It is the east, and Juliet is the sun
Artists, creative writers, and musicians have long been interested in the complex motives that spark passionate love, sexual desire, and sexual behavior. Recently, scholars from a variety of disciplines have begun to investigate two questions: “Why do men and women choose to engage in sexual liaisons?” “Why do they avoid such encounters?” Theories abound. Many theorists have complained that there exists a paucity of scales designed to measure the plethora of motives that prompt people to seek out or to avoid sexual activities. In fact, this observation is incorrect. Many such scales of documented reliability and validity do exist. The reason that few scholars are familiar with these scales is that they were developed by psychometricians from a variety of disciplines and are scattered about in an assortment of journals, college libraries, and researchers’ desk drawers, thus making them difficult to identify and locate. This paper will attempt to provide a compendium of all known sexual motives scales, hoping that this will encourage scholars to take a multidisciplinary approach in developing typologies of sexual motives and/or in conducting their own research into the nature of sexual motives. […]
Until recently, American sexologists generally assumed that young people engage in sexual activities for one of three reasons (the Big Three): love, a desire for pleasure, and/or a desire to procreate. […] Take a foray into the worlds of culture, art, and literature, however, and suddenly one becomes aware of how narrow the perspective of the Western scientist has been. There are a multitude of reasons why men and women might wish to engage in sexual activities. As Levin (1994) observed: “Coitus is undertaken not only for pleasure and procreation but also to degrade, control and dominate, to punish and hurt, to overcome loneliness or boredom, to rebel against authority, to establish one’s sexuality, or one’s achieving sexual competence (adulthood), or to show that sexual access was possible (to “score”), for duty, for adventure, to obtain favours such as a better position or role in life, or even for livelihood.”
photo { Man Ray, Prayer, 1930 }
