Sexual Libertinism Research Articles

\u201cThose are things for married people\u201d exploring parents\u2019/adults\u2019 and adolescents\u2019 perspectives on contraceptives in Narok and Homa Bay Counties, Kenya

BackgroundContraceptive use among adolescent girls is low in many sub-Saharan African countries including Kenya. Attitude and perspectives about contraception of community members including adolescent girls themselves may be likely to limit contraceptive use among adolescent girls. This study was conducted to explore and compare adults’/parents’ and adolescent girls’ narratives and perspectives about contraception in Narok and Homa Bay counties, Kenya.MethodsQualitative data from 45 in-depth-interviews conducted with purposively selected consenting adolescent girls aged 15–19 was used. Additionally, twelve focus group discussions were held with 86 consenting adults conveniently recruited from the two counties. All discussions were conducted in the local language and audio recorded following consent of the study participants. Female moderators were engaged throughout the study making it appropriate for the study to solicit feedback from the targeted respondents.ResultsFindings highlighted adults’ perceptions on adolescents’ sexuality and the presence of stringent conceptions about the side-effects of contraception in the study communities. Some participants underscored the need for open contraceptive talk between parents and their adolescent girls. Four main themes emerged from the discussions; (i) Perceptions about adolescents’ sexuality and risk prevention, (ii) Conceptions about contraception among nulligravida adolescents: fear of infertility, malformation and sexual libertinism, (iii) Post-pregnancy contraceptive considerations and (iv) Thinking differently: divergent views regarding contraceptives and parent/adolescent discussion.ConclusionsOur findings suggest the need for increased attention towards adolescents and their caregivers particularly in demystifying contraceptive misconceptions. Programmatic responses and models which include the provision of comprehensive sexuality education and increased access to and utilization of SRH information, products and services through a well-informed approach need to be well executed. Programmatic efforts like SRH community education should further seek to enhance the capacity of parents to discuss sexuality with their adolescents.

“My Name is Maria Dolores Porris Montez”: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Revolution in Bavaria and Beyond, 1846–61

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine depictions of Lola Montez, a self-professed Spanish dancer whose relationship with the Bavarian king Ludwig I contributed to his abdication during the Revolutions of 1848–49. First, I examine the ways in which pamphlets and the press helped transform the Montez affair into a cause célèbre that hastened revolutionary unrest in Bavaria. Next, I examine satirical libels that focused on Montez’s political power, her sexual libertinism, and her foreign identity. Finally, I examine the ways in which Montez responded to her critics in letters and autobiographical projects by fashioning herself simultaneously as an innocent victim of political Catholicism and as an emancipated woman who challenged social expectations. These divergent depictions of Montez provide a rare opportunity to analyze her objectification and agency during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Chastity on the Western Front: Sexual Politics in Wharton's A Son at the Front and Rinehart's Dangerous Days

Edith Wharton and popular romance novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, though not often studied together, are connected by striking plot similarities in their post-World War I novels, each of which draws on its author's journalistic expeditions to the front lines and highlights her fierce support for the Allies. Wharton's and Rinehart's shared pro-war politics fit uneasily into the canon of postwar literature, but these works merit further study because their complex treatment of soldier characters' sexuality challenges presumed narratives about female ignorance and male sexual libertinism during war and anticipates a modernist focus on the body as a locus of political meaning.

Fifty Shades of Unsaid: Women's Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Towards Sexual Morality.

The movie Fifty Shades of Grey has created a great deal of controversy which has reignited the debate on unusual and alternative sexual practices such as bondage. Erotophobic individuals have negative affect towards the type of sexual libertinism conveyed by the movie, while erotophilic persons have a positive attitude and emotional feelings towards this kind of sexual emancipation. Using the Implicit Association Test, this study aimed to explore the extent to which there is a difference in women's attitudes towards sexual morality on an explicit and implicit level. Our findings found that erotophobic and erotophilic women differed only on an explicit level of sex guilt and moral evaluation, while no difference in the implicit measure was found.

Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment by Paul Maltby (review)

Maltby, Paul. 2013. Christian Fundamentalism and Culture of Disenchantment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. $55.00 hc. $24.50 sc. 248 pp.Paul Maltby's Christian Fundamentalism and Culture of Disenchantment describes polarized predicament of United States in early twenty-first century, where deepest beliefs and values of Christian conservatives, especially those with an evangelical or fundamentalist bent, are more or less anathema to liberal secularists, whose beliefs and values (which are often just as deeply held) derive from basically incompatible worldview. Whereas fundamentalist worldview remains committed to Biblical literalism, metaphysical dualism, and conservative social agenda, postmodern outlook derives from what some critical theorists have called anti-foundationalism, insisting on historical of all texts, including Scripture, and indeed of all persons. This contingency principle, Maltby hastens to add, not amount to relativist, 'anything goes' outlook, but it does mean that any truth claims, whether or not they appeal to an ultimate or transcendent reality, are still subject to the provisional standpoint of here and now (42-43).Maltby's observation that United States is polarized between religious conservatives and secular is corroborated by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, who similarly argue that Americans are increasingly concentrated at opposite ends of religious spectrum-the highly religious at one pole, and avowedly secular at other. The moderate religious middle is shrinking (2012, 3). In Putnam and Campbell's compelling account of how such polarization came about, seismic upheaval of 1960s, especially its sexual libertinism, produced prudish aftershock of growth in conservative religion; especially after 1980, religion came to be increasingly associated with Republican Party (3). Similarly, Maltby discusses electoral mobilization of American evangelicals beginning in late 1970s, which marked new interventionist phase in political life of Christian Right (2013, 3). He too argues that this development was provoked by countercultural insurgencies and liberal initiatives of era (17). Furthermore, he contends that resurgence of politically active Christian fundamentalism in 1970s . . . may be partly understood as faith community consolidating its identity in face of diffusion and deepening of ironic sensibility in postmodern (84-85).If one legacy of dissident politics of 1960s was new postmodern sensibility that has gained influence and prestige ever since, perhaps most salient result of that sensibility was not so much political as metaphysical: development of culture of disenchantment, which Maltby describes as a secular ethos of unremitting and boundless critique, in which all forms of institutional authority, hegemonic norms and precepts, and 'master narratives' have fallen under suspicion (11-12). Ironic, self-reflexive attitudes not only pertain to dominant critical discourses in humanities and social sciences; they also manifest in popular media forms such as self-parodying movies, selfaware television shows, self-mocking advertisements, and so on. Maltby argues that this culture of disenchantment produces type of people who are cynical, skeptical, and suspicious almost to fault, but who tend to populate key domains of public sphere (12) such as higher education and mass media, for instance; they are often, but by no means exclusively . . . to be found within urban communities of secular liberals (15). While principal practitioners of this culture of disenchantment do not necessarily represent mainstream in United States, they nonetheless enjoy elite status and prestige of critical acclaim (14). …

The replication and critique of libertinism in Andrew Marvell's ‘To His Coy Mistress’

Marvell's ‘To His Coy Mistress’ both iterates and interrogates the discourse of sexual libertinism. His poem presents a double picture of libertine verse and the version of Epicurean philosophy informing it. That picture problematically sets topoi from the literature of sexual libertinism against Christian orthodoxy, refusing to portray their opposition in terms of unqualified polarities. At the last, Marvell leaves his readers to choose between rival visions of the world.

Sexual Politics of Authorship: Rereading the travels and translations of Richard and Isabel Burton

Women who accompanied male adventurers and geographers often made crucial (yet generally unacknowledged) contributions to the research and writing of their partners. These women were not always named as authors, but nevertheless participated in the production and promotion of texts, influencing their form and their impact. In this light the author reconsiders the works of Isabel Burton, wife of the famous British Victorian traveller, geographer, translator and author, Richard Burton. Reinterpreting and recentring the marginalised and often caricatured Isabel Burton, it is shown that Isabel performed many roles in the 'Burton industry', influencing the production, content and circulation of texts attributed mainly to her husband. While Isabel frequently worked with her husband, she sometimes worked against him, subverting and recasting 'his' texts, partly in order to oppose her husband's sexual libertinism and to advance her own political agenda, which can be located within late-Victorian social purity movements. Isabel's involvement with the gendered politics of purity illustrates the second dimension in what the author calls the twofold sexual politics of authorship.