Desiderio e fantasie sessuali: una ricerca esplorativa su donne con differenti orientamenti sessuali

Il desiderio sessuale rappresenta la fase più complessa e soggettiva della risposta sessuale e le fantasie erotiche sono una delle sue manifestazioni più comuni. Negli anni si è cercato di promuovere un approccio più positivo e informato alla sessualità e il seguente studio ha l'obiettivo generale di esplorare se e come desiderio e fantasie sono state modificate in questo processo. Sono stati indagati il desiderio sessuale, solitario e diadico, e le fantasie erotiche in un gruppo di donne con lo scopo di evidenziare eventuali differenze tra alcuni orientamenti (eterosessuale, bisessuale e omosessuale). La ricerca fa parte di un progetto più ampio, che ha come obiettivo la validazione di un nuovo questionario: il Sexual Desire and Erotic Fantasy Inventory (SDEF). Le donne che hanno preso parte alla ricerca sono state 1094, con un'età compresa tra i 18 e i 78 anni e un orientamento eterosessuale, bisessuale e omosessuale. Gli strumenti utilizzati sono stati: un questionario per la raccolta dei dati sociodemografici, l'SDI-2 e lo SDEF. I risultati riportano delle dif-ferenze significative tra gli orientamenti sessuali, con un maggiore livello di deside-rio sessuale solitario (SDI-2: F(2,1090)=28.14; SDEF: F(2,1091)=26.93) e diadico (SDI-2: F(2,1090)=9.29) nelle donne bisessuali, che sembrerebbero riportare anche una fre-quenza più alta in quasi tutte le fantasie presenti nello SDEF.

Voyeurism and erotic stereotypes in fashion photography: Modernity and postmodernity from the Countess of Castiglione to Helmut Newton

Voyeurism and desire are drives linked ontologically to the identity of the photographic and fashion system. Photographing someone is always an act of voyeuristic possession of something that belongs to another, or at least to the surrounding reality that one seeks to – fetishistically – appropriate. But the voyeuristic exercise of photography lives and is nourished by stimulating the exhibitionism of what is in front of the machine’s lens, thus completing and giving meaning to each other. When the context being photographed is fashion, the conditions of insistent voyeurism and intense desire (of emulation, projection, appropriation) become one with the very meaning of the image. In fact, moving from behaviour to the object, most of fashion’s photographic tradition can be traced back to an atmosphere of soft winking and erotic fantasy of the look. In this article, we take into consideration two well-known events that are generically associated with voyeurism and eroticism of the photographic image and fashion, reading them as a parable of the history of the male gaze of women’s bodies: from the triumph of the stereotype in the modern age to its sudden upheaval in the postmodern age. The first case is that of the Countess of Castiglione, who from the mid-nineteenth century was already able to demonstrate how photography could solidify male erotic imagery and, in so doing, present fashion as the style and attitude of an era. In contrast, we find Helmut Newton, famous and acclaimed fashion photographer and exceptional interpreter of the excesses of the eighties, able to bring that male erotic imagery to such exaggerations in the use of codes to make it almost harmless, cooling it.

Conclusion

The conclusion examines the last gasps of the Hollywood novel following the collapse of the studio system. As the inner workings of the industry became less and less of a secret, the Hollywood novel began emulating scandal magazines and the burgeoning porn industry to stay afloat. By the 1960s, it had devolved into a toothless genre that offered readers little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors. Once the film industry implemented a ratings system in the late 1960s, several screenwriters managed to restore the integrity of the Hollywood novel, only now approaching their literary endeavors not as antithetical to film work but as the first step in bringing their R-rated vision of Hollywood to the screen.

The Last Word

The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. While the young studio system worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders wrote fiction to fill in what newspapers and fan magazines left out. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these novels aimed to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. As likeminded filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s gradually brought the dark side of the industry to the screen, however, the Hollywood novel found itself struggling to live up to its original promise of delivering the unfilmable. By the 1960s, desperate to remain relevant, the genre had devolved into little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors, perhaps the only thing the public couldn’t already find elsewhere. Still, given their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these earlier works offer a window into the industry’s dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination.

EXPLORING GENDER STEREOTYPES IN MEDIA ADVERTS: A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS

This paper aims at identifying socio-cultural portrayal of women through representational, interactive and compositional meanings with a focus on gender stereotypes propagated by media advertisements in Pakistan. Media adverts as such are an instrumental tool for manipulating attitudes and behavior of large and diverse audience for example, a large body of data reveals that women are portrayed in media to stylize their physical attributes to tempt and persuade customers. Therefore, advertisements are instrumental in creating a certain mind-set by shaping an ideologythrough highlighting the hegemonic representation of men and sexual objectification of women for creating an erotic fantasy. The data for the study comprises print media adverts which were randomly collected to have primarily advertised Pakistan TV morning shows, home products and cosmetics and have been selected on an assumption that they embody a socio-cultural perspective. The findings show that the selected advertsproject the world of male chauvinism where women are shown as the facilitating sexual objects.

Patterns of Male/Erotic Fantasy in Coover’s “The Babysitter”

The paper aims at studying the patterns of the male fantasy in Robert Coover’s erotically charged short story, “The Babysitter”. The story centres on the image of a Babysitter stepping into a bathtub for having a shower while the phone in the living room rings, driving her out of the tub to answer it by the time the towel wrapping her pulls off giving a view of her naked body. In a rapid succession of one hundred and seven fragmented paragraphs, this image vividly recurs in and rolls up through the fantasies to fantasies of its male characters, blurring and overlapping these, creating fresh new versions of the story from the Babysitter being raped to the Babysitter saved from being raped. The study examines a clear line of development in the fantasies of each of these characters. Considering age, sexual orientation, experiments, adjustment and satisfaction, personality, and other socio-cultural variables, it (re)conceptualizes their fantasies as falling into certain patterns like obsessive, childlike, romantic, or deviant. And, finally and most importantly, it explores the binary power relation embedded in these fantasies wherein the Babysitter poses a fetish, an inanimate, sexualized object while the fantasies around her confirm to male/sexual power, violence, and masochistic pleasure. The research approaches the fantasies with psycho-feminist viewpoints.

Le dépassement de soi par la transgression des interdits chez Arrabal : quand l’érotisme brutal devient vecteur de communion avec le sacré / Surpassing Oneself by the Transgression of Taboos in Arrabal’s Theatre: When Brutal Eroticism Becomes a Way of Communion with the Sacred

Résumé: Le théâtre de Fernando Arrabal propose une œuvre fourmillante qui incarne l’unité du bas et du sublime. Cet article se propose tout d’abord de présenter brièvement en quoi le théâtre d’Arrabal est une œuvre qui englobe toutes les facettes de la vie, mais surtout en quoi Arrabal se situe dans la lignée de l’œuvre bataillenne, tant il souligne le lien entre le bien et le mal, dans une relation constante de coïncidence de contraires. Son dessein est de montrer que la complexité de l’homme est un trait caractéristique de tous, et par la même occasion, dénoncer le rejet de la société à l’encontre de ces perversions qu’il est nécessaire de prendre en compte. Par ailleurs, pour Bataille, tout comme pour Arrabal, la liberté artistique est un vecteur de révolte, et l’œuvre littéraire constitue une manifestation du désir de liberté et de dépassement des limites en renonçant aux cadres traditionnels. L’enjeu sera ensuite de montrer que le mal, qui pour Bataille existe en tant que transgression de l’ordre social, opère chez le dramaturge dans la mise en scène de l’érotisme, et dans sa manière de défier les lois sociales et sacrées. Arrabal lie l’érotisme aux pulsions sexuelles, à la dimension corporelle et surtout à la tension suscitée par les interdits – religieux – qui fait du fantasme érotique un acte de transgression. Enfin, il s’agira de montrer qu’Arrabal concrétise certes une forme d’érotisme à la fois brutal et sensuel mais pour autant toujours fascinant, où le sacrilège rejoint le sacré.Mots-clés : Arrabal ; théâtre Panique ; Bataille ; érotisme ; perversion ; mystique.Abstract : Fernando Arrabal’s theatre proposes a baroque work that embodies the conjunction between the low and the sublime. This article first aims to present briefly what makes Fernando Arrabal’s theatre a work that embraces the whole of life, and especially why Arrabal is directly linked to Bataille’s legacy, by emphasizing the connection between good and evil, in a constant fusion of opposites. His goal is to show how the human complexity is a common characteristic and to denounce society’s rejection of perversions that have to be taken into account. Moreover, to both Bataille and Arrabal, artistic liberty leads to uprising, and the literary work is a manifestation of a desire for freedom and of surpassing the boundaries by renouncing to traditional frames. The next purpose of the article will be to show that evil, which, for Bataille, exists as a transgression of the social order, as a voluntary taboo rupture, proceeds in the author’s work in the staging of eroticism and in its way of defying social and sacred laws. Arrabal relates eroticism to sexual drives, to physical dimension and mainly to the tension stirred up by the – religious – taboos that make the erotic fantasy a pure violation act. Finally, we will try to show that Arrabal turns such a both brutal and sensual eroticism, but still fascinating, into a reality, where the sacrilegious embraces the sacred.Keywords: Arrabal; Panic theatre; Bataille; eroticism; perversion; mystical.

Erotic fantasy, spirituality and Song of Songs

Fantasy plays an essential role in sexual activities. This article investigates (erotic) fantasy from a literary text perspective according to Song of Songs in the Christian Bible. The Song, according to many commentaries, starts with a reference to sex in Canticle 1:2, �Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine�. Although the word sex is not mentioned in the Song, it is referred to and implied a number of times in the deep structure of the text. The fantasies of this most beautiful woman (beauty, a secondary motif in the Song that is complementary to the main theme of love) are part of the rhetoric of the poet (probably a woman) to convince the reader about the enjoyment and beauty of erotic love. These could most likely stimulate erotic fantasies when reading the text. Part of the poet�s rhetoric is the way in which she describes this most beautiful woman and her most attractive lover using metaphors, allusions, symbols and similes to evoke all sorts of imaginations and fantasies in the mind of the reader to complement the erotic fantasies of the reader. The investigation of the composition and �lived experiences� (spiritualities) of erotic fantasies is approached from the perceptions of how the entanglement of the reader in the text augments fantasies, how the dynamic interaction between the text of Song of Songs and the reader involves the reader in the fantasies and spiritualities of the protagonists and the poet, how the lived experiences of the composed images and erotic fantasies in the text of the Song grip and involve the reader in the text and finally how the use or application of human senses in fantasies can intensify the lived experiences of fantasies. This research points out how God�s love and concern for his creatures are present as revealed in the relationship between two lovers. His love and concern are clearly visible in the enjoyment and pleasure given by God to humans in his creation which the lovers find in each other.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This research challenges the traditional discourse about sexuality for an enrichment of it. In the article the disciplines of theology, physiology, psychology and spirituality unite to include the entire person in sexual activities. The potential results would end up in a greater enjoyment of making love.

Counter-Turning The Turn of the Screw

For over a century, critics have typically approached Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw from the perspective of its young governess, whose obsession with her charges and the spectral figures that allegedly haunt them ultimately leads to disaster, the death of Miles. This article, however, offers a reading atypical of those previously accomplished. Analyzing the novella from a psychoanalytic and narratological perspective, it argues for a shift in point of view, contending that the locus of the novel, the manuscript ostensibly documenting the harrowing experiences of the young governess, is not penned by a woman but rather by a man, the principle reader of the thing itself, Douglas. Given the shift in point of view, it becomes wholly evident that it is Douglas’s wildly erotic fantasy that becomes the substance of the manuscript, one culminating not in the death of a child but, rather, in the petite mort or the “little death” of sexual orgasm, the equivalent of a masturbatory episode on the child’s part while in the passionate embrace of his governess. Read in this manner, the narrative coheres as a young man’s romantic retrospective of desire, obsession and sexual initiation.