The Nature of Sexual Desire (review)

In James Giles’ The Nature of Sexual Desire, the author attempts to provide an account of sexual desire’s essential “nature.” First and foremost the author is a philosopher attempting to contribute to a philosophically informed psychology of sexuality. The perspective that he brings to that task primarily comes from the phenomenological and existential traditions. He also engages with a variety of scholars who have contributed to the subject of sexual desire and sexuality more broadly, particularly from biomedical, evolutionary, and psychological perspectives. This engagement is primarily restricted to a critical phenomenological perspective. Support for his arguments is based primarily on introspective analysis of his own (apparent) sexual subjectivity, narrative reports from interviews done by other scholars, and his interpretations of literary and religious texts. He then uses that criticism as a platform to present a phenomenological account of the aspect of sexual subjectivity in question. An example of this is Chapter 2, The Sexual Process, in which he criticizes the various stage models of sexual activity. Rather than provide a high-level assessment of the epistemological and methodological status of stage models more generally, he instead replaces the models he criticizes with one of his own built around phenomenological language such as “rushing upward,” “ascending,” and “entering.”

Throughout his analysis the author maintains that concepts like “desire,” “sexual,” and “love” have an essential, intrinsic, and ultimate “nature” that is discoverable through this method. The author is highly critical of both scientific realist perspectives on sexuality that emphasize biological processes as the basis for subjective experience, and social constructivist perspectives that emphasize the cultural constitution of subjectivity. Specifically, the author argues that “there is little evidence that sexual desire is directly caused by any biological events” (179), and that “sexual desire, which lies at the heart of all sexuality, is not in any [my emphasis] meaningful sense a construction of culture” (180). Rather, he argues, sexual desire is a direct result of an existential need intrinsic to “the human condition” and that “the wellspring of sexual desire is to be found at the center of human consciousness” (179). The author takes it as following from this that sexual desire is “essentially” independent from both biological and cultural constitution, and that only phenomenological analysis will effectively reveal “the essence of the longing of our hearts” (1) and the “ultimate object of our own desires” (1).

The book is targeted primarily at psychologists and other social scientists interested in sexuality, philosophers interested in applying philosophy to psychology, and sexual health practitioners interested in phenomenological accounts of sexual subjectivity. The author is at his strongest when providing such phenomenological accounts. His descriptions are often detailed, nuanced, and unafraid of approaching the everyday reality of sexual experience head-on. He is to be commended for being unafraid of frankly discussing the details of sexual experience, as even the most sex-positive scholars have a tendency to whitewash their prose. I strongly believe that this unconscious self-censorship is ultimately injurious to sexual health, social justice, and the scientific study of sexuality. Whatever his other faults, the author has presented an unabashed celebration of human sexuality, and for that alone this book represents a contribution to the literature.

In that light, the book will no doubt be useful to scholars and sexual health practitioners interested in thinking about and describing sexual subjectivity in a positive way. In particular, I have in mind ethnographers interested in sexual culture, psychologists interviewing people about the details of their sexual experiences, and mental health workers who would find a taxonomy of sexual subjectivity useful. The author is much weaker when engaging with and evaluating the work of other sexuality scholars, and in providing a theoretical analysis of sexual subjectivity and its relationship to the materiality of the body. Scientific psychologists interested in incorporating a phenomenologically informed philosophical perspective into their research on sexuality will be disappointed, as the authors analysis offers little of theoretical or methodological use. Social scientists interested in the relationship between sexual subjectivity and culture...