference

This article returns to a philosophical conundrum that has troubled feminist theory since the topic of sexual violence has been taken seriously, what I call the problem of the “heteronormative sexual continuum”: how sexual assault and hegemonic heterosex are conceptually and politically related. I continue my response to the work of Nicola Gavey, who has argued for the existence of a “gray area” of sexual interactions that are ethically questionable without rising to the category of sexual assault, but whose analysis did not explicitly articulate what these two categories share or what distinguishes them from each other. After summarizing Gavey's position, I summarize my previous articulation of the common ground between instances of sexual assault and examples of sexual interactions in the “gray area.” I then develop a theoretical account of how the two categories differ, arguing that the victim's agency plays different roles in the two types of interactions. Both the fact of that distinction—that we are capable of providing a philosophical account of the difference between sexual interactions that fall into the gray area and those that constitute sexual assault—and its particular content are crucial for the development of a tenable feminist sexual ethics.

Bringing the Body Back to Sexual Ethics

Hypatia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Barnhill
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Small Step ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Ethical Inquiry ◽  
The One ◽  
Ethical Significance

The body and bodily experience make little appearance in analytic moral philosophy. This is true even of analytic sexual ethics—the one area of ethical inquiry we might have expected to give a starring role to bodily experience. I take a small step toward remedying that by identifying one way in which the bodily experience of sex is ethically significant: some of the physical actions of sex have a default expressive significance, conveying trust, affection, care, sensitivity, enjoyment, and pleasure. When people having sex don't in fact have these feelings, the sex can be misleading, even if they've antecedently communicated that they don't have these feelings. This account of how sex can mislead is inspired by a perhaps surprising source, Catholic sexual morality. Analytic sexual ethicists could benefit from emulating Catholic sexual morality's attentiveness to the bodily nature of sex and its ethical significance.

THE EMANCIPATION OF MASTURBATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY HUNGARY

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
GÁBOR SZEGEDI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Sex Education ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
The West ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Way

Abstract In this article, I discuss the emancipation of masturbation in twentieth-century Hungary, focusing on the socialist, Kádár era (late 1950s to late 1980s), which I claim was the time when the discourses concerning masturbation underwent profound transformation. I use Thomas Laqueur's periodization of discourses on masturbation in the West and make the case that in Hungary, due to its twentieth-century political and intellectual history, which affected both the institutionalization of sexology and discourses on sexuality, there is a markedly different chronology. In Hungary, interwar socialists were the first to suggest a new approach toward masturbation but these ideas remained marginal during the Horthy regime and in the ‘Stalinist’ 1950s. In the early years of the Kádár regime, debates about sexual morality reformulated what should be understood under socialist sexual morality. The concept of socialist humanism, especially Imre Hirschler's work, linked early 1960s sex education with the interwar socialist discourse on sex and paved the way to the emancipation of masturbation and the establishment of a post-Stalinist, socialist sexual ethics. In the 1970s and 1980s, iconic sexologists like Vilmos Szilágyi and Béla Buda moved away from socialist humanism and continued Hirschler's work, but mirroring the perspectives of contemporary Western science.

Regulating Interwar Prostitution

2018 ◽  
pp. 62-84
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Women Police ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Law ◽  
Witness Statements

During the interwar years, the state became concerned about an escalation in the extent to which notions of promiscuity and prostitution were overlapping in public discourse. The ‘common prostitute’ had long been used as a cultural and legal reference point against which all standards of female sexual morality were judged. This marginalisation of women who worked as prostitutes was predicated on the prejudicial notion that they were different to other women. Yet, by the 1920s, changes in women’s lifestyles were challenging this form of moral categorisation, and the Street Offences Committee (1927-8) was formed to review the solicitation laws. However, this chapter argues that the creation of the Committee was not a product of concerns about the unfairness of criminalising prostitutes. Instead, the Committee was the product of the Home Office’s concern that a perceived erosion in the notional boundary between promiscuity and prostitution had made solicitation harder to police. Moreover, in paying particular attention to witness statements given to the Committee by members of the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, the chapter shows that even arguments against using the law to control prostitution did not necessarily seek to challenge the idea that the prostitute was morally transgressive.

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