2 - Sexual desire

Summary

sexual desire as the wish for physical contact

Normal sexual desire, says Alan Goldman, is ‘purely the desire for contact with another person's body and for the pleasure which such contact produces’. The desire for such contact is both sufficient and necessary to make the desire sexual; and this physical contact, rather than the feelings and emotions that the contact might express, is ‘the goal of sexual desire’. Activities that have only this goal – for example, kissing embracing, and caressing under certain conditions – ‘qualify as sexual, even without the presence of genital symptoms of sexual excitement’. (1976, pp. 268–9)

Now the desire for bodily contact, and for the pleasure that it produces, will certainly be a necessary condition of normal sexual desire if the word ‘normal’ is used to exclude all difficult cases. Scoptophilia – the expression of sexual desire by visual means alone – is an obvious example of the sort of activity that will be ruled out. Similarly, according to Goldman, such activities as voyeurism, masturbation, and the use of pornography, are simply substitutes for ‘actual sexual contact’, (p. 270) So in the absence of the desire for bodily contact for its own sake there is no normal sexual desire. But given this definition, is it also the case that the desire only for physical contact, and for the pleasure that it brings, is a sufficient condition of normal sexual desire? The answer is not obviously ‘yes’.