El deseo erótico

El deseo erótico

María Victoria Ramírez* - 26/02/2008

A nivel erótico, el deseo es el componente motivador de la actividad, el desencadenante. El deseo es una tendencia que nos orienta y dirige a buscar, involucrarnos o continuar la actividad erótica, ya sea ésta en solitario o compartida, real o incluso imaginada.

Hay distintos tipos de deseo erótico: deseo de contacto físico, deseo de una caricia (o varias), deseo de caricias prolongadas, deseo de contacto genital, deseo de coito, deseo de un rato lúdico con la pareja (hacerse mimos o bromas), deseo de masturbación en solitario, deseo de besos y abrazos…

A pesar de la importancia que hoy se concede al deseo, no es hasta el año 1979 cuando Helen S. Kaplan (famosa sexóloga norteamericana) comienza a fijar la atención de la sexología en el mismo. Y es a partir de ese momento, en que se reconoce su importancia para explicar el comportamiento erótico, cuando se amplía su estudio.

En un principio, se hablaba del deseo para hacer referencia sólo a un tipo de deseo: el de coito. Sin embargo, en la actualidad las diversas investigaciones están comprobando que el deseo se manifiesta de muchas formas y que cada persona puede sentir distintos deseos en distintos momentos, y por cierto, no todos son de coito, aunque sean eróticos.

¿Qué buscan los adolescentes en las chicas?

February 24, 2008

Peeking Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter
By TARA PARKER-POPE

THE image of the testosterone-fueled teenage boy is a familiar one. It has been reinforced by movies such as “Porky’s,” “American Pie” and “Superbad,” which chronicle the escapades of high school boys determined to lose their virginity.

But are boys that age really defined primarily by their sexual urges? Or does the stereotype fall short, telling us less about teenage males and more about a culture that seems to have consistently low expectations of its boys?

A new report in The Journal of Adolescence this month suggests that when it comes to sex, girls and dating, boys are more complex than we typically give them credit for. While hormonal urges are no doubt an important part of a teenage boy’s life, they aren’t necessarily the defining trait influencing a boy’s relationships with girls.

Psychology researchers from the State University of New York at Oswego recently examined data collected from 105 10th-grade boys, average age 16, who answered questions about a number of health behaviors. In questions put to them about girls (most of the boys self-identified as heterosexual), the teenagers were asked to note their reasons for pursuing a relationship. The top answer, marked by 80 percent of the boys? “I really liked the person.”

Physical attraction and wanting to get to know someone better were tied as the second-most-popular answers. Boys who were sexually active were as likely to say they pursued sex out of love as they were to say they simply wanted to know what sex feels like or to satisfy a physical desire. Wanting to lose their virginity barely registered, with just 14 percent of boys checking that answer.

Researchers said the findings show that teenage boys really are motivated by love and a desire for meaningful relationships.

Viagra reduce la fertilidad

Men who take Viagra ‘put their fertility at risk’

Robin McKie, science editor
The Observer,
Sunday February 24 2008

Using Viagra may be damaging men’s fertility, researchers have warned. Experiments suggest that the anti-impotence drug can harm sperm and may prevent some men from fathering families.

In particular, young men who use the drug recreationally could impair their ability to have families. And fertility clinics that prescribe Viagra to help men produce sperm for IVF treatments could be preventing some couples from conceiving.

‘I think it is worrying that some IVF clinics are using Viagra in order to boost fertility results,’ said Dr David Glenn, a consultant gynaecologist at Queen’s University Belfast. ‘Couples that go there for treatment are, by definition, already having problems getting pregnant. Giving male partners something that could make the problem worse is scarcely the right approach.’

Glenn’s research, which is to be published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, is based on two sets of experiments. The first involved taking sperm samples from volunteers and then bathing them in weak solutions of Viagra. The aim was to produce a Viagra level equivalent to that found in the blood of a man who had taken a single 100-milligram tablet.

Mujeres bisexuales en el siglo XXI

Bisexual Women in the 21st Century

This book marks a new chapter in research by and about bisexual women.

By Amy Andre

In Bisexual Women in the Twenty-First Century (2003), editor Dawn Atkins, bi-academician extraordinaire, offers readers a collection of some of the finest research coming out of the bisexual academic community in the last few years. In each chapter contributing authors focus on a different element of the experience of bi women. Part of the book’s power and appeal comes from the fact that most of the researchers are bi women themselves, representing viewpoints from diverse members of bi communities. This is a key feature of the book: analysis of the bi women’s community is being conducted by its own members.

Writing styles vary from informal to highly academic, but there is a little (or a lot; see Elizabeth Whitney’s essay “Cyborgs Among Us: Performing Liminal States of Sexuality”) of each author’s personality in every piece. Certainly, each woman touches on the way in which her research resonates personally. In connecting with her research in this intimate way, each author connects with the audience as well. It is clear that this book was written for bisexual women, by bisexual women, and about bisexual women’s lived experiences. As a bisexual woman, student, educator, and researcher, I saw myself in every page of the book, even as I, at times, disagreed with an author’s analysis or conclusions.

The book covers a wide variety of topics, including: the ways in which bi women define “bisexuality” as a word and concept; relationships between various members of the LGBT community; the experiences of bi women in intimate partnerships with men; the role of bi women in sex work communities; analyses of bi women in film and literature; a bi women’s community in England; the difference between queer theory and bisexual theory; and much, much more.

¿Qué tiene de malo ser soltero?

What’s Wrong with Staying Single?
By Bella M. DePaulo, American Sexuality Magazine
Posted on February 18, 2008, Printed on February 22, 2008

I’m fifty-four years old and I have always been single. I love my single life. But for a long time I rarely said that out loud. I thought I was the only happy single person.

I didn’t love everything about my single life. I didn’t like that “poor thing” look I’d get when others first learned that I was single. I didn’t like their assumption that I must be miserable and lonely and pining for a partner.

There were other things I didn’t like that I thought I could pin on my single status, but I wasn’t really sure. For example, sometimes at work colleagues with partners would assume that I could cover the tasks that no one else wanted. Maybe they presumed that since I was single, I didn’t have a life and so had nothing better to do with my time. Socially, I was invited to lunch with my coupled colleagues during the week but not to their dinner and movie outings over the weekends.

Tentatively at first, I began asking other single people if they thought they were viewed and treated differently than coupled people just because they were single. The responses were overwhelming. It was time to proceed beyond anecdotes.

Years later after I had read hundreds of scientific studies about marital status, happiness, and discrimination, and after I conducted my own program of research, I realized that much of the conventional wisdom about people who are single was either grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong. The place of singles in society and the significance of getting married have changed dramatically over the past decades. But our views of single and married people have not yet caught up. I wrote about this in my book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. The subtitle captures what I learned about singles. Let me explain.

El Sade de Sollers

 Jueves, 21 de Febrero 2008

Sade
Philippe Sollers
Trad. C. Vizcaíno. Páginas de espuma, 2007. 112 páginas, 12 euros
No está claro quién de los dos es más controvertido, si el famoso marqués de Sade (1740-1814), conocido por sus escandalosas novelas sobre la perversa Juliette y la desdichada Justine, o Philippe Sollers (Burdeos, 1936), que desde hace medio siglo levanta polémicas en el mundo intelectual francés a través de sus sagaces escritos y desequilibrantes afirmaciones contra la falsa mentalidad conservadora que nos rodea. Los dos textos reunidos en Sade –“Sade en el tiempo” y la hipotética carta al cardenal Bernis, “Sade contra el Ser Supremo”– se publicaron en Le Monde, después de la bella biografía escrita por Maurice Lever (Fayard, 1991). En ellos, Sollers resucita y encarna la personalidad del autor del siglo XVIII, dando no sólo una imagen de la historia de ese siglo sino también una razón de la locura que surge en nuestro tan moderno siglo XXI.

La vida erótica en la vejez

La vida erótica en la vejez

María Victoria Ramírez* - 12/02/2008

La sexualidad, la erótica y la amatoria en la vejez están siendo objeto de mucho interés en la actualidad, aunque históricamente han estado cargadas de mitos y prejuicios. Evidentemente, en esta etapa se producen una serie de cambios físicos: el cuerpo es menos ágil, la vista y el oído menos agudos, el aspecto físico varía considerablemente (el cabello escasea, o se vuelve canoso, hay más tendencia a engordar, son inevitables las arrugas) y las enfermedades se hacen más frecuentes, así como las dolencias crónicas. Hay que tener en cuenta, no obstante, que los cambios físicos producto de la vejez varían mucho de una persona a otra.

Pero los cambios fundamentales que se producen en la visión que las personas mayores tienen de sí mismas, y en su comportamiento, no son un producto de sus cambios físicos, sino del rol social que se les impone. En nuestra cultura los ancianos y las ancianas son percibidos de forma negativa, y nuestras ideas sobre la vejez están llenas de mitos y prejuicios. Parte de esta concepción tan negativa de la vejez proviene de la idealización de la juventud que se realiza en nuestra sociedad (por ejemplo, en los medios de comunicación), donde se ensalzan las características de los adolescentes y los adultos y adultas jóvenes.

Es frecuente considerar a los ancianos y las ancianas como seres ‘asexuados’, especialmente en el caso de la mujer. Una vez más nos encontramos con que socialmente la vida erótica es equiparada a la vida reproductiva y, por tanto, limitada y empobrecida. Sin embargo, también en la vejez es posible tener una vida erótica plena y satisfactoria.

Flores por San Valentín

Breve tratado del amor

09 de febrero de 2008 - número: 836

Breve tratado

Por José Luis García Martín.

 

El amor: un defecto de la naturaleza agrandado por la imaginación.

En un matrimonio verdaderamente feliz no hay sitio para el amor.

El amor es una enfermedad que se cura por sí misma o no tiene cura.

El amante, cuando busca la felicidad de la amada, la confunde siempre con la propia.

Quien no tiene casa en otro corazón, por muchos palacios que tenga, no tiene casa.

El amor es la mejor demostración de lo fácil que resulta engañarse a sí mismo y lo difícil que resulta engañar a los demás.

Quien no ha amado apasionadamente ignora la mitad más hermosa y tenebrosa de la vida.

El amor, aunque no llegue temprano ni tarde, llega siempre a destiempo.

Amar es exigirle a otra persona lo que ella no tiene y a nosotros nos sobra.

El enamorado duerme poco, sueña mucho y casi siempre despierta en medio de una pesadilla.

Si el amor fuera siempre correspondido nadie habría hablado jamás de amor.

Investigaciones sobre el orgasmo

Carnal Knowledge: They give pleasure; science asks why

By Faye Flam

Inquirer Staff Writer
There are some natural phenomena whose wonder only deepens upon scientific investigation.

Take the orgasm. Scientists know it involves muscle contractions. They know it makes your pupils expand, and heart rate and blood pressure surge.

But why do orgasms feel good?

I was surprised to find that this is still something of a scientific mystery - though one that a few intrepid researchers are just starting to unravel.

“Really and truly, people don’t know,” says Julia Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research and coauthor of Becoming Orgasmic.

Right now, says Heiman, there’s a big debate over how the female orgasm evolved. Researchers would also like to know just how different the female kind is from the male.

“Why is it easier for women to have multiple orgasms than it is for men?” Heiman asks. “How does it interact with attachment issues?”

There are lots of other questions, she says, but oddly, in our supposedly sex-obsessed society, it’s nearly impossible to get funding for sex research.

Another complication: The orgasm question touches on some profound mysteries about how feelings and consciousness can emerge from the brain.

Después de hacer el amor

Después de hacer el amor: consejos para hombres

Carlos de la Cruz* - 04/02/2008

Casi siempre que los profesionales de la sexología hablan de “hacer el amor” o, si prefieren, del coito, hablan de cómo hacerlo. Procurando dar pautas que ayuden a incrementar el placer o la satisfacción de ambos miembros de la pareja. Otras veces, aunque menos, se intentan dar pistas sobre cómo conseguir que ese encuentro se lleve a cabo.

Sin embargo, rara vez se habla sobre lo que sucede después. Cuando todos sabemos que en el después están también muchas de las claves de la satisfacción, tanto de la propia como la de la pareja. Y, por supuesto, también en el después están algunas de las claves que hacen posible que se produzca un siguiente encuentro o, por el contrario, que lo conviertan en algo improbable.

Por eso creo que, sin perder el humor, sería conveniente atender a algunos consejos, en esta ocasión dirigidos especialmente a los hombres en sus relaciones con las mujeres. Recuerden: en las relaciones eróticas es tan importante lo que sucede antes del coito como lo que ocurre después:

Sobre los besos

January 31, 2008
Affairs of the Lips: Why We Kiss
Researchers are revealing hidden complexities behind the simple act of kissing, which relays powerful messages to your brain, body and partner

By Chip Walter

When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses.

Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers. In the body, a kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.

Not all the messages are internal. After all, kissing is a communal affair. The fusion of two bodies dispatches communiqués to your partner as powerful as the data you stream to yourself. Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. So much, in fact, that, according to recent research, if a first kiss goes bad, it can stop an otherwise promising relationship dead in its tracks.

Some scientists believe that the fusing of lips evolved because it facilitates mate selection. “Kissing,” said evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup of the University at Albany, State University of New York, last September in an interview with the BBC, “involves a very complicated exchange of information—olfactory information, tactile information and postural types of adjustments that may tap into underlying evolved and unconscious mechanisms that enable people to make determinations … about the degree to which they are genetically incompatible.” Kissing may even reveal the extent to which a partner is willing to commit to raising children, a central issue in long-term relationships and crucial to the survival of our species.

Enciclopedia de la literatura erótica

From The Times Literary Supplement
February 6, 2008
Erotic qualifications
An admirably serious but decidedly untrashy encyclopedia of erotic literature makes sex seem less fun than one might suppose

Robert Irwin

Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, editors
ENCYLOPEDIA OF EROTIC LITERATURE
Two volumes, 1,104pp. Routledge. £225.
978 1 57958 441 2

“Dallying with these youths is like seeing wolves beneath scattering cherry blossoms, whereas going to bed with prostitutes gives one the feeling of groping about in the dark beneath the new moon without a lantern”, as Ihara Saikaku, the seventeenth-century Japanese short story writer put it. The Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature takes one into some relatively unfamiliar sexual territories – Japanese, Chinese, Arab, Zulu, Thai and Catalan. Some of the biographical entries are so strange that I wondered if some of these writers had not been made up. (It is common practice in reference books to insert a bogus entry or two in order to establish copyright in any future plagiarism case in court.) Was Pierre Albert-Birot a real person? Did he really write Les Six Livres de Grabinlour (1991)? In its first book, Grabinlour is “an indulgent observer of the sexual activities, from passing moments including a queen and a cowherd, a marchioness and ‘a luxury hotel negro’ to a king and shepherdess . . . . In the second book, Grabinlour is a courteous host when the Angel Gabriel spends twelve hours in Paris, largely comprised of eating, drinking and sex”. And so on.

Gershon Legman, the scholar tramp and author of Unprintable Ozark Folklore, sounds pretty fishy, too: “Over his long career he championed origami, attacked the initiation rites of the medieval order of the Knights Templar, critiqued the typography of the fifteenth-century printer William Caxton, translated Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, and compiled a bibliography on the economist David Ricardo, but he devoted himself chiefly to the study of sexual humor and folklore”. Then there are René Depestre, the erotic voodoo novelist, and Felipe Guaman Pomo de Ayala, the Incan essayist. The Chinese Dengcao Heshang Zhuan (“The Candlewick Monk”), a long novel about a little fellow who leaps out of candles and expands to fill the desires of the women he falls on, has one of the strangest plots I have ever come across.

I also finished my reading of these two volumes with the feeling that sex was a lot less fun than I had hitherto supposed. Even thinking about sex has become difficult and it is being made more difficult year by year. For example, the American writer Pat Califia’s work “promotes lust in all its forms and her work contributes to the growing theoretical complexity about sexuality, both in relation to queer studies and the pornography debates”. The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s “works narrate a desire for an impossible plenitude beyond the binary oppositions and hollow conventions which structure mundane bourgeois reality”. The novelist Kathy Acker’s narrators “look directly into and through the bodies of desire in ways that shock traditions of reading and invent political realities that rage against the law of genre”. Acker made “books dangerous again” and “her writing breaks apart the infrastructure of capitalism and patriarchy”. Georges Bataille is a key maître à penser for many of the contributors in this reference book and, for Bataille, “sexuality is anguish”. The Marquis de Sade is at least as popular among intellectuals looking for guidance on sex.

El diamante de Ang Lee

El diamante de Ang Lee

GUSTAVO MARTÍN GARZO
EL PAÍS - Opinión - 03-02-2008

“El sexo es la raíz, el erotismo es el tallo y el amor es la flor. ¿Y los frutos? Los frutos del amor son intangibles y ése es su verdadero misterio”. Esta frase pertenece a La llama doble, el último libro de Octavio Paz. Tenía más de 80 años cuando lo escribió, y puede considerarse su testamento poético y vital. Es raro que un anciano dedique los últimos momentos de su vida a hablar del amor, aunque lo cierto es que nunca dejamos de hacerlo. No importa la edad ni las historias que se hayan vivido, el amor sigue a nuestro lado, siempre diferente y desconocido, con sus frutos intangibles y su cortejo de titiriteros. Nos enfrenta al misterio de la presencia de las cosas, un misterio muy superior a esos vanos enigmas que alimentan la intriga de los grandes best sellers. Alguien dijo que nos hace ver al otro con los ojos de la divinidad. Pues bien, es de ese sentimiento, y de su hondo poder disruptivo, del que habla la última película de Ang Lee, Deseo, peligro (Lust, caution) del director taiwanés afincado en Hollywood.

El mundo secreto de las fantasías eróticas

Secret cinema

Jan 31st 2008

Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head?: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies
By Brett Kahr. Basic Books; 304 pages; $28.

ASKING strangers to recount their most private thoughts about sex is unlikely to make a dull book, and Brett Kahr’s compendious research into the psychology of sexual fantasy is gripping. It is also somewhat alarming.

Leave it open on your desk at work, and prudish colleagues or bosses may think your reading matter highly unsuitable. If you have children, it is not the sort of thing (unless you are very modern-minded) that you would leave around at home. In particular, the middle section is unsparingly explicit about every possible sort of erotic daydream. It includes sentences such as “let us immerse ourselves in some representative incest fantasies”. (Let’s not, some readers may feel.)

Not that it is all so hair-raising. Some people, not unexpectedly perhaps, fantasise about celebrities. A handful imagine romantic tenderness with their real-life partners. But many of those surveyed say they like thinking about doing disgusting things with, to, or in front of, total strangers, or (perhaps more unsettlingly) the people they love.

The case studies are not dirty stories, however. They are part of a big, solemnly academic, five-year research project. Mr Kahr, a London-based academic and therapist, surveyed (anonymously) 18,000 people in Britain and America in conjunction with YouGov, an internet pollster, and conducted 132 five-hour interviews. The upshot is that nine out of ten people have sexual fantasies, mostly pretty lurid ones—and Mr Kahr thinks the remaining tenth are crippled by shame, guilt or repression.

Sexología en la Wikipedia

[Texto publicado en el Boletín de Información Sexológica nº 54 de la Asociación Estatal de Profesionales de la Sexología (AEPS)]

Una de las grandes ventajas de Internet es que muchas dudas pueden solucionarse tecleando solo unas palabras en el buscador y al instante tenemos a nuestra disposición centenares de páginas que, si no nos dan la información que esperábamos, al menos nos orientan suficientemente. En los primeros resultados suelen aparecer las entradas de Wikipedia, esa enciclopedia escrita por un batallón de voluntarios, a la que recientemente se comparó en exactitud con la Enciclopedia Británica. Y basta ojear algunos términos al azar (leyes de Newton, La Celestina, Holocausto) para darse cuenta de que en general el nivel es más que aceptable.

…Hasta que uno se pone a buscar palabras relacionadas con la sexología. Entonces sobreviene el pasmo, la depresión o el cabreo, según el estado anímico del momento. Para empezar, muchos conceptos no vienen (sexuación, sexación, amatoria, erastia, eromenia, andrerasta, ginerasta) y otros presentan deficiencias notables (la intersexualidad se relaciona con el hermafroditismo pero no se menciona el sentido que Hirschfeld le dio; se considera que los travestis son casi todos homosexuales –cuando corregí semejante error surgió el embrión de este artículo-; la historia de la sexología ocupa lo mismo que la explicación del funcionamiento del motor de un automóvil; el masoquismo se despacha en cuatro líneas; etc.). En cuanto a las grandes figuras, Kinsey se resume en un folio; Masters y Johnson tienen una raquítica entrada; Havelock Ellis y John Money no aparecen; el hecho sexual humano y su teórico no existen… Curiosamente, el activismo homosexual ha permitido que las entradas de Hirschfeld, Ulrichs, homosexualidad, teoría queer, etc., sean bastante nutridas.

En fin, si queremos que nuestro mensaje vaya calando, hace falta un poco de esfuerzo por parte de todos. A veces, sería suficiente con traducir la versión inglesa. Otras, basta un pequeño cambio para quitar un error flagrante. Y en ocasiones, hay que crear la entrada desde cero. Me parece un deber social que cada cual, en la medida de su tiempo y especialización, aporte su granito de arena a la construcción de la sexología en Internet . Y si a alguien le da pereza, que no se queje cuando en los próximos artículos solo recomiende enlaces en inglés. Tenemos lo que damos.

Juan Lejárraga Vera