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Generosity: Between Love and Desire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Abstract

“Safe sex” discourse attempts to protect women from dangers assumed inherent in erotic life, such as domination, submissiveness, and loss of freedom and self-control. However, Beauvoir's and Merleau-Ponty's revision of Sartre's ontology suggests that erotic life involves a kind of generosity that transforms existence; sex neither liberates personal existence nor poses a necessary threat to women's freedom. I also reconsider the conditions under which sex is assumed to involve a violation of being.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by Hypatia, Inc.

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