Sophie McBain at The New Statesman:
It is said that psychoanalysts see sex in everything, attributing any number of problems to unconscious sexual desires, but the British Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader wonders if such desires are themselves cover for other motivations. As he puts it, what are we “actually doing when we are doing sex?” (“Doing” sex?) Urban legend has it that men think about sex every seven seconds; researchers have ascertained it’s more like every hour and a half – but even then, are sexy thoughts a diversion from other, unhappier ones? This might explain, for example, why porn use surges on a Sunday night and Monday, when we confront the work stress we’ve set aside for the weekend.
While we tend to view sexual desire as a primal instinct to be tamed by society, our desires and how we express them are shaped by culture. Nor, as much as we might want to have no-strings-attached sex, is it possible to separate our sex lives from our emotional lives.
more here.