y fact of prostitution imply oppression, so that seeking prostitutes' rights is analogous to seeking better treatment for slaves, rather than an end to slavery? Every social assumption implies sexual assumption, and every sexual assumption implies social assumptions.
Topic 3: The central question of same-gender sexual desire is why and how such desire develops; in the most usual expression, is homosexuality a genetic trait, or a social trait? On closer examination, however, this question turns out to be simply a facet, or rather a turning on its head, of a broader and more fundamental question: namely how does different-gender sexual desire--or, indeed, sexual desire of any specified sort, develop?
At the most primary level the answer is undoubtedly biological; human beings have organs (homologous, as it happens, in the two biological sexes) that respond physiologically to certain types of stimulation (Stoltenberg, 1989). These responses can be--but not invariably are--experienced as sexual pleasure. But the pleasure is itself a mental construct, and in part a social construct; a gay man does not experience the pleasure from sexual touching by a woman that a non-gay man might experience from the same act. Why he doesn't is of a piece with the question of why the non-gay man does not experience similar pleasure when touched in a similar way by another man. Moreover, in one view (Rich, 1983), the etiology of lesbian desire is not simply a female analogue of gay male desire, but has quite different origins and characteristics. We are still near the beginning of understanding the origins of same-sex desire, or indeed of sexual desire in all its many forms.
Topic 5: On a purely physiological level, the development of sexuality in children is something that takes place overwhelmingly in adolescence, with the onset of puberty. In that respect it is a purely biological process. Yet it is clear that a type of sexual developme...