Roger Scruton: Comic Genius
Perhaps I exaggerate, but I did enjoy the following passage (excerpted from pp. 74-75 of his book Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation:
The personal nature of the object of desire
By referring to embodiment as the focus of desire we have therefore identified an important differentiating feature - although one that is shared with other states of mind. To distinguish desire from these other states, it is necessary to say more about its aim: what is wanted of the embodied person in desire? What, to put it technically, is the intentionality of sexual desire? A simple picture, common to Freud, to the writers of the Kinsey Report and to other volumes of once fashionable nonsense, represents sexual desire in the following way. Sexual arousal is a localised phenomenon, a swelling of the glands. This physical alteration permits pleasurable stimulus and eventual climax (orgasm). These are, according to the picture, the root phenomena of human sexuality, and the principal phenomena which any scientific investigation must examine and explain. The most simple-minded of the proponents of the picture (e.g. the authors of Kinsey)16 see orgasm as something like the aim of desire, the presence of the other person as its occasion. The picture can then be completed as follows: one person encounters another. This provokes arousal, which prompts the desire for stimulation of the gland, which prompts the pursuit of the other, and the engagement in the clinch which sets the subject on the road to orgasm. It so happens that it is the sight of another human being that sets this process in motion, usually a human being of the opposite sex. But it might have been one of the same sex; or a dog, or a caterpillar, or an expanse of water. The advantage of confining the response to human beings is that you can sometimes persuade them to cooperate.
It should be evident, in the light of all that has been said in the second chapter, that no such view is acceptable. As Nagel and Sartre have argued, its attempt to assimilate sexual desire to appetite misses the interpersonal component of human sexual responses.17 Moreover, it is not simply that the object of desire - on this view - is no longer a person. It is also that the particular person enters only accidentally into the intentional structure of the desire that he occasions. It happens to be him, but it might have been another. This is one reason why it is so easy to derive from this picture an idea of sexual taste: some are ‘turned on’ by women, some by men, some by children, some by pigs, cartridges, ice-cream cartons or mangel-worzels. The other person may then drop out of consideration altogether. When sexual desire is represented as ‘desire for an orgasm’ or ‘desire for pleasurable sensations in the sexual glands’, the role of the other person becomes wholly mysterious, as do virtually all the complex stratagems of human sexual union.
16 The Kinsey Report (Alfred C. Kinsey, W. B. Pomeroy, C. E. Martin et al., Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, London and Philadelphia, 1949; Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, London and Philadelphia, 1953); but the view is at least as old as Freud: see the passage from Freud quoted in the preface to this book.
17 T. Nagel, ‘Sexual Perversion’, in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979; Nagel criticises what he calls the ‘received radical view’ of sexual experience - roughly the view indicated in my previous paragraph - while Sartre (Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes, New York, 1956), criticises more generally the assimilation of sexual desire to appetite.