What is Sex?

Human sexuality represents a field of behavioral, social, cultural and civilizational research more or less linked to the realization of sexual pleasures. Sexology, born of the physiological and psychological analysis of sexual disorders, is considered to be the science of sexuality in the human being, in its medical and sociological components (including and especially those of neurobiology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis).

In the broadest sense, sexuality can also be defined as a "social practice" engendering sexual behaviors in which, for a given individual, there are sexual orientations and, at the level of society, structured social norms Around historical or religious constraints, medical or legal. The psychoanalytic notions of perversions and the law set the limits considered socially acceptable orientations or behaviors (harassment, sexual abuse of minors, rape).

This multiplicity of factors makes human sexuality an area where medical (health, prevention), social, philosophical (pleasure) or political (militancy, legislation) issues are expressed.

The psychoanalyst Herbert Rosenfeld in an attempt to explain and define sexuality in its entirety, taking into account paraphilia, set out three basic ideas. The first point is that according to Rosenfeld one can distinguish in all and for all three categories of acts of a sexual nature, which are: the pleasure of penetration, the pleasure to get dirty, and finally the pleasure to Find crushed (eg trampled). For him, these three forms mix more or less in all sexuality, knowing that the normal form privileges the act of penetration.

The second point is that in all forms of sexuality one finds first an act which one wishes to realize, then secondly, the organ on which phantasm is carried, and which is the part of the body which, Partner, makes it possible to carry out the sexual act in question. Now it is this act that decides the part of the body on which desire will be directed. This would explain in particular the fetishism of the foot. The third and last point is that generally speaking in every sexual act there are two actors, each having an opposite and complementary role. Indeed, for each of the three basic acts mentioned above, one can distinguish between an active agent and another passive: penetrating / getting penetrated, dirtying / getting dirty, crushing / crushing. These pleasures seem indeed opposite and complementary.

Sexual behavior is not restricted to sexual intercourse and is very diverse. They can be realized alone, in pairs, or in "group" and do not necessarily imply coitus. Religions usually fix the norms of this behavior (such as the obligation of a reproductive purpose in Catholic doctrine), following a structure that can be deconstructed by historical (cf. Alain Corbin) or philosophical ( Cf Michel Onfray) or neurological (see Erotic behavior Serge Wunsch).

The diversity of human sexual behavior is explained by changes in the human brain during evolution. The reproductive behavior of mammals has become an erotic behavior in hominids, and especially in humans, whose aim is the search for erotic pleasure by stimulating erogenous zones.