Bloomsbury The Moral Psychology of Sexual Passion (Moral Psychology of the Emotions)

Offering diverse perspectives on the nature and value of sexual passion, this book explores the states of sexual attraction, desire, and arousal that underlie central types of sexual orientation and identity. Each contributor focuses on some subset of these states and relates them to moral or other norms. Topics include how classifications of sexual passion reveal the classifier’s values; the conditions under which giving in to one’s sexual impulses may take precedence over pursuing one’s longer-term goals; the possibility of there being an agapic (value-bestowing) form of lust similar to agapic love; the need to distinguish passionate from dispassionate desires in any adequate analysis sexual desire; how one’s awareness of sexual anatomy—along with certain contingencies of psychosocial development—may help to explain the personal significance of sexual attraction; how sexual attractions can be assessed as rational or irrational in the same way as certain emotions; the importance of the physiological, phenomenal, psychological, and social dimensions of sexual orientation and identity; how asexuality or being ace might be a sexual orientation like being gay; how to best understand the appeal that kink and BDSM have for some autistic people; the unique difficulties encountered by trans women interested in having sexual or romantic relationships with nontrans men; the complex sexual dynamics found within sexual liberation movements; and finally, how we might have a political right to sexual pleasure even if no individual has a duty to provide us with it.