День: 17.09.2015

WAYS OF BOWING FROM THE HEART

Both straight and improvisational exchanges presuppose a number of ways to pay psychological dues. For example, we may simply feign the owed feeling, sometimes without in­tending to succeed; or we may offer the greater gift of trying to amplify a real feeling that we already have; or we may try to reframe an event and […]

GENDER AND SEXUAL SCIENCE

No one knows precisely when and where gender was initially used to refer to the social and cultural aspects of sexual difference, but it is clear that the term was already current in sexology by the early 1960s. For example, gender does not figure in Alex Comfort’s post-war overview of Sexual Behaviour in Society (1950) […]

Liberty BOUNDED AND EXTENDED

To survey the rise of sexual liberty up to 1800 is to contemplate a momentous ideological upheaval. The conventional justification for sexual discipline had been that immoral actions, even immoral beliefs, were dangerous. They corrupted individuals and undermined the well­being of societies; it was therefore legitimate, indeed imperative, to punish them. By the end of […]

PRIVATE VICES, PUBLIC BENEFITS

The gradual separation of personal morality and public affairs around the dawn of the eighteenth century also paved the way for a still more radical challenge. This was the idea that allowing sex outside mar­riage could actually benefit the public good. Some sexual licence was therefore to be tolerated, even encouraged. This notion directly contradicted […]

Decision-Making Capacity and Individual Choices

Providing high-quality care for nursing home residents means putting into practice the various competence-enhancing interventions we have con­sidered relating to personal control and communi­cation. Doing so means that residents participate in making decisions about their care. But how can we make sure that residents understand what they are 175 being asked to decide, especially when […]

OF DOCTORS AND DICTIONARIES

Despite sometimes sounding as if they were mere cliches, little more than the superannuated jargon of interpersonal relations, phrases like gender role or gender identity are in fact relatively new. Before the Second World War they didn’t exist and other closely connected expressions — such as gender-bender — did not appear until the early 1980s. […]