Sexual Interaction in Digital Contexts and Its Implications for Sexual Health: A Conceptual Analysis

Based on its prevalence, there is an urgent need to better understand the mechanisms, opportunities and risks of sexual interaction in digital contexts (SIDC) that are related with sexual arousal. While there is a growing body of literature on SIDC, there is also a lack of conceptual clarity and classification. Therefore, based on a conceptual analysis, we propose to distinguish between sexual interaction (1) through, (2) via, and (3) with digital technologies. (1) Sexual interactions through digital technologies are face-to-face sexual interactions that (a) have been started digitally (e.g., people initiating face-to-face sexual encounters through adult dating apps) or (b) are accompanied by digital technology (e.g., couples augmenting their face-to-face sexual encounters through filming themselves during the act and publishing the amateur pornography online). (2) Sexual interactions via digital technology are technology-mediated interpersonal sexual interactions (e.g., via text chat: cybersex; via smartphone: sexting; via webcam: webcam sex/camming). (3) Sexual interactions with digital technology occur when the technology itself has the role of an interaction partner (e.g., sexual interaction with a sex robot or with a media persona in pornography). The three types of SIDC and their respective subtypes are explained and backed up with empirical studies that are grouped according to two major mediators: consent and commerce. Regarding the causes and consequences of the three types of SIDC we suggest a classification that entails biological, psychological, social, economic, and technological factors. Regarding implications of SIDC we suggest to focus on both opportunities and risks for sexual health. The proposed conceptual framework of SIDC is meant to inform future research.

Sex in Tourism

This book encompasses the diversity and complexity of sex in tourism, including the light, dark and shades of grey between. It studies the affects and effects of diverse sexual encounters in tourism; romance tourism, sex tourism and exploitation in tourism, including the sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism and sexual harassment.

Subtle invasions: Aspects of Samoan women's wartime experiences

<p>During World War Two the peaceful “occupation” of the Samoa Islands by US Forces combined with existing colonial conditions to transform the lives of Samoans in important yet also subtle ways. Drawing on thirty two oral history interviews and the papers of the colonial administrations this thesis examines the wartime lives of Samoan women. Their accounts of their experiences reveal how they understood the war at the time and after years of life experience. Using approaches from social history and women’s history this thesis illustrates women’s agency in finding ways to manage the new social contexts and situations created by the war. The central argument of this thesis is that it was the ordinary business of negotiating daily life during the war that engaged and normalised social changes. These mundane everyday acts were significant historical moments that wove new and unique motifs into the tapestry of Samoan women’s history. The war brought to Samoa a multitude of American servicemen who saw Samoa through a ‘romantic’ lens as an arcadia of unrestrained social mores. In contrast, through this research Samoan women reveal their wartime experiences in their own words. The women’s narratives indicate that the war interrupted lives in many ways causing them to rethink their roles in response to the changes. The four areas of Samoan women’s lives that this thesis examines are their roles in their families and communities, their involvement with the churches, their engagement with wartime popular culture and lastly their wartime sexual encounters. The discussion opens with a portrait of Samoan society during the 1920s and 1930s, depicting the social and political forces that shaped women’s lives and influenced their understandings of their wartime experiences. This discussion highlights how colonial entanglements had a bearing on the different trajectories that women’s lives took during the war. The thesis then turns to explore the arrival of the war, examining the women’s initial experiences and reactions with a particular focus on what they learnt from their experiences and how they adapted to change in the context of their communities and families. The study finds that social transformation was a response to the war’s disruption of physical and cultural space and the critical structures and ideologies that are central to Samoans’ way of life. The second part of this enquiry examines how wartime circumstances affected Samoan women’s sometimes tense relations with the Christian churches. The churches occupied a central place in Samoan society as a provider of both spiritual nurture and secular education for women during the war years, so they deserve specific attention. Wartime conditions created opportunities that expanded and rejuvenated the scope of Samoan women’s agency which had been marginalised and narrowed by Christian influence before the war. At the same time, the war heightened the pre-war tensions between Samoan women’s agency and the power of the churches. Despite the clergy’s reluctance, the churches provided spaces in which American troops socialised with the Samoan population, creating social situations that were difficult to control. The third area analyses Samoan women’s engagement with wartime popular culture and how the consumption of introduced material culture galvanised their autonomy and enabled them to tailor social transformation to suit their personal perceptions. Wartime popular culture in its many forms contributed to the rapid absorption of new ideas and the adaptation of cultural practices. Women’s engagement with this popular culture resulted in ‘on the ground changes’ that stimulated social transformation and which should be appreciated as significant historical moments in their own right. The fourth area of discussion investigates Samoan women’s wartime sexual encounters. The perception that Samoan women’s sexual encounters with American servicemen were characterised by an unrestrained morality on their part ignores other factors that shaped these encounters, including violence and their own bodily knowledge and preparedness. This study shows that Samoan women had a variety of sexual encounters during the war and their narratives speak volumes about the pains of such life-changing moments. There was no single or archetypal wartime experience. The thirty two interviewees experienced the war in different parts of the Samoa islands and their social and political alignment has influenced their perceptions and understanding of their wartime lives. The social transformation brought by the war involved considered responses from the women who sought to balance personal and family interests and Samoan values. Exploring the women’s wartime lives reveals their resilience and their ability to overcome difficulties and effect change for the better of their community.</p>

Subtle invasions: Aspects of Samoan women's wartime experiences

<p>During World War Two the peaceful “occupation” of the Samoa Islands by US Forces combined with existing colonial conditions to transform the lives of Samoans in important yet also subtle ways. Drawing on thirty two oral history interviews and the papers of the colonial administrations this thesis examines the wartime lives of Samoan women. Their accounts of their experiences reveal how they understood the war at the time and after years of life experience. Using approaches from social history and women’s history this thesis illustrates women’s agency in finding ways to manage the new social contexts and situations created by the war. The central argument of this thesis is that it was the ordinary business of negotiating daily life during the war that engaged and normalised social changes. These mundane everyday acts were significant historical moments that wove new and unique motifs into the tapestry of Samoan women’s history. The war brought to Samoa a multitude of American servicemen who saw Samoa through a ‘romantic’ lens as an arcadia of unrestrained social mores. In contrast, through this research Samoan women reveal their wartime experiences in their own words. The women’s narratives indicate that the war interrupted lives in many ways causing them to rethink their roles in response to the changes. The four areas of Samoan women’s lives that this thesis examines are their roles in their families and communities, their involvement with the churches, their engagement with wartime popular culture and lastly their wartime sexual encounters. The discussion opens with a portrait of Samoan society during the 1920s and 1930s, depicting the social and political forces that shaped women’s lives and influenced their understandings of their wartime experiences. This discussion highlights how colonial entanglements had a bearing on the different trajectories that women’s lives took during the war. The thesis then turns to explore the arrival of the war, examining the women’s initial experiences and reactions with a particular focus on what they learnt from their experiences and how they adapted to change in the context of their communities and families. The study finds that social transformation was a response to the war’s disruption of physical and cultural space and the critical structures and ideologies that are central to Samoans’ way of life. The second part of this enquiry examines how wartime circumstances affected Samoan women’s sometimes tense relations with the Christian churches. The churches occupied a central place in Samoan society as a provider of both spiritual nurture and secular education for women during the war years, so they deserve specific attention. Wartime conditions created opportunities that expanded and rejuvenated the scope of Samoan women’s agency which had been marginalised and narrowed by Christian influence before the war. At the same time, the war heightened the pre-war tensions between Samoan women’s agency and the power of the churches. Despite the clergy’s reluctance, the churches provided spaces in which American troops socialised with the Samoan population, creating social situations that were difficult to control. The third area analyses Samoan women’s engagement with wartime popular culture and how the consumption of introduced material culture galvanised their autonomy and enabled them to tailor social transformation to suit their personal perceptions. Wartime popular culture in its many forms contributed to the rapid absorption of new ideas and the adaptation of cultural practices. Women’s engagement with this popular culture resulted in ‘on the ground changes’ that stimulated social transformation and which should be appreciated as significant historical moments in their own right. The fourth area of discussion investigates Samoan women’s wartime sexual encounters. The perception that Samoan women’s sexual encounters with American servicemen were characterised by an unrestrained morality on their part ignores other factors that shaped these encounters, including violence and their own bodily knowledge and preparedness. This study shows that Samoan women had a variety of sexual encounters during the war and their narratives speak volumes about the pains of such life-changing moments. There was no single or archetypal wartime experience. The thirty two interviewees experienced the war in different parts of the Samoa islands and their social and political alignment has influenced their perceptions and understanding of their wartime lives. The social transformation brought by the war involved considered responses from the women who sought to balance personal and family interests and Samoan values. Exploring the women’s wartime lives reveals their resilience and their ability to overcome difficulties and effect change for the better of their community.</p>

“Blurring the Line”: Intoxication, Gender, Consent, and Sexual Encounters Among Young Adults

Social concern about sexual practices and sexual consent among young adults has increased significantly in recent years, and intoxication has often played a key role in such debates. While many studies have long suggested that alcohol plays a role in facilitating (casual) sexual encounters, intoxication has largely either been conceptualized as a risk factor, or researchers have focused on the pharmacological effects of alcohol on behaviors associated with sexual interaction and consent. To date little work has explored how young adults define and negotiate acceptable and unacceptable levels of intoxication during sexual encounters, nor the ways in which different levels of intoxication influence gendered sexual scripts and meanings of consent. This paper explores the latter two research questions using data from 145 in-depth, qualitative interviews with cisgender, heterosexual young adults ages 18–25 in the San Francisco Bay Area. In examining these interview data, by exploring the relationship between intoxication and sexual consent, and the ways in which gender plays out in notions of acceptable and unacceptable intoxicated sexual encounters, we highlight how different levels of intoxication signal different sexual scripts. Narratives about sexual encounters at low levels of intoxication highlighted the role of intoxication in achieving sexual sociability, but they also relied on the notion that intoxicated consent was dependent on the social relationship between the partners outside drinking contexts. Narratives about sexual encounters in heavy drinking situations were more explicitly gendered, often in keeping with traditionally gendered sexual scripts. In general we found that when men discussed their own levels of intoxication, their narratives were more focused on sexual performance and low status sex partners, while women’s and some men’s narratives about women’s levels of intoxication were focused on women’s consent, safety, and respectability. Finally, some participants rely on “consent as a contract” and “intoxication parity”—the idea that potential sexual partners should be equally intoxicated—to handle relations of power in interpersonal sexual scripts. Since these notions are sometimes deployed strategically, we suggest that they may serve to “black-box” gendered inequalities in power between the parties involved.

Pathology, Power, and Patriarchy in The Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth

In both of his political novels, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989), García Márquez employs similar themes and narrative strategies to portray very different protagonists. The Patriarch is a prototypical Latin American dictator, while Simón Bolívar is the hero of Latin American independence. The protagonists share numerous characteristics, such as illnesses that serve as metaphors for their loss of power (physical in the case of the General, mental in the case of the Patriarch), characterization through their numerous sexual encounters, their distaste for losing at games, and their control of national funds. The Patriarch’s pathology functions to underscore a psychological obsession with power, whose loss corresponds to the Patriarch’s mental deterioration and ultimate senility, while the General’s illness relies on traditional associations of consumption as representative of melancholy (as outlined by Sontag in Illness as Metaphor), thus romanticizing the figure of Bolívar. This essay examines how García Márquez employs similar tropes and novelistic elements to evolve very different portraits of his two protagonists: the Patriarch as a mythic figure who epitomizes evil and the abuse of power, and the General as a postmodern historical figure who combines his power obsession with other mitigating characteristics, such as the love of his continent and the dream of its unity. A contraposition of these two characters illustrates social psychological distinctions between the dominance and the functionalist perspectives of power, in addition to clarifying many of the ambiguities inherent in García Márquez’s portrait of Bolívar.

Teorema’s Death Drive

This chapter offers a reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), not only as a major queer film, but as an early work of queer theory. Made in 1968, Teorema appears at a moment of political upheaval, and yet confoundingly discards a narrative of class struggle in order to focus on a series of sexual encounters between a handsome, unnamed stranger (played by Terence Stamp) and every member of a wealthy Milanese family. Does Pasolini’s first film to explicitly depict homosexuality entail a failure of his Marxist politics? Exploring the film’s political aesthetics, the chapter argues that what is at stake in Teorema is an aesthetic inscription of what Guy Hocquenghem, a few years later, would call “homosexual desire.” Far from describing a socially intelligible sexual orientation, this term names a movement towards dissolution and revolution, both material and metaphysical.

Sexual Arenas, Alcohol (Ab)use, and Predatory Leadership: Facilitators of US Military Sexual Violence

Scholars argue that, historically, military women have not been considered equals to men in kinship and, therefore, have and will likely continue to experience more violence and greater fear of violence. The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) may even foster military sexual violence through sexual arenas in work-home spaces, alcohol (ab)use fueling sexual encounters between colleagues, and predatory leadership. This exploratory, grounded theory study captures insights of women veterans ( n = 20) entering service between 1964 and 2016. Full inclusion is alleged, yet military women are objectified and “othered,” targets of sex-based attention, predation, and violence. From these data, military sexual violence (MSV) characterizes the AVF. To mitigate this, a renewed commitment to the US military’s historical ideal of altruistic care is necessary to realize the full inclusion of women and reduce if not eliminate military sexual violence.

Comedy

Heracles appeared in Greek and Roman comedy from the early fifth to the second century BC, and beyond. Comedy drew on myths from his birth to his apotheosis, featuring the Labors, among them the journey to the Underworld. Rich comic material was drawn from Heracles as a man of violence and as a master of sacrifice, the latter leading to themes of massive meat consumption, appetite, and ultimately the comic stock figure of the hungry parasite. The comic imagination also exploited his large sexual appetite, extending his fecundity from tragic myth to human sexual encounters in later comedy. Tragic myth often lurks explicitly behind comic versions of Heracles.