Sociology book

[Mith]

I have this sociology book for my class and I was reading the chapter about sexuality. It was a brief mention, but they actually took "the fourth orientation" into consideration. This was published a few years ago, too, so maybe newer books have some information about asexuality. It made me happy even to see it mentioned. I know the people in my class read it so maybe it stuck in some of their minds.

2015 Edit:

[M51]

Could you give us the title, author/editor, publisher, edition number, etc?

Thanks!

[Mith]

Yeah I could when I get home. I don't have it with me now. It's an interesting book but it denies individuality, sadly.

[waffo]

*opens her own sociology book to bookmarked pages*

"Romantic love--people being sexually attracted to one another and idealizing each other--showed up in..."

It just had to bold it like a definition too. ;_;

"The point, however, is that romantic love usually begins with sexual attraction. Finding ourselves sexually attracted to someone, we spend time with that person. If we discover mutual interests, we may label our feelings 'love.' Apparently, then, romantic love has two components. The first is emotional, a feeling of sexual attraction. The second is cognitive, a label that we attach to our feelings."

Well, at least this paragraph says usually. Yeah, my book's not as cool.

[M51]

"The point, however, is that romantic love usually begins with sexual attraction. Finding ourselves sexually attracted to someone, we spend time with that person. If we discover mutual interests, we may label our feelings 'love.' Apparently, then, romantic love has two components. The first is emotional, a feeling of sexual attraction. The second is cognitive, a label that we attach to our feelings."

Holy cow that whole definition is backwards to me. If you invert each sentence to its opposite, it applies to me perfectly! Especially the emotional component equaling sexual attraction. HUH?!? Did the person who wrote that spend more than three seconds studying human interaction to come up with that? Even most sexuals (I think) can separate emotional attraction from sexual attraction....

[Hallucigenia]

Holy cow that whole definition is backwards to me.

Me too (though maybe not quite as much as you). Honestly I don't understand where this popular view of sexual attraction being the instigating force in relationships is.

Caveat: I'm sexual. I do get sexually attracted to people sometimes without knowing them first. But I'm just as likely to get sexually attracted to someone after spending time with them and figuring out basically where they're coming from. Both the serious relationships I've had come from this latter sort of attraction.

Maybe there is some weird proto-attraction that these people are labeling as sexual and I'm not? *shrugs*

Or maybe I'm looking at it wrong, and they're taking it as a given that you've already spent a little bit of time with that person - I mean, even for a purely physical attraction, you need to at least have time to see what they look like - and when they say "spending time with the person" they mean going out of your way to be with them specifically and trying to figure out exactly how they tick. I suppose it makes more sense if I look at it that way.

And when they get to the part about "love" being a label that signifies mutual interest, they've just lost me completely. I'm not even going to try to figure that one out.

[Mith]

My book is Sociology: The Basics by John Macionis. There's not much in there about us, but its an accurate mention. :D It's not just talking about the reproduction of single celled organisms.