Sexual attraction arises from socially conditioned images, not raw nature

Evidence

These cares and kind attentions increased the discomfort, nausea, nervousness, and thousands of sufferings that almost always accompany first pregnancies. I found it so … It was my mother who started it one day when I was having dinner at her house …”Good heavens,” she cried suddenly, putting down her fork and looking at me with dismay. “Good heavens! I forgot to ask what you especially craved.” … And so there were my two mothers in consultation. And there was Junot, afraid I would bear him a child with a wild boar’s head … asking me every morning: “Laura, what do you crave?” My sister-in-law came back from Versailles and added her voice to the choir of questions, saying that she had seen innumerable people disfigured because of unsatisfied longings … I finally got frightened myself … I tried to think of what would please me most and couldn’t think of a thing. Then, one day, it occurred to me when I was eating pineapple lozenges that a pineapple had to be a very excellent thing … Once I persuaded myself that I had a longing for a pineapple, I felt at first a very lively desire, increased when Corcelet declared that … they were not in season. Ah, then I felt that mad desire which makes you feel that you will die if it is not satisfied. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1458 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Because the former were capable of being displaced, sublimated, and satisfied in fantasies (for example, sadism could be gratified in a number of socially acceptable ways), while the latter could not (only bread could relieve hunger), sexuality was more adaptable to social conditions.” The task of an analytical social psychology was to understand unconsciously motivated behavior in terms of the effect of the socio-economic substructure on basic psychic drives. Childhood experiences, Fromm argued, were especially important, because the family was the agent of society. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 330 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The sexual act is a learned technique added to desire from outside; Erotic drives adapt to social conditions while self-preservation drives resist them — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 330; Social expectation alone can manufacture intense physical craving — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1458 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Social expectation alone can manufacture intense physical craving #corroborates (0.92) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1458
• Erotic drives adapt to social conditions while self-preservation drives resist them #corroborates (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 330