Between Platonic Love and Internet Pornography

Sexuality & Culture, May 2017

The article sets out to show how an holistic approach in matters of sexuality is always more helpful than one-sided approaches. On the issue of internet pornography, the authors suggest that the recent anti-masturbation online movement ‘no fapping’ is based on wrong conclusions from insufficient evidence. We suggest that a holistic approach is called for, with emphasis on the embodied human. Abstinence or what is understood by ‘Platonic love’ is not a solution, according to Plato himself. From a phenomenological perspective, we suggest owning up to our strange bodies and habitualising sexual activity.

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Between Platonic Love and Internet Pornography

Sexuality & Culture December 2017, Volume 21, Issue 4, pp 1120–1139 | Cite as Between Platonic Love and Internet Pornography AuthorsAuthors and affiliations Tanja StaehlerAlexander Kozin Open Access Original Paper First Online: 04 May 2017 1 Shares 2.4k Downloads 1 Citations Abstract The article sets out to show how an holistic approach in matters of sexuality is always more helpful than one-sided approaches. On the issue of internet pornography, the authors suggest that the recent anti-masturbation online movement ‘no fapping’ is based on wrong conclusions from insufficient evidence. We suggest that a holistic approach is called for, with emphasis on the embodied human. Abstinence or what is understood by ‘Platonic love’ is not a solution, according to Plato himself. From a phenomenological perspective, we suggest owning up to our strange bodies and habitualising sexual activity. KeywordsPhenomenology Pornography Internet Internet porn Platonic love Plato Levinas Merleau-Ponty Nancy Eros Flirtation Body Corporeality Masters and Johnson Masters of Sex Desire Strangeness Dialogue  At its heart, though, you might say that Masters of Sex—the book and the show—is a postmodernist parable about the limits of science; how modern medicine can never truly understand our deepest, most intimate feelings. Masters’ and Johnson’s study of hormones and electrocardiogram impulses could deepen our understanding of our own skin and corpuscles, but alone it could not touch the soul, the essence of the bond between two people. (Maier 2014) Bodies are strangers to one another thanks to the foreignness of the spirit that animates them. This extraneousness constitutes their strangeness. Not only are bodies strange, but they do not recognize one another and approach one another only with difficulty, obliged to overcome at least a certain mistrust, and sometimes a fear or even repulsion. A body does not easily touch another body, because it knows that this proximity threatens to strike them both down in a new flaring up of the desire of spirit. (Nancy 2013) The purpose of this essay is to show that we are still jumping to hasty and faulty conclusions around issues of sexuality. This is due to a lack of critical discussions in the area that continues, in academic as well as general discourse. We will use the issue of internet porn and currently popular versions of an ‘abstinence’ proposal as our case in point, arguing for a more balanced, holistic, existential approach that considers who we are as embodied human beings. We would like to follow in the footsteps of Virginia Johnson whose contribution Maier describes as follows: “In many ways, she was leading the way, fashioning a more thorough, integrated approach to dealing with human sexuality than he ever envisioned” (Maier 2009, 149). What we need to improve our sex lives are better abilities to communicate to each other, across sexuate differences, and for sexuality research to become more holistic, communicate between approaches or become interdisciplinary, as the subtitle of this journal has it. In recent years, it has been established that our contemporary technologized world has an impact on our sex lives. This holds true in a number of general, not yet fully explored ways—for example, online dating is likely to make it more difficult to relate to a new partner physically because the initial connection has been built less on physical attraction (keeping in mind also that an encounter with an embodied other is different from seeing just a picture of the face) and more on shared interests, orientations, and life plans. Furthermore, our frequent involvement with the virtual world alienates us from our bodies, over time, and generally stands between us and a clearer sense of our bodily needs, preferences, desires, and possibilities. While these connections seem intuitively plausible and can be established more fully by describing the experience of our involvement with electronic media and especially social networks,1 there is one influence of the technologized world that has been clearly established by now: the harmful impact of frequent exposure to internet pornography on one’s ‘real’ or ‘actual’ sex life. These detrimental effects are usually described under the heading of ‘erectile dysfunction’, though we will need to ask in due course whether a more holistic description might be more useful and could hopefully also pave the way for describing the effects on the female gender, for example. The structure of this essay will establish the shortcomings of a purely scientific perspective before showing that a moralising perspective would certainly also be dissatisfying. After establishing how neuroscientific discussions of internet porn are often interpreted as pointing to a ‘refraining’ from porn and masturbation as the solution, we will consider the apparent opposite extreme: Platonic love. Interestingly, it turns out that t (...truncated)


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Tanja Staehler, Alexander Kozin. Between Platonic Love and Internet Pornography, Sexuality & Culture, 2017, pp. 1120-1139, Volume 21, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1007/s12119-017-9440-z