Nagel's Sexual Perversions
"About multiple combinations," Nagel says of orgies and presumably other many-person sexual encounters, "the least that can be said is that they are bound to be complicated" (Nagel, 1969). [All references in this piece come from Nagel's original on the subject of Sexual Perversion.]
While this is appealing as an opening line, it seems a bit disingenuous, given what he thinks about average, ordinary, non-perverted sexuality. He defines sexuality as a psychological process of multiple steps of awareness of oneself and then another, and then that other person's awareness of us, which compounds their awareness of their own self and sexual interest. Here is how he describes this give-and-take awareness process: "Sexual desire involves a kind of perception, but not merely a single perception of its object, for in the paradigm case of mutual desire there is a complex system of superimposed mutual perceptions- not only perceptions of the sexual object, but perceptions of oneself."
Or put in another way, it is important to understand that conventional sexual attraction is itself complex if it gets the participants to the level of fulfillment that is expected. Nagel identifies a three-stage demarcation of activities that must occur for sexual attraction to formalize. Those three stages include, in general terms, a recognition that a proverbial "he senses that she senses that he senses her," or a give and take reiteration until both parties are aware of what the other wants and desires. It is in this way that one can distinguish how human sexuality in a proper form is different from the love of other object, such as food. No matter that one may try to convince oneself otherwise, the food most likely never takes into its psyche an awareness of how much pleasure it gives to its eater. There can be none of the reciprocity of awareness that goes through the steps toward sexual attentiveness and, potentially, sexual fulfillment.
It is this issue of fulfillment that comes into play in regards to what Nagel considers healthy sexuality (and thus not perverse sexuality). Though there might be nothing wrong with stopping anywhere along this continuum of self- and other-awareness, the act of completion cannot be achieved until or unless...
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