Sexual paradigms
pp. 139-147
in: Katherine J. Morris (ed), Sartre on the body, Berlin, Springer, 2010Abstract
It is a cocktail lounge, well-lit and mirrored, not a bar, martinis and not beer, two strangers — a furtive glance from him, shy recognition from her. It is 1950s American high comedy: boy arouses girl, both are led through 90 minutes of misunderstandings of identity and intention, and, finally, by the end of the popcorn, boy kisses girl with a clean-cut fade-out or panned clip of a postcard horizon. It is one of the dangers of conceptual analysis that the philosopher's choice of paradigms betrays a personal bias, but it is an exceptional danger of sexual conceptual analysis that one's choice of paradigms also betrays one's private fantasies and personal obsessions.1 No doubt that is why, despite their extra-professional interest in the subject, most philosophers would rather write about indirect discourse than intercourse, the philosophy of mind rather than the philosophy of body.