Human Sexuality

Abstract That concupiscent is to romantic as lust is to love, as vice is to virtue, and as masculine is to feminine is widespread in today's idiomatic assumptions of the cause of human sexual conduct. Not so. Concupiscent and romantic sexuality overlap and merge and are multivariate. Both are partly phylogenically and partly ontogenetically determined. Courtship and mating are more robotically programmed in subhuman species than in humans. Derobotization of human sexuality may have been a feature of a more inclusive behavioral derobotization associated with the evolution of human language mapping in the brain and synchronously in the mind. Hypothetically, the evolutionary line of descent has been from qua-drupedal to bipedal, from nose to eyes, and from robotic to nonrobotic. An episode of mating is divisible into three stages: proceptive, acceptive, and conceptive, each of which mixes phylogenic and ontogenic determinants in variable degree. Contrectation, foreplay and erogenous zones are the proceptive terms made popular in marriage manuals of a century ago. Male and female mammals are programmed to be reciprocal, not identical in courtship and mating. In the human species, the reciprocality is exemplified in the male's greater dependence on the visual than the contrectative stimulus for erotic arousal, and vice versa for the female, though the difference is not absolute. Lovemap is the term that names an Supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Department of Health and Human Services, individual's brain/mind coding that depicts the ideation, imagery, and practices of romanticism and concupiscence. Pairbonded lovemaps may be ideologically correct, or they may be stigmatized as pathological or criminal, and as societally deviant, as in the case of some paraphilias. There are seven grand stratagems of paraphilias. Paraphilias constitute a major challenge in public health, witness the current dilemma of the church and sexual child abuse.