JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. International Phenomenological Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.A sexual desire is one kind of desire, and kinds have boundaries, however uneven some are drawn and however difficult it may be for us to locate particular instances within (or on) those boundaries. A glance at what philosophers, psychologists, and lovers have had to say about sexual desire raises the suspicion that it will escape pigeon-holes. Consider some of the claims that have been made about what a sexually desirous person really desires: to feel the friction of flesh against flesh,' to elicit involuntary audible responses from others through the infliction of pain,2 interpersonal communication,3 reflexive mutual recognition (multi-level iterations of sensings of other's sensings of our sensings of them),4 double reciprocal incarnation,5 reproduction,6 love, humiliation, pride, pain and pleasure. There seem no limits to what some have been willing to propose as the true targets of our sexual strivings. The culprit for this chaos is perversion.Consider why we cannot say that a sexual desire is simply a desirefor sex. The object of the desire, so specified, will itself know no bounds. If by 'sex' we mean certain familiar sexual activities-coitus and its closest cousins, then this definition of sexual desire puts us at a loss to say how voyeurism, exhibitionism, bestiality, coprophilia, and sadomasochism could be sexual perversions. Alternatively, if we give enough slack to our sense of what counts as 'sex', and allow our conception of sexual activity to range from the blase to the perverse, then we will have assembled such a motley array of activities that we are at a loss to say how any boundary has been drawn, and so will arrive, along this route, at inflated, and perhaps empty, notions of sex and sexual desire. Casting our classificatory nets widely enough to haul in activities as diverse as spanking, collecting shoes, ingesting fecal matter, and peeking through keyholes, we must surely view with wariness the idea that we are engaged in the business of taxonomy.Consider one plausible use of a 'narrow' taxonomic strategy. Alan Goldman defines sexual desire as a "desire for contact with another person's body and for the pleasures which such contact produces."7 The desire for contact with another person's body is secondary to the desire for the pleasure which such contact gives rise to, since, he says, "the desire for another person's body is, principally among other things, the desire for the pleasure that physical contact brings."8 Goldman offers this narrowing of the range of our sexual targets as, in part, a remedy to sexua...
