<Articles> What Is Sexual Desire?: Phenomenology and Conceptual Analysis

From the late 1960s, philosophical discussions on sex opened up in Britain and the U.S. The topics of the discussions were prostitution, rape, pornography and so on, but in order to deal with these problems, the question of "what is 'sexual' ?" must first be clarified. I, in this essay, reviewed the early discussions involving sexual activity and sexual desire, particularly the "phenomenological description" Nagel and Solomon gave and the argument of "conceptual analysis" that Goldman and Soble presented, intending to identify their effectiveness and limits. Nagel used Sartre's argument as a stepping-stone and considered "mutual interpersonal awareness, " in which two people "sense" each other's sexual arousal and build up their arousals even more, as the norm of sexual activity, and thus defined sexual activity that lacks such reciprocity as sexual perversion. However, I consider the problem in his argument to be in the simplicity in drawing the "norm" of sexual activity from the phenomenological description of a certain sexual activity. Solomon, who proposed the communication model that regards sexual activity as a type of body language that communicates various feelings, is a philosopher who also built upon Sartre's and Nagel's foundations, and his argument also carries many problems such as the possibility of there being other means to convey feelings. On the other hand, Goldman defines sexual desire as the desire for the pleasure of physical contact with another person. His definition served as a criticism of the idea that sex is a means for purposes such as reproduction, expression of love, communication, and interpersonal awareness. Soble points out that Goldman's definition excludes masturbation, which does not require physical contact with other individuals, from sexual activity, and thus presents his further simplified definition of sexual desire as the desire for certain pleasurable sensations. However, then it becomes difficult to identify the sensations that can be defined as sexual. Soble acknowledges the problem and states that this problem is beyond the scope of philosophical analysis and should be in the hands of empirical disciplines. In addition, according to Soble, how an individual comes to seek for sexual pleasurable sensations varies with his or her social conditions. Considering the above, both the phenomenological description and conceptual analysis contain flaws, and my conclusion is that only social constructionism can solve the question of what sexual desire is.