Communication and sexual desire

For most people, particularly in Western societies, the phenomenological expe-rience of sexual desire is inextricably linked to a conlplex array 'of enlotions and conlmunicative expression. Popular music, fictioti, television, and filni provide dc-pictions of sexually passionate and emotionally volatile romantic relationships, pop-ular magazines provide instructions for achieving and sustaining sexual satisfaction, and advice columns provide forums for sanctioning sexual infidelity and/or for cop-ing with sexual moral dilenmas.The drive to reproduce may be innate, but the evo-lution of social systems that regulate procreation has infused both the experience and expression of sexual desire with values, norms, constraints, contingeaes, and secondary emotions that make it as much a symbolic, interpersonal, and social con-struction as a physiological fact. As niight be expected, scholarship investigating the associations among sexual desire, eniotion, and communication reflects a diversity of perspectives, distill-guished largely on the basis of how sexual desire and emotion are defined. The ccli-tral focus of this chapter is the elaboration of two promirient approaches, which w