1. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Undetected, Unexamined, and Unsupported: The Physical-Mental
Dichotomy of Sexual Desire
By: Eric Eggleston
August 2013
A paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree
for the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences
Faculty Advisor: Chad Cyrenne
Preceptor: August Kampf-Lassin

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While sex researchers have focused their attention on whether
sexual desire is a biologically or socially constructed phenomenon,
there has been little to no attention paid to the consequences of such
a divided field on our conceptions of our sexual desires. In this
paper, I argue that there is a physical-mental dichotomy of sexual
desire that exists, that has gone largely undetected and unexamined
within sexual desire analysis; that we have assumed that our sexual
desires are, on the one hand, physical, and on the other, mental. I
argue that such a dichotomy is a inaccurate representation of our
sexual desires, and that, as a field, and as people who care about
their sexual lives, we need to step back and question whether such a
conception deserves to be guiding our sexual lives.
Introduction
Historically, the study of sexuality has devolved into two camps of thought: essentialism
and social constructionism. In the former camp, apologists argue that sexual desire is
something we are born with; that is, sexuality is a function of biology, a natural
characteristic of humanity, and a transcultural, transhistorical phenomenon. In the latter
camp, constructionists hold that sexual desire is something that is created and defined by
the socio-cultural contexts in which we live; that is, sexuality is not a natural
phenomenon (even the term ‘natural’ is often contested), and sexual desire, both what it
is and how it’s manifested, can be shown to be, in many cases, intertwined with various
political agendas and structures of authority.
Although this methodological dichotomy has defined and directed sexuality
studies in the past, current researchers have begun to both criticize and break away from
these two camps of thought (note especially Ehrhardt, 2000; Fuss, 1989; McClintock &
Herdt, 1996; Udry, 1993, 1995; Udry, Talbert, & Morris, 1986). James Giles (2006), for
example, advocates for what he calls a phenomenological perspective, in which he argues
that the origins of sexual desire stem from one’s awareness of one’s gender-identity. In a
similar vein, Lisa Diamond (2001), suggests that sexual desire always develops within

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the contexts of both biological and socio-cultural factors, and that, to this end, it is time
that we start to take seriously both sides of the equation.
Yet despite this, what I think to be positive, move towards the erosion of the
field’s strict dichotomous nature of inquiry, both essentialism and constructionism—
essentialism in particular—have had profound implications on the way we view our
sexual desires; most notably, they have influenced—and, perhaps, solidified1
—the way in
which we understand sexual desire as a dualistic phenomenon, whereby we conceptually
separate our desires to have sex into a dichotomy of physical and mental motivation; that
is, sometimes we have sex for physical reasons (e.g. pleasure), and sometimes we have
sex for other, non-physical reasons (e.g. love). Although this may seem like an obvious
truth, with no harm done, it is important to ask whether this dichotomous
conceptualization is an accurate representation of how we understand our sexual desires,
if not for the sole fact that nobody else is asking it.
As James Giles importantly reveals, whether we can even determine whether our
sexual desires are of physical or mental quality is not always obvious, let alone claim that
they, separately, play an equal role in comprising our sexual desires (as such a dichotomy
maintains). In The Nature of Sexual Desire (2003), he says, “Although sexual desire aims
at sexual activity with another body with male or female genitals, it does not necessarily
aim at activity involving the genitals of the other person’s body.” The noteworthy insight
here is how intertwined some of our physical desires, such as genitals, for example, can
be with some of our mental ones, such as gender identities. Indeed, in such a case,
1
Whether this dichotomous way of viewing our sexual desires existed before or after the
existence of essentialist and constructionist camps is not important; what is important,
though, is that the dichotomy exists currently, and that these methodological camps of

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although we may appear to seek out sex for physical gratification, we are actually seeking
out sex for emotional connection with a gendered human being. Despite how complex or
jargony this claim may sound, it is not foreign territory to us. The fact that so many of us
seek out sex for the purpose of expressing and furthering our love is evidence of how our
desire may be both physical and mental at the same time. But the problem here is not that
we desire both at the same time, but that we have made the jump from the fact that we
have simultaneous physical and mental desires, to the fact that our physical and mental
desires compose an equal part of our sexual desires. Here, the important thing to
remember is that seeking out sex for both physical and mental reasons does not
necessarily render both desires to have equal authority in how we behave.
The problem, then, is not that the dichotomy recognizes both kinds of desire, but
that it recognizes them as equally important. Further, it doesn’t take into account the
complex nature of how our desires are intertwined with one another, or the fact that
sometimes it is difficult to know whether our desires are exclusively physical or mental.
To this end, this paper will argue that the physical-mental dichotomy is wrong for three
reasons: the first is that by claiming equal authority on both parts, the biological
arguments get too much credit, while the constructionist arguments get too little; the
second is because it presupposes the fact that our sexual desires can be separated out into
equal and exclusive categories, neatly; and the third is because it presumes that it can
understand sexual desire apart from the matrix of our other desires. To argue this, I will
explore the biological arguments and their inconsistencies, in order to show how perhaps
these inconsistencies are evidence that sexual desire is not as controlled by physiological
foundations, as many still believe. I will also review the strengths of the constructionist

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literature, including Butler’s idea that biological sex is a constructed phenomenon, as
well as the arguments against claims towards ‘nature’ and ‘naturalness’, in order to show
how powerful and influential culture can be on our understanding of ourselves, our
conceptions of gender, and, thus, our sexual desires. Finally, I will offer practical and
imagined examples of sexual desire within different cultures and contexts, not only to
show how easily and quickly our sexual desires can change when context and culture
shift, but, also, to show how intertwined these desires are with the meaning of physical
reality, and other non-sexual desires.
The Origins of the Dichotomy
But before I get to the main arguments against such a dichotomy, it is important to
examine, first, whether or not such a dichotomy even exists, and, if so, where it comes
from. Does it stem from the biological/constructionist arguments, or do the
biological/constructionist arguments stem from it, for example? In this section, I will
discuss the validity of the existence of the physical-mental dichotomy as well as its
potential origins.
One way in which we can attest to the existence of such a dichotomy is by simply
looking at our colloquial discourse of sexual desire, whereby, on the one hand, we often
talk about being ‘horny’, yet, at the same time, we often refer to sexual intercourse as
‘making love’. Indeed, in Meston and Buss’ study Why Humans Have Sex (2007), 203
men and 241 women revealed some of their top motivations to be purely physical or
mental with responses such as “I wanted to experience pleasure,” and “I was horny,” or,
on the latter account, “I wanted to show my affection to the person,” and “I wanted to
express my love for the person.” The language that surrounds these motivations to have

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sex explicitly reflects the dichotomous view of sexual desire, for it presents such desires
as both separate from one another as well as equally important.
Another way in which we can attest the existence of the dichotomy is through
looking at the sexual desire disorder literature, and how sex researchers in this field
separate our physical and mental desires by arguing that certain levels of sexual desire are
normal, while others are not. This is evident simply by the extensive research that has
been done on Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (Segraves, K. B., & Segraves, R. T.,
1991; Dennerstein, Koochaki, Barton & Graziottin, 2006; Hayes, Dennerstein, Bennett,
Koochaki, Leiblum & Graziottin, 2007; Kingsberg, 2010). Although one could argue
here that measured reports of ‘levels of sexual desire’ are not necessarily reflective of
‘physical’ or ‘mental’ desires per se, because the term ‘sexual’ is sort of ambiguous in
this regard, the subjects’ ability to be diagnosed in the first place is dependent on the
subjects’ reported levels of desire to engage in physical sexual acts (or on reported levels
of actual physical behavior). As such, the sexual desire disorder literature assumes that
there is a certain level of physicality that needs to be expressed for us to be considered
normal, healthy, sexual beings, and that those who don’t exhibit the ‘correct’ levels of
desire are somehow disordered. The result of such an assumption, however, is that our
physical desires become a separate object of concern, and, thus, a separate part, of what it
means to have sexual desires. By distinguishing our physical desires from our mental
ones—and, decontextualizing them—the disorder literature reinforces our physical and
mental desires as separate and equally important parts of sexual desire, for we need them
both to be considered ‘healthy’.

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But where does this dichotomous way of thinking come from? Indeed, although it
is not difficult for one to imagine that we can have sex for physical reasons or mental
reasons alone, it is certainly not difficult for one to also imagine that we might have sex
for both reasons at the same time, or one reason more than the other, and that, as such, to
separate it in such a way would be to misrepresent its complexity. Even those most
committed to biological explanations for sexual desire would concede that, at some point,
biology cannot provide an explanation for all the nuances of our sexual desire—same for
the social constructionists. Yet the physical and the mental realms of desire persist in our
everyday language, in our mental health world, and in our conceptual understandings of
what it means to have sexual desires.
One possible reason that we have conceptually divided our desires in this way is
because of the strong associations we have made to sex; that is, on one level, sex means
love, and, on another, sex means reproduction. And although philosophers for centuries
have examined and debated the link between love and sex, and evolutionary
psychologists have persuasively shown how we can link our sexual desires—both
physical and mental—to different reproductive advantages, which are evident across
species (Buss, 1994; Wallen, 1995; Fisher, 1998), these complex arguments are not the
main grounds for why we decide to conceptually separate sexual desire into physical and
mental categories. Indeed, they may play a small role in influencing how we understand
our desires, but the real reason we have for accepting such a dichotomy is not because we
are convinced by these arguments, but because, simply put, we know that sex is linked to
reproduction and love. On the former link, given that the survival of our species seems to
be a positive thing, this association allows us to conceptually understand sex as a physical

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necessity, with no further explanation. At the same time, the fact that we understand sex
to be an expression of love is enough for us to conceptually understand sex as a mental
desire for closeness and connection; we need not delve into the philosophical debates
between love and sex in order to understand that the two are linked, or that one is a
manifestation of the other. To this end, because love and reproduction are arguably the
two strongest associations we make regarding sexual intercourse, they become important
factors that influence our desires to engage in such behavior.
Another plausible reason that this dichotomy continues to define and plague our
conceptions of sexual desire is because our essentialist and constructionist methodologies
continue to reinforce it. Indeed, regardless of whether our physical-mental dichotomous
conceptions of sexual desire existed before or after these camps of research, the
development of such methodologies, along with their efforts to claim physiological or
constructionist foundations, and, perhaps most importantly, the equal authority they have
over sexuality research, are all factors that, arguably, reaffirm the idea that sexual desire
is exclusively physical in some ways, and exclusively mental in others. Because we are
not all sex biologists, or philosophical social constructionists, the fact that these two
camps of thought exist, alone, may be enough for many of us to accept them to be
correct; one need not agree with, or even fully understand, the arguments on either side in
order to trust the experts in the field. I will now turn to the biological arguments, to
question whether or not they have empirically proven themselves to be as convincing as
they claim to be.

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The Inconsistency of Essentialist/Biological Arguments
One of the most common ways in which essentialists have argued for the
existence of sexual desire is through examining sex hormones—specifically androgens
(which include testosterone, androstenedione, and dehydroepiandrosterone), estrogens
(such as estrone and estriol), progesterone, and prolactin—and their relation to sexual
desire2
(Bancroft, 2002, 2005; Regan, 1999; Rako, 1999; Ganz and Greendale, 2007).
According to Regan (1999), “a growing body of evidence indicates that sexual desire is
to some extent androgen dependent in both men and women” (e.g., Davidson, Camargo,
& Smith, 1979; O’Carroll & Bancroft, 1984; Sherwin, 1988; Skakkebaek, Bancroft,
Davidson, & Warner, 1981; Waxenberg, Finkbeiner, Drellich, & Sutherland, 1960).
In addition, one study, conducted by Halpern, Udry, Campbell, Suchindran, and Mason
(1994) “found a positive correlation between free testosterone levels and frequency of
sexual thoughts in adolescent boys” (Regan, 1999). Many others have concluded that
levels of androgen can directly decrease or increase sexual desire. On the former account,
“Men treated with CPA or MPA (which are antiandrogenic substances) have “reported a
reduction in their frequency of sexual thoughts, erotic fantasies, and sexual urges” (e.g.,
Bancroft et al., 1974; Berlin & Meinecke, 1981; Cooper, Ismail, Phanjoo, & Love, 1972;
Hucker, Langevin, & Bain, 1988; Kravitz et al., 1995; Young, 1987). On the latter
account, Regan says, “The administration of exogenous androgens (usually testosterone)
to men and women complaining of low sexual interest has been noted to result in an
increase in the self-reported strength of sexual desire (Rabkin, Rabkin, & Wagner, 1995)
2
It is important to note here, again, that most sex researchers advocating for biological
foundations of sexual desire do not believe that hormones, on their own, are able to
explain the origins of our sexual desire; rather, they simply say that hormones are a
necessary component for its existence and appearance.

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and in the frequency of sexual thoughts (O’Carroll & Bankroft, 1984) and in the desire
for intercourse” (Greenblatt et al., 1942; Kennedy, 1973; Salmon & Geist, 1943).
Yet despite these findings, Regan (1999) also reports later on that it may be the
case that “only a minimum amount of androgenic substance [may] need to be present in
the hormonal environment for desire to be experienced”. Here, she cites Sherwin’s (1988)
study which “proposed that sexual desire will be noticeably affected only when the level
of hormone has dropped below some unspecified critical threshold,” and that “at or above
this threshold, increasing levels of hormone will have no further influence on desire”
(Regan, 1999). Bancroft, Sanders, Davidson and Warner, in 1983, discovered that
although levels of testosterone were highly correlated with sexual behavior, they were
insignificantly, or even, to some extent, negatively correlated with subjective measures of
sexual feeling and thought. From this research, Regan concludes that overall, sexual
desire appears to be “somewhat androgen dependent”—a claim that fails to draw any real
conclusions about how sexual desire may operate. The same type of outcome follows
from Regan’s examination of other sex hormones as well. Estrogen, she concludes, is not
likely to be causally related to sexual desire in men or women; progesterone “may or may
not increase or decrease female sexual desire”; and “the role of prolactin in sexual desire
remains unclear, despite numerous studies and substantial interest on the part of the
scientific community” (Regan, 1999).
More recently, Bancroft (2002) published a study concluding that “an adult
male’s continued interest in sex depends on his having a normal level of circulating
testosterone,” and that, “If an otherwise normal male has his testosterone lowered by
testicular suppressive drugs, he experiences a decline in sexual interest, which returns

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when the process is reversed” (p. 17). But as James Giles notes in his article “Sex
Hormones and Sexual Desires (2008),” Bancroft also concludes, in the same research,
that such drugs are further related to a “marked decrease in the frequency of spontaneous
erections” as well as “a strong trend towards decreased ability to maintain an erection
during intercourse” (Bagetell et al., 1994, pp. 713–714) and, also, the fact that
spontaneous nocturnal erections come and go according to whether testosterone is
withdrawn or replaced.
To this end, Giles criticizes Bancroft’s research from a number of standpoints. For
one, he argues, spontaneous nocturnal erections that come and go tell us nothing about
levels of sexual desire; this is plain and simple. An erection does not always reflect
sexual desire, especially if it is spontaneous. Here, he cites Mann, Pankok, Connemann,
and Röschke (2003), who hold that the physiology of nocturnal erections are not only
poorly understood
(Mann and Sohn, 2005), but, also, may be related to REM sleep, and,
thus, may have other factors unrelated to sexual desire influencing its appearance.
A
second problem Giles notes in Bancroft is that he seems to ignore the fact that a
decreased ability to maintain an erection could also explain a decrease in sexual desire;
indeed, the fact that there is often a level of anxiety and embarrassment that might come
from not being able to maintain an erection could easily affect a man’s desire to have sex,
and, also, his desires to engage in behaviors that may lead to sex. Here, he cites Bagetell
et al.’s (1994) findings that the withdrawal of testosterone has led not only to a decline in
sex, but a “decline in kissing and fondling” as well. To this end, one reoccurring problem
within the essentialist literature seems to be that its method often fails to control for all
the possible factors that could be influencing one’s reported levels of sexual desire.

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Indeed, to isolate hormones from the context in which they are measured is to ignore the
possible factors that may be affecting not only one’s sexual desires, but one’s level of
hormones as well.
The inconsistencies of Regan’s and Bancroft’s findings regarding the link
between testosterone and sexual desire are further supported by what we know about the
sexual desire of Eunuchs as well—Eunuchs are men who were historically castrated in
many different cultures including ancient Greece, ancient China, Rome, Byzantium, and
different Islamic societies for the sake of trying to stop men from having sex or
impregnating women (Giles, 2008). What we know is that despite the fact that these men
suffered permanent testosterone deficiency from having their testicles removed, they
continued to have sexual desires towards, and sexual intercourse with, women (Aucoin
and Wassersug, 2006)
Up until now, I have been discussing the biological research that has been done
on men, largely because most of what is available has focused itself on men’s sexual
desire. But the biological literature on women’s sexual desires that is available is no
better. In fact, much of the literature on women is even less consistent than what exists
for men, for many of the studies that examine the link between sex hormones and sexual
desire of women only hold true for some women. Giles (2008) references several studies
ranging from hormone changes in women due to ovulation, oral contraceptive usage,
breast-feeding and menopause, which all support the same conclusion: hormone changes
affect some women but not others. What’s more is that these studies don’t take into
account the fact that many think that having sex while menstruating is disgusting, or the
fact that taking care of a baby takes time and effort, or that many women may see their

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menstrual cycle as an integral part of their femininity, youth, or sexual desirability, all of
which are perfectly logical explanations for why a woman may experience changes in her
levels of sexual desire. Again, the problem that presents itself is that the biological
literature attempts to isolate sex hormones in order to examine sexual desire, yet, in doing
so, neglects other factors that could be influencing sexual desire.
To this end, one explanation for why we are seeing so many inconsistencies in the
biological literature, for both men and women, is because, by choosing to examine,
solely, the physical links to sexual desire, researchers choose to decontextualize sexual
desire, ignoring many of the social and cultural factors that are arguably relevant.
Another possible explanation for why we are seeing so many inconsistencies is because
sexual desire, simply put, does not operate—primarily—as physical phenomenon, as
many sex researchers have assumed. To examine this question, the next section of this
paper will explore some of the constructionist arguments, and how these arguments
compare to their biological counterparts.
Constructionist Arguments of Biological Sex and Notions of ‘Nature’
One of the most influential thinkers in the onset of social constructionism theory
is Michel Foucault (1980) and his notion that, historically, discourses of sexual desire,
which were perceived to be ‘repressed,’ were actually crafted by people of social
authority and power as political and ideological strategies. Although Foucault brings
interesting and, for many, persuasive theories regarding how sexuality has operated since
the Protestant Reformation, what is more important, for this paper at least, is the fact that
Foucault offers a foundation for many other social constructionists to base their own
theories. As Deborah Tolman and Lisa Diamond (2001) note, “Numerous feminists have

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built on Foucault’s analysis by highlighting the extent to which conventional
understandings of sexuality both spring from and reproduce hierarchies of gender that
privilege (White, middle class) men and oppress women”3
. For example, Fine, in 1988,
performed a study that concluded that “school based discourses about adolescent
sexuality within sex education made frequent references to male but not female sexual
desire” (Tolman & Diamond, 2001). To this end, Tolman and Diamond (2001) suggest
that such cultural discourses, which tell women that their sexual desires are not the same
as men’s, can lead women to disregard or deny many sexual desires they have because
they “lack the cultural basis to acknowledge and meaningfully interpret such feelings and
experiences,” and, as such, have influence over not only reported levels of sexual desire,
but actual levels of sexual desire as well.
Some theorists, such as Judith Butler, go as far as to argue that not only is our
sexual desire culturally construed, but that even that our categories of biological sex—
that is, men and women—are culturally construed4
. Inspired by Simone de Beauvoir who
said in The Second Sex (1970), “One is not a woman, rather one becomes a woman,”
Butler grounds much of her argument in this same notion—that is, that gender is
something that is gradually acquired. To this end, she works to rid of the idea that
“woman” is a stable category of identity. She says, in Gender Trouble (1990),
If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be
exhaustive, not because a pre-gendered “person” transcends the
specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not
always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical
3
See also Bartky, 1990; Duggan, 1990; Ramazanoglu & Holland, 1993; Rich, 1980;
Rubin, 1984; Tiefer, 1987, 1995.
4
This is a claim that precedes, and, arguably, trumps discussion on whether our sexual
desires are sociocultural construed, for as Giles notes, our sexual desires are always
aimed at one gender or another; I will explore this claim in more detail in the last section.

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contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic,
sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.
As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the
political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced
and maintained (p. 6).
The question of what it means to be a woman is further assessed and deconstructed by
other claims by Butler including those against the link between gender and sex, as well as
those arguing for the erosion of biological sex as a binary. In response to the widely
accepted distinction—that gender is culturally construed roles that we follow, while sex
is stable descriptions of biology—Butler says,
If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then
a gender cannot be said to follow from sex in any one way…
Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not
follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the
bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies
(p. 10).
She continues, “And what is “sex” anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or
hormonal?” To this end, Butler argues that biological sex could potentially be conceived
to be just as constructed as gender, in a way that is subject to the way we understand
gender discourse. As Simone de Beauvoir notes, “the body is a situation” (1970), or, in
other words, there is no physical body that exists, which has not already interpreted by
cultural meaning. Butler expands,
The limits of the discursive analysis of gender presuppose and
preempt the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender
configurations within culture. This is not to say that any and all
gendered possibilities are open, but that the boundaries of analysis
suggest the limits of a discursively conditioned experience (p. 13).
The problem, then, with stable categories of biological sex that becomes clear is not only
that we haven’t fully decided what “sex” is, but also that categories of sex—that is, the
physical body—do not exist outside of cultural interpretation. Just as we understand men

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to have penises and women to have vaginas, we could instead potentially categorize men
and women according to hair color, for example. All people with brown and black hair
are men. All people with blonde or red hair are women. The important thing to think
about here is not whether such categorization would be easier or more difficult, but the
fact that such a methodological categorization is perfectly comprehensible.
Although not many have taken on Butler and succeeded, one of her most serious
critics is Martha Nussbaum, and her article, “The Professor of Parody” (1999), in which
Nussbaum critiques Butler from a number of standpoints, including her writing style, her
lack of practical focus for feminist progress, her claim that there is no agent behind or
prior to the social forces that produce the self, and her claim to the cultural construction
of biological sex. Because writing style and feminist focus are merely preferences that
have little to do with the validity of Butler’s claims, I will focus on the latter two
critiques. Regarding whether there is a self that exists pre-socially and pre-culturally,
Nussbaum (1999) says,
Butler does in the end want to say that we have a kind of agency, an
ability to undertake change and resistance. But where does this
ability come from, if there is no structure in the personality that is
not thoroughly power's (referencing Foucault, 1980) creation? It is
not impossible for Butler to answer this question, but she certainly
has not answered it yet, in a way that would convince those who
believe that human beings have at least some pre-cultural desires--
for food, for comfort, for cognitive mastery, for survival--and that
this structure in the personality is crucial in the explanation of our
development as moral and political agents.
But Nussbaum is missing what I think is Butler’s point here. That is, the question of
whether or not we have a self that precedes culture and society is one that becomes
irrelevant the second we are born; in fact, it becomes irrelevant the second our parents
realize that they are going to have a baby, and they start to buy boy or girl clothes, or pick

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out names, or redecorate the baby’s room. Butler’s point in arguing that the self is socio-
culturally constructed is not that a pre-cultural self never exists, but, rather, that the hopes
of reaching or understanding that pre-cultural self is, really, a hopeless and impossible
pursuit5
. To this end, Nussbaum and Butler are talking past one another in the sense that
Nussbaum believes Butler is making such a claim in order to say something about how
the self exists, ontologically and metaphysically, while Butler is actually making her
claim in order to suggest that we need to be aware of the power structures that influence
our thought.
Regarding Butler’s claim that biological sex is socially construed, Nussbaum
says,
It is much too simple to say that power is all that the body is. We
might have had the bodies of birds or dinosaurs or lions, but we do
not; and this reality shapes our choices. Culture can shape and
reshape some aspects of our bodily existence, but it does not shape
all the aspects of it. "In the man burdened by hunger and thirst," as
Sextus Empiricus observed long ago, "it is impossible to produce by
argument the conviction that he is not so burdened” (p. 8).
This analysis also has a couple pitfalls. The first is the same one that arose from the
previous critique; that is, while Nussbaum takes Butler’s claims as claims to ontological
reality, Butler makes such claims with a specific political agenda in mind. Her claims to
social construction of biological sex are not to say that biological sexes are socially
construed, per se—that penises and vaginas do not exist—but that our conceptions of
biological sex as natural and objectively stable categories are socially construed; yet
because the only way for Butler to achieve this message is to make the claim that our
5
This is a nuanced distinction that is perhaps supported by the fact that Butler’s argument
is not that “a pre-cultural self never exists,” but, rather, “the self is culturally
constructed.”

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biological sex is logically comprehensible as a socially construed phenomenon,
Nussbaum, along with many others, easily miss this underlying political agenda.
The second issue with Nussbaum’s critique regards her reference to Sextus
Empiricus; that some parts of the body are simply not socially construed; that no matter
what society says, a hungry person is a hungry person, and a thirsty person is a thirsty
person; that there are some truths to the body. But the problem here is that whether we
can access those truths has still not been demonstrated. What are we supposed to make of
anorexic people or people who commit suicide, for example? If hunger and survival were
bodily truths, they would transcend any cultural influence regarding hunger and survival,
but, clearly, this is not the case. One could argue here that Nussbaum’s point still stands,
for she is arguing a broader claim about bodily truth: that in order to survive, there are
certain minimum requirements to the body that must be met, such as food and water
intake, and that, to this end, anorexic and suicidal individuals only support her idea of
bodily truth because they fail to flourish. But, again, Butler never argues that everything
about the body is socially construed, or that there are no truths to the body. What she
argues is that biological sex—in relation to categories of gender identity—is not a stable
truth. Butler argues for the social construction of biological sex, not to erode the stability
of our genitals, as physical, ontological structures, but, rather, to erode the stability of the
conceptual link between our genitals and the labels we create, i.e. ‘men’ and ‘women’. In
other words, she does not mean to say that people do not have penises and vaginas,
rather, that categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ need not exist as a transcultural,
transhistorical truth of what it means to be a human being. To this end, any claims to
ontology become red herring fallacies, for they do not address Butler head on.

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Butler is not the only one who thinks that sex could potentially be a socially
construed phenomenon. As Anne Fausto-Sterling’s notes in her article The Five Sexes
Revisited, approximately 1.7 percent of people qualify as intersex individuals6
(p. 20); to
this end, Fausto-Sterling argues that the two categories of sex we have do not accurately
represent what needs to be represented. A better system, she proposes, would be one that
recognized five sexes, which includes males, females, ‘herms’ (true hermaphrodites—
people born with testes and ovaries), ‘merms’ (male pseudo-hermaphrodies—people born
with testes and some aspect of female genitalia), and ‘ferms’ (female pseudo-
hermaphrodites—people born with ovaries and some aspect of male genitalia) (Fausto-
Sterling, 2000). Although some have argued that Fausto-Sterling’s estimates were way
higher than they actually should be7
, the important theme here, again, is not how common
or uncommon these categories of identification are, but, rather, how they are able to test
our understanding of stable, biological categories of sex. One may tempted to argue, and
rightfully so, that advocating five stable categories instead of two only reinforces the
notion that we can quantify and categorize our sex identities—that is, instead of two, now
we have five. But despite her advancement of the five sex system, Fausto-Sterling says,
“sex is a vast, infinitely malleable continuum that defies the constraints of even five
categories” (1993), and, as such, reveals her goal in arguing for such a system not to be to
simply re-categorize people in a different way, but, rather to accommodate for, and
6
Fausto-Sterling notes that this is a ballpark percentage and is dependent on other factors
such as location, for example.
7
Sax (2002), for example, contends that many of the intersex individuals that Fausto-
Sterling accepted as intersexuals are not considered to be intersexuals according to
clinicians.

20.
Eggleston, 19
become tolerant towards, as much variety as we can, which is, certainly, a worthwhile
pursuit that both Fausto-Sterling and Butler evidently share.
One last topic I think is relevant to this discussion of constructionist literature is
the concept of ‘nature’ and/or ‘naturalness’, and how claims to ‘nature’, when it comes to
sexuality studies, have allowed us to accept pre-social, pre-cultural explanations for our
sexual desires, despite the fact that such claims are vague and unsupported by the
biological literature, as we have seen. Indeed, claims to nature have been found
throughout the literature in statements such as “The nature of the society in which a
people live clearly plays a significant part in shaping the patterns of human sexual
behavior (Ford and Beach, 1951, p.19), or “It is an essential part of our conceptual
apparatus that the sexes are a polarity, and a dichotomy in nature” (Greer, 1971, p.15).
Master and Johnson (1970), scholars who have been overwhelmingly influential in the
field for their work on the human sexual response cycle, also refer to the term on multiple
occasions. One example is their sweeping claim that, “The whole of sexual experience
for both the human male and female is constituted in two…separate systems… that
coexist naturally...” If claims to ‘nature’, though, despite their vagueness, are so
commonly used as essential parts to arguments of sex researchers, it is important to look
at both what researchers mean when they argue for ‘nature’, as well as the motivations
that drive such claims.
Raymond Williams (1979), a historian of culture, offered three different things
that ‘nature’ can potentially refer to. Firstly, ‘nature’ can refer to the essential quality of a
thing; for example, the ‘nature’ of a society is the essential quality of that society.
Secondly, ‘nature’ can refer to an inherent legitimating force, such that things that exist

21.
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‘contrary to nature’ do not have the same force, or move in the same the same direction,
as ‘nature’. And thirdly, ‘nature’ can refer to the fixed material world, such that a female
orgasm is ‘natural’ because a female orgasm exists as a fixed physical phenomenon
(Tieffer, 2004). In addition to these conceptions, Tieffer (2004) suggests there are two
more characteristics of ‘nature’ relevant to the sexuality literature that Williams does not
address: the first is that if something is ‘natural,’ it is universal; and the second is that
‘nature’ is biological predisposition. To this end, nature is something that is both cross-
cultural and pre-cultural.
But where do such definitions come from, and why are there so many of them?
Tiefer (2004) notes that the word ‘nature’ can been traced back to the European
Enlightenment, in which it served to “support the right of the people to resist the doctrine
of the divine right of kings as well as to resist abuses of power by the church.” The same
rhetorical power has been observed in feminist studies and sexuality studies, where, on
the former account, many argue that, historically, men have made such claims to nature
in order to subordinate women by rationalizing women’s ‘natural’ state of being, and, on
the latter account, natural phenomena are simply unchangeable and inevitable truths
about how the universe or biology exists, such that any arguments against it are denied.
Tiefer adds, “That special rhetorical power often seems to call on nature by contrast with
culture, as if anything human-made can be the result of trickery, but something prior to
and outside of human culture can be trusted.” To this end, what is ‘natural’ is largely
dependent on the goals of whoever is claiming ‘nature’, and, often, is used as a tool of
authority towards political goals and ontological claims.

22.
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If this is true, then the employment of the term ‘nature’ may potentially have deep
roots in culture itself, despite its claim to be universal and pre-cultural. And if ‘nature’
has deep roots in culture, then ‘nature’, though used historically to discount and deny
culture, has really been a culturally-embodied notion all along.
The claim that “nature” is not separate from culture, as well as the claims
discussed earlier in this section are important because they expose both how powerful
and pervasive culture and society are in our own thought, and, further, how complicated
our sense of sex and gender, our sense of desire, and even our sense of self can be. The
constructionist arguments are helpful and necessary to examine, and continue to examine,
because they force us to enter a context that takes seriously the role that culture plays in
our lives. The next section of this paper will offer practical and imagined examples of
sexual desire within different cultures and contexts, not only to show how easily and
quickly our sexual desires can change when context and culture shift, but, also, to show
how intertwined these desires are with the meaning of physical reality as well as our
other, non-sexual desires.
Sexual Desires and Behaviors in Context
In 1984, Gilbert Herdt published a work titled Ritualized Homosexuality in
Melanesia, in which he explored the sexual culture of Sambia men in relation to their
lives, in general. What he found, in essence, was that these people had a whole different
way of perceiving the parts of the physical sexual world than Western society does today.
Specifically, he found that Sambian people view semen as something that is highly
valued, and, as something that has five different levels of importance. He says, “Sambia
have five main cultural categories of semen valuation. These include erotic play,

23.
Eggleston, 22
procreation, growth, strength, and spirituality, all of which are connected with sexual
behavior” (p.175). Although erotic play, procreation, strength, and spirituality are helpful
in understanding differences between the two cultures, perhaps the most important—and
surprising—difference is the way Sambian people perceive semen as something that is
integral to growth. Hertd (1984) says,
Oral sexual contacts feed semen into a boy’s body, distributing
sperm to his maturing skin, bones, skull, and producing changes
toward masculinization (i.e., eventuating in biological puberty). The
bulk of externally ingested semen goes to the boy’s semen organ,
where it accumulates as a “pool” (p. 182)
He continues,
Girls require and are permitted no inseminations until marriage.
Men believe that post-marital oral sexual contacts in cases of
marriage before menarche provide a young wife’s body with semen
to stimulate the final “growth” changes necessary for childbearing
(p. 182).
To this end, it is clear that people of Sambia view semen not only as something that
facilitates growth, but, also, as something that is valuably transferred from one man into
another, where it is stored, and then transferred again; it is not something that is
continuously reproduced in the testes. Because of this, semen, unlike in Western culture,
has much more value, and plays an integral role in how Sambian society operates, in a
way that affects not only sexual behavior, but all facets of what it means to be a healthy,
normal person of New Guinea. To this end, it becomes clear that sexual physical cues,
and their meanings, reveal themselves to be subject to culture and context, for the things
Western culture considers to be sexy, or simply insignificant in this case, are certainly not
understood in the same way by Sambian people, for example. Indeed, it is not always the
case that a penis or a vagina must represent sexiness or anything sexual at all. From here,

24.
Eggleston, 23
it is not that big a leap to imagine that our desires—sexual and non—may also be affected
in a similar way by the meaning culture places on our physical reality and our sexual
lives.
To push this idea further, take, for example, the following scenario: A man has a
one-night stand with a woman and really enjoys it. But a week later, he finds out that the
woman he had sex with used to be a man, and is now a woman—she is a transsexual.
Because of this, he gets disgusted and angry at her for not telling him, loses all sexual
interest, and never wants to have sex with her again. What’s important to take note of in
this scenario is that although the man lost all sexual interest to the point of never wanting
sex again, the woman’s body never changed at all; it was, and is, a woman’s body, with
breasts, a vagina, wide hips etc. The only thing that changed was the new knowledge the
man received that the woman is a transsexual; to this end, the only possible explanation
for the change we see in the man’s sexual desire is that the negative stigma of
transsexuals caused the man to not want to be associated with the woman. This scenario
is important because it reveals that our physical desires are not always separate from our
mental ones.
James Giles, in The Nature of Sexual Desire (2008), offers a similar scenario—
one that takes this claim a step further and argues that not only are our physical desires
not always separate from our mental ones, but that sometimes it may be difficult to even
tell whether our desires are physical or mental at all—that is, we can’t even label them as
such. To make this argument, he describes a situation in which a heterosexual male is
receiving fellatio from another person, but is blindfolded and cannot tell whether the
person performing fellatio is male or female. Yet, he notes that despite the fact that it

25.
Eggleston, 24
would be very difficult to tell whether the male’s fellator is male or female—simply from
the feelings of receiving fellatio—it would be of paramount importance that his fellator is
female because he is heterosexual. But what does it mean to say that he wants his fellator
to be female? Does this mean that he wants her vagina? That does not seem right given
the fact that giving fellatio to a man has nothing to do with a vagina. It seems safe to say,
then, that what he wants is a gendered human being to give him fellatio. But, the problem
here, as Kessler and McKenna (1987) reveal, is that the defining characteristic of whether
a male is a male or a female a female is his or her genitals; in other words, females do not
and cannot exist without female genitals, and males do not and cannot exist without male
genitals. To this end, one could argue that desiring a female, in essence, requires, at the
very least, the desire for the existence of female genitals (even if these desires are not
actually aimed at the genitals). It is here that the problem becomes clear: to label one’s
desires for the existence of female genitals as physical or mental is an impossible task
because such objects of desire are neither exclusively physical nor mental themselves.
A concrete example of this notion that desires may not fit physical or mental
labels is evident through examining many sexual fetishes. Take a foot fetish or a leather
fetish, for example. The reason these desires are not purely physical is because, without
sexual context, we would not be attracted to them; indeed, most of us are not attracted to
statues of feet, or to leather couches. But at the same time, they cannot be purely mental
desires either because we cannot be attracted to a foot that does not physically exist.
Indeed, what these fetishes, and many others, reveal to us is that it is the combination of a
physical object with the meaning we ascribe to it that determines whether or not we
become sexually attracted. Take, for example, the following scenario: If we were to take

26.
Eggleston, 25
a male body and put it in three different outfits—say, homeless rags, a business suit, and
a fireman suspenders—is it not true that many of us would report changes in levels of
sexual desire from one outfit to another (and other cultures would reflect different levels
of desire, depending on the outfits)? And, importantly, is it not true that these changes in
sexual desire would not simply be changes in mental attraction, or intellectual
stimulation, but physiological and real, physically-felt changes in our levels of sexual
desire? Again, what becomes clear here is that the dichotomy of physical and mental
desire fails not only because we cannot label our desires as physical or mental, but, also,
because we cannot label our objects of desire as physical or mental, for to label such
objects in this way would be to remove them from the sexual realm altogether.
Thus far, I have been attempting to show how the dichotomy fails because of how
our physical and mental desires intertwine, and because of how our objects of desire exist
between the physical and mental realm of ontology. But there is one last problem with the
physical-mental dichotomy: that is, it doesn’t accurately represent how desire and choice
operate.
In Value, Comparability, and Choice, Donald Regan, in an attempt to explain how
we go about making choices in life, explicates G.E. Moore’s conception of ‘good’ such
that “good” is not some property or entity to be maximized, as in the view of the
utilitarian, but, rather, that it is the best state of affairs that we attempt to produce in our
everyday lives (Regan, p.134). To this end, he continues that we don’t always know what
the best choice is, and that sometimes “we drift into things” that lead us down different
paths in life. I bring this up because not because it reveals something important about
how we go about making choices, but, rather, because it reveals something important

27.
Eggleston, 26
about our choices themselves: that is, that our choices in life are not separated into sexual
and non-sexual choices, but, rather, that they exist in one big matrix, or one big choice
making system. In our attempt to produce the “best state of affairs”, we consider both
sexual and nonsexual desires, we mix them together, and then we make our best possible
decision. To make this more concrete, take, for example, a homosexual man who wants
to have a family (perhaps before we had the technology, and before it was socially
tolerable, this was a hard choice). Both the desire for gay sex—a sexual desire—and the
desire for a family—a non-sexual desire—are both factors that will influence his ultimate
choice on whom to marry. Say he were to choose to have a family, instead of gay sex. It
doesn’t necessarily follow that his homosexual desires will stay constant, or even
existent, for the rest of his life. He may get busy with his family, fall deeply in love with
his children, and forget that he isn’t having sex with men, simply because its not as
important to him as having sex with other men. To this end, the stability of physical
desires, as advocated by the biological literature, has been assumed to exist as a constant
measurable phenomenon, regardless of the circumstances we encounter in life, regardless
of our culture, and regardless of our choice-making capacity to choose what we think is
important in life. This is wrong.
A similar argument has been echoed by Blumstein and Shwartz (1990), who
contend that there are two key factors that can facilitate or deter sexual behavior: gender
roles and/or the ‘societal organization of opportunities’. On the former account, they
simply argue that gender roles can guide us to engage in certain behaviors because there
exist certain expectations that come with being a male or a female that we often consider.
On the latter account, the societal organization of opportunities is the way in which our

28.
Eggleston, 27
life circumstances present themselves to us, such that they are able to influence our
sexual behaviors. Indeed, as Blumstein and Shwartz argue, there are certain
circumstances that permit certain behaviors to occur and other circumstances that deter
other behaviors from occurring. They explain, “these circumstances may be as concrete
as a woman’s being unable to have heterosexual experience within an institution of
chaperonage or as subtle as her being unable to have sexual relations outside her marriage
because she is a suburban housewife who, in the course of her typical day, never finds
herself in the company of men” (McWhirter, Sanders, & Reinisch, 1990, p.310). But the
important thing to note here, again, is not only that such circumstances can determine
whether our sexual desires will be expressed, but, also, that they can determine whether
they exist, and how strongly.
Conclusion
This paper has argued that the physical-mental dichotomy is wrong for three
reasons. The first is, while such a dichotomy professes equal authority on both categories
of sexual desire, the biological arguments have shown themselves to be much less
consistent than the constructionist ones. The second is, while such a dichotomy professes
exclusive categories, it is not always clear not only whether our physical and mental
desires are exclusive, but, also, whether they can be discerned or labeled in such a way.
And the third is because while such a dichotomy exists in order to explain our sexual
desires, it does not account for other desires that are intertwined with our sexual ones.
What this paper calls for, then, is a closer examination of the physical-mental dichotomy.
What does it mean to be ‘horny’, for example? Is ‘horniness’ really a purely physical
need for sexual release, or has our conception of horniness come from already existing

29.
Eggleston, 28
expectations of the physical-mental dichotomy? If the goal is to understand our sexual
desires, as well as the relationships that incorporate such behaviors, then we must first
become clearer on what it means to have sexual desires, and to be a sexual being.

30.
Eggleston, 29
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