Thursday, March 05, 2009
Love and Sex
Just a note. Getting material together to teach the Sociology of Love and Sex this Spring term. Connecting love and sex is not terribly difficult although a common assumption is that they are always and intimately connected, I don't make that assumption. Love relates to affinity and connectivity so that we can talk about the love of country, the love of scotch, golf, family, children, etc... There is no implication of sex in the definition of love. Love doesn't have to refer to romantic love but when it does it often involves sex too. Sex is an immortality project so that we 'connect' with our ancestors and our progeny. We are part of a long continuum of existence on this planet and beyond. Truth is we often have sex with people we don't care about at all, and sometimes, with other species. So love and sex are not intrinsically connected. When men rape, they don't love the person they are raping.
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Responding to Roger, thanks for your very creative inflection of Becker (and Lifton's) idea that children serve as an immortality project, seen by you newly that sex itself is an immortality project. Do I understand you correctly? I can see that bearing and raising children is a conscious immortality project. If sex is an immortality project, I think sex would be an immortality project conducted at the subconscious level most of the time, when romance and lust have taken over. But I do readily agree that romance often serves as an immortality project (Rank cautioned against this.) and certainly when a couple engages in sex and at least one of the partners intends to conceive, that is indeed an immortality project. Thanks for the new perspective on sexuality and immortality.
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