The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies Kindle Edition
by Anthony Giddens (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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Review
'It is difficult to imagine social-scientific thought and practice in Britain and much of Continental Europe without the distinctive contribution of Anthony Giddens. His prolific work has the unique merit of tying together the rich tradition of modern social thought with the challenges of whatever is new and unprecedented in what he has called the 'late modern' or 'post-traditional' world.' Times Literary Supplement
'The major achievement of Professor Giddens is to have written a book which is both politically correct and interesting ... an immensely enjoyable book.' Political Studies
'Interesting and informative, thoughtful and thought provoking, concise and to the point.' Contemporary Sociology
'A powerful, and often brilliantly provocative, theory of how sexuality and gender are reproduced and transformed ... a model of theoretically informed, empirically based sociological analysis that will be of great interest to all those concerned with the trajectory of sexuality, gender, and identity in modern social processes.' The Times Higher Education Supplement
About the Author
Anthony Giddens is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
From the Back Cover
“Giddens, a towering figure in Anglo-American sociology, has now extended his analyses of modernity to include the area of intimacy in this thoughtful and provocative book.”—Choice
“This is a short book that differs in style from Giddens’s others. He strives here for accessibility and readability. . . . The chapters are all interesting and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, concise and to the point.”—Contemporary Sociology
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Inside Flap
The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does “sexuality” come into being, and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life more generally? In answering these questions, the author disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture.
The author suggests that the revolutionary changes in which sexuality has become cauth up are more long-term than generally conceded. He sees them as intrinsic to the development of modern societies as a whole and to the broad characteristics of that development. Sexuality as we know it today is a creation of modernity, a terrain upon which the contradictory tendencies of modern social life play themselves out in full. Emancipation and oppression, opportunity and risk—these have become a part of a heady mix that irresistably ties our individual lives to global outcomes and the transformation of intimacy.
We live today in a social order in which, for the first time in histroy, women are becoming equal to men—or at least have lodged a claim to such equality as their right. The author does not attempt to analyze the gender inequalities that persist in the economic or political domains, but instead concentrates on a more hisdden personal area in which women—ordinary women, in the course of their day-to-day lives, quite apart from any political agenda—have pioneered changes of greate, and generalizable, importance. These changes essentially concern an exploration of the potentialities of the “pure relationship,” a relaitonship that presumes sexual and emotional equality, and is explosive in its connotations for pre-existing relations of power.
The author analyzes the emergence of what he calls plastic sexuality—sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction—in terms of the emotional emancipation implicit in the pure relationship, as well as women’s claim to sexual pleasure. Plastic sexuality is decentered sexuality, freed from both reproduction and subservience to a fixed object. It can be molded as a trait of personality, and thus become bound up with the reflexivity of the self. Premised on plastic sexuality, the pure relationship is not exclusively heterosexual; it is neutral in terms of sexual orientation.
The author speculates that the transformaion of intimacy might be a subversive influence on modern institutions as a whole, for a social world in which the dominant ideal was to achieve intinsic rewards from the company of others might be vastly different from that which we know at the present.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Publisher
Anthony Giddens is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Review
'It is difficult to imagine social-scientific thought and practice in Britain and much of Continental Europe without the distinctive contribution of Anthony Giddens. His prolific work has the unique merit of tying together the rich tradition of modern social thought with the challenges of whatever is new and unprecedented in what he has called the 'late modern' or 'post-traditional' world.' Times Literary Supplement
'The major achievement of Professor Giddens is to have written a book which is both politically correct and interesting ... an immensely enjoyable book.' Political Studies
'Interesting and informative, thoughtful and thought provoking, concise and to the point.' Contemporary Sociology
'A powerful, and often brilliantly provocative, theory of how sexuality and gender are reproduced and transformed ... a model of theoretically informed, empirically based sociological analysis that will be of great interest to all those concerned with the trajectory of sexuality, gender, and identity in modern social processes.' The Times Higher Education Supplement
--This text refers to the paperback edition.
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Product details
ASIN : B07M9CXB75
Publisher : Polity; 1st edition (23 April 2013)
Language : English
File size : 549 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 224 pages
Customer Reviews: 3.9 out of 5 stars 18 ratings
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jo
3.0 out of 5 stars ok
Reviewed in Germany on 4 February 2019
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Ok
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七海光一
4.0 out of 5 stars 読み返すにたる価値を有する
Reviewed in Japan on 19 April 2005
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近代社会における性愛概念の変容をあとづけ、今後人間にとっての性愛が如何にあるべきかを説く、この分野でも特に著名な書物。フーコーの、権力の管理下にある身体という解釈を部分的には認めるが、消費社会における、恋愛マニュアルなどが、生活習慣や性愛観念の相互浸透性に与える影響を無視できないとする著者の立場は、より時代に即した考え方であると思う。所謂、性の二重基準や性の人格原則などに見られる男権主義的性愛観念を超えた、コミュニケーションとしての性のあり方の進展は、広義の社会の民主化の進展と無関係ではない、という著者の指摘は的を得たものと思う。議論がやや抽象的で、平易な英語にも関わらずやや解りづらいところもあるが、読むのに妨げになるほど大きな問題ではない。だが、こうした大学系の出版物によくある、編集の甘さから生じる綴りの誤りが散見され、この点に関しては、出版社の反省を促したい。
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kaminsky
4.0 out of 5 stars moralistic. but...
Reviewed in the United States on 16 November 2020
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a rather moralistic view of female promiscuity.
despite this issue this book is very influential. Giddens concept of "pure relationship" is widely cited -
examples - Enrique Gil Calvo "EL NUEVO SEXO DEBIL" -
Oscar Guasch "LA CRISIS DE LA HETEROSEXUALIDAD".
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Alex Nelson
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential theory in the sociology of love
Reviewed in the United States on 27 April 2015
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Giddings is as acceptable as pure theory gets which is probably why he is popularly assigned in classrooms. It's also a nice quick read.
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Marc
1.0 out of 5 stars A Stunningly Flawed Work from a Legitimate Giant
Reviewed in the United States on 18 March 2016
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Giddens' attempt at micro-sociology and a venture into psychological theory and gender studies is an amazing failure. The question of agreement aside, he takes the most uniformly rejected components of Freud, rejects discourse on essentialism, and oversteps his foundation and evidence to create a perplexing argument that male dominance and aggression are resultant from female abandonment, most specifically the loss of control over women. This book, if popularly known, would be an excellent reinforcement for men's rights groups, as it essentially argues that everyone's social problems are the result of men caught in a culture gap, whereby the natural order they expect has evaporated, so the frustration of not being able to dominate women or have complicit women in their lives, causes them to "reasonably" dominate them. In once example, a discussion on pornography as evidence of how men suffer no sexual enjoyment compared to women, he characterizes the participants as the women being grateful and satisfied, while the men plod on silently without joy or expression. It's stunning that someone could interpret something so inversely. I'm guessing most people read this for a class. If you don't have to, don't read this unless you want to be mad at insulting and lazy scholarship, or if you are an insecure man who wants to blame women's attempts for equality for their own rapes.
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Therese
Jul 07, 2020Therese rated it really liked it
Shelves: research-authoritarianism, dating-and-relationships, politics-and-society, philosophy, psychology, womens-issues
This is a sociologist's perspective on how concepts of intimacy and relationships have changed since the sexual revolution of the 1960s. I was interested in it because I'm trying to understand authoritarianism at both the political and personal level, and part of my thinking is that there is a relationship between authoritarian attitudes and intimacy, since authoritarianism revolves around control, and controlling another person is arguably a form of intimacy, in which there's a breaking down of barriers between two wills to enable the intrusion of one will into another.
I think it was Giddens who first introduced the concept of "pure relationships" in sociology. This refers to consensual relationships people have just for the sake of their own happiness and fulfillment, which they can leave at will. Giddens idea is that such relationships have become more common and more of an ideal since the sexual revolution, particularly for women and GLBTQ folks. The idea of the pure relationship differs from e.g. traditional marriage, which was more of a practical economic arrangement, or the notion of romantic love or sexual license that was driven by emotional or physical compulsion. A lot of people have struggled with this shift, for example, straight men and women in cases where the women have moved away from ideals of chastity and see sex as a prelude to an egalitarian relationship, but where the men don't want commitment and just want sex.
I mostly skimmed the chapters in the beginning and middle, because even though Giddens was doing important work by putting into words a lot of the changes that had been wrought by modernity, viewed from today's perspective it didn't feel very new or surprising to me. Where things got interesting was the last two chapters, where he discusses ideas from the philosopher Wilhelm Reich about repression and from Herbert Marcuse about "eros and civilization." (I haven't read Reich or Marcuse, so can't judge how accurately Giddens represents their thinking, but found the ideas interesting.) Reich was against bourgeois marriage as a repressive, authoritarian institution. He believed that traditional monogamous marriage served to develop authoritarian traits of character, which in turn supported an exploitative social system. Despite Reich's reputation as a wackadoodle crackpot, there's clearly some truth to this.
Marcuse's idea was that sexual emancipation should not be considered the same thing as just hedonism. Sexual love becomes liberating in combination with respect for the other as an equal, which disrupts the old traditional patriarchalist (authoritarian) family structure and also paves the way for broader egalitarian social citizenship. However, when sexual permissiveness turns into objectifying others as commodities of pleasure, it becomes just another form of oppressiveness.
In the last chapter of the book, Giddens expands on these ideas to talk about how egalitarian relationships between people can both follow a model of democracy at the personal level and reinforce egalitarian democracy at the political level. For me, this all goes toward showing how humanist ethics is foundational for democracy and how healthy interpersonal relationships based on mutual respect model healthy democracy as a system of governance. This contrasts with domestic abuse and violence, which models authoritarian governance - a point also made in a book I read about the mindset of domestic abusers, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. The latter book was written by a clinical psychologist who had spent decades working with abusers, and has an insightful chapter where the author argues that the mindset of abusers is also reflected in systems of social and political oppression.
Giddens's book can also be considered in combination with another book I panned in a review a while back, Mark Regnerus's Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy. Regnerus, as I pointed out, reveals himself as anti-individualist and authoritarian in his thinking, and his book revolves around contrasting Giddens's idea of the pure relationship with the "exchange" model of relationships - the more traditional idea of marriage as economic exchange. Regnerus loves the exchange model, is clearly nostalgic for the days when people could be said to "own" each other, and can't seem to get out of the dehumanizing idea of human beings as useful goods; Regnerus argues (obliquely, not directly) that the pure relationship model inevitably devolves into this commoditization of sex as consumption, and that the exchange model at least has the dignity of focusing on sexual exchange from a producer perspective instead of the consumer perspective.
I find Regnerus's views horrible, as I think real feminist emancipation is to treat women as human beings, not as objects, and it doesn't help to consider intimate relationships through the lens of economic production instead of as a consumer activity - the goal should be to go beyond such a limited view. Even while we recognize and concede that human beings will always see each other to some degree as useful means to various practical ends, there's also a humanist, ethical imperative to see each other as more than merely this, as ends in ourselves. Without this humanist respect for the sacredness of others' autonomy, it is all too easy to fall into authoritarian forms of relationship and governance in both the public and private spheres. (less)
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