Being on top
John Ryle
- Sexual Desire by Roger Scruton
Weidenfeld, 428 pp, £18.95, February 1986, ISBN 0 297 78479 X - The History of Sexuality. Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure by Michel Foucault, translated by Robert Hurley
Pantheon, 293 pp, $17.95, December 1985, ISBN 0 394 54349 1 - Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times by Philippe Ariès and André Béjin, translated by Anthony Forster
Blackwell, 220 pp, £17.50, April 1985, ISBN 0 631 13476 X - No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 by Allan Brandt
Oxford (New York), 245 pp, £18.50, August 1985, ISBN 0 19 503269 1 - Jealousy by Nancy Friday
Collins, 593 pp, £12.95, January 1986, ISBN 0 00 217587 8
What is more important: is it the project of understanding why sexual desire is, or has become, a problem for us like no other, fraught with particular anxiety and special perplexity; or is it the task of establishing – maintaining, perhaps – principles according to which this desire can be regulated, guided, temporised? The change in relations between the sexes and the concomitant change in relations between members of the same sex, the double alteration that has come over us in the last two or three generations makes a certain kind of intellectual investigation possible for the first time. The impure hush has ended; the tongues of desire have been freed. Texts that were formerly read selectively, through a haze of anxiety, or feverishly perused for the legitimation of proscribed longings have at length entered ordinary scholarly discourse.
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