>
How Sexual Desire Works: The Enigmatic Urge

How Sexual Desire Works: The Enigmatic Urge

  • £18.89
  • Save £12


Frederick Toates
Cambridge University Press, 9/22/2014
EAN 9781107688049, ISBN10: 1107688043

Paperback, 512 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.9 cm
Language: English

There are countless books on sex and an endless fascination with the subject. Varieties and vagaries of sexual desire have long been documented, but there has been little engagement with cutting-edge scientific research to uncover the biological and psychological bases of sexual desire. Here, Frederick Toates uses the insights of modern science to show how a wide range of desire-related phenomena - fantasy, novelty-seeking, sexual addiction, sex-drug interactions, fetishes, voyeurism, and sexual violence and killing - start to make sense. For example, the role of the brain's neurochemical dopamine can now be much better understood in terms of wanting, and a distinction between wanting and liking has been established. Also, an understanding of the layered organization of the brain, sometimes described as hierarchical, can be used to explain temptation and conflict. This is a fascinating book with great social relevance to society and its problems with sexuality.

1. What is enigmatic about sexual desire?
2. Explaining desire
multiple perspectives
3. Sexual desire in a broad context
4. An incentive-based model
5. Sex and levels of organization
6. Sexual attraction
7. Shades of desire from simple to complex
8. Details of the brain and desire
9. Arousal
10. The consequences of sexual behaviour and associated expectations
11. Sexual familiarity and novelty
12. Inhibition, conflict and temptation
13. How did sexual desire get here?
14. Setting the trajectory
link to adult sexuality
15. Sexual desire in interaction
16. Representations of sex
17. Sexual addiction
18. Variations in desire
general principles
19. Some forms of desire at the fringes
20. The toxic fusion
violence and sexual desire
21. Sexually associated (serial) murder
22. Concluding remarks.