The Psychology of Sex by Meg-John Barker

Author:Meg-John Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Learning from the margins

Until recently, psychologists and related professionals who studied the paraphilias, or ‘abnormal’ sexual practices, have focused on explaining why people might engage with them: often trying to come up with universal causes of sadism, masochism, etc. in a way similar to the way they did with same-sex attraction (see Chapter 1). In recent years, however, many of us have questioned that way of thinking, rooted as it is in cultural assumptions about acceptability, and dubious notions that any human behaviour can have one explanation that applies to everybody who engages in it (see Chapter 2).

Recent scholars and professionals have taken the radically different approach of asking what we might learn from those at the outer limits of human sexual experience which could be of use to everybody, rather than how we might explain them and keep them at a comfortable distance.8 In the next two sections we’ll look at what we now know about kink, and about non-monogamous relationships, from this kind of psychology, and the light that this shines on sexual practices and sexual relationships more widely.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.