Showing papers on "Lust published in 1996"

Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700

Abstract: The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity's diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon but rather as an embodiment of greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In "The Sinister Way", Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion - as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn's study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture. Surveying Chinese religion from 1000 BCE to the beginning of the twentieth century, "The Sinister Way" views the Wutong cult as by no means an aberration. In Von Glahn's work we see how, from earliest times, the Chinese imagined an enchanted world populated by fiendish fairies and goblins, ancient stones and trees that spring suddenly to life, ghosts of the unshriven dead, and the blood-eating spirits of the mountains and forests. From earliest times, too, we find in Chinese religious culture an abiding tension between two fundamental orientations: on one hand, belief in the power of sacrifice and exorcism to win blessings and avert calamity through direct appeal to a multitude of gods; on the other, faith in an all-encompassing moral equilibrium inhering in the cosmos.

Madonna/Whore, Pimp/Protector: International Law and Organization Related to Prostitution

Abstract: Madonnaor whore? Pimp or protector? International law and organization related to global prostitution reflect assumptions about gender relations that portray women either as whores and victims of men's lust or as good wives and mother madonnas who work to save these fallen women.

Elfriede Jelinek's Language of Violence

Abstract: I. War by Other Means Elfriede Jelinek's writings can perhaps best be read as a sustained critique of the presence of violence in postwar Austria. True to her programmatic Bachmann essay, "War by Other Means" ["Der Krieg mit anderen Mitteln"], most of her novels, plays, and short essays dissect the covert but insidious continuation of fascist ideology and its belligerent potential in postwar gender relations. While novels such as The Piano Teacher [Die Klavierspielerin] (1983) or Lust (1989) place the force of the analysis on body politics and the pornographic exploitation of women's bodies to uncover their underlying war-like economy, other recent texts have turned to the epistemological and philosophical foundations of fascism, evident in Wolken. Heim (1988) and Totenauberg (1991), or to the neo-Nazism of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO). That gender inequity is to be regarded as the covert perpetuation of fascism and its victim-perpetrator dialectic is, to be sure, an assumption that underlies much of first-wave German feminism and women's literature as it emerged after the World War II. Its theoretical justification had been provided by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment, when they established a correlation between the violence of instrumental reason, the biopolitics of fascism, anti-Semitism, and the historical objectification of women as phusis.1 The legacy of this tradition can be discerned in the New German Feminism of the 1970s, no

The Pleasures of Restraint: The Mean of Coyness in Cavalier Poetry

Abstract: Up through the middle ages, Christian attitudes toward sexuality combined an ascetic repugnance toward sinful carnality with a Chris tianized version of the pagan ethical focus on moderating bodily pleasures. The former celebrated celibacy as the purest state; the lat ter fostered restrained, temperate sexuality between married couples. With the Protestant Reformation, celibacy was unseated as an ideal and the promotion of moderate conjugal love intensified.1 Like the medieval Scholastics, late sixteenth-century English Protestants often invoked Aristotle's conception of temperance, the mean with respect to bodily appetites, to define proper conjugal sexuality. Temperate sexual relations between married partners were the mean between a sin-producing abstinence and sinful fornication. In his Domesticall Duties, for example, William Gouge argues that proper sexual rela tions between husband and wife—what he and his fellow clergymen, following Saint Paul, call "due benevolence"—prevent spouses from falling into the "defect" of abstinence, which increases desire and promotes sinful onanism, and lustful "excess," which debilitates body and soul.2 While celebrating conjugal affection, ministers warned against excessive desires and feelings. They distinguished be tween temperate love and lust, which the Jacobean minister Alexan der Niccholes notes had "no meane, no bound." Lust could not provide a solid basis for a lifelong conjugal relationship, for it was not only excessive but also transient: the fire of intense passion soon turned cold.3

The Male Heterosexual: Lust in His Loins, Sin in His Soul?

Abstract: Foreword - Ronald F Levant A Sexual Gender Journey The Itinerary Biological Beginnings Genes and Juices Developmental Milestones Sexuality throughout the Life Cycle Sociocultural Variables Messages from the Underground Sexual Heroes Birth of Superpenis Fallen Heroes Superpenis Meets Kryptonite Not for Women Only Personal Sexual Victimization Last Dance Dancing the Dangerous Dance with Disease The New Warrior Sex at the Beat of a Drum? Achieving True Manhood Reconstructing Male Sexuality

How Could You Do That?!: The Abdication of Character, Courage, and Conscience

Abstract: In a lively, upbeat, and pulling-no-punches style, Dr. Laura Schlessinger-the nationally syndicated radio superhost and author of 10 Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives--takes on the moral dilemmas of our times, from love versus lust to irresponsible parenting, from the mindless pursuit of happiness at the expense of others to excuses for taking the easy way out.

The Male Masochist in Restoration Drama

Abstract: Because early Restoration drama revels in the fetishization and objectification of newly introduced female actresses, masochistically represented male characters jar the spectator leading one to ask: why the male masochist in Restoration drama. By examining several plays within the context of a specifically sadomasochistic dialectic, the pathos underneath the "humor," specific psychological ramifications, as well as other aspects begin to emerge. Three early Restoration plays convey one or more male characters masochistically; Thomas ShadwelFs The Virtuoso, Thomas Otway's The Orphan, and Venice Preserved comprise the egregious trinity. In these works, playwrights utilize the male masochist figure to reinforce the paradigm of homosocial society controlled by young, virile, and witty males. Outside of the elite, empowered group males become Othered/feminized and, subsequently, masochistically represented. In order to explain the phenomenon's dramaturgical signification, I begin by examining the period's cultural mechanisms of oppression. Next I examine the ways in which Otway and Shadwell utilize these mechanisms on the stage as a means to further the empowered male's agenda. From socio-historical generalities to dramaturgical specifics, exegesis becomes possible.Beginning with the milieu, sexual permissiveness marks courtly and, subsequently, all of early Restoration society, and early Restoration drama particularly reflects a frenzy of phallocentric lasciviousness. Mar)' Daly defines patriarchal lechery as phallic lust which fuses together obsession and aggression. According to Daly, "phallic lust begets phallocratie society, that is sadosociety, which is, in fact, pseudosociety," and she contends that "as obsession it specializes in genital fixation and fetishism . . . [and] as aggression it rapes, dismembers, and kills" (1). Phallic lust drives patriarchal society albeit usually covertly or through sublimation; however, this period overtly savors male sexual obsession and aggression, and the stage reflects this overt hostility.1In addition, the paradigm shift away from cultural identification to individual subjectification constitutes an important factor in the sadomasochistic equation. Prior to the revolution, one's identity centers around cultural units of identity such as king, country, and religion. However, the act of regicide demythicizes the great-chain-of-being world view and provides ontological basis that, for the individual, anything is possible. In Restoration literature and drama this means that "the new subject becomes the location of the new drama of individual conscience" (Barker 70) or that art begins to reflect the Cartesian sense of self.Of course, the individual dramatist is, at least initially, almost exclusively male. In order to further understand the dynamics of the new individual/subject/playwright, Simone de Beauvoir's consciousness hermeneutics proves helpful. Beauvoir states that "if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed ... the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object" (xvii). Following Beauvoir's assertion, with orgiastic enthusiasm the cultural milieu literally sets the stage for hostile positing of the essential male subject against the inessential woman/Other. Within this malevolent context the definition of Other quickly expands; thus, playwrights portray older, inept, and "effeminate" males in the role of masochist/Other.In Shadwell's The Virtuoso, Sir Formal Trifle effeminizes himself by donning drag while in pursuit of a young woman. Shadwell portrays Trifle as masochist because of inadequacies including lack of wit, fopishness, and so forth. While Trifle wears drag, Sir Samuel attempts to rape him. Because Trifle appears as a big, hulking, Amazon woman and because male-drag is inherently funny within the context of misogynist culture, the spectator laughs. …

Beauty and Lust

Abstract: Why does lust demand beauty? How does it differ from functional beauty and from the beauty of what is purposive without definable purpose? Does eroticism really aim at visions of immortality ? How does erotic craving differ from the cognitive or practical intentions that aim at objects or objectives ? What is the difference between sexual satisfaction and the erotic transport ? Is erotic passion really a craving for the quiescence of the inert? What is erotic glamour in women and in men ? What kind of animality does eroticism see and crave in human bodies? Why is it youth that inflames the extreme emotions of eroticism ?

How Justice Brennan Freed Novels and Movies During the Sixties

Abstract: In June 1963, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote a piece for Esquire magazine entitled "Sex... and the Supreme Court." In it, Lewis, who was then working the Times's Supreme Court beat, observed that the nine not-so-old men sitting on the Court seemed to be quietly "liberating the country from puritanism." Equally surprising was the fact that the liberation was proceeding from a landmark decision rendered in 1957, called Roth v. United States, in which the High Court had seemingly canonized the Comstockian attitude toward sexually-oriented expressive material by holding that "obscenity," i.e., "material having a tendency to excite lustful thoughts," was not protectable by the Constitution's free speech or free press guarantees. The reason it was not, said Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., speaking for the Court, was because obscenity was "utterly without redeeming social importance." In other words, obscene expression was worthless and so unworthy of 1st Amendment protection. The contradictory encouraging evidence cited by Lewis consisted in largely unnoticed Supreme Court decisions, after Roth, that had resulted in the freeing from State or federal censorship of two French films, The Game ofLove and Lady Chatterley's Lover, both based on well-known risque literary works, plus a nudist magazine called Sunshine and Health, and three gay-oriented magazines titled MANual, Trim and Grecian Guild Pictorial. (Today such material would not even raise Jesse Helms's eyebrows.) What the Court seemed to say in freeing those works was that, in its view, they did not meet the Roth test for obscenity, that is, the Brethren could not believe that they aroused the average person's lust, and so they ought to be deemed "constitutionally protected" from government suppression. In the gay-oriented magazines case, Justice Harlan, speaking for the Court, observed that, to be properly counted obscene, material had not only to be calculated to arouse its auditor's lust, it also had to be "patently offensive," terminology that some Court-watchers supposed meant it

'Both kinds in one/Both male and female': Ate, Lust and hermaphroditic Venus in Book IV of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene

Abstract: This is a PDF version of a working paper published in 1996. ©Graham Atkin and Chester College.